The following interview was with Jeff Worbach, pastor of Christ Alone Presbyterian Church, about the female pastors. Due to its length, it was split up into three parts with the first portion dealing with more abstract conversation about the image of God in men and women, the second portion deals with the texts of the issue in question, and the third installment discusses the nature of preaching itself.
TB: Okay so let me start by reading a text from 1 Timothy 2, and I have it right here so let me read it first, and I’ll include a few verses before for context. And this is the ESV.
“I desire then that in every place the men should pray, lifting holy hands without anger or quarreling; likewise also that women should adorn themselves in respectable apparel, with modesty and self-control, not with braided hair and gold or pearls or costly attire, but with what is proper for women who profess godliness—with good works. Let a woman learn quietly with all submissiveness. I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man; rather, she is to remain quiet. For Adam was formed first, then Eve; and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor. Yet she will be saved through childbearing—if they continue in faith and love and holiness, with self-control.”
So first, as far as expectations go, there is a lot here and clearly we are not going to get into all of it. But why don’t you take it away.
JW: First thing to note is our cultural context. Timothy had traveled with Paul for a bit and was sent as a sort of emissary on his behalf to different churches. Paul gets word that the church at Ephesus is teaching all kinds of weird stuff, which, by the way, is not abnormal, all of the churches had some weird stuff going on, so he sends Timothy to help straighten them out with what he calls “strange teachings.” We see in the letter that Timothy is young, and Paul gives him some clout with the qualifications for elders, deacons and such, so when he shows up people won’t look down on him. Then Paul goes into some of the particulars of the church. First he instructs on what to do with some of these men that are just fighting, then he talks about women who are getting all gussied up to go to church and being a distraction of some kind. Then we get to this passage on teaching and exercising authority.
There are basically three ways this passage is taken. First, some take it as a hard and fast rule about how things ought to work in church both then and now, and while it clearly has some application to the first century Ephesian culture, it is not bound to it. Second, some think it means that women in general shouldn’t lead, but educated women can and should teach. And there are other verses used to validate this. Lastly, some think the prohibition was strictly limited to that place and time of the Ephesian church as it has not a thing to do with us today.
TB: And you would hold the first view.
JW: I hold to the first view, yes.
TB: Ok, why?
JW: Well, first let me tell you some hermeneutical challenges which have clouded the topic, and these are things specific to Ephesus. So we have a few mentions of the city in the New Testament, we have Paul’s interaction in the city in Acts 19 where he gets in some hot water with the Artemis cult, a riot is started, and he is pulled out of there. Then there is Paul’s letter to the Ephesians. He also sends Timothy to the church at Ephesus and we get some inside details about the church through this, and then lastly in the Revelation of John we have a brief letter to the church at Ephesus in chapter 2. So we have a pretty good idea of the challenges.
Like I mentioned, there was a cult of Artemis at Ephesus, Artemis was the goddess of the hunt and wild animals, the goddess of women, virginity, I believe, and she was heavily attended to by female worshippers. Anyway, there has been some thoughts that the city was straight up matriarchal, as in, women leading everything, cult priestesses everywhere and such, and because of this, when the church started at Ephesus, this idea of loud, boisterous women coming into the church and thinking they could lead everything, was the reason Paul gave his prohibition about no women pastors, essentially, and for his command for them to keep quiet in church. That’s the assumption.
But I think the idea of a matriarchal society in Ephesus is more than a little overstated. It is true that in Ephesus, it looks like females took a more prominent role in the temple cult than in other cities at other times, and since Artemis was clearly the dominant religious figure in Ephesus, the presumption is that therefore women were dominant. But that isn’t the case, even if we concede that they were more active as priestesses in the cult. And there was was some movement towards emancipation to some degree. But to assert that Ephesus was a true matriarchal society where women are dominant, make the rules, to the subjugation of the men, its just not true. Just because women adopted more freedom and more active role in civic life is a very, very far cry from female dominance of a matriarchal society. You know, people who are sympathetic to the female pastor role today will site women at the time having certain titles on their tombs indicating a position of authority, and I’m happy to grant this because it is true, but that still is far from a matriarchy if for no other reason than the ratio of these titles is still way, way heavy on the man’s side. I mean, there is a bevy of evidence of women not even being considered equal under the law as a man in the Roman empire, they receive a very basic education, with the exception maybe of the high born, they had fewer rights. And that is why the advent of Christianity was such a game changer for women, it was the inflection point for women’s equality in history. So I think the matriarchy is, at the very least, an extremely stylized hyperbole, if not just plain wrong, even while acknowledging perhaps a local, tempered emancipation of women.
TB; Ok, so is there any truth to this idea that Paul was speaking to specific sins or dangers that the Ephesian church faced? Like, were some of these priestesses coming on board and thinking they should be running things?
JW: Well yeah, all of Paul’s letters were written to specific people with specific problems, right? Same with Peter. And God, in his sovereignty, uses the letters and writings of specific people with specific problems to give us eternal principles. Our job is to figure out how to extract those eternal principles from the rubble of antiquity through our hermeneutics.
TB: So you would say this prohibition of women pastors here, or women elders, is pretty clear and is unrelated to the cultural context.
JW: Yes, I think that it is clear, and no, like I said, Paul is writing to a people in a cultural context and so it makes complete sense he is addressing things they can see, and we ought to expect there to be tethers or hints to what was going on around him. But just because we know there may have been some women with something to prove doesn’t mean Paul is making the whole thing up from whole cloth. And we can see that in the reasons that he gives for the prohibition.
TB: The creation order reason and the deception reason you are talking about?
JW: Yes, I think there is a very conspicuous reason the Bible gives us and I think there is a principled reason that is not immediately evident. When Paul gives the reason for his prohibition and he uses a timeless example – he pulls his reason from way back in creation and the Fall. Adam was made first, then Eve. This automatically tosses out the third option, in my mind, because what Paul is saying is that this is a systemic thing, not a cultural or local problem only. In other words, this usurping of authority is not the first time it has showed up in history. So there is something of the order of creation here and that order denotes a hierarchy. Now before we get crazy with this word that is like political catnip today, let’s remember that hierarchy is one of those things which exists in the Godhead. The Son submits to the Father though is coequal with him. And we get the impression in the gospels that Jesus is thrilled about this; this is how the Godhead works a very intimate, equal, but different, mysterious relationship.
TB: Yeah, and I suspect that we have a little too much Marx in our blood to see that we are not looking at this from an unbiased perspective. If anyone mentions hierarchy or head or whatever instantly the dialectic is launched and you got a bourgeoisie and a proletariat, oppressor and oppressed. But that is something we are taking to the text, that is our problem, not the Bible’s.
JW: Exactly, and just to go back to the verse, we find something interesting. That word that is translated “exercise authority” or sometimes it is “usurp authority”, the latter I find to be more helpful, is a very interesting word. Typically the word for ‘authority’ in the New Testament is exousia which means something like “delegated power”. Jesus says all authority has been given to him in Matthew 28.
Paul doesn’t use this word here and it is worth discussing why not. I mean, he does elsewhere and a lot. He uses exousia all over the place. But here he uses the word autoenteo. Now this is interesting because not only is this the only place in the Bible where the word is used, but even in ancient Greek literature we only have about a half dozen examples of its use. That’s not to say it was not commonly used, it just means from the surviving texts, it’s not very common. What is even more interesting is how the word morphed over time. Initially the word actually meant “murder”. So the word morphed a bit, and the idea of a murder became eclipsed and the definition of “master” or even “master-mind” began to emerge. By the first century autoenteo primarily meant “ to master” at least in Koine Greek, which is what Paul wrote in. But I think the translation of “usurp” carries some of that original flare – to usurp something means to take power that was given to another and history is replete with example of usurpation involving murder.
TB: Huh, that is very interesting. But are you saying that well, …do you think that there is any trace of connection to the original definition murder at this point or had the definition completely changed?
JW: Well, we are very quickly getting past my knowledge base in ancient Greek. I am not any kind of scholar in that area, so take this for what its worth, which may not be much, but whatever..here it goes.
I think that it is true that words can evolve far past their original meaning while still carrying the smell, if you will, of the original. Take our word ‘nice’. In the old English it meant ‘unaware’ or ‘ignorant’, sort of simple and blissfully unaware. Of course, today when we use it we mean maybe sweet, pleasant, or agreeable, you know, he’s such a nice boy. But it also carries a non-threatening connotation. If a man is known as a nice guy you probably couldn’t imagine him manning the helm of a battleship or storming the beaches of Normandy. Because there is something about being nice that seems like glissading over the surface of life and its not a hard stretch to get to ‘ignorant’. The point is you can still get the the original meaning of nice from the modern definition, its not too far of a stretch
TB: It’s not like you went to a polar opposite or a completely different category.
JW: Exactly, it’s still in the family, just maybe a distant cousin. So the question is, is there some inkling of the original ‘murder’ in autoenteo when Paul used it in the first century? Remember, in a few verses Paul goes all the way back to creation and the fall to ground his prohibition, so if we go back there we see that after the fall God tells Eve that her desire would be for her husband. That word ‘desire’ is the same word God used when warning Cain about being envious of his brother, saying sin ‘desires’ you, but you must master it. That desire is a consumptive, usurping desire, a murderous desire to take authority that was not given. So I think Paul used the word autoenteo purposely to bring in the connotation of not just authority but one that is taken or usurped, not given.
But I think at the very least if we look at the word in the first century it certainly has the meanings of using force, of rulership and dominance, sort of self-determination and even a whiff of the murderous, though not physically of course. Basically to to dominate, to get one’s way.
TB: Yeah, but, okay, there are two problems that I can see with that and from what I understand, well…here, let me challenge you on this first. Isn’t the fact that Paul uses that autoenteo word proof against your position? You are saying that it is a bad kind of authority. And he is saying that he doesn’t permit women to have this bad kind of authority over a man. Well, okay, there you go. Just because Paul says he doesn’t want women to have the rotten authority over a man, it doesn’t then follow that she can’t have the good kind, right?
JW: Or is he saying that any time a woman exercises authority over a man, it is necessarily this kind? That is what I think we are to take from this.
TB: Well I think the accumulated response to your point would be that all women at all times in all places who act like these specific women Timothy was personally interacting with, should never have authority because it will always be a usurped authority. Those types of women should learn in quietness and submission and that would be true for all time. That is not necessarily indicative of the godly, honorable women then and there or here and now.
JW: Yes, that is the argument, that is a great summation of the opposite position that I take.
TB: Okay, but I don’t feel like you have really said or presented anything that definitively destroys those arguments with facts and logic, as Ben Shapiro says.
JW: Well let me answer you briefly in terms of the idea of merit, because it sounds like this may be a good time to give that idea a quick clean death. It does no good to say a woman is as good as a man at preaching and therefore she merits it, when the position of pastor, or priest in Israel, was a gifted position. God gave the priesthood to the Levite men. So what if some guy from Benjamin could have done just as good or a better job. It was not given to him no matter how much merit is attached. Now among that group, certain men are not qualified to lead, that is clearly true which the next chapter elucidates for us, but just as Adam was given the job of keeping the garden, the Levites were given the job of keeping the temple, same Hebrew word, and the pastor is an extension of this. All of these are gifted positions, gifted to the male image, the merit of the female image notwithstanding.
Okay, now onto the part where I destroy you with facts and logic, as you put it. In this passage, I will grant that there is some hermeneutical wiggle room. But not in other places. And remember, even if I concede all of the points here about bullish women in Ephesus, this is still a negative command of who should not preach, which is still a very far cry from a positive command to do so, and even in the next chapter we have the qualifications for elder and it is addressed to men exclusively. I repeat, there is no positive command in the New Testament naming women as preachers or teachers in the church.
TB: Yeah, but wouldn’t we also need to look at the context of the culture here too with the qualifications for elders? Like, this is an extension of the former prohibition? No women, therefore men, and here are the qualifications for those men specifically for Ephesus.
JW: Again, there is obviously something to the cultural context, but if you say that women can teach today because that prohibition was only for that time, then we would need to apply those same principles to the qualifications to men – that they were named by Paul specifically to be catered to a small group of men at one place in the world at one time in history. This would mean next time an elder is being recognized at a church and the man doesn’t meet these qualifications, someone could legitimately stand up and say, “Well, that list was for a specific time in history and doesn’t necessarily apply to this guy and his three wives who wants to be pastor.”
TB: Unless there is very clear passages which would trump the cultural, of course, which would enshrine the qualification, which we have in the picture of Christ and the church.
JW: And we do have those kind of passages for women teaching. Like if you jump over to 1 Corinthians 14. Let me just pull this up on my phone… And this is the ESV I’m using too, but it is also the most literal translation. So, here is what I want to do. I want to read this slowly so we don’t get ahead of ourselves, I want to then look at why Paul gives the command, and then we are going to look at how Paul interacts with those who are not getting with the program, okay? Okay, here we go, and this is in a section of the letter where Paul is talking about orderly worship, he talks about if a couple of people are speaking in tongues, wait your turn, make sure there is someone to interpret, etcetera, and he ends with “For God is not a God of confusion but of peace”, then he says, “As in all the churches of the saints…” Got that? So what follows will be a blanket statement that applies to all churches of the saints, and this includes the church at Ephesus where, remember, even if we concede all the women’s emancipation and the local Artemis cult, we still have no clear positive permission for women to teach. Okay?
TB: I’m with you, go on.
JW: So “As in all the churches of the saints, the women should keep silent in the churches. For they are not permitted to speak, but should be in submission…” This is unambiguous. This is a command that arches over all the church for all of time including the church in Ephesus where we had some hermeneutical wiggle room to maybe see it differently if we squinted real hard and read into the text what isn’t there. And it gets even harder to shake the local-Ephesus command when we also turn to chapter four of the same letter. I will read this here because it fits in well here. So 1 Corinthians 4:17, Paul is telling the Corinthians that he is sending Timothy – Timothy, get that? The same man he sends the letter to at Ephesus – and he says “that is why I sent Timothy, my beloved and faithful child in the Lord, to remind you of my ways in Christ, as I teach them everywhere in every church.” So just to put the nail in the coffin, Paul tells the Corinthians he is sending Timothy, the same guy with the same message, to instruct them in the same thing he instructs in all the churches.
So, I don’t know how to get around that even if I wanted to. But lets continue to read in chapter 14 and see why Paul gives this command and what he ties it to. “As in all the churches of the saints, the women should keep silent in the churches. For they are not permitted to speak, but should be in submission as the Law also says. If there is anything they desire to learn, let them ask their husbands at home. For it is shameful for a woman to speak in church.”
What does Paul tie the command to here? The Law of God. So in the first interdiction we talked about, Paul tied the command to creation order and the Fall, here he ties it to the Law of God. I don’t know about you, but if God gives you a command and he says that just to make this clear, I am going to bury the reason in the reality of my image, the reality of fallen man, and the Law of God, he has my attention.
TB: Yeah, I mean, that’s quite the line up. If you are picking people to be on your spiritual dodgeball team, you could do worse than all of reality and God’s Law.
JW: But keep following me. Read on, picking up in verse 36 here, “Or was it from you that the word of God came? Or are you the only ones it has reached? If anyone thinks that he is a prophet, or spiritual, he should acknowledge that the things I am writing to you are a command of the Lord. If anyone does not recognize this, he is not recognized. So, my brothers, earnestly desire to prophesy, and do not forbid speaking in tongues. But all things should be done decently and in order”
TB: I’m sensing some sarcasm.
JW: As well you should, Paul is laying it on pretty thick. Now, this is not only aimed at the women portion but all of orderly worship in all the churches, including when to prophesy and speak in tongues and stuff, but yeah, there is not a small amount of sarcasm. Paul is basically guffawing at their insolence acting like God gives them special revelation and they have their own bespoke gospel and message from God. Who do you think you are? And just to finish up real quick, look at the devastating consequences – Paul is saying if you don’t recognize or acknowledge the orderly worship I just laid out, you are not recognized – and I take that to mean recognized as a spiritual authority, not like a salvation thing. That’s devastating, man, do you want to be on the receiving end of that? Not me.
TB: Yeah, well, I guess that is … hmm. But is there also some hermeneutics there that might give us some context of why Paul said this to the Corinthians, some kind of similar set up as in Ephesus.
JW: You will find that it is always pretty easily to confine Paul’s writings to this or that state of affairs of his time for those ho want to manipulate the text to accommodate their desires. You’ve seen how people justify gay and lesbian love using the texts. That’s what people do when they want license to do what they want in the present time. But you will find the only other way to then apply these things to our lives is to interpret them through our own cultural eyes and desire. I mean, what else is there? Are you going to explain it all away?
TB: Okay, okay, I can see the point. Jumping back to the Timothy passage, lets briefly talk about the deception part. Eve was deceived, Adam was not, it seems like we have to take this also as a categorical claim about fallen man and women, that women are more easily deceived than men. Acknowledging that there are a great many stupid men, we have to deal with the fact that the Bible says this clearly. My take on this is, men and women are equally sinful and under the curse of Adam. And they can both be deceived but their areas of deception are different and when it comes to leadership, that is a particular area susceptible to deception. But for men, that area would be different. And I think specifically that area of deception for men, where they are weak, is women.
JW: Right, I agree completely. We get a sense of this, again, in the Greek. Paul says Adam was not deceived – apatao – but Eve was deceived – exapatao – the ‘ex’ being an intensifier like ‘wholly deceived’. She was taking in by the serpent and this was an out of order deception. In God’s order it is Him, man, then woman came from man, then together they had power over the beasts. What happened in the fall? The woman succumbed to the beast, the man succumbed to the woman, and they both did so to be like God – it completely subverted the order. So I agree that one area of deception men are prone to is women, probably other things too.
But another thing to note is that I don’t think Paul is letting men off the hook here, only mentioning women as the deceived ones. I think this is also an indictment. Adam wasn’t deceived, he sinned willfully and he did so because he valued Eve more than God. We acknowledge differences of intent in our legal system with cold blooded acts having a more heinous crime. So Adam here is the responsible party for all the fall of humanity, his is the one act of disobedience that Paul tells us in Romans 5.
TB: Which would be a solid point for the order of a church and men having the authority. It recognizes the order of creation while also mitigate the disorder of the fall. Like, there was the way it should have been, plan A pre-fall, then after the fall both parties wanted to basically sinfully switch places, and because we have to live out this image in a fallen world in fallen bodies, God gives commands to make sure we maintain these boundaries, even though it is pumping water up hill for both genders. If you don’t keep pumping, the flesh will want to subvert the order of creation, and that’s what Paul’s commandments are trying to avoid. The female wants to consume the male and the male passively allows it. Like an emulation of the praying mantis, where the man is eaten by the female, her sin is the hunger to eat him and his is allowing it.
JW: Right, or another analogy is like we are boats with holes in our hulls and if we don’t keep the sump pumps running, we will go under, and these interdictions are meant to keep the pump running for both genders. I think just to cap off these texts if we need any more evidence we can just recognize that all the apostles are men, we do not have any canonical books by a woman, every appointment in the Bible is a male. We have a few exceptions like Deborah, which actually proves the rule and acts as an indictment on men themselves. We can either take that to mean that this is all because of female subjugation and toxic patriarchy for all of time, or that there is something to men in authority and the mentality and qualities that are necessary for authority. I mean, I think the reason we see the rise of female authority is because of that old phrase ‘Hard times make hard men, hard men make soft times and soft times make soft men.” We have had soft times in the West and the result has been soft men in leadership. Soft men have feminine qualities and so, in the church, we have already established the feminine in leadership, might as well have the women as well.
TB: What would you say to the idea that, about the Apostles being all men, that that was because it would have been too much change for the people at that time to take? Kind of like give Christianity a good head start, choose men because we are just concerned about the message now, then later we can address the gender thing later. What do you think about that, because that is an argument I have heard.
JW: To that I would say it completely undercuts their entire claim. Often, the reasons cited for women ordination is because examples are pulled from the gospels and small, ancillary portions of the letters to prove the point that women did have a fundamentally new respect and equality that Christ gave them. You know, that he was radically countercultural in his talking to the Samaritan woman, or having women as the bearers of the resurrection news. The point they are making is that Jesus clearly was radically countercultural, so I don’t know how it is any kind of defense that when it came to choosing disciples he all of a sudden was showing deference to cultural considerations. I mean, what better time to subvert the whole gender thing then right there. Even one out twelve would have done it, I think.
TB: Yeah, I saw the same problem with that, and I suppose it really easy to get lost on this conversation on strict boundaries and forget that, the question is not can women be saintly and exemplary ministers of the Gospel. Clearly and unambiguously the answer is yes, they are and can be and in a wholly different way than men. I mean, I think of some of the stories I have heard of. There was a young woman, and this was recently, who was something like nineteen and moved to Africa and adopted a bunch of girls and had just decided that this was her life, she was going to love and minister as a mother to these orphaned girls and raise them. And she was this beautiful, blonde woman, the kind you would see sipping a pumpkin spice latte at Starbucks and being completely self absorbed. But she gave up her life for the Gospel, and in a way that is so different and tender and beautiful than a man. That was the image of God at work through this beautiful stained glass of the feminine. It was absolutely stunning.
JW: Amen.
TB: Okay, so, now that we have tackled some of the texts, I think the two most direct texts, lets move on to that very interesting word picture you used about preaching.
The interview continues in Part 3.
Thought Butter 