Note that this message is going to be dealing entirely with Paul's letters, since that's the only place where anything clear is said on the subject. I've heard of people using the creation story in this context (possibly Gen 3:16), but that's pretty unusual. First, let's look at the evidence that Paul accepted women as colleagues: (1) The general principle is that there is neither male nor female in Christ (Gal 3:28). (2) Paul sends greetings to colleagues at the end of some of his letters. Women are often mentioned there, e.g. Phoebe (Rom 16:1) as mentioned as a deacon, and the rest of Rom. 16 includes a number of other women who appear to be fellow-workers. Phil 4:2 lists two women as people who worked for the gospel side by side with Paul. (3) In I Cor 11 Paul assumes that women at least deliver prophecies in church. However there is also evidence for differences in role between men and women. (1) The clearest is in marriage. The husband is the head of the wife (I Cor 11:3). Language involving being subject or submissive (there's a range of possible meanings in the Greek) appears in Eph 5:22, Col 3:18, and Tit 2:5. (2) There are several places where there are specific prohibitions again women acting in certain capacities. 1 Cor 14:34 prohibits them from speaking in church. I Tim 2:12 prohibits women from being put into a position of authority over men. This presents us with a seeming inconsistency. There are several ways of dealing with it. The interpretations that maintain the prohibitions are well known, I think, so I won't discuss them here. What I'm going to deal with here are arguments that would justify ordination of women. (1) First, note that the "headship" or "submission" is generally qualified. E.g. I Cor 7 is written quite symmetrically, and teaches that husbands and wives must submit to each other. In 1 Cor 11:11, after talking about the fact that women should cover their head, Paul makes sure that we do not carry the distinction too far -- he cautions us that men and women are dependent upon each other. One reasonable view is that Paul is speaking of headship as primarily a symbolic thing. The relationship between man and woman is a symbol of God's love for mankind. Clearly he sees the husband's love for his wife as symbolic of God's love for us. However it's not clear how far this goes beyond symbolic. Yes, women wear headcovering as a token of this headship. But husbands are supposed to defer to their wives needs just as wives defer to their husbands'. (2) Note that the strongest statements on church leadership are in passages about which there are questions of authorship. The specific prohibitions of female church leadership are in I Cor 14:34-35 and the Pastoral Epistles. There are very serious doubts about the authorship of the Pastorals. I Cor 14:34-35 appears in a different place in the early Western texts. This suggests to some people that it was originally a gloss, which made its way into the text. (As far as I know, the only other places in the NT where a text appears in different places in major manuscripts are the dubious endings in Mark, and the equally dubious story of the woman taken in adultery in John.) (3) A number of interpreters have suggested that I Cor 14:34-35 is addressed to a specific situation, e.g. that a group of women was making noise in church. Some such explanation seems necessary if you accept the text as genuine, since I Cor 11 makes it seem unlikely that Paul intended a general prohibition of women speaking in Church. My own evaluation is as follows: (1) Paul did not write Tim and Titus, nor I Cor 13:34-35, and the limitations on women's roles there are not consistent with his views. I believe they reflect a later situation, as the Church began to move towards a "catholic" church government, with bishops and other more formal structure. (2) He did expect a certain asymmetry between men and women, but it was primarily symbolic, and had limited practical consequences. Specifically, I believe he accepted women as leaders in the church, at least as deacons. However I think it's possible that there was some difference in offices held by men and women, or that in some other way the symbolic headship of men was acknowledged in church government. Unfortunately we don't have the details of church government in Paul's time, so there's simply no way of knowing. But his views do leave open the possibility of some difference in roles. I would say however that if so the difference would likely be quite circumscribed, and might even be just a matter of head covering. I'd like to make one other comment: Paul was not a social reformer. His concern was with the Gospel. Thus he did not attack slavery, but rather helped the church live with it. In my opinion this was perfectly appropriate. He is very concerned that the church avoid any scandal that might hinder spreading the Gospel. Any scandal should be the scandal of the cross, not controversial social policy. This coonsideration is going to tend to make him accept existing distinctions in role between women and men. However in the 20th Cent., we have a different situation. Now, for many people it is making distinctions in role that causes scandal. If we aren't careful we're going to be in exactly the situation that Paul tried to avoid: when people look at us, instead of seeing Christ, they're going to see a group of people trying to enforce obsolete social policy. --- Path: christian Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian From: vek@allegra.att.com (Van Kelly) Subject: Husbands should be in authority over their wives. Approved: christian@aramis.rutgers.edu davies@elf.owlnet.rice.edu (Stephen Clark Davies) writes: > The Christian feminists here on campus are trying desperately to convince me > that the Bible doesn't support a husband-has-authority-over-wife attitude. Hmmm, the fact that they're spending that much time on you must mean they haven't given up on you yet. You should be flattered! :-) But seriously, this letter does raise many interesting questions about how recent believers in Evangelical traditions are being exposed (or not) to the subject of Biblical interpretation (hermeneutics). My goal here is not to argue with your conclusions, merely to suggest some lines of study which may lead you to better skills for interpreting the Bible, as well as a more satisfactory understanding of the issues at hand. A secondary intent is to distinguish some valid and invalid premises about the hermeneutic process from within the Evangelical camp. > One, in particular, has been studying Greek for two years and says that when > you go back to the original documents, you don't get the same interpretation > that such translations as NIV give you. Your own words suggest a source of confusion. Translation is not intepretation. It is not designed to give you an interpretation. A translation does not relieve the reader of the burden of being a sound interpreter. Translation and hermeneutics are separate disciplines with different and sometimes conflicting sets of constraints. Translators (at least the NIV New Testament guys I knew personally) are often frustrated by the inexactness of the translation process. The final product is always a compromise among literalness, semantic accuracy, readability, and good literary style. Are translations appropriate for devotional studies? Yes. Worship? YES! Bible overview study? Yes. Inductive doctrinal studies for private edification? Yes, with care. It is not for nothing, however, that almost every seminary-level course on hermeneutics, most emphatically including those from Evangelical- inerrantist traditions, _presumes_ working from Greek and Hebrew texts. If you are serious about either establishing or critiquing the Biblical basis of support for any particular doctrinal issue, it is ever-so-much easier in the long run to work from the original languages (presumably with the help of technical commentaries and language tools). The next-best alternative, working comparatively from a half-dozen high-quality translations representing various theological traditions, gives only a limited feel for translation tradeoffs and ambiguities. But this latter approach, IMHO is a distant second in payoff per effort expended. Your "feminist" (your label or hers, by the way?) friend may be a little inexperienced yet to constitute herself a Biblical authority, but her training is definitely on the right course, and two years farther along than yours, I might add. > She claims, in particular, that the word "submit" in Ephesians 5 > and other passages does not in fact mean "submit", but rather "honor," in > a very non-authority-related way. More precisely, what she means is that the Koine Greek word which is *translated* "submit" in Ephesians 5 (hypotassomenoi) has a different (but overlapping) set of connotations from the English word "submit". Furthermore, she means that the connotational differences between these two particular words are in sufficient tension that one needs to be fully aware of them when *interpreting* this passage from an English translation. This kind of thing happens so commonly that it is quite unremarkable. My recommendation: check a good Koine dictionary in a library, either Kittel & Friedrich's 10-volume set or the 3-volume one by Colin Brown. You may not yet have the skills to understand all of what they say, but you will learn something about both translation and interpretation. Your friend may even be able to help you. (Only half a smiley-face) > I am here to make the astounding claim (having studied Greek for 0.0 > years) that all of that is nonsense. You are telling THIS to your budding-Greek-scholar-feminist friend and she is still talking to you? You must have many positive qualities, besides your obvious theological humility. ;-| > After reading several passages > carefully, I have come to the conclusion that either: > > 1) The Bible CLEARLY states that husbands should be in authority > over their wives. No two ways about it. > > or 2) The translators of the NIV and similar texts have made SERIOUS > errors in translation. We're not talking about missing a > word or two here. We're talking about laying waste to > entire sections of the Pauline letters. Or......3) The Bible says whatever it says, and the translators of the NIV made the compromises they felt were judicious, but the interpretational methods of the reader were just slightly out-to-lunch. (Naaaah, couldn't be that!) In my own personal exigesis of Scripture, especially early on, I found case #3 to be true of myself frighteningly often -- often enough that that's the first thing I now suspect myself of doing when someone who appears to have done some serious study contradicts me. Perhaps you are new enough in the faith not to have had this experience quite as much as I. But mind you, I'm not _always_ wrong, especially lately. > Let's just look at a couple of passages, shall we? By all means! > The above-mentioned Ephesians 5:22-27... [cited text deleted in interests of space] > To me, this passage is as crystal-clear as you can get regarding > what God intended for the husband-wife relationship. And I claim that if > there are translation errors, they must be SERIOUS translation errors to > get anything BUT the view that husbands are to be in authority over their > wives. Some issues that would be raised about your approach in any first course on Biblical hermeneutics (and I'm sorry if I seem at first to be nitpicky): 1. You choose 5:22-27 as a legitimate literary unit to excerpt as your text. Picking the limits of a text to exposit is a deliberate interpretive choice. Is your delimitation reasonable or are you unwittingly guilty of unfortunate selective quotation? Let's see ... Paul first introduces the notion of "submission" not in 5:22, but in 21. Furthermore in the Greek (working from memory here, please forgive if I miscount), all of 17-21 is a single sentence followed by a string of [actually 18-21, I think --clh] participial phrases, so you would have to go *at least* as far back as 21, possibly to 17, to catch the beginning of Paul's flow of thought leading into this topic. A wise expositor once said, "always read Paul from a running start!"; i.e., introductions and transitions _DO_ matter. After verse 27, the section on husbands and wives goes on for six more verses! Verse 33 is important because here Paul reiterates and summarizes his major conclusion about husbands and wives. Note his word choice here. Interesting choice of synonyms, what?? In chapter 6 there are two more roughly parallel two-parters, one on the parent-child relationship and one on masters and slaves. In both of these relationships, submission and obedience figure prominently (from at least one side of the relationship). Thus, Paul's treatment on submission does not end until 6:9, not at 5:27. Maybe leaving off 5:17-20 is harmless and excluding 6:1-9 is barely permissible, but you really can't do without 5:21,28-33. So, you ask, what's the big deal about picking text boundaries in this case? Can something this simple really mess me up? More on that later... > Even if "submit" does mean something like "honor", then the passage >would read: "wives, honor your husbands as you do the Lord....Now as the >church honors Christ, so also wives should honor their husbands in >everything." Certainly the way in which the church "honors" Christ and wives >should "honor" the Lord is not on an equal-to-equal basis. It is on a >subject-to-master basis. Or on a beneficiary-to-benefactor basis? Or on a saved-to-savior basis? Or on a created-to-creator basis? Or on a friend-to-friend basis? [whoops -- sorry, mustn't mix St. John and St. Paul, tsk. tsk. :-) ] Paul certainly isn't saying that the relationship between husbands and wives is _identical_ to that between Christ and the Church, just _analogous_. The decision regarding what aspect of the Church-Christ relationship Paul has in view is a conclusion to be drawn in the process of making the *interpretation*. The beneficiary-benefactor aspect is certainly locally present in the text here, arguably at least as strongly as your subject-master suggestion. So the next lesson is: 2. Beware of reasoning by dichotomy in general. "Either A or B" is _prima facie_ a suspect premise for any argument, unless you can establish that B is not only disjoint from A, but its exact logical complement. This is the second time in one post you've stumbled into this one. Watch your step! And as I suggested before, the range of proper readings for "submit" can best be suggested by a dive into a good Koine Greek dictionary. I won't spoil your fun here by telling you what you'll find. > And also, whatever the words mean, the passage clearly states: "wives, > do X, and husbands, do Y." I don't think you can misconstrue that wives and > husbands were meant to take very different roles. I don't think Paul would dispute here that each one of us plays many roles in life, some of them pretty asymmetrical. Could you or I give birth? If you're implying that the only alternative to your position is a denial of the very existence of distinct social roles, then false dichotomy strikes again! On the other hand, you may be implying that Paul's acceptance of distinct roles here has major deontic force, that he is arguing that they _should_ or _must_ be actively enforced, rather than that they just ARE. If so, you have some arguments that sorely need building. > You can squirm if you want, > and get your feminist publications ready to slap me, [like Galatians 3:28 :-) ] > but unless you can > meaningfully interpret this passage, I stand firm in my beliefs. Wow, just like Martin Luther before the Diet at Worms! (or was that Lex Luthor after his diet of worms?) Now here's where your choice in bracketing the passage becomes crucial. If we take 5:21 literally and as a topic sentence (well, topic phrase -- this is Greek, not English) stating the need for all Christians to practice mutual "submission" (hypotassomai, whatever your Greek dictionary says that means), then 5:22-6:9 follows naturally as an amplification and illustration of this principle in the context of three asymmetric and problematic human role-relationships. Within this interpretive framework, you must then decide which of these six cases Paul intended for illustrating hypotassomai: just wives (the word itself is only repeated for wives), wives together with children and slaves (strongly associated with the concept), or all six cases. If some of these are excluded from being illustrations of hypotassomai, then where do they fit in with respect to 5:21? Put another way, does Paul only mean to imply that a. showing respect and deference (wives to husbands), and maybe b. obedience in the Lord (children to parents), and c. whole-hearted service (slaves to masters) are part of our mutual "submission", or does he also intend to include d. self-sacrificial giving (husbands to wives), e. self-restraint and nurturing (parents to children), and f. respect as equals toward those of lower station (masters to servants)? Or you might take the appearance of hypotassomai in 5:21 to be largely gratuitous with respect to what follows, but any way you choose, you have a case that needs to be built. Repeat: I am not telling you what to believe about this passage. My aim is to lay out some questions and some avenues of investigation that you might be able to explore with further study. I wouldn't dream of short-circuiting your fun. > The Word > of God is inerrant. Hmmm... I hear that a lot lately on this net. I am also inclined to believe it. But in this context it's a little bit _non sequitur_. Inerrancy is a condition attibuted to the Greek and Hebrew autographs of the Bible. It does little to guarantee the skill of the interpreter or to relieve the constraints of the translator. You may here be unconsciously confounding inerrancy with a doctrine of perspicuity (self-evincing meaning). If so, be careful until you know the limitations of this later doctrine. See the interpretive document from the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy (posted a few weeks back to s.r.c) for a crisp but telegraphic position on this topic from one inerrantist perspective (not necessarily mine or the only possible one). > One other passage is sufficient to illustrate the point: [text of 1 Cor. 11: 3-10 omitted to save space] Basically the same mistakes all over again with just a few new wrinkles. This is not the whole of Paul's treatment of the head-covering topic, which goes on for several verses yet. Note that his argument takes a strange turn from verse 11 on, partially cutting the legs out from under what he said in 3-10. Not to worry though, since this is far from the only place in I Cor. where Paul argues both sides of an issue before suggesting his resolution. He does it for intellect vs. simplicity, marriage vs. singleness, tongues vs. prophecy, to name just a few obvious cases. So then, in 3-10 whose position is he presenting anyway, his own, some opponent's, or a mixture of both? Do verses 1-2 (also omitted from your citation) shed any light on this? Given the general rebuking tone of the whole letter, is it more sensible to read 11:2 "straight" or as gentle sarcasm setting up the next rebuke? (What? Paul sarcastic?) So, if this passage is in the nature of a rhetorical argument, not a straight exposition, then what roles do the man-woman-authority verses play in that argument? Are they premises or conclusions? And, again, whose? If they are premises, especially not his own, then we must allow Paul more latitude with respect to whether he actually believes them in the form and with the same force that he states them. There are, after all, several useful patterns of argument, all found in the Bible, which do not depend on all premises for all positions being true (cf. most of Job). You might also check the "Interpretation" article in the Encyclopedia Judaica (again, from vague memory here) for a catalog of forms of argument with which Paul would have been familiar. Again, no answers for you, just questions. And nothing that should offend inerrantist sensibilities. At least they don't offend mine. > Enough said. I have heard some vague remarks about "head" not really > meaning "head"... Get thee to a dictionary, for Pete's sake! OK, OK, a little spoiler. You will find some very interesting conundrums regarding both the translation of Hebrew "rosh" as Greek "kephale" and of Greek "kephale" as English "head". Basically "rosh" and "head" are somewhat closer in connotations than is "kephale" with either of them. I won't say more; just prepare for a little surprise. > I didn't quite know what to make of them, but it seems to me > very clear from this passage that husbands should be in authority over their > wives. Hmmm... would this still true if kephale did not mean _anything_ like "boss" in this passage? Colin Brown deals specifically with this usage, even more pointedly than the usually more expansive treatment in K&F. > Please, I welcome comments on the above passages. I am trying > desperately to understand Christian feminists at Rice, but it just doesn't > make any sense to me right now. It may just take time :-) > How can one refute Scripture? Please help. So now you want to refute Scripture? :-), :-), :-), etc. etc. Seriously, though, you might start with a couple popular-level introductory books on hermeneutics. Is _Scripture Twisting_ by James Sire still in print? If so, that's quite clever and easy to read. It's kind of a "don't let this happen to you" tour of bogus hermeneutics through the ages. Best Wishes, Van Kelly vek@allegra.att.com AT&T Bell Laboratories.