Category Archives: Gender and Leadership

New Testament Scandals: Female church leaders

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I just received by e-mail a link to an article by David Instone-Brewer, of Tyndale House in Cambridge, entitled New Testament Scandals: Female church leaders. This is part of a new “e-newsletter” from Christianity magazine. Regular readers of this blog will remember that I linked last year to Instone-Brewer’s teaching on divorce and remarriage – his site on this subject is now working.

Instone-Brewer gives interesting insights on the position of women in the early church. Here is a sample:

The guilty secret of the early Church was that it did rely to some extent on female leaders. In public women had to keep quiet, literally. Paul allowed them to attend teaching sessions (which would be frowned on by Jews and Romans) but he didn’t allow them to join in the discussion (1 Corinthians 14 vs34-35). Timothy was warned not to let women teach because, like Eve, they weren’t sufficiently educated (1 Timothy 2 vs12-14). But quietly, in the background, some women got on with leadership roles in spite of these restrictions.

Now I’m not sure that I agree with his understanding of 1 Corinthians 14:34-35; after all, elsewhere in the same letter Paul explicitly permits women to speak out loud in Christian gatherings. But he is surely right in interpreting 1 Timothy 2:12-14 in the light of the situation of women at that time.

It is interesting to see how he deals with the biblical material on women apparently in leadership positions in the church. Concerning how the names Junia and Nympha were changed to Junias and Nymphas, he writes:

Why did later scribes make these laughable attempts to hide the female leaders in the early church? Because it was a shameful – but true. The truth is confirmed by two other early documents. The heroine in a 2nd Century novel ‘Paul and Thecla’ is told to ‘Go and teach the word of the Lord’. Although this is a novel, the author assumed his audience would regard this as normal. He elaborated at length how Thecla was saved from execution by burning and by wild animals (which he expected his audience to be awed at) but he merely mentioned in passing that she became a Christian teacher, because he didn’t expect his readers to be surprised by this. The normality of female church leaders is confirmed in Pliny’s report about Christians in 112 AD. His report was for the emperor, so he collected information from the highest available source – he arrested two local church ministers and tortured them. The fact that he tortured them means they were slaves, and his word for ‘ministers’ is ‘ministrae’ – ie female. So two female slaves led the church in that area!

Instone-Brewer concludes with:

The whole world has now caught up with Paul’s teaching that all humans, however different, are equal. This teaching enabled the early church to do what it didn’t want to admit in public – it allowed some women to work quietly as leaders and teachers. It is therefore ironic that the few modern institutions that don’t follow this early church practice are mainly churches.

Indeed!

C.S. Lewis got it wrong on women priests

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A couple of days ago I noted C.S. Lewis’ criticism of the arguments used by complementarians. But of course that does not imply that he was an egalitarian. Indeed I now have proof that he was not. I thank my commenter Iconoclast for a link to an interesting essay by Lewis apparently entitled Priestesses in the Church?, posted last year by Alice C. Linsley on her blog. According to this page the essay was originally written in 1948. In it Lewis makes clear his opposition to the ordination of women in the Church of England.

Lewis certainly would not have approved of Barbie becoming an Episcopal priest, as pictured here. Thanks to Dave Walker at the Church Times blog for the link (although it’s broken) to the Facebook group Friends of Episcopal Priest Barbie (not sure if my link will work any better). It is a real group, so this is not just an April fool, and I took the picture from it.

To start with, C.S. Lewis got one thing quite wrong: no one was asking for a separate “order of priestesses”, but for women to be admitted to the existing order of priests, as has now happened. But I think he is on the ball to say that

the opposers (many of them women) can produce at first nothing but an inarticulate distaste, a sense of discomfort which they themselves find it hard to analyse

– to which some would add a shallow and tendentious interpretation of certain Bible passages.

When it comes down to it, the argument which Lewis makes is that God is male, not female. That implies that for him women are less the image of God than men. He admits that it is “masculine imagery” which is used of God, but he confuses the imagery with the reality when he makes God really masculine. When Robert Burns wrote “My Love is Like a Red, Red Rose”, his beautiful poetic imagery was not supposed to mean that the woman he loved was in fact not a woman but a rose. I’m not really qualified to lecture a professor of literature like Lewis, but he seems to have forgotten the basics of how poetry works. Poetic images are figures of speech not to be taken literally. So if calling God Father is indeed “masculine imagery” of the poetic kind, it precisely does not imply that God is really and essentially male.

Lewis gets to the most basic issue when he writes:

The innovators are really implying that sex is something superficial, irrelevant to the spiritual life. To say that men and women are equally eligible for a certain profession is to say that for the purposes of that profession their sex is irrelevant. We are, within that context, treating both as neuters. As the State grows more like a hive or an ant-hill it needs an increasing number of workers who can be treated as neuters. This may be inevitable for our secular life. But in our Christian life we must return to reality. There we are not homogeneous units, but different and complimentary organs of a mystical body.

Here “complimentary” is a transcriber’s error for “complementary”; Lewis certainly wouldn’t have confused the two words, and the latter appears in this version of the text. So he upholds the principle of complementary roles for men and women, while in this essay being careful to avoid the kinds of arguments which he put in the mouth of the Ape in The Last Battle.

In the paragraph I just quoted Lewis has hit the nail on the head. Indeed I would hold, along with most egalitarians I imagine, that distinctions of sex are “irrelevant to the spiritual life”. But Lewis seems to disagree. So how can we resolve this? Lewis, having rejected reason earlier in the essay, turns to church tradition. As an evangelical I prefer to turn to Scripture. And there I read:

So God created human beings in his own image,
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them.

Genesis 1:27 (TNIV)

There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.

Galatians 3:28 (TNIV)

Thus the Bible makes it clear that males and females are equally made in the image of God, and that the distinction between them is precisely “irrelevant to the spiritual life” in Christ. Thus the clear biblical position is that God is neither male nor female, and that neither gender is better fitted than the other to represent him to humanity.

Of course C.S. Lewis was right and prescient to write that

the Church of England herself would be torn in shreds

by allowing women priests. In the 1990s the shreds were inexpertly patched together by such means as the infamous “flying bishops”. Now that women bishops are in prospect the whole patchwork is falling apart again. But the reason this has been so contentious is that a large minority in the church has been taken in by the kinds of bad arguments about the essential masculinity of God which Lewis put forward.

To be fair to C.S. Lewis, he was a man of his time and so shared “an inarticulate distaste, a sense of discomfort” with the idea of women priests. In 1948 he was not young (he turned 50 that year) but still unmarried. He had little experience of women apart from his odd relationship with his surrogate mother Jane Moore. It is perhaps hardly surprising that he treated them more or less as a separate species. But, fortunately for half of humanity, that is not how God treats them.

C.S. Lewis on complementarianism

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C.S. Lewis didn’t have anything to say about the kind of complementarianism that is being promoted by CBMW among others, according to which men and women are allocated complementary, but allegedly equal roles in the family and in the church – and it is men who decide which these roles are. That is because the concept had not been invented when he died.

But Lewis did have an idea of what it meant to speak of complementary roles where the allocation of these roles is all done by one side. In the first chapter of The Last Battle he writes of how the ape Shift, a clear figure of evil in his story, and the donkey Puzzle

both said they were friends, but from the way things went on you might have thought that Puzzle was more like Shift’s servant than his friend. He did all the work. … Puzzle never complained, because he knew that Shift was far cleverer than himself and he thought it was very kind of Shift to be friends with him at all. (p.7 of my Puffin edition)

After getting the reluctant Puzzle to fish a lion’s skin out of Caldron Pool, Shift says:

You know you’re no good at thinking, Puzzle, so why don’t you let me do your thinking for you? Why don’t you treat me as I treat you? I don’t think I can do everything. I know you’re better at some things than I am. That’s why I let you go into the Pool; I knew you’d do it better than me. But why can’t I have my turn when it comes to something I can do and you can’t? Am I never allowed to do anything? Do be fair. Turn and turn about. (p.12, emphasis as in the original)

With arguments like these Shift asserts his leadership over the poor Puzzle and exploits him as his servant, to do all the dirty jobs while Shift reserves for himself all the nice ones. These arguments sound remarkably like the ones which complementarians use to justify men getting all the desirable roles in church and in family, while all the ones which the men don’t want end up being given to women.

Now Shift probably was cleverer than Puzzle, so he could justify being the one who did the thinking – although not the evil he brought from it. But there is plenty of proof that men are no better at thinking or at leading than women are, and so no justification for men allocating to themselves all the leadership roles and any other tasks that they take a fancy to.

Authority, power and rights in the New Testament, part 3

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This post continues (after rather too long a delay) and concludes the series in part 1 and part 2, in which I looked at the New Testament use of exousia and related words concerning authority and rights. I included “power” in the series title, but in fact this would seem to be a good rendering only in a few cases in Revelation (6:8, 9:3,10,19), and perhaps also in references to Roman authority (e.g. John 19:10,11), as only here does the word have any real connotations of physical ability or coercive power.

I will continue by looking at the “authority” given to believers in Jesus.

First we note that the most basic exousia given to believers is to become the children of God (John 1:12).

Then we see that Jesus, while he was still alive on earth, gave exousia to his disciples, not just the Twelve, and that this authority was to cast out evil spirits (Matthew 10:1; Mark 3:15, 6:7; Luke 9:1, 10:19). In two of these places, in fact referring only to the Twelve, this is linked with the exousia to heal (Matthew 10:1; Luke 9:1). In parables this was likened to the exousia of servants to do the work assigned to them (Mark 13:34; Luke 19:17).

In the post-Resurrection parts of the New Testament it is rare for exousia to be attributed to believers, apart from the sense “right” found mainly in 1 Corinthians (also Acts 5:4; 2 Thessalonians 3:9; Hebrews 13:10; Revelation 22:14). Simon the magician desires the exousia which he sees in Peter and John, referring to how they could confer the Holy Spirit (Acts 8:19). Faithful believers at Thyatira are promised exousia over the nations (Revelation 2:26). The two witnesses have exousia to shut the sky and over the waters (Revelation 11:6). And besides these three we have only the two cases where Paul claims exousia concerning the Corinthian church (2 Corinthians 10:8, 13:10), which are the only cases in the New Testament of one believer having any kind of exousia relating to specific other believers.

So what is this exousia which Paul had? It was not authority over the Corinthians, but it was authority “for building you up, not for tearing you down” (13:10, TNIV). In fact in Greek the phrase is almost the same in 10:8 and 13:10, literally “for building and not for destroying”, with “of you” added only in 10:8, so perhaps Paul’s exousia here is to be understood as more general, to build up the church as a whole.. Paul does not claim any absolute authority over the Corinthians, to choose for himself whether to build them up or tear them down, but only the specific authority or commission which God gave him to build them up. Even so he is reluctant to invoke this authority, choosing to encourage or beg (parakaleo) his listeners to do what is right and refraining from ordering them to do anything.

Thus Paul’s attitude to authority in the church is entirely consistent with that of Jesus, who told his disciples not to be like the rulers of the Gentiles who exercise authority (exousiazo) but to lead by serving (Luke 22:25-26).

To summarise, in the New Testament we see a hierarchy of authority only among secular leaders. Gentile rulers like Pilate have exousia over their subjects, given to them by the emperor (and ultimately by God); military officers are under their ruler’s exousia and have others under them. But there is no trace of this kind of hierarchy of authority in the New Testament picture of how Christian believers should relate to one another.

Certain Christians, complementarians, try to teach some kind of hierarchy for the church: God the Father > God the Son > the Church > church leaders > husbands > wives > children. But there is hardly a trace of this picture in the Bible. The only places where words in the exousia group are used in this connection are when Jesus explains how he is turning this picture upside down:

You know that those who are regarded as rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority (katexousiazo) over them. 43 Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, 44 and whoever wants to be first must be slave of all. 45 For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.

Mark 10:42-45 (TNIV)

Authority, power and rights in the New Testament, part 2

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In part 1 of this series I looked at the various occurrences of words for “authority” in the New Testament, primarily exousia and exestin. I only began to consider their significance for wider biblical teaching. In this post I am continuing that process.

As I noted, exestin is commonly used in the gospels and in Acts of an activity which is permitted, by religious or secular law. This also seems to be the sense in which the noun derived from this verb, exousia, is sometimes used in those books. For example, Saul of Tarsus was given exousia, permission or the right, to arrest Jewish believers in Jesus (Acts 9:14, 26:10,12). And the opponents of Jesus asked him who gave him the exousia, permission or the right, to do what he was doing (Matthew 21:23; Mark 11:28; Luke 20:2).

This use of exousia and exestin leads naturally into the usage, mainly in 1 Corinthians, concerning the rights of Christians. Paul appears to be teaching that God has given to those in Christ permission, or the right, to do anything they want – but that doesn’t mean that they should do what is unhelpful. To put it another way, we are no longer bound by a whole lot of “Thou shalt not” laws, but we are expected to behave in ways which build up others and glorify God. Understood in this way this exousia is at the heart of Paul’s gospel message.

This kind of exousia is hierarchical in a sense, in that it derives ultimately from God and is mediated through the people and institutions called authorities, exousia in the plural. But it is not a hierarchy of command on the military model, but the opposite – a hierarchy of giving up the right to command by granting permission and rights.

In the New Testament we also see another kind of exousia, authority, that of people who are recognised as having authority in themselves. This is what, according to John Richardson, John Goldingay calls Authority B, distinct from Authority A which is conferred by a hierarchy. This Authority B is what the crowds in Galilee saw in Jesus (Matthew 7:29; Mark 1:22; Luke 4:32). But these are the only clear cases in the New Testament of exousia being used of this kind of authority, and related words are never used in this sense. Whereas there clearly is a sense in which some believers are recognised as charismatically empowered to teach and lead, the exousia word group is never used of this. Whenever exousia is attributed to believers, it is given to them by the Lord and so of the hierarchical type.

Indeed most commonly when exousia is attributed to Jesus it is something he has inherently or as the gift of God the Father. This is the basis of his authority to forgive sins (Matthew 9:6,8; Mark 2:10; Luke 5:24), to drive out evil spirits (Mark 1:27; Luke 4:36), to judge (John 5:27), and to die and rise again (John 10:18). It is not humans, or evil forces, who gave him the authority referred to in the famous Great Commission passage: “All authority [exousia] in heaven and on earth has been given to me” (Matthew 28:18, TNIV; cf. John 17:2).

But here we must avoid any misunderstanding by noting that this Christian authority is never over other people. It is interesting to analyse the phrases used with exousia which might mean this. Most frequently exousia is specified by an infinitive of an activity, suggesting a basically dynamic concept, permission or right to do something, not the static concept of authority over something or someone. But in some cases a prepositional phrase is used, and there is a wide variation:

With genitive alone:

  • Matthew 10:1 and Mark 6:7: Jesus’ disciples are given exousia “of” evil spirits.
  • John 17:2: Jesus has exousia “of” all flesh.
  • Romans 9:21: the potter has exousia “of” the clay.
  • 1 Corinthians 7:4: a husband and a wife exousiazo “of” one another’s bodies.

With epi + genitive:

  • 1 Corinthians 11:10: a woman has exousia “on” or over her head.
  • Revelation 2:26: believers receive exousia “on” the nations.
  • Revelation 11:6: the two witnesses have exousia “on” the waters.
  • Revelation 14:18: an angel has exousia “on” the fire.

With epi + accusative:

  • Luke 9:1: Jesus’ disciples have exousia “on” evil spirits.
  • Revelation 6:8: death has exousia “on” a quarter of the earth.
  • Revelation 13:7: the beast receives exousia “on” everyone.
  • Revelation 22:14: the blessed have exousia “on” the tree of life.

With peri + genitive:

  • 1 Corinthians 7:37: a man has exousia “about” his desire.

With epano + genitive:

  • Luke 19:17: the faithful servant is given exousia “over” ten cities.

Similarly a variety of prepositions are used with exousia:

en + dative:

  • Acts 5:4: Ananias’ property was “in” his exousia.

hupo + accusative

  • Matthew 8:9 and Luke 7:8: the officer is “under” exousia, secular authority.

ek + genitive:

  • Luke 23:7: Jesus is “from” Herod’s exousia (perhaps here meaning the territory Herod ruled).

Finally we have the only place in the whole New Testament (with the possible exception of Revelation 2:26, a clear allusion to Psalm 2:8 – a careful read of 2 Corinthians 10:8 and 13:10 will show that these are not exceptions) where it is said that any one human has exousia over any other one:

kata + genitive:

  • John 19:11: Jesus recognises that Pilate has secular exousia “against” him.

So what of the authority given to believers in Jesus? This post is already too long, so I will go on to that in the next part.

Continued and concluded in part 3.

The last bastion of complementarianism collapses!

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I was astonished this morning. At my church the last bastion of complementarianism, of separate roles for men and women has collapsed. No, we haven’t appointed a woman pastor yet – although we probably have a 50/50 chance of getting one next time round. It’s something far more radical, perhaps even unique. We have appointed a MAN to be in charge of the flowers in church!

I’m sure my friend James, who grows flowers as a hobby, will do an excellent job.

Authority, power and rights in the New Testament, part 1

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Sorry for the break in blogging. I have been working hard, and then there were technical problems with my site last night. Here we go again…

The issue of New Testament teaching on authority and rights has come up in a number of places recently. In my post Complementarianism is fundamentally flawed and anti-Christian I pointed out how central a non-Christian concept of authority is to complementarian thinking. A couple of weeks ago John Richardson compared two different kinds of authority, and how they relate to Anglican ministry. And Dave Faulkner, while discussing the question Is Internet Access A Human Right?, suggested that there was something fundamentally non-Christian in the concept of human rights, a position with which I disagreed in a comment.

The biblical material on this subject centres on two word groups, exousia and authentein. In discussions over the latter, which occurs only once in the Bible (1 Timothy 2:12), huge amounts of virtual ink have been spilled on various blogs. I have little to add here except to say that I don’t think anyone has bettered the KJV rendering “usurp authority”. But exousia and related words are much more common, and commonly misunderstood, and so deserve a closer study. I restrict my study to usage in the New Testament largely because that is what I can do easily with the tools I have at hand.

The noun exousia, generally translated “authority” or “power”, occurs just over 100 times in the New Testament. At least in its form it is derived from the impersonal verb exestin, often rendered “it is permitted” or “it is lawful”, which is found 32 times in the New Testament, either in this present tense form or as the neuter participle exon. Also found are the derived verbs exousiazo, four times, and katexousiazo, twice.

It makes sense to start with the basic form, exestin. This is found most commonly in the gospels, in discussions between Jesus and his opponents over what is permitted under Jewish law (Matthew 12:2,4,10,12, 14:4, 19:3, 22:17, 27:6; Mark 2:24,26, 3:4, 6:18, 10:2, 12:14; Luke 6:2,4,9, 14:3, 20:22; John 5:10). Occasionally it is used for what is permitted by the Roman authorities, either by their general law (John 18:31; Acts 16:21, 22:25) or in a particular case (Acts 21:37). This same concept is conveyed by the noun exousia when it is used in these same discussions (Matthew 21:23,23,24,27, 28:18; Mark 11:28,28,29,33; Luke 20:2,2,8): Jesus’ enemies wanted to know what permission he had to do what he was doing.

However, the rendering of exestin as “it is lawful” is misleading, as this was not a legal term, but a general one concerning permission. This becomes clear in a few other cases (Matthew 20:15; Acts 2:9; 2 Corinthians 12:4) where it is refers to what is allowed or right in a more general sense.

This leaves only the occurrences of exestin in 1 Corinthians 6:12 and 10:23, twice in each verse. These need to be understood in the light of what exousia and exousiazo mean in the same letter, where they occur nine times (7:37, 8:9, 9:4,5,6,12,12,18, 11:10) and three times (6:12, 7:4,4) respectively. All of this is in the course of an extended discussion about the freedom that Christians have but also how they should use these freedoms in a responsible way. Within this context exousia seems to mean something like “right”, and indeed the whole passage is reminiscent of contemporary discussions about human rights. It seems to have a similar meaning in a few other places (Acts 5:4; 2 Thessalonians 3:9; Hebrews 13:10; Revelation 22:14).

In 1 Corinthians the derived verb exousiazo must mean something like “have rights over”.

One possible exception is exousia in 1 Corinthians 11:10. This has sometimes been understood as “a sign of authority”, on no good exegetical basis, but in the context of the letter and the usage of exousia in it the meaning must be something like that the woman has the right to choose her own hairstyle.

Exousia does have a quite different use in the context of secular authority, where it refers not to permission obtained but to the right to give permission to others or withhold it. The word is used in this sense nine times (Matthew 8:9; Luke 7:8, 20:20, 23:7; John 19:10,10,11; Revelation 17:12,13) as a general abstract noun, and six times (Luke 12:11; Romans 13:1,1,2,3, Titus 3:1) personified, and mostly plural, referring to people having this kind of authority. Three times (Acts 9:14, 26:10,12) exousia is used of the authority given to Saul of Tarsus by the Jewish religious authorities.

The personified use of exousia, mostly in the plural, is also found referring to spiritual beings possessing authority, eight times (1 Corinthians 15:24; Ephesians 1:21, 3:10, 6:12, Colossians 1:16, 2:10,15; 1 Peter 3:22).

Four times in Revelation (6:8, 9:3,10,19) exousia refers to the power of messengers of evil to cause harm. Twice in the same book (14:18, 18:1) it refers to the authority of an angel.

The verbs katexousiazo (Matthew 20:25; Mark 10:42) and exousiazo (Luke 22:25) are used of wrong human exercise of authority.

Many of the remaining occurrences of exousia refer to the authority of Jesus: in his teaching (Matthew 7:29; Mark 1:22, Luke 4:32); to forgive sins (Matthew 9:6,8; Mark 2:10; Luke 5:24); to drive out evil spirits (Mark 1:27; Luke 4:36); and more generally (Matthew 28:18; John 5:27, 10:18,18, 17:2; Revelation 12:10). Some occurrences refer to the authority of God the Father (Luke 12:5; Acts 1:7; Rom 9:21 (in a parable); Jude 25; Revelation 16:9).

There are a few cases of exousia attributed to or claimed by forces of evil (Luke 4:6, 22:53; Acts 26:18; Ephesians 2:2; Colossians 1:13; Revelation 13:2,4,5,7,12, 20:6).

Then the word is sometimes used for the authority of believers in a general sense (Matthew 10:1; Mark 3:15, 6:7, 13:34 (in a parable); Luke 9:1, 10:19, 19:17 (in a parable); John 1:12; Acts 8:19; Revelation 2:26, 11:6,6).

And then we are left with just two places where exousia is used to refer to the authority which one Christian, in this case an apostle, has over other Christians (2 Corinthians 10:8, 13:10). Nowhere at all are any of these words used to refer to any kind of authority of a husband over his wife – except in the perfectly symmetrical 1 Corinthians 7:4. But if you listen to some Christians talking about the authority of Christian leaders and Christian husbands, you would think that this was a major theme of the Bible. Hasn’t something got a bit out of proportion here?

So we need to look more closely at what these words actually mean in the Christian context – but I will leave that for a further post.

Continued in part 2 and concluded in part 3.

Complementarianism is fundamentally flawed and anti-Christian

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I have had a busy few days, so no time to write anything new. But there is something which I wrote, in a comment on my recent post asking whether women will ever be equal, which I think deserves to be upgraded to a post. Here is what I wrote:

To me the whole of complementarianism, as I see it, is fundamentally flawed and anti-Christian because it is predicated on a concept of authority which is completely opposed to the teaching of Jesus and the apostles. I don’t mean to say that all complementarians are anti-Christian, but I do say that their thinking has been taken captive by an anti-Christian worldly philosophy of authority, which has its roots more in Machiavelli and Nietzsche than in Jesus.

If these words sound strong, contrast what some complementarians have to say about the authority given to husbands and pastors with the concept of Christian authority I have put forward in my previous posts on this subject. See the contrast made especially plain here. The following is an example of the complementarian position, as put forward by Bruce Ware quoted here:

It is God-like to submit to rightful authority with joy and gladness as it is God-like to exert wise and beneficial rightful authority.

But where does the Bible say anything about humans exerting this kind of authority, which is indeed God’s prerogative?

A question for complementarians: Will women ever be equal?

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I thank Suzanne McCarthy and John Hobbins for a two link chain leading me to Jeremy Pierce’s interesting post Ontological Equality and Functional Subordination. Here Jeremy examines the argument that both in the Trinity and in relationships between men and women eternal functional subordination, in either case a controversial doctrine, implies ontological or essential inequality, which in either case could be seen as heretical.

In his post Jeremy discusses a point made by Philip Payne, who wrote:

I believe that ontological equality is perfectly compatible with functional subordination as long as that subordination is voluntary and temporary, as was Christ’s voluntary and temporary subordination to the Father in the incarnation (e.g. Phil 2:6-11). It seems to me that if subordination in necessary and eternal, it is then an aspect of one’s essence.

Jeremy looks at this issue primarily from the perspective of the Trinity, which I will not consider in detail here. In his last paragraph he comes back to what for me is the more relevant issue, relationships between men and women. He points out that

Marriage relationships end in death, and there’s no reason to think elder-congregation relationships continue with any authoritative relationship post-death.

Therefore these relationships are not eternal, and so the argument that eternal subordination implies essential inequality, even if it is valid, does not apply here.

However, Jeremy had earlier argued that in the case of the Trinity the distinguishing issue which might make functional subordination ontological or essential is not that it is eternal, in the strict temporal sense of lasting for ever past and future. For indeed

Something’s being true at every time certainly does not imply that it had to be true.

Rather, as Jeremy suggests but does not explain in detail, what would make a particular type of subordination essential is that it is true in every possible world.

Is this true of the subordination of women, as taught by complementarians? Would they say that women are functionally subordinate in every possible world? That is an interesting question, and not an easy one to answer.

Now clearly God could have created a world in which women are not subordinate to men – in fact I believe that he did! He is able to do such things because he is able to create separate families of women and men who are ontologically different from our own human family. But the real issue has to be about whether subordination of women is an essential attribute of our own species, the notional descendants of Adam and Eve. The question is not about separately created species – any more than it is about animals, some of which naturally change their gender implying that for them gender is not an essential characteristic.

So the question really is this: are there, in the complementarian world view, possible worlds in which human women, related to us, are not functionally subordinate to human men?

Now I am sure that complementarians would hold that their rules on subordination of women would apply in any human colony in any other part of the universe which humans might in future be able to travel to. Indeed they probably already want to apply them on the International Space Station. So this subordination applies, on their view, in any world to which the descendants of Adam and Eve can travel by their own power.

But how about any world to which God might want to move them, or from where he might have moved them in the past? I know that complementarians generally hold that Eve was already subordinate to Adam in the Garden of Eden, basing this view on a misunderstanding of “helper” in Genesis 2:18,20. Do they hold that women will remain functionally subordinate to men in God’s eternal kingdom, or in the lake of fire? I guess I would accept that there is subordination of women in the place of eternal punishment, where the curse of the fall may apply with its fullest force. But in the new heavenly Jerusalem?

So, complementarians, if you want to show that women are essentially, ontologically equal to men, and that this equality is not compromised by the functional subordination you teach, then you need to tell us about a possible world in which truly human women, daughters of Eve, are not subordinate to their men, the sons of Adam. If it is indeed part of your future hope that in the coming kingdom women will fully enjoy their essential equality with men, then please tell us that openly. But if it is not, if you hold that women will remain subordinate in God’s eternal kingdom, then you are left with no possible world in which women are not functionally subordinate. And that, by Jeremy’s argument which seems convincing, implies that women are not essentially equal to men. If that’s what you really believe, admit it!

"Husband of one wife" was not used of women, it seems

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There has been recent controversy, starting with Don Johnson’s comment here at Gentle Wisdom, also in this comment and following ones in a long thread at Parchment and Pen, concerning what the Australian author Bruce Fleming wrote about the biblical phrase generally translated “husband of one wife”. This phrase is found in 1 Timothy 3:2 and Titus 1:6 as a qualification for overseers and for elders respectively. Its use in these verses is commonly cited as an argument that women cannot be church leaders, as of course they cannot be husbands.

Unfortunately the details of what Fleming wrote do not support everything they have been claimed to support. There is no evidence that the phrase translated “husband of one wife” was used of women as well of men.

Nevertheless, and independently of Fleming’s argument, this phrase should not be understood as not allowing women to lead churches. Some years ago I argued this, in my series The Scholarly and Fundamentalist Approaches to the Bible, and last week I noted that Bill Mounce confirms it. In the course of my earlier argument I referred to what Bruce Fleming had written about this phrase. In particular I looked at what he wrote about the view of the late French Bible scholar Lucien Deiss. But I did not rely on this passage for my argument because I could not confirm what Fleming had written.

Here I quote again, for easy reference, the passage from Fleming:

The second qualification in the list deals with the overseer’s married life. Careful research has shown that this qualification means that whether one is a husband or a wife it is important to be a “faithful spouse.” It requires that an overseer, if married, be faithful and be “a one-spouse kind of person.”According to Lucien Deiss (notes to the French Bible, the TOB, Edition Intégrale, p. 646, note a), this Greek phrase was used in Asia Minor, on both Jewish and pagan gravestone inscriptions, to designate a woman or a man, who was faithful to his or her spouse in a way characterized by “a particularly fervent conjugal love.”

When I read Deiss’ comment about how this phrase was used on ancient grave inscriptions in Turkey, where Paul and Timothy ministered, I confirmed it with him myself, reaching him by telephone in Vaucresson, France.

Some might find this insight into 1 Timothy 3:2 surprising because modern versions of the Bible translate this Greek phrase as – “husband of one wife” – making this qualification appear to be restricted to men only! Instead, rightly understood, this qualification is about faithfulness in marriage by a Christian spouse. It is not saying that oversight is “for men only.”

In his comment here last week Don Johnson again quoted the very same passage. I replied regretting that what Deiss wrote, and said to Fleming on the telephone, had not been confirmed. I doubt if it is a coincidence that the next day TL brought up the same subject at Parchment and Pen. I presume it is the same TL who has now commented on this matter here at Gentle Wisdom, suggesting that we “get the original statement that Lucein Deiss wrote”.

At first I thought that this would be a problem. The French Bible version TOB, Edition Intégrale, is available at amazon.fr (thanks to the blogger at Blog by-the-sea for this link), but I didn’t want to pay €57.00 for this 3000 page book.

But then I discovered an online edition of this Bible (link from here, a long list of Bibles and related resources in French). These are page images, and so include all the original matter with the original pagination – although there does seem to be some inconsistency between the page numbers on the images and that in the table of contents. But there have been many editions of this work, perhaps with slightly different pagination. The online version is the 10th edition (2004); amazon.fr is offering the 11th edition (2008).

I turned first to the cited page 646 (of over 3000 in this book). This turns out to be from the text of 2 Samuel, and not surprisingly there is nothing relevant in the text or footnotes here. This page number must be an error in Fleming’s book – or perhaps it refers to a New Testament only edition of TOB.

Then I found the footnote on 1 Timothy 3:2, on the words mari d’une seule femme (“husband of only one wife”). It seems that this is what Fleming was quoting. Here is the full footnote text in French:

Selon les commentateurs, l’apôtre viserait l’inconduite (mais cela n’allait-il pas de soi qu’il faille s’en abstenir ?), ou bien il interdirait le remariage après veuvage, ou encore il s’en prendrait au fait de répudier sa femme pour en épouser une autre (cf. Mc 10,1-11 par.). Mais on peut aussi entendre les expressions mari d’une seule femme ou femme d’un seul mari (cf. 1 Tm 5,9), expressions que l’on rencontre dans les inscriptions juives et païennes, dans le sens d’un amour conjugal particulièrement fervant. (p.2915 of the 2004 edition)

I understand the gist of this, but not enough to offer a definitive translation. The first sentence summarises the various views of commentators. The second sentence means something like:

But one can also understand the expressions husband of only one wife or wife of only one husband (cf. 1 Timothy 5:9), expressions which one encounters in Jewish and pagan inscriptions, in the sense of a particularly fervent conjugal love.

On the same expression in Titus 1:6 and the reversed expression in 1 Timothy 5:9 there are footnotes referring back to this one on 1 Timothy 3:2.

This footnote is clearly where Fleming found the words “a particularly fervent conjugal love.” But it does not quite say what Fleming seems to have taken it to say, or at least what some other interpreters have taken Fleming to say.

Deiss (if he indeed wrote this footnote) was referring not only to the expression in 1 Timothy 3:2 mias gunaikos aner (this is in fact the nominative case of the expression, as in Titus 1:6; in 1 Timothy the accusative of this is found), literally “man of one woman”, but also to the reversed expression in 5:9, henos andros gune, “woman of one man”. What Deiss wrote is entirely consistent with what scholars of Greek would expect, that the former expression is used of a man who showed “a particularly fervent conjugal love” and the latter of a woman who showed this. It is I believe well documented that these expressions are used in inscriptions, of men and women respectively. If Deiss had intended to say anything different and unexpected, he would surely have made that clear.

What some interpreters have understood Fleming to be claiming is that the former expression, mias gunaikos aner “man of one woman”, was used on inscriptions of women as well as of men, and so should be understood as a gender generic expression. If this is what Deiss meant, and confirmed to Fleming by telephone, he certainly didn’t make it clear in his footnote. And neither Deiss nor Fleming seems to have offered any evidence that mias gunaikos aner was ever used of a woman. To be fair to Fleming, the quoted passage, which I have never seen in a wider context, does not make an explicit claim to this effect, although it does seem to indicate it.

Perhaps the most charitable explanation I can come to here is that there was a misunderstanding between Deiss and Fleming because of the language barrier between them. So I would think that, unless Fleming can come up with some specific evidence, we must conclude that the phrase translated “husband of one wife” was not used of women and was probably not understood as gender generic.

But this by no means proves that church leaders must be male. To quote again Bill Mounce from my post last week,

the lists show us the type of person who can be in leadership.

They do not offer detailed rules. And so “husband of one wife” should not be understood as specifying that no overseer or elder may be unmarried, or divorced and remarried, or polygamous, or lacking “a particularly fervent conjugal love”, or female. Rather, the decision on who to appoint should be based on the general principles laid down by the apostle as interpreted in the specific cultural context. In first century Ephesus and Crete women church leaders may have been inappropriate. That doesn’t mean that the same applies in 21st century Europe and North America.