Women in ministry (part 5)

This is the fifth installment from an essay produced by the Prescott Memorial Baptist Church in response to inquiries made by the Shelby Baptist Association about their (PMC's) doctrinal integrity:

SHOULD WOMEN BE SILENT?

I Corinthians 14:34ff and I Timothy 2:11-12 and 3:1-7 are sometimes cited as blanket prohibitions, for all times and all places, against women speaking in church. There are several problems with this interpretation, all of which suggest alternative constructions.

First, a strict reading ignores all of the wight of authority recited above [see previous article]. It simply would not make sense for Paul to condemn the idea of female leadership in the church, and then to commend by name a number of women who were church leaders. How can a woman be silent, yet teach and preach and organize churches? The only way to maintain this kind of strict interpretation would be to discard large portions of Scripture–something we are not prepared to do.

Second, such an interpretation would require that every female who enters the door of a church remain mute until she leaves! If this were to happen, we Baptists would lose Sunday School teachers, GA and VBS workers, youth leaders, WMU circles, choir members, and the literally millions of women who have enabled the work of Christ to move forward, both at home and on the foreign mission field. The point is, there is no textual reason here to differentiate between preaching and any other kind of utterance; the word is "speak," not "preach." We know of no SBC congregation that follows this strict interpretation to its logical end.

Fortunately, there are at least two plausible alternative interpretations which comport with common sense as well as Biblical scholarship, and which allow us to see the Bible as a coherent whole.

First, with regard to I Corinthians 14:34ff, we have the situation that in the same letter, as noted above , Paul has already implicitly endorsed the notion that women can "prophesy" (preach). I Cor. 11:5. So what is he talking about in Chapter 14?

Several Greek scholars have noted that certain grammatical cues in this passage strongly suggest that Paul is quoting from another writer. Also, the use of masculine plural forms in the verse 36 ("you men" rather than simply "you") in the Greek text indicates that Paul may be specifically addressing men in the church at Corinth who are denigrating the role of female members. Without belaboring the technical points, it has been suggested that Paul is quoting the Corinthians’ words back to them in order to refute their argument. Therefore, a correct translation would sound something like this:

(You say in your letter), "As in all the churches of the saints, the women should keep silence in the churches. For they are not permitted to speak, but should be subordinate, as even the law says. If there is anything they desire to know, let them ask their husbands at home. For it is shameful for a woman to speak in church.

WHAT! Did the word of God originate with you men, or are you men the only ones it has reached?

This translation also explains the otherwise puzzling reference to the law. Paul would hardly be in the position of urging new churches to follow the old Jewish legalisms; he was generally on the opposite side of that argument. More likely, he was quoting the Jewish traditionalists at Corinth, and taking issue with them.

A second possibility, and one which applies to both the Corinthian passage and the excerpts from I Timothy, is that these instructions relate to the specific context in which the recipients of the letters found themselves. In some areas where churches were forming, pagan influences were strong, even within the churches themselves. This was certainly true at Corinth, a brawling seaport city known for its licentiousness. Some women were recently converted from religions in which temple prostitutes were the norm, for example. There are indications that they were disruptive in worship, perhaps not being accustomed to Christian forms of worship. Also, for the reasons mentioned earlier in this discussion, many women of the time were uneducated and undoubtedly unqualified to preach or teach. Therefore, in some congregations there was a special need for order and discipline in order to promote the spread of the Gospel–Paul’s primary concern.

This interpretation is consistent with the nuances of meaning contained in the Greek term translated "authority" in I Timothy 2:12. The term actually conveys the idea of abuse of authority. As surely as all would agree, no person in a church setting, whether male or female, should be permitted to abuse authority.

(More in the part 6)

NOTE:  If you're discovering this series "mid-stream," here are links to the previous articles in the Women in Ministry series:
Find part 1 here
Find part 2 here
Find the interlude here
Find part 3 here
Find part 4 here