Editor’s Note: The piece below represents the opinion of the author. Anglican Pastor does not take a site-wide position for or against women’s ordination. We do, however, require both clarity and charity. We ask that your responses to it do so as well.
God is not fair.
He deprives men of the most profound and satisfying experience imaginable. Both men and women participate in the creation of another human being, but only women get to carry that little human being inside their body for nine months, nourishing that baby with sustenance from their own body. Only women get to bring that precious child into the world. In many cases, that child will have a more intimate relationship with its mother than with anyone else in the world.
So if God believes in equality, it is a different equality from what most think. God’s equality does not mean giving every person the same chance to do everything.
Neither did Jesus’ equality mean that. He treated women in revolutionary ways, and had female disciples like Mary who studied with him in ways normally impossible for Jewish women. Women traveled with him and talked with him in public in ways that violated cultural conventions. So when he chose his twelve apostles, it wasn’t the culture or his own fears that prevented him from including women.
This is difficult to think through, because we want to believe that Jesus must have believed in equality as we do. But he did not.
Nor did Paul. Several times he told wives to be submissive to their husbands. He never told husbands to submit to their wives. Sure, he told the members of the Ephesian church to submit to one another (Eph. 5:21). But then his very next word was for wives to submit to their husbands (Eph. 5:22). At that point, we expect him to follow that up with a word to husbands to submit to their wives, but he does not.
He said women were not to exercise authority (presumably as a pastor in the church) over a man (1 Tim. 2:12). Women—not men—were to have a symbol of authority on their heads (1 Cor. 11:10). A bishop, presbyter, and deacon was—each one of them—to be the husband of one wife (1 Tim. 3:2; 3:12; Titus 1:6).
Was Paul so man-focused because his culture would not permit female religious leaders and he could never imagine such a thing?
Hardly. The ancient world was full of altars and shrines with priestesses at Rome, Corinth, and every major city. Ephesus was dominated by an enormous temple to Artemis (Diana), led by a female priest and her female assistants. So female presbyters in the early Church would not have been revolutionary. They were all over the Mediterranean world, and particularly in the backyard of one of the early Church’s most important centers. Yet none of the elders in the church at Ephesus was female (Acts 20:17-38); all the articles and pronouns designating the elders are masculine.
But are we missing something? Is Paul simply talking about our fallen condition, whereas Jesus wants to redeem us from fallenness and bring us to the new creation which recreates things before the fall?
The problem is that Paul argues for male headship based on things before the fall—not after the fall. He says women should not be pastors because “Adam was formed first, then Eve” (1 Tim. 2:13). That is an argument based on the situation before the fall. He told the Corinthians that men don’t need to cover their heads because “man was not made from woman, but woman from man. Neither was man created for woman, but woman for man” (1 Cor. 11:8-9). Again, Paul appealed to the situation before the fall.
Perhaps we are revolted by what Paul said and by what Jesus did (or did not do) because they violate what recent cultural mavens have told us. Men and women are absolutely equal in every way, we have been told. Therefore they should have the same role in every sphere of life, and many of us Christians have deduced that they should have the same roles in the church. After all, didn’t Paul himself say that “in Christ there is not male and female” (Gal. 3:28)?
He did indeed. Yet this is in the midst of his passionate argument that we are “justified by faith” (Gal. 3:24) and not “by the law” (Gal. 3:11). In other words, you don’t have to be a Jew or a Jewish man who obeys Jewish law to be saved. All that matters is whether you—Jew or gentile, man or woman—give allegiance to the Jewish messiah (Gal. 3:26). As long as any of these are baptized into that messiah, they have “put on messiah” (Gal. 3:27).
This famous verse—Galatians 3:28—has nothing to do with family or church ministry roles but with salvation through the Jewish messiah. Men and women alike are saved by baptism and faith in that same Jewish messiah, and that has nothing to do with their roles in the home or church.
Paul’s point is equality in justification by the Jewish messiah, not equality in roles in the home or church.
We late moderns want to apply Galatians 3:28 to the home and church, but Paul refused to.
That is our conundrum in the ACNA. We want to extend Galatians 3:28 to realms where Paul and Jesus clearly did not go.
What do we do? Should we feel a bit uncomfortable about trying to improve on what Paul and Jesus thought and did?
Gerald R. McDermott is Teaching Pastor at Christ the King Anglican Church in Hoover, AL.
Excellent article. One of the things that got me to change my view on this issue is that after Adam and Eve both sinned, it was Adam who was first held accountable. This clearly shows the principle of headship. Anglicans that are supporting WO have to go to great lengths to explain away plain passages of scripture. Usually, this done through cultural arguments. But those arguments don’t stand up when fully evaluated. The issue also gets consulted when one speaks of “women in ministry “ in general terms. No traditionalist rejects women in ministry. The issue is ordination specifically to the presbyter/bishop offices. It is my prayer that my fellow Anglican brothers and sisters who support WO, would let the Scriptures and the church”s universal and unanimous voice up to the 20th century, to rethink their position even if has social costs to do so.
It sounds to me like you think these are arguments egalitarians haven’t heard before and scriptures they’ve never thought about. It’s academically irresponsible to fail to read those you critique. I implore you to sit down with works by evangelical and Anglican scholars who seek to be fully faithful to Scripture and tradition who have in fact read the passages you are reading and don’t make the same conclusions. Will Witt, N.T. Wright, and John Stackhouse might be a good place to start. If you’re unwilling to actually read and engage your challengers, what credit will they give you when you make arguments against straw opponents who think “God is fair, therefore women priests”?
I would only mention: it is worth bearing in mind that the Rev. Dr. Gerald McDermott, Anglican Chair of Divinity at Beeson Divinity School and Director of the Institute of Anglican Studies, has not only read those he critiques, but is in fact personal friends with many of them (e.g. N.T. Wright). One would be hard-pressed to find someone more familiar with the importance of academic responsibility than Dr. McDermott, who has had made regular contributions of both scholastic and popular works for decades.
I am aware that he holds those prestigious titles and positions. All the more shame that his argument is so uncharitable.
It is not uncharitable to hold to the direct and clear teachings of scripture as can be understood from a simple reading of the Word, and if that is insufficient a glance at the history of the Church and the writings of the early Church Fathers.
The question is, are you attempting to submit the scriptures to your will or are you willing to submit your will to the scriptures?
God’s will be done, not ours.
Dr. McDermott did not say anything in this article that was uncharitable. No meanness in tone, no harsh or demeaning words. He Simply laid out the biblical testimony. His position is in harmony with the church’s universal and unanimous understanding of scripture pertaining to this issue for 2,000 years. That should trump modern day innovations.
In the context of the biblical worldview, gender equality, as it is formulated today, is meaningless. When Anglicans contemplate reception of Christ’s body and blood in the Eucharist, it is appropriate to see before them a masculine form. Likewise, in contemplation of the Annunciation and the Incarnation we properly have before us an image/icon of Mary, not a masculine form. Likewise, Scripture presents couplets with a male and female figure.The moreh/prophet at the Oak between Ai and Bethel has a counterpart in Deborah at the Palm between Bethel and Ramah. The blood on the doors ordered by Moses to save the households has a counterpart in the scarlet cord hung from the window by Rahab to save her household. The binary feature of the biblical worldview denies the dualistic eqalitarianism of gender equality.
Let the Bible speak, and don’t make it say what “seems” fair or right.
Indeed, I think it to be more careless to fail to actually interpret the Bible thoughtfully, assuming that our world of meanings for language perfectly maps on to that of the initial ancient recipients of the text. “Letting the Bible speak” is not drawing whatever conclusion first emerges from your mind when reading the text: it is the careful work of many people having discussions and arguments with one another about what the texts meant for the author and readers and what that entails for us as later readers in our own milieu. In other words, the position embodied in this blog post is not the self-evident meaning of the Bible’s words on women and ministry. It is an interpretation made by people who have done work, and there are other people who have done work who do not agree that we ought to interpret the Bible as McDermott has done above.
The sort of exegesis that leads to female leadership is the same sort that leads to same-sex “marriage.”
The sort of exegesis where man doesn’t mean man and woman doesn’t mean woman because that’s not a “careful enough“ reading of the text.
The word commonly translated as husband in 1 Timothy 3, ἄνδρα, literally means “a male human being; a man; husband” and γυναικὸς, literally means “a woman; wife; my lady”.
One of the qualifications of ordination is being the “man of one woman”.
I understand that there are divorced and remarried priests in the Anglican church. If Paul’s instructions about female priests are taken so seriously ( and I am not suggesting they shouldn’t be ) why is the instruction about being married to only one woman not taken equally to heart for male clerics?
It should be, though we are given caveats in the text about the unmarried and about what rightfully regulates divorce.
There aren’t any caveats given to say “in these instances it’s fine to ordain women and isn’t in fact shameful.”
Fr. McDermott is in error when he states “He [Paul} said women were not to exercise authority (presumably as a pastor in the church) over a man (1 Tim. 2:12).”
That particular verse is in the singular in Greek, i.e.; “That woman”. The pericope in 1 Tim goes from plural to singular and then back to plural.
That does not take away from the other strictures and commendations Paul places on the church referred to in 1 Tim 2.
“That woman.” Your comment made me curious. So I looked. But it DOESN’T say “that” woman. Neither the near demonstrative pronoun (houtos, or hode – “this”) in any form, nor the far demonstrative pronoun (ekeinos – “that”) in any form, appear in the sentence. It is simply “gune – woman” (a woman). (http://www.blueletterbible.org/esv/1ti/2/1/t_conc_1121012 — not sure if this site uses NA28 or some other Greek text, but without evidence to the contrary, I wouldn’t expect a textual variance to be in play here).
In this context, I can’t see where “a woman” would mean anything different that what Dr. McDermott is saying in this article. Without any other textual direction, “a woman” is any women. Which is “women”.
You do know that Paul did not write Timothy or Titus. Right?
First Timothy 1:1, 2 Timothy 1:1, Titus 1:1.
Might need to give them a read.
The argument regarding 1 Timothy 2 depends on reading verse 13 (“For Adam was formed first, then Eve”) as Paul’s first argument for the prohibition in verse 12, followed by “And Adam was not the one deceived” (verse 14) as his second argument. What is missing on this reading is an explanation of how verse 14 functions. (In the past many concluded from this that women are more gullible and hence unsuited to teaching. Is this how Gerald McDermott understands Paul’s second argument?)
To me it makes more sense to read verses 13-14 together as forming a single argument and rationale – an appeal to the whole narrative of Gen 2-3. (The salvation through childbirth continues this with the reference to the name Adam gives to Eve after the fall.) We are surely agreed that the statement about the woman becoming a sinner in verse 14 is not meant to say that Adam did not become a sinner. The emphasis is on the way in which the woman became a sinner, namely through being deceived. Adam sinned without having been deceived because he had been formed first and had heard God’s prohibition directly, only then Eve was formed. Eve therefore had presumably heard indirectly about God’s prohibition, just as she hears indirectly, from the serpent, about God’s (alleged) motive with Adam beside her keeping quiet, failing to contradict the serpent. It’s those who heard the teaching second-hand who should keep quiet (cf. 5:13).
The reading of Galatians 3:28 offered by Gerald McDermott fails to account for the “no longer”. Paul makes a salvation historical statement here. It seems therefore insufficient that to claim that the verse means to stress that “Men and women alike are saved by baptism and faith in that same Jewish messiah,” as if women under the old covenant were not saved in the same way as men (or non-Jews in the same way as Jews). Under the new covenant the privileged access given to Jews is broadened to include non-Jews. A contextual reading of Galatians 3 would seem to suggest that in a similar way the privileged place of men in worship is now broadened to include women. Roles in the home are indeed not the issue here but the equality baptism confers on Jew and Gentile, slave and free is about more than being equally redeemable which they have always been.
I am very sympathetic to the male-only priesthood arguments but when you start of by basically proclaiming that being able to make babies should be enough for women because its so mystical, and you happen to be someone who has no idea how crummy your “mystical experience” feels on female bodies and often souls, then its pretty hard to keep reading. Friendly suggestion, please, stop grinding this particular axe. Makin’ babies is not the summit of biblical womanhood. Neither is teaching Sunday School, wiping noses, and coffee hour. To assume so is dangerously close to functionalist language, which is not Gospel, but modernity talking.
Seems a little strange and much too late to be debating this, considering the Anglican Church allows for the ordination of women, and I, for one, have been very encouraged in my own faith journey by highly educated and inspirational priests who happen to be female. Shouldn’t the church be now encouraging young women to train for ordination considering so much of the church is in decline, rather than dredging up old arguments about all the reasons not to? Bringing up scriptural points is all fine and dandy, but I can only think there would be benefit to moving on from some of these contentions, no matter what Paul thought or not.
I almost chuckled when I read the comments from an Anglican brother that I was “academically irresponsible” and “uncharitable” and ought to feel “shame” because I made an argument from the plain sense of the text.
It seems he thinks I was uncharitable because I suggested that some scholars have argued for WO from the theological maxim that God is just.
Yet this is indeed the case. Alan Padgett has used, among other principles, “a strong biblical witness to justice.” Rebecca Groothuis has argued from “the priesthood of all believers . . . and the equality in spiritual status of women and men in Christ” against the traditionalist “caste system” that prescribes gender roles. It is “unfair,” she wrote, when authority is given to men and not to equally deserving women. The legendary Krister Stendahl insisted that if “emancipation” of slaves and women was right and just, then WO must also be. Patricia Gundry made a case for WO based on “fully human” equality.
But it is not just scholars. I hear it in our churches: “It’s not fair if only men can be ordained. After all, God calls women to ministry too!”
For the record, Barbara Gauthier and I (with the help of two other women and two other men) wrote a long piece on this question. We engaged the arguments of the spring 2017 “Holy Orders Task Force Report,” interacting with the scholarly arguments there. Among many other things, we argued for a Marian charism through which God has given a multitude of ministries to women: prophecy, spiritual motherhood, faith and evangelism, teaching, hospitality and helps, corporal works of mercy, and mentoring.
We pointed to Macrina (theologian with Gregory of Nyssa), Dominca (spiritual mother, lifelong service to the Christian community, gifts of healing prayer and prophecy), Hilda of Whitby (educator and diplomat), Walburga (missionary work with Boniface), Milburga of Shrewsbury (abbess, gifts of evangelism, pastoral care, physical healing, and spiritual deliverance from sin’s power), Clare of Assisi (foundress of Franciscan order to care for the poor), Hildegard von Bingen (mystic, herbalist, spiritual writer, composer), Catherine of Siena (mystic author, nurse of the critically ill, catalyst for reformation of the papacy), and Teresa of Avila (mystic, reformer of the Carmelite order, businesswoman, prolific author on prayer).
The Anglican brother who faults me for not tangling with scholars such as NT Wright and John Stackhouse on this issue should know that I am friends with both and am familiar with their arguments. Truth be told, at one time I agreed with them and even blurbed Stackhouse’s books on this subject. If this Anglican brother thought about it, he might recognize that some of the arguments I made in my little piece above were directed at common pro-WO arguments.
I tried to stick to the logic of the plain sense of the text, which is a Reformation hermeneutic that Anglicans should take seriously. That does not mean that historical criticism cannot help us. But for every “contextual” argument that is advanced above for WO, there are plenty of counter arguments that can also draw from history and literary context. The debate back and forth is endless.
As Anglicans we should sit at the feet of the Fathers and ask why they opposed WO. We should also ask why the whole tradition, with few exceptions, opposed WO until the 1960s. As members of ACNA, we should take seriously the unanimous statement by the College of Bishops that WO is a “recent innovation” and has “insufficient scriptural warrant.”
It is telling that learned scholars are deeply divided on this important question. It is also telling that tradition has been against it. As a Church that reads Scripture through tradition, we should spend at least as much time trying to understand the logic of the Tradition as we do arguing the latest results of biblical scholarship.
I used to be a “traditionalist”. Ironically, a major factor in turning me egalitarian was the realization that endorsement of wife-beating “within reason” is also a big historic part of the “orthodox” tradition. Did every Christian in the past support that? No (a la Chrysostom), but enough did to where it was legal in medieval canon law and even in early modern church polity. If the same historic church that says no to women’s ordination based on their reading of the Scriptures also says that some wife beating to assert authority is okay or something to be endured, then maybe something is extremely flawed in the “orthodox” tradition’s Biblical hermeneutic. I’m glad that the old “orthodox” tradition has been abandoned by the majority of Christians, slowly but surely, beginning with the Protestant Reformation, but it should make you question if the old “orthodox” tradition has been wrong also on the women’s ordination thing, especially when the same set of verses were used to endorse women’s subjugation in the home, with the logical consequence being that wife-beating was considered okay to ensure subjugation.
I’d say it’s still subconsciously okay in many church’s minds based on the fact that most don’t take domestic violence seriously. I know this first-hand from my childhood. The same suppositions about women that once encouraged Christian men to make wife-beating canonically okay are still alive and well, causing church leaders to not care about the victims and to even blame them for the abuse they endure (i.e,. “you weren’t submissive enough!”)
And yes, I get that not all men beat their wives in the past, and that many preachers encouraged husbands to be long-suffering to their wives and not go there, yada yada. I also realize that back in the day, men were responsible for debts their wives accrued and could go to debtors prison, or even could be held liable for a wife’s crime/misbehavior in public, and that’s why they were allowed to discipline their wives. But that just speaks to how broken a hierarchical system is and how harmful such presuppositions against women are, particularly when they fall through the the giant gaping ecclesial and judicial cracks with abusive husbands. I want people to consider here that ideas have consequences. The same arguments employed against women’s ordination are the same as the historic arguments for why a husband had the right to discipline his wife. And given that creeps like R.C. Sproul, Jr. openly endorsed wife spanking, I think it’s long past time we had an honest discussion on why we have to read the Bible in the most unfavorable light and assume it says the worst of women.