I do not permit a woman to teach
why Baptists in particular struggle with the woman question
It’s worth noting the strategies that are at hand when we discuss women and the church.
Some approach the question as a repristination project, where the Biblical text is thought to offer an original, good word about women. Women’s identity in the image of God is identified in the Genesis narrative. Additional positive female figures are pointed out, from Deborah to Huldah to Rahab, with the ultimate female exemplar identified in Mary, the second Eve, who in her obedience reverses the curse of Eve’s disobedience. By this account, the Bible speaks well of women, throughout. The full inclusion of women obviously follows. “Patriarchy” and any malign treatment of women speak of the existence of fallen structures that, including hierarchy and other forms of oppression, are sinful and so prevail against the good, given created order that sets men and women as equal partners and co-heirs.
Problems lurk, even here. For if God’s design in creating a world and redeeming it in Christ was to overturn gender-based hierarchies, why doesn’t he say so?
And why does he seem to do so little to settle this account? If toppling patriarchy were the true intent of the incarnation, there would have been many opportunities to settle this score; he might have started at female disciples, or even more categorically, a female Christ. Perhaps the keys of the kingdom might have been given to Mary, and not Peter. If it was the case that God came in Christ to trounce female subjugation, might he have said this directly- even once?
It is true, of course, that Christ subverts some gender norms when he approaches women. The woman with the issue of blood, whose bleeding would have made her “unclean”, presumes to touch Jesus’ garment. An analogue to Uzzah’s touching of the ark (2 Sam 6:7), when the woman touches the place where God dwells (in Christ! For real!) might suggest that the woman should be struck dead. But she is instead healed and not even rebuked, merely told to “go in peace” (Luke 8:43-48).
Women are included in Christ’s ministry, but though we might wish it to be otherwise, their liberation is not the main event. “Patriarchy”, it seems, was not Christ’s chief concern.
Ahh, but you say- surely here is a category error. For God in coming in Christ surely intended to overthrow all sin, including sinful social structures and the forms of oppression they maintain and enforce. Surely, in this way at least, Christ could be said to have come to vanquish patriarchy?
The problem with this line of argument is that “vanquishing patriarchy” is rather thin soup to base a religion on. Even when it is expanded to include “vanquishing all forms of oppression”, it quickly becomes an entirely human project, judged by its success at overturning social structures. Any form of religion that assumes liberation from authority to be its main task will have a hard time staying Christian. Under this view, “Christianity” can become identical with “removing any obstacles to oppression”, a category which itself is a moving target.
A second view is that the Biblical text contains outdated mores and norms that we need to move beyond. We might identify patriarchy as one example, but there are surely others; racism, androcentrism (preference for male power and influence), and homophobia can all be found in Scripture, because, according to this view, the Bible is an outdated text that reflects its cultural preferences. Though these preferences are reflected in Scripture, they are not taught or demanded by the Biblical text. Our job as interpreters is to separate the “wheat”- the timeless, universal wisdom- from the “chaff”- the local, and limited cultural context.
Tempting though it may be, as common as this approach is, it is not actually all that easy to discern what is “chaff”. When Jesus says in Luke 12:51-53:
51 Do you think I came to bring peace on earth? No, I tell you, but division. 52 From now on there will be five in one family divided against each other, three against two and two against three. 53 They will be divided, father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law
Is he in fact promoting family discord? How about when Jesus initially refuses the Canaanite’s woman’s request with the statement that “It is not right to take the children’s bread and toss it to the dogs” (Matthew 15:26). Modern amateur commentators have taken this to mean that Jesus exhibited racism, which the Canaanite woman subsequently corrects him on. Such an interpretation is appropriate if our job is to separate the biblical wheat from the chaff; it is completely ridiculous if we see the biblical text as more than a winnowing project.
The challenge of being a Baptist amidst these hermeneutical strategies loom large in many recent treatments of women’s leadership. Beth Allison Barr has a recent book out, following on her first, on the question of women’s leadership in Baptist life.
The hardening of views on women’s ordination in Baptist life are somewhat surprising. On the one hand, Baptists are uniquely situated to include women in ordained ministry. This is because the Baptist view of ordination is a mere formalization of a high view of the priesthood of all believers. For a Baptist, all Christians are “ministers”. Ordination bestows an official recognition of ministry, but there are no special privileges and affordances that are bestowed in ordination. Because there are no sacraments, the ordained Southern Baptist pastor cannot do anything after the fact that they could not do before. Ordination is a formality.
It is for this reason curious that the battles against women’s ordination are the fiercest among Baptists, for whom ordination means so little. What has happened, I suspect, is that an obvious inclusion of women into formal ministry, under the view of the priesthood of all believers, was preempted by broader social and political concerns.
If ordination for Baptists is simply a formal recognition of a theological fact- the priesthood of all believers- than there are no theological grounds on which to exclude women from the pastoral office. If all persons can be ministers of the gospel, and women are persons, than there are no theological grounds on which to exclude women from functioning as ordained ministers. This is likely why women were included, by fiat, for so many years. When it became a priority to exclude women from pastoral roles, a theology had to be articulated- perhaps even invented- in order to do so.
As far as I can tell, what happened in the late 1970s is that Baptists became Presbyterians in order to do just that.
The previous Baptist commitment to the priesthood of all believers, which made the pastoral role more of a first-among-equals, hardened— even to the point that in 1988 the SBC issued a resolution on the pastoral role.1 The Danvers Statement (1987), from about this same time, made a formal statement about the relation between men and women. It’s notable that the first seven stated motivations of the Danvers statement are explicitly social concerns- things like “the increasing promotion given to feminist egalitarianism with accompanying distortions or neglect of the glad harmony portrayed in Scripture between the loving, humble leadership of redeemed husbands and the intelligent, willing support of that leadership by redeemed wives” and “the widespread ambivalence regarding the values of motherhood, vocational homemaking, and the many ministries historically performed by women.” It’s clear that what the authors of the statement desired was to reinforce particular social views about the role of women in the home and society and to backfill them theologically.
Though backfilling one’s social commitments theologically is among the most common of motivations for “statements” and “open letters”, this does not make it prudent.
But for a non creedal organization issuing non-binding statements, this one really stuck.
Though there are many texts upon which to make an argument to include women from pastoral roles, arguing to exclude them takes a bit more work. Fortunately for this issue, Baptists are nothing if not industrious, and they worked quite hard not on dealing with the biblical texts that speak explicitly to women in church life- which reflect about evenly on both men’s and women’s participation- but by focusing on the intermediate assumption- that “women are persons”- stated above. In order to exclude women from formal church leadership, a distinction needed to be made between male and female that would elevate male authority in creation and therefore make female superiority in ministry “natural”. It is the only way for Baptists to theologically support male-only ministry. Baptists have done quite a good job of this- if by “good” I mean “thorough”.
By rooting a male only ordained ministry in creation, Baptists have adopted a view that is similar to a Catholic view of natural law. Under such a view, “creation order” is thought to posit a preferential status or authority for men, and a subsidiary status for women. The classic text for this argument is 1 Timothy 2:13-15—an epistle, and an odd one at thought—not, interestingly, Genesis 2, which does not indicate a priority in the order of creation for animals or human creatures. If there is any priority in the Genesis account, it is of increasing sophistication, which might crown women as the highpoint of all creation.
But we haven’t done that, have we.
Instead, we have ontologized differences between men and women that, if they exist, are much more subtle and interesting than the ones suggested by the Danvers statement. In turn, people have come to think that if they prefer an arrangement of church polity that allows women to lead, they have somehow meddled with something more “essential” than simply who is assigned a church vote. Those who demand women’s leadership dig in as thoroughly, calling this a “gospel issue”. But the issue of women’s place in the church is a much, much smaller issue than one of women’s “nature”. That people on both sides continue to hammer on it, as if it were the cornerstone on which the whole foundation rests, reveals that we do not understand the issue much at all.
When Paul speaks most directly about the relation between men and women in Christian marriage, he tells us it is a “mystery” (Ephesians 5:23). We reveal our ignorance when we make it into hard and fast demands and prohibitions.
Yesss. Something I have been thinking about in the last month or so is how easy it is to mistake good things (such as racial + economic justice and, for this post in particular, proper honoring and empowering of women) as the ultimate telos as believers. I would venture to say that while these things are important and we should be mindful of them, if we chase after these things we will miss the whole point. I think of John 15 where the impetus of the branches is to be towards the Vine, not towards the fruit. Yet if we are abiding in the Vine, the fruit will come.
These thoughts are a little more directed at the first half of your post, not so much addressing the Baptist stuff.
Thanks for always writing thought-provoking posts.
I posted this last week in reply to an article on 1 Tim 2:11-15: “I feel out of place with the comp/egal debate because my study of John has pretty much led me to believe it’s all moot. If John’s community didn’t have any authoritative ordained teachers, then of course women can teach. Which is exactly what we see in John.”
Re: the priesthood of believers, Philip Benedict quotes Bob Scribner that it became one of the “lost doctrines of the reformation”:
“Although anticlerical sentiments gave impetus to the Reformation and although the triumph of Protestantism meant a sharp reduction in the size and legal privileges of the clergy, the Reformation emphatically did not deny the ministry all special functions and power. The doctrine of the priesthood of all believers threatened briefly to eliminate all distinctions between laypeople and clergy, but this soon became one of the "lost doctrines of the Reformation.” As soon as the upheavals of the Peasants' War showed the dangers of asserting it too blithely, the leading Reformed theologians started to insist that only trained theologians could be authoritative interpreters of the Bible.”
As an amateur historian (and a recovering presbyterian, fwiw), it seems that the tension between clericalism and anti-clericalism (understood neutrally and/or pejoratively) will continue to oscillate until Christ returns.