That is an explosive passage, and I have been praying for Scott as he prepares his sermon. I don’t know what he is going to say. I do know that he will take these verses seriously – he won’t joke about them or skip over them or apologize for them – and he will thoughtfully integrate them with the rest of the verses in the context and with the Bible’s message as a whole. For that I thank God.
I believe it is possible for sober-minded Christians to arrive at different conclusions about these words from St. Paul. To paint with broad strokes, some will say, “These words are consistent with other Bible passages that promote male leadership in the home and in the church, and they are grounded in creation order. Therefore, women shouldn’t preach or hold the office of elder.” Others will say, “St. Paul also says to greet one another with a holy kiss [Four times! Romans 16:16; 1 Corinthians 16:20; 2 Corinthians 13:12; 1 Thessalonians 5:26]. And Jesus commanded his disciples to wash one another’s feet (John 13:14). We recognize these commandments to be culture-bound practices that do not apply to us directly today, and the same should go for what Paul says about women teaching and leading.”
I think that there are fair arguments on both sides. Here I will go no further than that. By “fair arguments” I do not mean “equally valid,” or, “there’s just no way to decide between them,” or, “they’re both wrong and I alone understand the true synthesis.” I only mean that a cordial, reasoned, and even passionate discussion can take place between Christians who differ on this matter without either side denouncing the other or evicting their opponent from the room. I have no more to say about the specifics of that debate.
But I do have something to say concerning responses to this issue that I find foolish, cowardly, uncharitable, or downright dangerous.
Foolish: “St. Paul was a misogynist, right?”
The charge of misogyny against Paul can really only be brought by someone who has not read enough of him to have earned the right to give an opinion worth hearing in public discussion. Two questions should be asked of anyone who would accuse Paul of misogyny: (1) Have you read all 13 of his extant letters? (2) Were you awake when you read them? A little digging into the Pauline corpus will reveal texts so stunningly respectful of women that one could scarcely believe a first century Jewish Pharisee wrote them apart from divine inspiration: “In Christ there is neither male nor female” (Galatians 3:28); “the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does” (1 Corinthians 7:4). Most impressively, Paul insists that a husband must love his wife enough to submit to death by torture for her sake (Ephesians 5:25). Let me be clear. Harvey Weinstein, Donald Trump, and Bill Hybels are all misogynists. St. Paul wasn’t.
Cowardly: Just ignore the problematic Scriptures.
I think this is the majority position in evangelical churches today. There are countless churches where you could attend every Sunday for a decade or more and never once hear a sermon that included an exposition of the passage in 1 Timothy 2 that I will hear tomorrow. The preachers at these churches don’t want to offend people, and so they avoid hard texts. The most common way of skirting difficult passages is to preach sermon series with names like “Elevate” or “Guardrails” and then cherry-pick Scriptures that are amenable to whatever point the preacher wants to make. Now I will say something blunt and adversarial. Pastors who shun hard verses should resign from the ministry and pursue other callings. Don’t go to their churches. You don’t want a sniveling coward as your shepherd. Go to a church where the preacher goes verse by verse through books of the Bible, thoughtfully acknowledges Scriptural authority, and sometimes says things you don’t like.
Uncharitable: Impugn the motives of those who disagree with you.
This temptation is so natural and so universal that it must be consciously resisted. (Hang it all, some might say I fell into it myself in the paragraph above when I accused preachers of cowardice for never expounding 1 Timothy 2. “Hey, lighten up - maybe some of those preachers just haven’t gotten around to it yet. And maybe they will before they die of old age." Hm. Possibly.)
It is a special duty to do one’s best to refrain from assigning foul motives in an issue so fraught with passion and likely to trigger outrage. Ask yourself, “Did I come by at least some of my opinions honestly? Maybe my opponent did too.”
Downright Dangerous: Grant indulgences to powerful people who agree with you.
The number of women who have accused former Willow Creek pastor Bill Hybels of sexually inappropriate conduct has climbed to ten. He has denied all allegations. So at this point it is a he said/she said she said she said she said she said she said she said she said she said she said. He’s guilty.
In reading the testimonies of the women staff members that Bill hit on, I noticed that a particularly painful element of the harassment was the fact that he had been so "pro-women." They acknowledged that he provided them with valuable mentorship, that he had opened doors of ministry that had been closed to them in more conservative churches, that he busted the glass ceilings and empowered them in ways that previous generations of women had never known. He was an evangelical feminist trailblazer! How could he, of all people, first exploit, and then discard and slander, the very women who had been his valued partners in ministry?
Among the thousands of lessons to be learned in combing through the wreckage of Willow Creek Church is this: please be on your guard against people who agree with you and are in a position of power to give you what you want. By satisfying your thirst, they can tempt you to hold back from calling them out quickly for their crimes. It’s a common pattern. Harvey Weinstein gives a budding starlet what she craves – a movie role - and in the aftermath his own lawyer lamely points out, “Weinstein didn’t invent the casting couch.” Donald Trump gives some evangelicals what they want – say, conservative judges and tax reform – and some of them go and make donkeys of themselves by never noticing that the man is a son of hell.
Some people who disagree with you have good hearts, and some people who agree with you - and can even do you a lot of favors - have bad ones.
