While I was preparing for this message on the radio on consecutive days were debates about women in leadership. One day it was about women speaking on the marae at Waitangi, bought about because our political parties both have women leaders. I loved the fact that the prime minister as a woman could speak at the porch gateway to the marae because that was the domain of the God of Peace… a name for our God, the one true God in 1 Corinthians 14. Maori were reluctant however to change their Tikanga to allow for women to have equal speaking rights. Then next day was an interview about women being trained and released into leadership in the rural sector. The issue of women in leadership is an important one in our society and within the Church.
This is the second message in the series Women and Leadership in the New Testament:
the silent witnesses and the silencing passages which is my contribution to
our wider winter sermon series Her story,
Her voice women in the bible. In our first talk we explored the silent
witnesses to Paul’s acceptance of women in leadership in the early church. But
we also need to look at the passages that seem to be, and have been used, as
Anti women in leadership.
The passage that we are
looking at today “has been used unrelentingly as a proof text to swiftly and
decisively squelch the ministry of women in fellowship” (John Zens, 2012).In
one book I read for this sermon today it was noted that this had been used this
century to defend the firing of a women Hebrew professor from a very
conservative Seminary in the states. She could not have a position where she
taught and had authority over men. Likewise it has been pointed to as proof
that Paul and scripture are anti-women, and so should be dismissed at best as
archaic and irrelevant, and at worst as harmful and dangerous.
The passage is also acknowledged as
being difficult at many levels “Contextually, culturally, linguistically,
grammatically and conceptually’. Big words, big issues. We need to dig deep and
wrestle with it. Because in the end it has a lot to say to us that we might not
hear if we simply either write it off or quote it to reinforce our own
preconceived ideas … Can I say that there are many different interpretations of
this passage, I’ve found that choices about words and meaning are often made
depending on which view of men and women you hold. You will understand which side of the argument I am on as we go through this.
When
it comes to the Epistles in the New Testament we need to realise that the key
to understanding is that they are occasional. They are written to a specific occasion
a specific time and a specific place, to a context. We need to understand it in
that context before we can start to apply it. The context of the whole of
Paul’s letter to Timothy is that Paul has left Timothy in Ephesus to deal with
false teachers and teachings that are disrupting the Church and its witness. It
would be great if we had a comprehensive understanding of what those false
teaching were, but we only get glimpses from what Paul tells us, its influence
however needs to be kept in mind all the time.
Paul starts dealing with this false
teaching by addressing the impact that it was having on public worship and
prayer life of the Church. This passage is a continuation of Paul’s teaching
which started in verse 1 with
a call to prayer for all people, because God’s heart was for all people
to come to a saving knowledge of the truth through the one God and one mediator
between humanity and God Jesus Christ who gave his life as a ransom for all.
There is a universality of that prayer, all people, men and women, Christ died
for all, men and women. We come to saving knowledge the same way, men and
women. But also a very strong call of the uniqueness of the Christian faith,
through the one God and mediator.Then Paul had gone on to deal with the demeanour
of the people who prayed, both men and women. He told men to lift holy hands
and pray without anger or dispute. He adresses women, that when they pray,
again affirming their participation in public worship and prayer, they should
not adorn themselves with jewelry, braided hair styles and in appropriate
clothes their focus should be on their lives and good deeds. In the worship of
the goddess Atrimus in Ephesus women would adorn themselves in their jewelry
and finery and with new hairstyles as a way of reflecting their status in
society and curry favour with their deity, it seems that this was carried over
into the church. Paul is saying it is not about your outward appearance but
their heart attitude shown in how they treat others, that what mattered in
prayer. Sadly this passage has been applied in ways that are oppressive to
women, like the dress code at Gloriavale in New Zealand. On the other hand we
don’t often hear of men being told their prayers are invalid if they do not
stand with raised hands when they pray. The emphasis in this passage is on the
heart attitude of the prayer.
Then Paul moves on to say. “ A
woman should learn in quietness and full submission.” The first thing we should
note is that Paul wants women to learn. In Paul’s letter to the church at
Ephesus he had said he wanted the whole body to learn and grow into maturity
and fullness to be equipped for every good deed (Ephesians 4). The gospel and
New Testament Church was different from its Jewish and some pagan systems in
that it saw women learning in religious matters as important. It was important
that men and women together knew the scriptures and the gospel and how to apply
them in life. The education of women has been at the forefront of the missionary
movement in the nineteenth century, and one reason Christianity has had such an
impact in many countries. Women’s education is still an important issue in the
world today.
The word that the NIV rightly
translates ‘quietness’ has been translated in other places as in silence. It
has been used to effectively silence women, from speaking and taking part in
public worship. The word quietness here is the same as the word “quite life”
that Paul had used as the reason why we should pray for people in authority, in
1 Timothy 2:2 so we could live a peaceful and quite life, which were the best
conditions for the church to grow into all Holiness and godliness. It’s not
about silence it’s about a lack of conflict and trouble, the right environment
to learn. Submission here has the idea of not all women being submissive to all
men, rather it is the right attitude for learning, like silence in a
library, it’s not to men per se but to the word of God, to the
gospel and apostolic teaching. Jewish Rabbi’s disciples needed to have the same
attitude when they learned to be quite and also to be in submission to the
torah and their teacher. We are going to look at this concept in more depth when
we look at 1 Corinthians.
Martha’s sister Mary is the example of
what it means to be a disciple and a learner in Luke 10:38-42. She is sitting
at the feet of Jesus, a technical term by the way for being a disciple, and
engaged in learning. It shows that Jesus was comfortable with Women as
disciples and in the public space of the house, which in Jewish and roman
society was predominantly the preserve of men. Now it’s likely Paul said this
because there were women present who because of the influence of false teachers
and were not willing to listen, in fact in 2 Timothy 3:6-7 Paul talks of a
group of women who were gullible and under the influence of the false teachers
who were always learning but did not come to a knowledge of the truth. They
were not willing to accept the apostolic teaching, you can imagine how that
would impact public worship. They would be argumentative and
disruptive.
Lets move on… “I do not permit a woman
to teach or to assume authority over a man, she must be quite.”
Firstly the flow of scripture in the
gospel and New Testament is towards equal involvement of men and women in
leadership and the mission of the church. As we saw last time…The women were the first
to hear the good news that Jesus had risen from the dead. Men and women were
together in the upper room at Pentecost and received the infilling of the holy
spirit which Jesus said would enable them to be his witnesses. Paul’s own
ministry practices elsewhere in scripture show us that Paul was in actual fact
comfortable with women in leadership. Of importance here is that in Ephesus,
Pricilla and Aquilla, had been teaching and had taught Apollos the truth about
the gospel. Paul uses the same title co-workers for them, her, as he does for
Timothy and Titus. In light of that how do we understand Paul now saying I do
not permit women to teach?
The word do not now permit has been
argued over as to whether it is a blanket ban or more along the lines of in
this situation, or now I do not… It is in the present tense… had Paul changed his practice? It also
follows in a line of words where Paul had said I want, I want and I now do not
permit, none of these is an imperative they are not a command. That’s important
and how you interpret that is at the heart of how this passage is applied.
We then need to consider what Paul is
not permitting. There are two things here teach and have authority over a man.
The word for authority here is unique in the New Testament cannon, it’s not the
usual word for authority. It has negative overtones about authority in its uses
in other early literature. It only
becomes more common and takes on a positive vibe after Constantine makes
Christianity the state religion of the Roman Empire in 312 AD. Which may
reflect that desire in roman society for order and hierarchy. The word can mean be dominant or domineering.
Paul does not permit a women to teach in such a way that she is trying to get
what she wants and dominate men, she needs to be quite, which again is the word
not for silent but peaceful, and in order. Women teaching and dominating men
would have been looked down upon by roman and Greek society and Jewish society
as well and would be detrimental to the spread of the gospel. Just as that dominating
attitude towards women is detrimental to the gospel in our day and culture.
We shouldn’t be surprised that Paul
would not allow women to dominate men, because in his letter to the church at
Ephesus as Paul had addressed the Roman household code his teaching had been
Ephesians 5:12 submit to one another out of reverence to Christ. There
is a mutuality about that, that revolutionizes the Roman household code from an
imposition of a strict social order into loving service. Perhaps the best way
of looking at this idea of authority is the teaching of Jesus in Matthew 20:25 where
he tells his disciples not to be like the gentile rulers who lord it over each
other, rather they were to learn to be the servant of all. So is it women
per sae that Paul is against or is it the way this group of women in Ephesus
were behaving contra to the Christian understanding of servant leadership:
Co-workers together? The Christian understanding of leadership is service, and
in our Presbyterian Church that is a group activity, co-workers together. We
are suspicious of the danger of power being in the hands of a single person or
even a single group without checks and balances. Robert k Greenleaf published a
book called ‘servant leadership’ in 1977 which started the revolution of
looking at leadership in society and business, his ideal of leadership came
from Jesus and is a flat leadership structure of people committed together to
working for a common goal and the common good. This issue of power and
dominance is still with us today…Over the Christmas holidays I read a couple of
books on issues to do with power and toxic cultures in church, and the idea of
leadership being mastery and dominance was seen as resulting in abusive
cultures and in particularly sexual abuse from key leaders towards women.
Then
Paul goes back to the genesis story… For Adam was formed first, then eve. And
Adam was not the one deceived; it was the woman who was deceived and became a
sinner. But women will be saved through childbirth’. The hierarchical
understanding of this passage, is that Paul is asserting the primacy of men, because
in the second creation story in genesis men were created first, (in the first
creation story it simply says God created man in his image both male and
female)…and because eve listened to the serpent that women are easily deceived
and not as spiritually smart as men, so relegating them to the domestic sphere
of childbirth and caring for the family. Again social context is important.
Firstly from 1 Timothy 4:3 we see that some of the false teaching was around
abstinence and not being married, in 2 Timothy 1:17-18 Paul talks of two false
teachers who had said the resurrection had already come, there is a sense here
that the group of women were seeing that married life and childbearing were no
longer part of that new resurrection life. The other side to this is that the
main religion in Ephesus was the worship of the goddess Artimus, or Diane,
Ephesus was world famous and dominated by the temple of Artimus, a large
portion of its wealth came from that, (you can see that in Acts 19). In that
religion priestesses were dominant, it was a religion where women dominated men
and Artimus was also the one that women prayed to for safety in childbirth. The
hair styles that are mentioned in verse 8-10 were associated with this worship
as well… displays of wealth and sexuality were part of their worship and it was
said their prayers were wrapped up in their hair. So Paul is working on two
fronts here, not to say that women are inferior to men, but probably to remind
that group of women that they were not above men, the creation story is used as
a leveler. In fact in the myth about Atrimus and Apollos the two twin god
children of zeus, much was made of the fact that Artimus the female was born
first and here Paul maybe countering that from the bible. The false teachers
were very caught up in myth and genealogies.
While
there is some debate over the childbirth part, saving her is not the being
saved in terms of being put right with God, which is only by faith in Christ,
that does not make sense and on a different pastoral level a misunderstanding
of this passage can have horrible and damaging impact on childless couples. The
wider understanding of the word saved is in play here to mean physical safety.
There may have been a fear for women who had been part of the Artimus worship,
as most pagans in Ephesus would have been at facing pregnancy without that
reliance on pagan prayer… kind of like in modern times facing pregnancy without
modern medicine… and one of the main reasons women died in that time and
culture was in child birth, but it is God who is with them in that situation. At
the same time Paul is addressing the fact that this normal God given role
of the women is not to be abandoned.
In the end Paul’s hope for women is
that they may continue in faith, love and holiness with propriety. The same
thing that Paul wishes for all the church. Faith that invisible relationship
with God, made possible for all through Jesus Christ, reflected in love, how we
treat those around us and holiness a life that is consistent with the one God
whom we worship, very relevant if Paul is dealing with the remnants of Artimus
worship for pagans recently converted to Christ. Propriety gives the idea of
self-control, which is one of the fruit of the Holy Spirit.
After this passage Paul goes on to talk
to Timothy about setting up elders in the Church. He says they are to be the
heads of households. Which in Roman times were more usually men, although we
have a few example where this is not the case like Lydia’s in Phillipi, and
also Chloe’s people in Corinth and even Martha and Mary who invite Jesus round
to dinner. This reflected the society of Paul’s day. Today however, our western
society and its understanding of the place of women is very different than it
was in Paul’s day. How we understand and apply Paul’s teaching has been and is
still hotly debated and can and does have an impact on the gospel.
Paul’s focus is on the mission of the church, God
wanting all people to come to a saving knowledge of the truth. The gospel has
been welcomed in to many places because Christians were and are prepared to
teach women. In many places round the world there may be good reason for
caution in the speed of which women are welcomed into public leadership, as in
Paul’s day, having many women teachers is a society that did not permit women
teachers would have been counterproductive, today it may still endanger them
and the church. But in the west as Philip Towner finishes his commentary on
this passage says “too little too slow could neutralize the church’s impact on
society just as effectively.” In the end we are called to be co-workers in the
gospel, working together not looking to dominate each other and have our own
way.
much of this material comes from two sermons I gave back in 2018
on verses 8-10 https://howard-carter.blogspot.com/2018/03/a-pleasing-and-attractive-attitude-for.html
on verse 11- 15 https://howard-carter.blogspot.com/2018/03/this-could-be-fraught-women-in.html
