The biggest irony to me is the fact that our Southern Baptist Confession of Faith only prohibits women from the ‘office of pastor,’ yet some Southern Baptists wish to prohibit women from every position within the church or any other office outside the church that has any kind of authority over men. Further, when women serve on Southern Baptist church staffs, complementarian congregations call them ‘directors’ rather than ‘ministers,’ though these gifted women are ministering and serving just like a man would in the same position, a man the congregation would bestow the title ‘minister’ upon were he in it. It reminds me of the old fable ‘The Emperor Has No Clothes.” I sometimes wonder if Southern Baptists really think women aren’t ministering if they simply don’t call them a minister. Who are we fooling? God? –Mutuality Summer 2008
“Headship means sacrificial servanthood. Submission means
yielding to the heart of a servant. And the key to marriage is
Eph. 5:21 — both submitting, both yielding to one another.” –Mutuality Spring 2008
This squares well with the Greek! Savior is an apposition to “head.” The key example is Christ sacrificing Himself for His body, the Church.
Supposing women only had translated the Bible, from age to age, is there a likelihood that men wouldhave rested content with the outcome? Therefore, our brothers have no good reason to complain if, whileconceding that men have done the best they could alone, we assert that they did not do the best that couldhave been done. The work would have been of a much higher order had they fi rst helped women to learnthe sacred languages (instead of putting obstacles in their way), and then, have given them a place by theirside on translations committees. — Katharine Bushnell, God’s Word to Women
When people who had suffered grievously, whom you could have said had a divine right to being angry and filled with a lust for revenge, came and told their stories…you wanted to take off your shoes because you said, ‘I’m standing on holy ground.’ –Archbishop Desmond Tutu describing the proceedings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission
But his love is greater than all our hate; and he will not rest until Judas has turned to him, until Satan has turned to him, until the dark has turned to him; until we can all, all of us, without exception freely return his look of love in our own eyes and hearts. And then, healed, whole, complete but not finished, we will know the joy of being co-creators with the one to whom we call. –Madeleine L’Engle, The Irrational Season, p215
“If you are still not convinced, I challenge you to read Berkeley and Alvera Mickelsen’s essay “What Does Kephale Mean in the New Testament?” Here’s a sample: “The most complete Greek-English lexicon (covering Homeric, classical and koine Greek) in current existence is a two-volume work of more than 2,000 pages compiled by Liddel, Scott, Jones and McKenzie, published first in 1843…This lexicon lists, with examples, the common meanings of kephale. The list does not include ‘authority,’ ‘superior rank,’ ‘leader,’ ‘director,’ or anything similar as a meaning” (19). The Mickelsens go on for fourteen pages talking about Greek. Philip Barton Payne’s response to the Mickelsens’ article says, “The Mickelsens actually understate their case from Greek usage. Including its 1968 supplement, the Liddell and Scott lexicon lists forty-eight separate English equivalents of figurative meanings of kephale. None of them implies leader, authority, first or supreme” –Janet George, Still Side by Side
“In a more recent study in Michigan, elementary school children were asked: ‘If you woke up tomorrow and discovered you were the other gender, how would your life be different?’ Most of the girls stated that they’d rather remain female but readily listed positive features of being a boy…but the majority of boys were horrified by even the imaginary prospect of becoming girls. Some envisioned taking their life as a result…but almost never any advantages—of being female…their socialization as children is not merely complementary but often asymmetrical.” –Mary Van Leeuwen
“When I visited a group of unregistered church leaders in a city near Hong Kong in 2001, I discovered that between one-half to two-thirds of all church planters in China today are women, most between the ages of 18 and 24. These women along with their male colleagues, lead an estimated 25,000 people to Christ daily…’Are you pastors or evangelists?’…The translator pointed to the woman on the left. ‘This one oversees 2,000 churches, and this other one oversees 5,000 churches, he said.’ I was stunned. Some denominations in the United States are still arguing about whether a woman can stand behind a pulpit, I said to myself. Meanwhile, women in China are engaging in dangerous missions and governing thousands of new churches. There’s something wrong with this picture!“-Mutuality Fall 2003 p5
*If we say God only uses women when there are no good men around then does this mean that all “good men” disappear in times of danger?
Within the religious world itself, biblical inerrancy and sacramentalism are the most significant cultural boundaries when it comes to women’s ordination…Why are biblical inerrancy and sacramentalism so deeply and so tightly connected to resistance to female clergy? …for both of these denominational subcultures, gender equality has come to symbolize the liberal modern world that they define themselves against. –Mark Chaves, Ordaining Women, 10.
I will argue that, contrary to both the official ideology of these denominations and the popular understanding of them, resistance to women’s ordination is not a necessary outcome of either inerrancy or sacramentalism. The fusion of inerrancy and sacramentalism with resistance to women’s ordination is more cultural achievement than logical necessity. The persuasiveness of the argument that inerrancy or sacramentalism implies ‘no women clergy’ has been greatly enhanced by the construction of institutional environments within which that inference, which could easily go the other way, is taken to be not merely valid, but obvious. I will argue that this connection–between inerrancy and sacramentalism on the one hand and gender inequality on the other hand–has been forged, and continues to be renewed, in the effort to carve out and sustain religious worlds that are not liberal…These denominations’ strong resistance to women’s ordination is part of their broader antiliberal identity. –90-91
The hostile reception of the Woman’s Bible, however, even by prominent advocates of gender equality in religion, shows that Stanton’s rejection of biblical authority was not considered a necessary condition for wholehearted support of women’s ordination at the turn of the twentieth century…In the closing decades of the nineteenth century, however, most of those who supported gender equality both in society and in the churches, unlike Stanton, attempted to do so within the bounds of biblical authority and even of full-blown inerrancy. Work on the Woman’s Bible was delayed, for example, because, in her first (1886) attempt to mobilize female biblical scholars, Stanton was ‘disappointed to find that most of the learned women she tried to enlist in the project still considered her claim that the Bible was not divinely inspired to be suspect’ (Fitzgerald 1993: xxv). And when the Woman’s Bible was published in 1895, the National American Woman Suffrage Association ‘passed a resolution disavowing any connection to its publication or intent’ (Fitzgerald 1993: xxvi)…it did not seem necessary to most supporters of gender equality to reject biblical authority. –93-94
These examples are meant to illustrate the basic point that a commitment to biblical inerrancy does not require, either logically or historically, opposition to women’s ordination…One does not need the ‘liberal’ interpretive strategies of Stanton’s Woman’s Bible or higher criticism in order to support women’s ordination…If it is not logically or intellectually difficult to combine inerrantism with full gender equality, why has it become so culturally difficult to do so?… The answer to this question lies in the construction of an inerrantist institutional world defining itself in opposition to the world of liberal religion…the fundamentalist movement took on antimodernity as its central defining identity, and made inerrancy and opposition to women’s ordination, among other issues, symbols of that antimodern stance. Because gender equality is such a defining core of the modern liberal agenda, resisting women’s ordination became a way to symbolize antiliberalism within the religious world. –101-102
Women in fact served as ministers and other sorts of religious leaders within fundamentalism. Given the high level of resistance to female clergy among even ‘liberal’ congregations, the congregation-level resistance to female clergy probably was no greater among fundamentalist congregations than it was among congregations in general. –106
The 1890s dispute over the Woman’s Bible was a similar instance of conflict. The position taken by Stanton, Rose, and Mott became more typical as the women’s movement entered the twentieth century. Antiliberal fundamentalists, then, were not alone in connecting inerrancy to gender inequality. At least some segments of the women’s movement shared the position that commitment to biblical authority was inimical, or at least not necessary, to working for gender equality. The symbolic connection between gender inequality and inerrancy was thus mutually constructed by those on both sides of the conflict between liberalism and antiliberalism…this package of identifying features has become more firm over time. –107
As the biblically inerrant world became increasingly institutionalized, the empirical connection between inerrancy and resistance to women’s ordination became increasingly tight. Observers of the developing world of biblical inerrancy are unanimous in pointing to the fact that gender policies become increasingly strict from 1930s onward. –109
In contemplation, it is truth that actually begins to surround one’s mind and to overwhelm it. The more the mind is quiet and silent, the more divine truth radiates, shines, and transfigures within it.
–p.56 Orthodox Prayer Life: The Interior Way by Matthew The Poor
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