Kudos to Howie and the Howie Luvzus blog for calling attention to some glaring inconsistencies in the positions that Southern Seminary President Al Mohler has taken regarding church-state separation issues.
It looks like the weather vane at Southern Seminary keeps turning on Al.
(Those who have seen the documentary "The Battle for the Minds" about the fundamentalist takeover of Southern Seminary will understand this comment)
22 comments:
I'm not sure if "Battle for the Minds" is the same video I saw a few years ago, but IF IT IS... ugh.
It was the funniest thing. It was like a bad politcal commercial cross-bred with a Michael Moore movie. It even had the bad guys in black and white, if I remember correctly.
I know personally one guy who was interviewed, who says that he was totally taken out of context.
The ominous camera angles were a good effect too.
Of course I may have seen a different documentary.
AW & Hashman,
I thought the documentary was exceptionally good.
I guess its just a joke to people who think they can dictate to God whether he could call a woman to the ministry.
I don't remember mentioning or even thinking anything about women.
You're pretty awesome if you can read minds. After the Living Proof debacle, I would be a little slower to make assumptions.
My comment was about the production style and the propogandist element of the film.
The Cannes filmfestival thought Farenheit 911 was "excellent" ...
preaching to the choir.
No doubt there was truth in the video, but it definately had a "payback" feel to it.
AW,
God can call a woman to any ministry that he chooses.
Southern Baptists think they can dictate that he can't choose women to pastoral ministry.
Does anything more need to be said?
Actually, if you want to get technical, Southern Baptist believe the Bible clearly states that women cannot be in pastoral authority over men. That doesn't mean they can't be Women's pastors or children's pastors or even youth pastors. And it really could be that women can be associate pastors and teach in the church and especially outside of it (as in seminary). The thrust of the texts in question seem to suggest that ultimate authority in the church should be in the hands of men so that the order God set up from creation would be sustained and modeled in the local congregations.
Furthermore, it seems that Bible limits leadership in all sorts of other situations as well. Thus, the limitation is placed not on what God's call is, but rather on what specific place within the church that calling is directed. Also, I don't think it is a matter of limiting God, but rather in highlighting what Scripture says in order to allow experience not to be in conflict with His revealed Word (which it should not be, since Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever -- prompting us to assume that so is the Father and Holy Spirit).
"Junia"
is a new book out that speaks to the issue of women and ministry in the church. I'm reading it now.
"Eldon Epp shows that the greetings of Romans 16 contain one more woman's name than those of us educated in the twentieth century were led to believe. Her name is Junia, and Paul applies to her and her partner, Adronicus, the name 'apostle'....For those Christians whose concern about women in leadership roles is tied to the question whether women actually served as leaders during the church's earliest generation, this book is an eye-opener."
I've read the Scriptures that those who would bar women from being senior pastors have used to justify their position. Those same Scriptures speak to me differently.
Marty, I am not familiar with that book, but am interested in how this man has arrived at his conclusion. The text in the ESV reads, "Greet Andronicus and Junia, my kinsmen and my fellow prisoners. They are well known to the apostles, and they were in Christ before me." The NASB says, "who are outstanding among the apostles." The Greek seems ambigious, "ev tois apostolois."
Additionally, while there is some belief that these were husband and wife, both of the major Greek New Testaments, the UBS and the Nestle-Aland have as the text a masculine name Junius. The UBS even grades this reading an A (signifying absolute certainty that this is the right reading). The texts that testify to this reading are not only extremely early, but diverse in type and distribution (giving extremely strong external evidence for this reading). The earliest manuscript with the feminine name is a text correction made to Codex Vaticanus. In order for this to be the best reading there would have to be overwhelming internal evidence to suggest that early on it was changed by the text and that later it would have been changed back.
So I think a better explanation of this could be that a couple of later copiers believed that these two could have been husband and wife and thus inserted that change into the text. The greatness of the Bible is that it is easy to see what has been inserted into the text or included into the text over time by comparing it to the other 5000 or so manuscripts. When the text is testified to by serveral families of texts (many of which were very early) over a long period of time spread over a large geographical area, the likelihood of it being an errant text is almost impossible.
Epp is an accomplished scholar, but I would like to see what other textual critics would say about his work.
As to your statement, "Those same Scriptures speak to me differently" I would ask, "Is that the question we should be asking -- how does this speak to me?" Rather shouldn't it be "What was the Holy Spirit trying to communicate through Paul regarding the role of women in the church?" Based on the evidence, taking into account the culture and arguments used by Paul in the passages, we have to draw conclusions on the universal intent and thus the applications made because of it. Asking how it speaks to us subjects the text to our 21st century reading, not the intent of the Holy Spirit (which should be the overarching hermeutical concern).
D.R.
My position is fairly simple.
Either God is sovereign and calls whomever he wills, whenever he wills, to whatever position he wills, or God is being limited by a sexist interpetation of how he should act.
First century Jewish Christians had a parallel problem with racist interpretations about God's ability to redeem uncircumcised Gentiles.
D. R.,
You asked "Is that the question we should be asking -- how does this speak to me?"
Yes! Without a doubt! I believe that IS the question that we should ask. I strongly believe the Holy Spirit is able to guide me. Belief is personal. When we arrive at the judgement seat we will not be asked what someone else believed, we will stand on our own belief.
God can call whomever for whatever. It is His call. I've always been of the opinion that if God could call Balaam's ass, He can certainly call a woman.
Oh and regarding "Junia". I've just started reading it. It is quite scholarly. I'll have to keep my dictionary by my side and do internet searches I am sure before I finish. It's a thin little book, but oh boy! I hope I haven't bit off more than I can chew.
Why are you making the call of God so subjective that even Scripture cannot say otherwise? And BTW, belief is not personal. We are not called to live as Lone Ranger Christians. Christianity is to be lived in community.
And actually your statement "When we arrive at the judgement seat we will not be asked what someone else believed, we will stand on our own belief" is technically inaccurate. According to James, those who teach will be held to a higher standard: James 3:1, "Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers, for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness."
So, still, Scripture stands. If you want to believe what is contrary to Scripture, that is your prerogative, but don't go accusing those who are trying to be faithful to Scripture of supressing women or limiting God. God sets the limits -- we are called to abide by them.
I labor in community while I'm here on this earth. I face the final judgement on my own.
What I believe is not contrary to Scripture as I interpret it, only your interpretation of it.
Well, my interpretation, as well as pretty much all of that of Church history until the 20th century.
Yep,it would appear so.
In my mind when Jesus chose women to proclaim his resurrection to the world, he liberated them for all time. It just took this long for some men to realize it.
Huh?..You've lost me. Sorry.
Perhaps Ken Schenck, Professor of New Testament at Indiana Wesleyan University can explain it:
http://watkins.gospelcom.net/women4.htm
His blogspot is:
http://kenschenck.blogspot.com/
D.R. & A.W.,
I'm sure you guys are aware that the arguments you are using were also used to support slavery.
AW,
If you practiced your hermeneutic consistently and without contradiction it leads back to justifying slavery.
If the principle of non-contradiction is foundational to your hermeneutic, then your inconsistent application of it at this point is an issue.
Consistent Calvinists like R.J. Rushdoony and other Christian Reconstructionists do not deny this.
ck,
You said:
The passages typically used to support slavery were oblique and not inherently constitutive of church organization. The passages used to direct men and women to appropriate roles in the church are quite explicit and undoubtedly constitutive of normative church organization.
A lot of Christians died in the civil war on account of that oblique and not inherently constitutive biblical interpretation.
The references you use are no less oblique than the ones used to justify slavery.
James Watkins of Internet for Christians states: There are "two specific prohibitions against women in leadership (1 Corinthians 14:34-36, 1 Timothy 2:12)."
"In contrast to these two isolated passages, there are hundreds of verses describing Godly women in administrative and teaching roles: Miriam (prophet--there is no distinction between "prophets" and "prophetess" in Hebrew Scripture), Deborah (prophet, judge, military leader), Esther (queen), Hulda (prophet), Noadiah (prophet), Anna (prophet), Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Susanne and "many others" (Christ's disciples), Mary Magdalene (the first evangelist), the daughters of Philip (prophets), Priscilla (teacher), Chloe (house church leader), Mary the mother of John (house church leader), Lydia (house church leader), Nympha of Laodicea (house church leader), Phoebe (deacon, not "deaconess" as translated in the KJV), and Junia (an apostle)."
That's quite an impressive list of women in leadership roles in the early church.
So Marty, are you saying that you don't have an argument as to what the text says, but that you think it contradicts itself in practice, thus leading you to take the side of the practice rather than the clear teaching by Paul?
For someone who places more emphasis on the NT and has a hermeneutic that places it well behind the NT in authority, you sure did cite many references to the OT leadership roles of women (one of which was queen -- I know in this day and age men apparently want to be queens, but at that time, only a women could serve in that role -- it didn't add to your argument). Also, Phoebe as a deacon is legitimate. That is not a specific teaching position and is in fact, under the authority of the elders who would have been male.
You see the problem with you understanding my position is that you believe I in some way denegrate women in order to try to place them in their God-given roles. But that is not the case. I believe that their God-given role is in submission to men (BTW, submission is not a negative term -- remember Christ submitted to the Father and we submit to Christ). So I believe women can teach and lead in every aspect in the church except when it comes to the point when there is no male headship in authority over her. Additionally, I believe that if men would grow up and lead in the home, you would never see a woman complain about male headship there either.
If I am right and God desires women to be in these roles, then it is for their good and they fulfill the Law of Christ in doing so. Of all the women I have met and known I know of none who didn't desire to be led by a strong man who embodied what Paul called them to in Ephesians 5:22-33. That is every woman's dream! That is what we are to model in the church and the home. And if men acted the way they should (not overbearing, but loving and masculine -- not lazy, but responsible), there would not be a woman Christian woman alive who would not desire to follow them.
That is what it means for order to exist in the home and the church, and my wife loves me for my position on this, as do many of my friends wives love their husbands for this. None of them feel like they are being discriminated against or denegrated in their roles in the home. Femininity needs to return to where it once was -- taking joy in serving in the home with a Christlike love for their husbands, children, and Church.
That is the picture Paul is painting in Ephesians and in 1 Timothy.
ck,
Post comments on a blog that has scrolled off the page and then smirk when there is no response.
You are back to spraying graffiti again.
My response to your sexist chain of command interpretation of scripture has been posted for seven years. Here are some links:
The Christian Family: Chain of Command or Mutual Submission.
Dead Head Leads SBC FamilyDead Head
Women's Issueswomen's issues
ck,
If you insist on wasting my time, I'm going to start asking for contributions to tutor you.
The justifications for slavery are much more explicit in the New Testament than are the sexist qualifications you cite for pastoral ministry.
If you've missed the challenge that this presents to your hermeneutic, then you might need to re-read the book of Philemon and the 6th chapter of Ephesians and be a little more consistent with your interpretation.
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