Does the Bible Say that Women Can Become Pastors?

Room For Nuance

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The lynchpin text is 1 Timothy 2 .12, right? You don't even have to talk about anything else. It's just 1

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Timothy 2 .12. I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man. Is that a

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Hindaitis or not? Yes, it is. I was trying to remember what a Hindaitis was other than a female chicken. Yeah, because several different times, like four, five, half a dozen times in the pastoral epistles, teaching and having authority is the job description of an elder.

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It is how you pastor. Yeah, that's just what it is, right? And so it's that verse that nails the whole thing down.

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The question is, is Paul just being either culture -bound or arbitrary in saying that?

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Is that aimed at just one particular situation or is it more universal? And the argument that I make in that book is that actually, not just in verse 12, but through the whole of chapter two of 1

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Timothy, Paul is thinking about the story of Genesis and the fall. And he actually is pulling out of that what

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I end up calling paradigmatic sins of men and women, by which I mean, in a fallen world, men are gonna tend to sin in a particular way.

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Women are gonna tend to sin in a particular way. And both those things are talked about in those curses. Your relationships are gonna be messed up in these ways because of the fall.

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And it looks to me very much like Paul is taking those curses and applying them in chapter two of 1

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Timothy, first to talk to all Christians without regard to male or female in the first few verses, then to talk to men about their paradigmatic sin struggle, and then to talk to women.

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So it's not arbitrary. It's not aimed at women in particular. Paul's, you know, he's spraying the machine gun all over the place, just nailing everybody for the fact that they're acting like Genesis said they were gonna act like.

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And that's just one of them that falls there. So I think what you end up with in the end is not an arbitrary command.

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You actually end up with Paul saying, look, authority structures are good. And God put those in creation right from the very beginning.

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And they were beautiful. And he intended them to be there even before the fall. Satan's work was to upend all of those authority structures, like dominoes falling upward and culminating in Adam declaring war against God, basically.

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And he's saying to those people in Timothy's church, all of you are actually doing the work of the snake as you also try to usurp and overturn the authority structures that God has put into the church.

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So it really becomes this not arbitrary, but very high stakes thing of, are you gonna be on the side of God or are you gonna be on the side of the serpent?