I’m not sure why the issue of women in pastoral roles has been weighing on my mind lately but it has. I am a convinced complentarian, which means that I believe that men and women have different and complementary roles in the Church. Women are not to be elders or authoritatively teach men in spiritual matters. Here’s why I believe this.
My reason for being a complimentarian has to do with my view of God’s covenants. First Timothy 2:11-15 [1] is the passage where the discussion usually comes down to. There, Paul expressly forbids “a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man” because “Adam was formed first, then Eve; and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor.” I believe that in taking verses 13 and 14 together (they appear to be a single thought-unit) we see that there is more to the argument than just that Adam was created first (fact A) and that Eve was deceived (fact B). The key that draws facts A and B together is when Paul says that Eve “became a transgressor.” There is a lot of theological weight packed into that phrase, more than is obvious from a cursory reading. To burrow into that theology, we need to consider what the scriptures say about the fall.
The Bible says that mankind fell in Adam (Rom 5:12, 1 Cor 15:22 [2]) and yet Paul states here that it is Eve who becomes a transgressor. So why, then, is it not the biblical view that mankind fell in Eve since she ate first (Gen 3:6)? Her being deceived is no excuse (consider Israel’s covenant with the Gibeonites in Joshua 9) and Paul does not extend it as one here. I believe that humanity fell in Adam because Adam represented all of mankind (Rom 5:11-21) when he broke covenant with God (Hos 6:7 [3]) and that included his wife. Though Eve was deceived and broke the Law, mankind did not fall in her because she did not represent the human race, but we did fall in our federal head Adam.
The way this informs 1 Tim 2:11-15 is not so much that women are more easily deceived than men (personally, my wife has often rescued me from foolishness), but more that from the beginning of mankind the man was the head, the leader. True, Adam was formed first but the order of creation does not automatically invest authority or else the animals would be in charge! The divinely instituted arrangement was that Adam was given the role of leadership in the garden and in that role he represented all of mankind that came after him, Eve included. Adam’s existence prior to Eve is significant only in the same way it is significant for all of mankind: federal headship in the Covenant of Works.
Taking all this theology back to 1 Timothy we see that Paul does not allow a woman to have authority over a man nor to teach him because in the beginning it was the man who was considered the leader and was held responsible. Furthermore, this was not some arbitrary whim of God in creation; He did it to express the relationship between Christ and the Church (Eph 5:25-33 [4], esp. 5:32 [5]). Christ represents the Church in the New Covenant (Luke 22:20 & Acts 20:28). The Church is not to have authority over Jesus nor are we going to teach him and so it is with the relationship between man and women in the Church. This situation is much more than just cultural.
My experience with egalitarian (men and women are equal in the New Covenant) hermeneutics has been “interesting.” At the time I was taking a class in which I had to study the issue, homosexual Gene Robinson was being promoted to Episcopal Bishop. These things seem unconnected till I heard Robinson being interviewed on the radio. In defense of his homosexuality, he said:
The other problem there is that homosexuality, as a sexual orientation, is a construct that’s only about 100 years old, so for us to take that construct and read it back into ancient texts just does not do justice to those texts. There’s no question that the seven very brief passages that are seen to be related to homosexuality, in scripture, both Old and New Testaments, are negative, but what I would maintain is that they do not in any way address what we’re talking about today, which are faithful, monogamous, life-long intentioned relationships between people of the same sex. The scripture simply does not address that issue.
When I heard this I recognized that the egalitarian hermeneutic was the same! Craig Keener in his essay in “Two Views on Women in Ministry [6]” claimed that the issue was that women were uneducated and therefore easily deceived. Paul would never have envisioned a situation where women were just as educated as men.
But there are errors with this hermeneutic. The qualifications that Keener and Robinson place on the prohibitions they are responding to are not found in the Bible. History can help Biblical interpretation but it should not set a text on its head. What would happen to Keener’s argument if the ruins of a first century, all-women college were excavated in Ephesus? Even if we allow his premise, the qualifications prove too much. For Keener, are we to assume that all the women and none of the men were being deceived? For Robinson, are we to assume that “faithful, monogamous, life-long intentioned relationships between people of the same sex” never existed in biblical times? Once we embrace this kind of hermeneutic, anything is justifiable and nothing relates to us today, such as something like this:
Jesus and Paul were speaking to Jews who believed that they could be saved by following the Mosaic Law. That is not the situation in Roman Catholicism; they don’t think you can be saved by following the Mosaic law. You cannot take the biblical teaching of that time and apply it to them today, it just doesn’t apply.
In the end, we need to allow the Bible to stand on its own. It may seem archaic and dated, indeed I know some women who would be very good pastors. But God did not say these things to no purpose. If the Bible is authoritative and sufficient then we must abide by its teaching no matter what the conventional wisdom of the day dictates.
Addendum [7]