While debate continues to 'rage' over the future format of this blog (see poll below, and vote if you haven't already, pretty soon we might even reach 20 people) life and studies continue as normal.
Of particular value today was the visit by Martin Hallet of the True Freedom Trust to our Ethics lectures. TFT occupies a fairly lonely position on the issue of same sex attraction, seeking to offer help and teaching for those who believe that the bible prohibits homosexual practice whilst teaching that God does not promise a complete transformation of our sinful sexual feelings (in this life). Martin took all three sessions and displayed tremendous grace, honesty, commitment and not a little humour as he spoke on the issue of homosexuality (or 'same sex attraction' which is his preferred term). His mature godly discipleship shone out, and I for one felt extremely glad that the TFT exists and does the ministry it does. Their website is certainly worth a visit and their ministry is well worth praying for.
Among the challenging things Martin had to say were (my summaries, not necessarily his words);
- We need more conservative evangelicals who are willing to be open about their sexuality. This would provide credible examples of those trying to live under the bible's prohibitions (within the extravagant forgiveness and grace of God), as well as prevent accusations of hypocrisy and secrecy.
- We should avoid appealing to the 'damage' done by homosexual practice since much of this applies to promiscuous homosexuality, not loving committed homosexual monogamy (which is what the debate within the Church is concerned with).
- We must argue from the bible and theology rather than from sociological study. , otherwise people are left open to liberal arguments.
- Human sexuality is extremely complex and we should avoid a simplistic analysis of the causes of particular sexual tendencies.
- Related to which, we should avoid thinking that certain people (including ourselves) will never experience particular sexual tendencies or desires.
- We need extremely good, cogent and compassionate bible teaching on the issue of sexuality. Again, poor theology leaves people vulnerable to liberal approaches to the issue.
-We should reject perfectionism and its promise of full healing/transformation/deliverance from same sex attraction in the here and now. The pastoral consequences of perfectionism can be deep, especially when 'healing' does not occur.
- We must thus broaden our definition of healing to include knowing purpose, meaning, value, love in our lives through God and through his Church, amidst and even because of genuine struggles.
- Protestants need to do more work on the marriage relationship in Genesis 2 and throughout scripture, especially in relation to the sacramental nature of sexual relations. Strong theology in this area makes much sense of God's prohibition of all sex outside marriage, even in loving relationships.
Showing posts with label Gender Issues. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Gender Issues. Show all posts
Tuesday, March 06, 2007
Monday, October 23, 2006
Women Preaching to Men and Ordination and all that kind of thing
Following on from this post, Sandy Grant (an Anglican Minister in Sydney) has kindly sent me details of his response to Graham Cole's paper on Women teaching Men in the Church which he gave at Oak Hill earlier this year (and which also seems to be doing the rounds in Sydney). Sandy's paper addresses each of Graham's seven points/considerations very ably and also contains a handy link to Graham's original paper online.
Sandy Grant's paper can be read HERE
Graham Cole's paper (for those who don't have access to the copy on Acorn) can be read HERE
Sandy Grant's paper can be read HERE
Graham Cole's paper (for those who don't have access to the copy on Acorn) can be read HERE
Friday, May 19, 2006
Should we just 'Adam and Eve it'?
One of the benefits of being at bible college is the opportunity it gives to think hard about some thorny issues. I'm talking about the kind of issues that are (in some respects at least) 'secondary' (e.g. although I would baptise babies I would happily fellowship with someone who doesn't) but nevertheless important because
a. They're part of what God has given us graciously in his loving self-revelation in the bible.
b. Therefore they must be (ultimately) for our good and our spiritual health and the health of our churches (otherwise why would God have bothered telling us anything about them?).
Last night for example, I was at a lecture held at college looking at the issue 'can women preach to men?' where a guy called Graham Cole was arguing for a 'yes' (some people may be surprised to hear that such views are given an airing at a 'fundamentalist-faschist-narrow-minded-calvinistic' institution like Oak Hill, but let me tell you, not only are they given an airing but they are backed by several members of the faculty, and women do preach in college chapel services!). It was a great opportunity to hear from someone committed to scripture and yet taking a different view to the one I've always taken. I went prepared to be persuaded, though clear in my own head why I've always held to more of a 'no' position.
Graham Cole presented his case very tightly, with more than a little passion and much skill. However, I'm sorry to say that he failed to persuade me. Although his case makes sense logically not all of the steps in his argument are (in my opinion) true.
Of crucial importance was his interpretation of 1Timothy 2:11-15 which is perhaps the clearest apparent prohibition of women publicly preaching to a mixed congregation. Cole's argument was that in 1Timothy Paul was addressing a specific situation in the church at Ephesus where people were getting misled by false teaching (which is true) and therefore he is re-establishing the authority of his own apostleship and his teaching in the church by restricting who can teach. So, when Paul refers to the Genesis story (2:13-14) to back up his prohibition he is making an analogy to Eve being misled by listening to the serpent instead of listening to Adam who had been given God's word. The point (in this view) is not so much that 'women can't teach men because there's a basic difference between them by nature or in the way God has ordered his world' but 'those who have received God's word should teach it and others should listen'. So, women could've taught freely in the church in general, it's just that not so in the church in Ephesus because they were listening to false teaching and as a result Paul was needing to restrict the teaching role to those to whom God's word had been first given (himself especially and through him Timothy) and those they would appoint as trustworthy (the elders Timothy is to appoint in ch3).
The problem however is that Cole failed to explain why all the people Paul does permit to teach publicly to a mixed congregation are men. Why forbid all women to teach any men? And if the teaching/leadership office is open to women in exactly the same way as to men, why not get Timothy to appoint faithful elders and 'elderesses' in chapter 3, those men and women who were godly and gifted and reliable who hadn't been duped by the false teachers?
More crucially however, was his suggestion that Paul was using the creation story of Genesis 1-3 purely as an appropriate analogy rather than to say something specific about the nature of men and women and God's created chosen order. In my opinion, this view hinges on there not being any theological significance in God creating Adam first and not Eve, such that when Paul says 'Adam was formed first, then Eve' he's talking about the mere facts of the story to say that those who receive God's word first (which in the Genesis story just happened to be the man because he was made first) should teach it and others should listen (which just happened to be Eve). In other words, God could've created Adam second but it just so happened he didn't, and we can't read anything theological (about the nature of how God does things and orders things) or anthropological (about the way God has made humans and wants his people to be ordered) into it. This seems a highly unlikely and minimalistic reading of Genesis and Paul and I'm unconvinced by it for the following reasons;
a. Genesis 1-3 is a carefully ordered narrative, and just about all the other details do have theological significance. It seems unimaginable that just about everything else in the story is meant to tell us something about the nature of what it means to be human and about how God relates to humans etc. etc. and yet the fact that Adam is created first and received God's word first is incidental and tells us nothing about the nature or order of how God want things to be.
b. 1 Timothy 2:11-15 reads more naturally as taking the Genesis account as normative for male-female order in God's people (not just illustrative of falling foul to false teaching). He uses the specific example of Adam and Eve in Genesis 2-3 to back up a general statement about men and women in vs. 12. This, I would argue, better explains the general language of 1 Timothy 2 and also the male-dominated pattern of leadership in the rest of the letter (and indeed the rest of the scripture).
So, practically, I'm afraid I still think women shouldn't teach or have authority over men, which means that the regular, authoritative preaching of God's word to his gathered people should be given to those men who have been given to the church as pastor-teachers and appointed by the church to serve in this way (whether full-time paid or not). If this is what God has said we should do then it must be better than doing it our own way and it must ultimately be for our good.
However, much more thought needs to be given to the biblical gift of prophecy, since it is abundantly clear that this is different from what the bible calls teaching and yet it is a gift that women can exercise in the context of church meetings (1 Corinthians 11:4-5). It seems that perhaps the problems over women's minsitry wouldn't arise so much if our church services and our church life wasn't so minister/clergy dominated and instead teaching-leaders exercised their ministries in an Ephesians 4:11-16 kind of way - equipping everyone else to be able to use their gifts to build the church. We need the authoritative and regular teaching of God's word by pastors so that the whole church is able to speak the truth in love as we grow up to be mature Christ-like christian communities.
a. They're part of what God has given us graciously in his loving self-revelation in the bible.
b. Therefore they must be (ultimately) for our good and our spiritual health and the health of our churches (otherwise why would God have bothered telling us anything about them?).
Last night for example, I was at a lecture held at college looking at the issue 'can women preach to men?' where a guy called Graham Cole was arguing for a 'yes' (some people may be surprised to hear that such views are given an airing at a 'fundamentalist-faschist-narrow-minded-calvinistic' institution like Oak Hill, but let me tell you, not only are they given an airing but they are backed by several members of the faculty, and women do preach in college chapel services!). It was a great opportunity to hear from someone committed to scripture and yet taking a different view to the one I've always taken. I went prepared to be persuaded, though clear in my own head why I've always held to more of a 'no' position.
Graham Cole presented his case very tightly, with more than a little passion and much skill. However, I'm sorry to say that he failed to persuade me. Although his case makes sense logically not all of the steps in his argument are (in my opinion) true.
Of crucial importance was his interpretation of 1Timothy 2:11-15 which is perhaps the clearest apparent prohibition of women publicly preaching to a mixed congregation. Cole's argument was that in 1Timothy Paul was addressing a specific situation in the church at Ephesus where people were getting misled by false teaching (which is true) and therefore he is re-establishing the authority of his own apostleship and his teaching in the church by restricting who can teach. So, when Paul refers to the Genesis story (2:13-14) to back up his prohibition he is making an analogy to Eve being misled by listening to the serpent instead of listening to Adam who had been given God's word. The point (in this view) is not so much that 'women can't teach men because there's a basic difference between them by nature or in the way God has ordered his world' but 'those who have received God's word should teach it and others should listen'. So, women could've taught freely in the church in general, it's just that not so in the church in Ephesus because they were listening to false teaching and as a result Paul was needing to restrict the teaching role to those to whom God's word had been first given (himself especially and through him Timothy) and those they would appoint as trustworthy (the elders Timothy is to appoint in ch3).
The problem however is that Cole failed to explain why all the people Paul does permit to teach publicly to a mixed congregation are men. Why forbid all women to teach any men? And if the teaching/leadership office is open to women in exactly the same way as to men, why not get Timothy to appoint faithful elders and 'elderesses' in chapter 3, those men and women who were godly and gifted and reliable who hadn't been duped by the false teachers?
More crucially however, was his suggestion that Paul was using the creation story of Genesis 1-3 purely as an appropriate analogy rather than to say something specific about the nature of men and women and God's created chosen order. In my opinion, this view hinges on there not being any theological significance in God creating Adam first and not Eve, such that when Paul says 'Adam was formed first, then Eve' he's talking about the mere facts of the story to say that those who receive God's word first (which in the Genesis story just happened to be the man because he was made first) should teach it and others should listen (which just happened to be Eve). In other words, God could've created Adam second but it just so happened he didn't, and we can't read anything theological (about the nature of how God does things and orders things) or anthropological (about the way God has made humans and wants his people to be ordered) into it. This seems a highly unlikely and minimalistic reading of Genesis and Paul and I'm unconvinced by it for the following reasons;
a. Genesis 1-3 is a carefully ordered narrative, and just about all the other details do have theological significance. It seems unimaginable that just about everything else in the story is meant to tell us something about the nature of what it means to be human and about how God relates to humans etc. etc. and yet the fact that Adam is created first and received God's word first is incidental and tells us nothing about the nature or order of how God want things to be.
b. 1 Timothy 2:11-15 reads more naturally as taking the Genesis account as normative for male-female order in God's people (not just illustrative of falling foul to false teaching). He uses the specific example of Adam and Eve in Genesis 2-3 to back up a general statement about men and women in vs. 12. This, I would argue, better explains the general language of 1 Timothy 2 and also the male-dominated pattern of leadership in the rest of the letter (and indeed the rest of the scripture).
So, practically, I'm afraid I still think women shouldn't teach or have authority over men, which means that the regular, authoritative preaching of God's word to his gathered people should be given to those men who have been given to the church as pastor-teachers and appointed by the church to serve in this way (whether full-time paid or not). If this is what God has said we should do then it must be better than doing it our own way and it must ultimately be for our good.
However, much more thought needs to be given to the biblical gift of prophecy, since it is abundantly clear that this is different from what the bible calls teaching and yet it is a gift that women can exercise in the context of church meetings (1 Corinthians 11:4-5). It seems that perhaps the problems over women's minsitry wouldn't arise so much if our church services and our church life wasn't so minister/clergy dominated and instead teaching-leaders exercised their ministries in an Ephesians 4:11-16 kind of way - equipping everyone else to be able to use their gifts to build the church. We need the authoritative and regular teaching of God's word by pastors so that the whole church is able to speak the truth in love as we grow up to be mature Christ-like christian communities.
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