Peter Lundell, D.Miss.
Author’s note: I am not promoting women in ministry per se.
I am promoting honest and accurate biblical interpretation and application.
The passages that supposedly prohibit women in ministry are fairly culture-and-context specific. This starts with 1 Corinthians 14:34–35 which partly illuminates the meaning of 1 Timothy 2:11–12.
In the New Testament era—in line with Jewish practice and even practice in many non-Western cultures today—women sat on one side of the church and men on the other. But in those days women weren’t allowed the education that men were, and they tended to ask their husbands on the other side of the aisle what the elder was talking about, thus verse 34 tells them to be “silent” (sigaw) and verse 35 tells them to wait until they get home to ask hubby what the preacher meant. Just stop interrupting the sermon!
First Timothy 2:12 says women should be “silent.” Everywhere else in the New Testament hesuchia is translated “quiet.” Hmmm. Why the difference? There’s no good reason.
Another cultural factor was the cults of Mythraism that rivaled the church. The intensity varied by region. Women were known as leaders of these perverse cults, and the notion of a woman leading or speaking in a church was too reminiscent or associated with the image of women who led these cults. At least that’s a historical assessment of one thing going on.
Look at 1 Timothy 2:8, 9, 12. Each time Paul says, “I.” He’s not a careless writer. He’s very honest and discerns between what is by revelation from God and what is his own position. When he says, “I,” he’s clarifying his own position, which ,though I believe in plenary inspiration of Scripture, obviously not every verse carries the same weight, and many verses must be understood in context.
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Consider the statement in Galatians 3:28, which is a universal statement based on God’s salvation given to all who believe and is unbounded by any historical or cultural context. Every ethnic, social, and male/female barrier in the church is broken down.
Prohibition of women in ministry arises when chauvinists take verses out of context. I am not a feminist or in favor of feminism, just as I am not in favor of chauvinism. I’m only going by what the Bible says.
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Romans 16 lists Paul’s helpers and ministry associates. If you’ve never preached it, it’s worth doing, and very inspiring if you thread together the greetings with the people who are mentioned both there and in Paul’s letters.
He greets 28 people. Ten of them are women. That’s over 35 percent. Quite a large figure for a guy who some say didn’t want women in ministry. His universal statement in Galatians 3:28 trumps the context-specific statements in Corinthians and Timothy.
In verse 7 he greets Andronicus and Junia. In Greek it’s in the accusative case, Junian. Translators have traditionally mistranslated it as if it’s nominative case—the male form Junias. They assume it was male. But this supposed male name of Junias did not even exist in the New Testament era; there was no such name as Junias in the Roman Empire at that time. Yet the female name Junia was very common in the Roman Empire among both Greek and Latin speakers. This had to be a woman, most likely the wife of Andronicus. Paul says they were in prison with him. He also says they were “outstanding among the apostles.” This exemplifies that not only did Paul have female ministers, but also that Junia was also an apostle and an outstanding apostle at that. (Some translations are increasingly getting the name Junia right. You’ll see it in most new translations.)
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I think I can say with conviction that if men who oppose women in ministry based on the biblical passages they cite in 1 Corinthians 14 and 1 Timothy 2, they should also support and affirm the idea of slavery, both ancient and modern-day slavery. They should also oppose circumcising baby boys. Any other view seems to be hypocritical.
In Ephesians 6:5–8 and Colossians 4:22–25, Paul clearly writes that slaves should respect their masters. This is a specific, culturally related, statement like the ones about women. For Paul to openly oppose slavery would have been anarchist and gotten him and the church in deathly trouble from the Roman society around him that legally saw slaves as objects to be owned. So he undermines the whole mindset and institution of slavery by declaring in Ephesians 3:28 that there is neither slave nor free, along with neither male nor female and neither Jew nor Greek. This is a universal statement that asserts that in Christ we have a new social order, which is not based on ethnicity, social standing, or gender but rather unity in Christ. And in Philemon he states that the escaped slave Onesimus became his “son” and that Philemon should receive him back not as a slave but “as a man and as a brother in the Lord.”
References throughout Scripture, including Paul, identify people never as objects to be owned or victims to oppress but as noble creatures with dignity who are created in God’s image and by faith are God’s children. Thus in the slave-holding Roman Empire, Paul undermines the institution of slavery by declaring them to be not objects but human beings—and brothers (and implicitly sisters) in Christ. Also note his condemning of slave traders in 1 Timothy 1:10.
In the same way he speaks specifically about women’s situations within culturally defined situations of not talking across the church aisle to ask questions (1 Cor. 14:34–35) and not being in authority over men (1 Tim. 2:11–15). Yet he similarly undermines the social inequality of women by his universal statement of Ephesians 3:28 and by his example of including so many women, some in leadership positions, in his ministry.
Thus, to be consistent in how you exegete and apply the Bible, if you oppose women in ministry, you must also affirm the institution of slavery. Anything else is hypocritical.
About circumcision, he clearly says in Galatians 5:2, “Mark my words! I, Paul, tell you that if you let yourselves be circumcised, Christ will be of no value to you at all.” If the anti-women interpreters are correct, then it’s also correct that Christ is of no value to me—and probably to most of them as well. But contextually, Galatians is written to people in the midst of an intense debate about the covenantal value of circumcision, with the Judaizers pressing them to adhere to the Old Testament. Paul’s words in Galatians are highly contextual, just as his words are in passages above.
One could apply the same principles to topics throughout the Old and New Testament.
Also note that in both 1 Timothy 2 and Galatians 5, Paul clarifies that it is “I” or “I, Paul” who is speaking and giving an exhortation. This is different from most other passages where he is sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly, speaking more directly from the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.
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God does not call women to ministry.
God does not call men to ministry either.
God calls humble servants.
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Other Considerations
Sociologically, women generally have equal place with men in spontaneous occurrences or common-interest driven movements, such as the Holiness Movement. But when any group or organization becomes institutionalized, as the Church of the Nazarene was formed, women tend to get pushed to the fringes or pressed down to lesser levels. We see this in how women were so active in the Holiness Movement but were largely shut out when the movement institutionalized into the church.
This is not always the case. Women’s liberation and equal rights have changed a lot of this–due to women’s movements in battle with the male-dominated institutional forces. But humanly speaking, it is a common pattern.
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Once a woman maneuvers past men who may not like women in ministry and gets into a pastoral position, she often finds that her greatest opposition or criticism or trouble comes not from the men but from the women.
Some, like my wife and other women in ministry, theorize that this often has something to do with other women being envious or jealous (even if subconsciously) of the woman in a pastoral role (educated and accomplished) compared to themselves, especially if they’re not professionals.
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My wife, Kim, was one of the few females ordained in her day (1985). Watchword and Song mentions her on page 533.
Along with me she got tired of all the talk about women’s rights, especially from the feminists who always seemed frustrated and angry. Kim always said the important thing was calling and anointing.
When women get caught up in rights, they’re correct in an earthly, civic way. Emphasizing rights was essential in the Civil Rights Movement when white supremacy had to be fought and taken down. Demonstrations, politics, and laws were central to achieving that.
But biblically, in the Kingdom of God, males included, Christians only have one right: John 1:12, the covenantal right, or authority, to be called children of God. Everything flows from that.
For Kim the issue was always about calling and anointing. Always. And that has made an infinitely greater difference than talk about rights—because God’s calling, unlike earthly citizenship, is not about rights but about a spiritual calling.
When men opposed her, though, she stood up to them big time and bit their heads off. When the D.S. held her back for the third year in a row because he’d never ordained a woman before and didn’t know any other D.S.s who had, she famously told him that “the blood will come back to your head.” Within twenty minutes the office secretary called back and asked if she could come back and fill our her application for ordination.
At a breakfast of Korean pastors (who are very male dominant by culture), a new pastor snickered and derisively asked, “Who is this lady pastor?” The other pastors all started laughing and making comments about how this guy had no clue and had no idea about who she was—not that she would assert any rights; rather, she would demonstrate her calling and spiritual authority.
So in the particular area of pastoral ministry, emphasis on rights tends to beget fighting between chauvinism and feminism. And those who do tend to get locked in a combative attitude that simmers beneath the surface. But calling, anointing, and servanthood cut through those debates; they are redemptive and positive in nature; they are very hard to argue against; and they are eternally important.
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Just for Fun: the Author of Hebrews
Something I might add: My theory is that Priscilla wrote Hebrews. Two reasons:
1. She was highly knowledgeable and would have been entirely capable of writing it.
2. It’s the only NT book that’s anonymous, and it’s entirely different in every way from everything Paul wrote–and unlike liberals, I strongly argue that all the letters attributed to him were indeed from him; their differences reflect different contexts, different purpose, and different period of his life.
The point then for #2 is that throughout history in most contexts, women were not taken seriously as authors, thus they wrote anonymously, or in the case of someone like George Eliot, were women who took on a pseudonymous male name in order to get into print. If Priscilla indeed was the author, she might have known she wouldn’t have been given a fair reading if her name was on it. Put it on your list of questions for when you get to heaven.
