Women in Ministry: Why the Issue Matters

    Michael Heiser is blogging about women in ministry. He describes himself as “unconvinced of egalitarian views while being relatively unconcerned over complementarian fears.” He doesn’t feel a need to oppose a woman’s sense of calling to the ministries of teaching and preaching, but he finds no exegetical basis for the view that scripture mandates the ordination of women to the role of episkopoi (“bishops”) or presbuteroi (“elders”).

    Mike invited me to dialogue with him on the topic. I am an egalitarian. I was born and raised in an egalitarian environment with plenty of strong women around me. Their example convinced me early on that women as a class are just as capable as men as a class in whatever they set their minds to. I don’t ever remember thinking the contrary.

    Furthermore, I serve in a denomination, the United Methodist Church, which places no limits on what kind of ministry women can be appointed to.

    Over the last few months, I have been privileged to encourage a young woman who feels that God is calling her to be an ordained elder and a military chaplain. She is now a first year divinity student at Asbury Theological Seminary. It is not unusual for a Wisconsin girl to know how to shoot a gun, drywall, and shingle as well as any man. She qualifies. Will she also turn out to be a gifted public speaker, a “maidservant” on whom the spirit of God has been poured, to quote the prophet Joel (2:28-29 = 3:1-2 in the Hebrew Bible)?

    I expect so, but the expectation needs to be tested. United Methodists erect a series of flaming hoops candidates to ordained ministry must jump through. The process is not for the faint of heart.

    A candidate must (1) “agree to exercise responsible self-control by personal habits conducive to bodily health, mental and emotional maturity, fidelity in marriage and celibacy in singleness, social responsibility, and growth in grace and the knowledge and love of God”; (2) he or she must also respond with the confidence of faith to a series of questions:

1. Do you know God as pardoning God? Have you the love of God abiding in you? Do you desire nothing but God? Are you holy in all manner of conversation?

2. Have you gifts, as well as evidence of God’s grace, for the work? Have you a clear, sound understanding; a right judgment in the things of God; a just conception of salvation by faith? Do you speak justly, readily, clearly?

3. Have you fruit? Have you been truly convinced of sin and converted to God, and are believers edified by your service?  

    In a non-egalitarian cultural context in which women were not expected to aim a gun and kill a dangerous individual in the line of police or military duty, serve as a chaplain to men and women under arms, or as governor of a state; in a cultural context in which women were excluded from some ordained roles and accepted in others (see the pastoral letters in the NT), the chances of a woman feeling called to be an “elder” or “priest” were slim.

    In an egalitarian cultural context, the chances are not slim at all. Like Heiser, I can think of no compelling reason to oppose the felt calling of a woman to the office of ordained elder.

    Women ordained to the ministry of preaching and teaching: it might not matter to Mike in the abstract, but it matters in the concrete if, as is my case, I am mentoring more than one woman on the path of ordained ministry, a call they heard independent of anything I said or did.

    We are creatures of the culture in which we live; there is nothing necessarily wrong with that. Given that culture changes, occasionally even for the better, it has to be shown that the fact of women seeking the office of ordained elder violates a core biblical principle. It has not been shown. Even though I can’t imagine Paul or Peter condoning women bishops or elders – and, given their cultural context, for them to have done so could easily have brought ill-repute to the gospel - I don’t think the details of instruction in apostolic letters written for specific times and places were meant to be valid for all times and places without due consideration of cultural context.

    Nor does anyone else; if they did, they would feel bound to put widows on a list if they are over 60 years old (1 Timothy 5:9), tell slaves to be “submissive to their masters in every respect” (Titus 2:9), and so on.

    That said, I agree with most of Heiser’s exegetical comments. “Biblical egalitarians” no less than “biblical complementarians” tend to ride roughshod over scripture that contradicts their emphases.

    The most I would claim for the egalitarian framework for marriage and ordained ministry is that it is compatible with scripture if scripture is read canonically (interpreting individual passages in light of the entire witness of scripture) and creedally (a creed is a normed norm derived from scripture which establishes a hierarchy of truth; biblicists – non-Catholic, non-Orthodox, non-Lutheran, and non-Reformed Christians tend in my view to be hyper-biblicists, to think that creeds are better lost than found). I also believe that the “love-obey” and the complementarian frameworks of marriage and the barring of women from the priesthood or the office of ordained elder are compatible with scripture read canonically and creedally.

    How we read scripture is important. If you reject the subordination of the teaching of individual passages to the teaching of scripture understood as a whole (one can arrive at the latter only through theological and spiritual discernment, a responsibility which cannot be evaded); if you reject the notion of a hierarchy of truth; you have no choice but to offer me a holy kiss the next time I see you, require women to have long hair and wear hair coverings in worship, and wash my feet and everyone else’s in accordance with a plain sense reading of John 13. If you reject the notion of a hierarchy of truth, you have no choice but to except a geocentric worldview and other details of ancient cosmology that are foundational to the particular way biblical authors express God-given truths; the same goes for ancient understandings of the process of procreation. For most Christians, such biblicisms when enforced today are examples of biblicism gone viral. Put another way, Christians by and large err on the side of biblicism, except when they don’t. Another way has yet to be revealed.

    Whether to err or not on the side of biblicism in the case of the call of women to the office of elder is a matter about which Christians legitimately disagree. Since that is my judgment, I cordially disagree with both “biblical complementarians” and “biblical egalitarians.”

    In my next post, I will look briefly at Mike’s exegetical observations.

Women in Ministry Series

Women In Ministry: Is There a Biblical View? (Michael Heiser)
Women in Ministry: Why The Issue Matters (John Hobbins)
What the New Testament has to say about Women in Ministry (John Hobbins)
Women as Ministers (Michael Heiser)
Women in Ministry: Response to John Hobbins (Michael Heiser)
Women in Ministry: A Response to Michael Heiser (John Hobbins)
Next Round (Michael Heiser)
Heiser incurs the wrath of McCarthy (John Hobbins)
A Thanks to John Hobbins on the Women in Ministry Issue (Michael Heiser) 

 

Comments

[Michael]

John,

I'm curious about the vocabulary that gets used in discussions like this: "sense of calling"; "feels that God is calling"; "feeling called"; "felt calling."

Does God "call" people to be pastors? Is there any evidence for this? What is a "call"? How would you know if you had one? How would others know if you had one? Why doesn't the series of UM "flaming hoops" mentioned above (pretty good questions, btw) mention anything about a "call"? Why don't the series of similar "flaming hoops" in 1 Tim 3:1ff mention a "call" (instead, it speaks of "aspiring")?

I know you like thinking about words :) So: in using the word "call" in the context of pastoral ministries, aren't people just projecting their desires (which may be perfectly legitimate) onto God, and inventing the idea of a "call"? Why not just say: if you want to be a pastor, and you have the necessary qualifications, do it?

Michael

[Terry L Eves]

I appreciate Michael's apt question about "call" To dip just a little toe or two in the water I'll say this. In my Christian tradition, which is Presbyterian, we think in terms of a triple call.

The inward call which also needs to be discerned and tested by the other two calls.

The outer call which is the discernment of the church, especially the local congregation. Here the thinking is that if the Spirit gives gifts for the nurturing and growth of the body, then the litmus paper test is the issue of whether the body is nurtured and experiences growth when my gifts are used (which doesn't mean that any gifts emerge in us full grown like Minerva from the forehead of Jupiter :-) ).

The confirmed call, which is the discernment by fellow minsters and elders in the larger church (which in my case is my Presbytery). We seek Spirit given and church confirmed syzygy, where all three calls line up and reinforce each other.

I have found these to be very practical and useful, and followed this threefold path myself (which can really sustain you when ministry is tough (that it's not just my idea that I was supposed to be here!).

John I deeply appreciate your website, purposes, competence, spirit and entheos and read it several times a week.

Terry L Eves

[Michael]

Terry,

very interesting! I've heard others say similar things--i.e., "if I didn't feel called, I wouldn't be doing ministry when things got tough."

So I'll ask the question again: is the idea of a "call to ministry" simply something we are creating to convince ourselves of the rightness of our desires when things get tough?

Maybe instead of speaking of a "triple call" we should simply speak of "individual desire," "local discernment," and "wider confirmation."

Thoughts?

Michael (not Heiser)

[JohnFH]

Hi Michael,

Good to have you commenting here. Yours is a fair question; it reminds me of discussion among scholars of the Hebrew Bible about call narratives therein.

For example, did Isaiah sense that the message he was about to deliver was destined to be a polarizing force such that those who heard it would be more inclined than ever to deny the hard truth he would impart? "Hardening of the heart" is after all a common event in all "family systems," the political family included).

Or was Isa 6 created after the fact in order to think of the rejection of the prophetic message in terms of "retrospective determinism" (Nicholas Nassim Taleb)?

Perhaps you lean towards the second interpretation of the experience of call. Fair enough, but phenomenologically speaking, the first interpretation does not seem far-fetched. There is a passage that supports the first interpretation in the Iliad; not to mention 1 Kings 22 (Micaiah ben-Imlah). That is, it was a given that true prophets were purveyors of doom, and that their message would polarize matters further.

I am sure there are cases of "creation" as you put it. Furthermore, if there is no God to do the calling, no transcendent reality which impinges on our lives from the outside, the question is not even a real one.

I see no way to resolve such dilemmas from the perspectives available to us. But I would point out that many people - not just religious people - experience call as something that is against their desires and wishes. They feel dragged into it. The biblical call narratives often follow this pattern. Calvin is famous for having resisted long and hard to the call of reforming Geneva. And so on.

One would expect the sense of call in the Presbyterian tradition to fit that of Calvin's call in some sense, but I would note the discrepancies as well.

Calvin did not accept the call until he was inwardly convinced of it; on the other hand, the confirmation of the call came first (Farel's insistence), such that it is not properly conceived of as confirmation; the outer call, or local discernment, was hit and miss.