I could hardly believe my ears when a Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) pastor blurted a few years ago, “We need to rethink the whole topic of women’s ordination.” I was stunned because those words were coming from a woman.
“Why of all things do we need that?” I reacted. “Women’s ordination is an established policy in the denomination.”
“But too many people support it for the wrong reasons,” she responded. She then explained how many of her colleagues had sensed a deep calling to Christian vocation, including the proclamation of the Word. But they also knew that the Bible singles them out to keep silent in church. Recognizing the disparity between God’s call to them and God’s Word to all, they simply chose to dismiss the Word — at least those specific, exclusionary texts — as pre-modern expressions of male chauvinism and patriarchy.
The ultimate problem, she explained, is that such interpretive turns have led a host of church leaders — both male and female — to dismiss out of hand many passages of Scripture and to take the whole Bible with a grain of salt.
While that inference may be somewhat overstated, it behooves us to pause a moment to ask how we do read the Bible in the light of our shared conviction that God the Holy Spirit, “… calls women and men to all ministries of the Church” (BSF, line 64).
On one level we read the Bible theologically. We tackle the broad sweep themes of Scripture, listening to where a collection of texts expresses a consensus witness on a subject.
For centuries most believers perceived a consensus witness on structural hierarchies. Not only had God commissioned humanity to have dominion over the earth (Gen 1:28ff.); God also commissioned men to exercise authority over women. Such hierarchical understanding led to innumerable inequities, from owning slaves to child abuse, from management exploiting labor to clergy preying upon children.
Closer study revealed other biblical passages that countered and even repudiated that thinking:
- the example of Jesus showing deference to women, children, the poor and the powerless,
- the “great reversal” teaching of Jesus wherein the last become first and the first last, and
- the declaration, “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” (Gal. 3:28)
What once stood as a consensus witness to hierarchical structures has given way within our fellowship to the broader theological thinking that equalizes the status of women and men.
On another level we read the Bible exegetically. We try to understand the original, Holy Spirit-inspired author’s intended meaning of each chapter and verse. When writers seem to express contradictory thoughts, we know we need to dig deeper. Interpreting the Apostle Paul is a case in point. Letters traditionally treated as Pauline call for women to cover their heads, to be silent in church, and to avoid exercising teaching authority over men. Then again, some of those same letters allude to women as “fellow workers” (a term commonly used for elders), prophets, and in one case an apostle (Rom. 16:7). They weren’t being silent. They were exercising teaching authority, to be sure! Plus, that sweeping declaration of equality in Christ (third bullet above) comes from one of those Pauline texts.
Taken that way, the prevailing message we hear from Paul and others is one of equal status and equal authority for women and men in church leadership.
Such contradictory signals suggest that historically particular situations at hand led to such teachings, and that the intended points behind those restrictive commands reflected other broad concerns: the need to present oneself with modesty, to avoid disrupting the worship of God, and to thoroughly educate and equip those proclaiming the Word — behaviors required of us all.
Frankly, when folks ask me, “How come you ordain women?” I simply respond, as I learned to sing as a child, “For the Bible tells me so.”
We do well to remember not only the right conclusions but also the right reasons that support those conclusions. Every one of us is guilty, at least from time to time, of dismissing persons who are precious in our Lord’s sight. Let us all, as Paul would say, “fan into flame the gift of God that is within [them] …” (2Tim. 1:6-TNIV).
–JHH
