Book of 1 Timothy - Ch. 2, v. 12 | Part 4

If y 'all would like to turn to 1 Timothy 2, we will keep truckin' along, maybe even finish verse 12 today, but I won't make any promises, just in case. I would hate to have to go back on that, but we will make progress, that's for sure.

While y 'all turn there, I'll just kind of bring everybody up to speed one more time. At this point, we're really mainly still in verse 12 for the purpose of considering some of the objections that are often thrown.

Paul's Prohibition and Its Cultural Objections

At this passage broadly, but also this verse specifically, because when Paul says, I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence, that is like a battering ram to the large, I don't know, I guess you could say majority at this point, of sentiments that the church has toward women in the church.

And so if it means, as we've said many times throughout the study, if it means what it sounds like it means, it presents a massive problem. And so that is where the objections come from, to attempt to reinterpret Paul's words, or to perhaps put his words, maybe we do take his words literally and plainly, but we arrest them to a specific cultural context 2 ,000 years ago, a number of things like that.

And so we've been looking at, or we've been considering some of the objections, and we've really only, I think, considered one so far, maybe a couple of them. But let me see here, where do I want to pick up from where we left off?

Okay, so the first main objection that we looked at, we did cover just a little bit at the end of last week, was that the Apostle Paul's prohibitions in this passage are quote-unquote culturally focused.

So that kind of goes back to what I mentioned a second ago, which is we're going to take what Paul is saying literally and plainly, but we don't have to apply it to us because we don't live in ancient Ephesus at the time he was writing these words.

So that is one of the key objections that we receive from a lot of the more liberal interpreters at this particular point. Some will go as far as to say that, and this is a slight review, but they'll go as far as to say that the Apostle Paul's words here are merely a product of the ancient traditions of that time, which was a predominantly sexist culture.

And, of course, last week we discussed at length the problems with stating something that audacious to say that the Apostle Paul would be more moved by contemporary culture than he would be the testimony that he had received and was now delivering by the Holy Spirit via these epistles here.

That's quite the take to have. And in reality, in contrast with that particular interpretation, one of the things we mentioned last week, this was the very last thing we ended on, was that the irony is that around the time that Paul was writing in and around Ephesus, the culture in and around Ephesus, in the religious context, it was actually a pervasively egalitarian culture at that time.

For example, there were women priestesses that were very common in the pagan temples and things like that. The pagans had no problem with women being in leadership positions in a religious context when Paul was writing this.

And so to say, well, he's writing this because he lived in a sexist culture, and so he was just kind of wanting to be in vogue with what was popular at that time, number one, is to absolutely disrespect the apostle himself, a man of conviction, a man who believed in nothing more than the scriptures as the sole infallible rule of faith.

And that was his foundation for everything. So it's massively disrespectful there, but it is also historically inaccurate because the apostle Paul was not having to work with a sexist culture in the religious context, but rather an egalitarian one at that time.

And so what he was doing was the apostle Paul and other apostles, by the way, it wasn't just Paul, they were coming in and they were saying women shouldn't be doing that, talking about the pagan priestesses and the way they would have been behaving and all of the things they would have been doing in the temples and things of that sort.

They're saying they can't be leaders in this religion. So he was given contrast. He wasn't going with the flow, so to speak, with regard to the culture he was in. And so the church was actually going against the trends of that time, not using the culture to decide their policies and things of that sort, which, of course, is one of the accusations that the apostle Paul receives.

And so that was kind of the first objection that we looked at. There's a couple more. There's really a number of them. The thing is, though, as we go through the ones that we're going to look at, is you can take a similar defensive approach against just about any of them.

There will be, quote-unquote, nuances coming from different directions from some of the objections to this passage. But if you remember just a couple of key things, pretty much all of which we've already discussed, things like context determines the use of words, context determines the meaning, not just the definitional meaning of the word, but also the force of the grammar that's being used.

We'll actually look at that more specifically in just a moment. If we remember just things like that, context, context is king, and you use the whole of Scripture to interpret Scripture, just a few basic hermeneutical principles like that, interpretive principles like that, then, you know, yes, you're going to have an onslaught of different attacks and interpretations, but you can keep it simple and bring it back to those basic ideas, and oftentimes it'll help quite a bit.

And so that's why we're looking at these, and we're not going to look at every single objection that could come, but some of the top ones, and then from there the rest just kind of flows. So that's the first objection.

Oh, one other thing I'll say just with regard to a lot of people saying, well, Paul was talking about a specific culture. It's not applicable to us in the 21st century. It was just for those in Ephesus at that time.

The apostle Paul in the very next chapter, if you want to look at chapter 3 for a second, in the very next chapter he makes it very clear that his prohibition here in verse 12, and not just the one in verse 12, but any instruction he gives throughout the entire letter, all of it transcends a specific culture or a specific geographical location, a specific time in history.

It goes beyond that, and here's how we know that. In chapter 3, verse 15, he says this. He says, If I tarry long, that thou mayest know how thou oughtest to behave thyself in the house of God, which is the church of the living God, the pillar and ground of the truth.

Now, you'll notice a couple of different—Dad often talks about, and this is a principle he learned from Brother Rocky, and it wasn't new with Brother Rocky either. This is where Dad learned it from. But this principle of the word formula, the specific phrases that are often—it's like a refrain.

There are a number of refrains that you'll catch when you read scriptures in both Testaments. And when you see that, it is something that's worth pausing and thinking about because what's happening is the author, the writer at that point, is tying in what he's saying to a host of other scriptural truths.

And in this case right here, when the Apostle Paul uses phrases like the house of God, the church of the living God, the pillar and the ground of truth, these are phrases that are used synonymously with God's church at large, not just one singular local church.

So when he says the pillar and the ground of truth, that is every local church throughout all of Christian history. And you can think of it as collectively together they are the pillar of truth, but you can also biblically look at them on the individual level and say they are the pillar and ground for truth.

And so the Apostle Paul here is saying what I am writing is for every church for all time. In the very next chapter after this, despite the objections that we sometimes see that make the claim, what he's writing is actually specific to that culture.

And really it's even more unfair than that, because to be consistent you would have to say the entire epistle was written for that culture at that time, but they don't do that. What they'll do is they'll hone in to this one verse that is troublesome in so many ways, and they'll say that particular verse, that particular exhortation is what should be tied back to that point.

But he's saying no, I'm writing all of this that you may know how you ought to behave. And then he ties it to the church at large, which is a pretty amazing thing. Now, in addition to that as well, as we will see shortly, and I'm really excited to get to it.

We've been hanging out of verses 11 and 12 so long. I'm excited to get to verses 13 and 14 because when we get there what we'll see is that the Apostle Paul bases his entire teaching in this section on the creation order.

Well, the moment you do something like that, that also refutes the idea that we should think of it narrowly through the lens of one church in one city 2 ,000 years ago. And so there's that as well. All right, so there's the first objection we looked at.

The Present-Tense Translation Objection

Another objection to the traditional interpretation of verse 12 is going back to this idea of messing with the grammar or looking at the word narrowly and things of that sort without allowing context, as well as just, you know, agreed upon rules of grammar to allow the apostle to speak.

One objection we have is something like this. A better translation of verse 12 should be, I am not permitting a woman to teach in order to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence. Now, if you look at your Bible here, what does it say?

I suffer not a woman to teach, and on from there. The objection comes that it would be better translated, I am not permitting. In other words, in this scenario, it's tied very closely to what we just talked about.

You know, this is all exclusively back for that context of ancient Ephesus, but here they make kind of a grammatical argument for that. And so what they'll say is based upon the grammar that Paul is using, we know that he was talking exclusively to this audience and nobody else.

And the problem—and by the way, you will hear very skilled— you will hear legitimately skilled and well-educated scholars make this very claim, that there's a translational issue here. And all of it is based upon the fact that when Paul says, I suffer not, it's in the present tense.

So what they're doing is they're making an appeal to the present tense form of Paul's verb here. Now, I know this is—they like to get in the weeds too. There are great conservative scholars that can go pretty deep and get dense really fast when you start talking about grammar and things like that, but it can be very edifying.

It can be very beneficial. The liberal scholars do the same thing. They get in the weeds, and we'll talk about why that can be such a weapon wielded in their hands here in just a minute. But they're making an appeal to the present tense forms of Paul's instruction here and saying because of this grammatical truth, what Paul is saying can apply across all time and all churches.

It has to apply with who he's talking to in this moment. Now, we've talked a number of times throughout this study, and maybe even in studies before this, about the context of there being fallacies committed when you are studying the Scripture.

The most common kind of fallacy that you can have, and the best of them, myself included, and even good learned scholars can make this too, and that is one form or other of what you might call a word study fallacy.

So anybody can do it. It's not that if a person does it, they're trying to cheat per se. It's just we are human. We are fallible. We are finite. And so sometimes we might make a mistake, and then in our studies later, we correct it and things of that sort.

In other words, people can make a lot out of a single word and literally come up with an interpretation based upon that. Even in isolation, they may be correct. That's the thing. If you're studying just the word by itself, they may even be correct in what they're saying is true here.

But the problem is when they then apply that to a context that does not call for what they're saying it means. That's when they can get into trouble. They can come up with a whole host of different interpretive grids from that very fallacy alone.

They teach it for a number of years, and then maybe someday they realize, wait a second, that wasn't correct. That's fine. That happens, again, to the best of them. And so it doesn't mean a person is cheating right off the bat.

However, there are people that do cheat. There are people that use word study fallacies to their benefit to throw off really good and well-intentioned Christians trying to figure this stuff out. They get a scholarly person that comes to the table with some kind of grammatical argument like this, and then they're like, okay, well, the case is settled.

So we've talked a lot about word study fallacies, but there's another category as well just simply referred to as grammatical fallacies, and this would be one of them. So in other words, we're saying because this word or this phrase is in the present tense, it can only mean this.

That's a simplified version of how that fallacy can work. Now I want to read to you guys a couple of quotes, and again, I just want to say this. Is this going into the weeds ourselves? Of course. But for what purpose?

It's not for the purpose of needing to memorize all of this in order to be able to stand for truth. That's not what it's about. What it's about is understanding that there are answers. Number one, there are answers to the attacks on Scripture that we receive.

There are answers. They are consistent answers based upon rules that you can apply to every passage in the whole Bible and remain consistent. And so it's good for us to go through this just for that edification alone.

But it does equip us. Any bit of these types of things that we can remember, when we approach a person that wants to attack God's word in a peculiar way, we have some information in our back pocket to help, even if we're not going to go in there guns a-blazing with every single point.

That's okay. You don't have to do that. We're not called to do that even. And so this is really for an exercise of edification more than anything. But in a great book, one of my favorite books actually, and some of it is over my head because I'm not a Greek scholar, but enough of it is written to just people that understand that whether it's just on the English, the basic English level, and then applying some of those principles back to the Greek, you can get a lot from it.

And it's called Exegetical Fallacies. That's the name of the book by a great Christian man named D .A. Carson, who unfortunately isn't doing well these days. He may very well be going on to be with the Lord soon due to some illness.

He has Parkinson's, I believe, and it's really sad. But he has done an amazing amount of great work for the church throughout the years, and there are a number of very influential guys out there right now who are students of his.

So his handprint will be left in a good way. But he wrote this book back in the 80s, and then a second edition came out in the 90s, and then a third edition just came out. So it's really good stuff, and all of the best Greek scholars that I'm aware of really revere this particular book.

And I want to quote it a little bit because he is going to speak to the argument that we are now dealing with, the objection that, well, because it's in the present tense, this would be better translated, I am not permitting so as to imply that Paul is speaking directly to that local church and nothing more than that.

So here's what he says with regard to the perception of tense in the grammar and how that can be a problem sometimes. He says, quote, It is not altogether clear that tense is a very accurate way of referring to the Greek tenses.

The word tense calls up notions of time, present tense, future tense, and so forth. But suppose a verb form is morphologically present tense while not in fact referring to present time but to the past.

And, of course, what he's referring to is something that we see happen in Scripture. And then after that he says, then shall we refer to such an example as past present tense? The possibilities for confusion are boundless.

Okay, so that was like his introduction to what he's about to go in for several pages covering these grammatical fallacies that can occur. And so here what Dr. Carson is simply pointing out is that confusion can occur when you don't understand that in Greek a verb form can structurally be present tense.

That's what he means when he says morphologically present tense. He means the structure of the verb, if you were to like break it into parts and then reconstruct it like a building, like a structure, it is structurally present tense.

But he's saying that it can be like that without regard to time. It can be structurally present tense without respect to a specific point in time. And so, for example, just look up at verse 1 of the chapter we're in, 1 Timothy 2, verse 1.

Look at what Paul says. He says, I exhort, therefore, that first of all supplications, prayers, intercessions, and giving of thanks be made for all men. Guess what we have here? When he says, I exhort, therefore, it is another verb form in the present tense, but obviously without regard to that point in time because nobody would disagree that Paul is locking the exhortation for us to pray to his cultural context of ancient Ephesus.

And so Paul uses a form, a verb form here that is structurally present tense, but his exhortation is without regard to time. He wants Christians praying in this way all the time. It's just a particular grammatical structure that he's using here.

So there is a literal one-for-one comparison with what we're dealing with in verse 12 when he says, I suffer not a woman to teach in the present tense. Up at verse 1, he says, I exhort, therefore, that you pray.

That's also in the present tense. And so if you're going to be consistent, you apply these rules across the board and you don't have the issues that some of the more egalitarian scholars want to bring to the table.

Let me quote him one more time. This is interesting. He continues in the same page. He says, quote, a rising number of Greek grammarians argue that the fundamental semantic force of the Greek tense is aspect.

So in other words, not necessarily time, but aspect. All right. A rising number of Greek grammarians argue that the fundamental semantic force of the Greek tense is aspect. It reflects the author's choice of how to present an action.

The time of the action is not conveyed by the Greek tense, nor the kind of action that took place, but by the author's conception of that action. For example, an author might think of a particular action as a complete action, even if it took a very long time to complete, and therefore choose the aorist tense.

Now, that last part there, Dad will appreciate, because what he's pointing out is the aorist tense obviously is a verb form that is without regard to time. And the author of a particular passage may use that verb form to describe something that they view as complete, even though it took a long time to actually complete the action.

What they do is they choose that verb form simply to denote completeness. It's not to say that this is something that happened outside of time altogether. Does that make sense? So, again, it's a little dense, but the point of bringing all of this forward is simply to say that when you have even a scholar, a legitimate scholar, come to the table and say, well, Paul cannot mean what you think he means here.

Because, you see, when he says, I urge, or how does he put it in the KJV, I suffer, not a woman to teach, it's in the present tense. And therefore, it can only mean the local congregation that he is speaking to.

Well, again, when you consider the whole of grammar in the whole context of the New Testament, there's not only no issue here, but it is, again, an example of what's the word I want to use? It's an example of abusing the text itself.

It's the same it would be the same thing as I've said before. If I were to write a book right now, and by some miracle, we're still around 2 ,000 years from now, which it wouldn't be, but let's just say for hypothetical sake that it is, I would hope that the people reading my work long after I'm in the grave would have enough respect and honor for the work that they would take it for my intent and not try to force something upon it.

That I can no longer defend because I'm not here. Everybody, in their right mind, would want that very thing if they were to write something. And yet those same people, without even thinking twice about it, will violate that principle of just basic human decency against the Word of God.

And they will force things upon it that aren't actually there. To say that the translation should be, I am not permitting, rather than the way that most translations do have it, is simply not how we should understand the present tense form in the Greek, which of course is demonstrated by D .A. Carson here.

The Authority of the Apostles and the Church

And if I could just give you guys just put a picture in your mind of how awful things like this can be sometimes. Picture yourself or picture a little grandmother. A sweet old lady that has spent her entire life in the Scriptures.

She's never had anything more than the King James Version that her parents gave her. And she has read it faithfully every day for years and years. And she has read it plainly because the Scriptures are given to us plainly.

And she has come away with conclusions that are logical based upon the way in which the Scriptures have been delivered. And one day, to her bewilderment, she finds out that her granddaughter has recently been ordained to the pastorate.

And she doesn't know what to do about this other than to go to her and say, sweetheart, look at what the Apostle Paul says here. He says, I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence.

How could you be doing this? It's not appropriate. To which maybe the granddaughter at this particular point, who is now an elder in her church and is very proud of that, may come to the grandmother not knowing how to really defend what the grandmother is saying because this is a passage, again, that is often neglected.

So what she does is maybe goes and pops off a commentary off the shelf, maybe something by Gordon Fee or one of the other notable egalitarian scholars and commentators of the day. And she takes the commentary over to 1 Timothy 2, and she reads Gordon Fee's argument that, well, because this is in the present tense verbal form, grandma, what Paul was saying was that women in the local church of Ephesus should not be usurping authority over the man.

But this has nothing to do with me. Now, the grandmother has no idea what to do with that. It's essentially a sophistry that the commentator is bringing to the table, assuming that your kind, well-meaning Christians will not be able to refute what he is saying from the grammar, from the grammatical argument he is making.

In this case, grandma can't. She doesn't know what to do. So what is her response? Well, I don't know what to say about that, but all I know is this doesn't seem right. To which the granddaughter closes the book.

She has her victory. She puts it back on the shelf. Grandma is antiquated. Now I'm going to go preach to my new congregation. Well, in cases like that, whether it be the commentator, whether it be the granddaughter, whether it be anyone that does something like that to sweet little grandma or to anybody else for that matter, they have their reward.

This is their heaven, is being able to say that we have won arguments like this and to now be able to say I get to do what I want. And I can justify it morally because this commentator over here is telling me that I can't.

But grandma will have her reward for staying faithful to staying true, and she did not need any knowledge of the Greek in order to remain faithful. All she needed was to read her scriptures faithfully, plainly, and to stay firm.

And that's what she did. And so these kinds of objections I'll get you, Robert. These kinds of objections are frustrating because it makes good, well-meaning Christians stumble and think, well, that is gospel truth, so this is okay.

I can sit under the I can submit myself to the preaching authority of a woman because I take these guys' word for it. They know more than me. It's evil for that reason, but it's also evil for the purpose of making the person that is going to stay firm with their conviction, even if they can't defend it on a technical basis.

It's evil that you put them in a position for feeling inadequate because they're not inadequate. They just simply didn't go take six years of Greek like some of the scholars do then make these they cheat and they use these arguments.

They know the rules of grammar, and they're still going to make these arguments anyway, and it's really sad. Go ahead, Robert.

It's even overlooked on the historical side of it is from as early as like the conversion of Paul. He goes down to Jerusalem. He's introduced to the apostles. He's got his own leaderboard above him. He's not a rogue individual writing these things over and over and over again in the Book of Acts, which is chronicled by Luke, accompanying Paul.

If there was some sort of mandate for or against it, especially in the outward meaning, wouldn't there be other apostles saying so? Objecting to Paul. Right. So just on the leadership side of things, there's people above all who aren't saying, yeah, ignore this thing in the letters of Corinthians.

We need to make sure that it's broadly to all the there's no sort of revelation to James, the brother of Jesus, or James, the brother of Andrew and Peter. There's none of the James and John. There's nothing recorded.

Therefore, Paul, under his own earthly authority, under the apostles who are above him, is getting sanctioned by them plus the Holy Spirit. It's nowhere. The contradictions that I'm saying are absent.

It's a form. It's an exegesis, basically.

It is. And you mentioned Luke. And what a lot of people forget is that Paul had an entourage. He was he's not a rogue apostle, I agree, but he was itinerant. He was moving around. He was a missionary.

So he was sent out by the church. And he did submit to that local church authority, by the way. That is how missions should work, is that whether you're a missionary, whether you're an apologist out on the road, you need to be a church member.

And to be able to submit to their authority because that's where checks and balances are. That's where people are held accountable. That's an aside. The point is the apostle Paul had that as well as did everybody.

But he had an entourage. He wasn't just totally by himself all the time. One of those in his group was Luke, the historian, the gospel writer. Not during every missionary journey, but for a lot of it.

For that reason, it's interesting. In fact, I believe it's in this epistle here. He quotes the gospel of Luke in the same verses quoting Deuteronomy. We'll talk about that when we get there. It's a testament that, of course, the gospel of Luke is scripture because he holds it to the same authority as Deuteronomy written by Moses.

But another thing we take from that is Paul had the entire record of Jesus' life through Luke. He had Luke's writing. He had Luke's gospel. And so the apostle Paul was not coming up with stuff. He knew Jesus' teachings.

And, of course, Dad and I agree with Dad that his three years in the Arabian Desert, he had he was receiving special revelation from Jesus post-resurrection. And so he had the gospel of Luke. He had spent time with the Lord.

He had to have seen the Lord so that he could be an apostle. And he was also going to Jerusalem to the other apostles saying it's like cross-reference me. Not reference. Cross-examine. Cross-reference.

Cross-examine me. Ask me questions. See if my doctrine is solid. And so that's a good point is that none of these arguments are in isolation. As we've said before, they're not Paul's opinion. They are consistent with everything.

Go ahead, Dad.

Sure. Right? So, I'm a grandma a lot of times. I mean, I'm a grandma that knows the Greek. It's a brand. But you know what's beautiful? You've already pointed out in verse 1. You're going to argue that for the first question.

Then you have to say that verse 1 is not Paul according to all churches of all time to pray. But look at verse 8. Same thing. I will, therefore, that men pray everywhere. Right? So, you have to say that's not for everybody.

But here, even more important, look at verse 7. Whereunto I am ordained an apostle. He is calling on his apostolic authority when he tells people you need to pray. And if you're a woman, you don't need to preach.

So, I don't care who you are. You can take the immediate context, usually, and prove these liberals to be false. Just with the English Bible, if that's all you have. Right. Just count on it. Go up to verse 1 and read down to it.

And right in front of it, if you're in an argument and your adrenaline is flowing because you think they've got you beat. But you know you're right. Just go up to verse 1 and read slowly down to it.

Sure. Oftentimes, and, Dad, I think you would agree with this, in the heat of a moment, like disagreement. It may not even be a debate necessarily, but a disagreement happening. We have this odd pull to feel like we need to rush things.

Like we need to—if we aren't able to just spout out something quick, we lose it. What Dad is saying is that it is perfectly acceptable. And if it's not acceptable to the other person, then you have an answer there as well.

But it's perfectly acceptable to open up the Scriptures and to go through it from point one. And Dad has done this before in real time with people that were hotly disagreeing with something he was saying.

And he made them slow down and went to the top. In one case, it was Mormons. But I've heard him do it with everyone from Mormons to godly believers that maybe are more Arminian. And to other weird biblical takes.

I mean I've heard it a number of times, but his point is it's a terrific weapon. It is the sword of the Lord, is it not? To open it up and to slow down and to remind—sometimes you just have to remind yourself what is going on here.

Let's zoom out. Okay, I get it's present tense. I don't dispute that. But let's see how is the apostle—why is the apostle using this particular grammatical structure? And the context can answer that. So that's a great reminder there.

The Husbands-and-Wives Interpretation

Let me give you guys one more objection. And I think we can be done with verse 12. And then next week get into the last part of Paul's argument here, which is really the most magnificent. Because it takes us back to the Garden of Eden.

It takes us back to God's good design for men and women. And I'm excited to get there. But one more objection. We have looked at the objection of it's anchored to the cultural context of ancient Ephesus.

We've looked at the objection of it being—of the translation being incorrect because of the present tense. Here's another one. And this one is—this one perhaps is the most tricky. And I'll explain why in just a second.

And by tricky, I again assume that the person arguing is going to try to convince the person that in isolation this argument— this argument should be valid because of isolated Greek arguments. You'll see what I mean in just a second.

So another objection in verse 12 is that it only applies—and listen how tricky this is. But it's also—this one makes me laugh more than any other. I was going to try to hold it in until the end. But you'll like this one.

And again, these are serious people that bring these forth. The other objection is that this only applies, verse 12, to husbands and wives specifically, not to men and women generally. Well, see, now you have an open door.

So they will affirm the idea that a woman should not usurp the authority over their husband or to teach her husband. But generally speaking, everything else is fair game. That's how the argument there would flow.

And so in this objection—oh, and let me throw this out really quick because this is important. The words that are used in verse 12 when he says, I suffer not a woman to teach nor to usurp authority over man.

So the Greek terms for woman and man in this verse, in isolation they could be translated wife or husband. So you see how people can try to trip up good people appealing to the Greek, appealing to word studies and things of that sort.

And so you could legitimately translate those words in isolation as wives and husbands. Of course, we have to remember, though, that context determines the use of the word. But in this particular objection, which again states that headship is appropriate in the home.

But outside of that context, outside of the home, women can be in leadership positions anywhere and everywhere they want to be, including the eldership. That's how the argument goes. I'll address the fact of whether or not husbands and wives is a legitimate translation here.