1 Women in the Church, 1 Corinthians 14:33-40 (September 7, 2014) 33 For God is not a God of confusion but of peace. As in all the churches of the saints, 34 the women should keep silent in the churches. For they are not permitted to speak, but should be in submission, as the Law also says. 35 If there is anything they desire to learn, let them ask their husbands at home. For it is shameful for a woman to speak in church. 36 Or was it from you that the word of God came? Or are you the only ones it has reached? 37 If anyone thinks that he is a prophet, or spiritual, he should acknowledge that the things I am writing to you are a command of the Lord. 38 If anyone does not recognize this, he is not recognized. 39 So, my brothers, earnestly desire to prophesy, and do not forbid speaking in tongues. 40 But all things should be done decently and in order. PRAY Twenty years ago or so Tim Keller in New York City preached a series of sermons on this book, and he titled the series, Hot Potatoes from 1 Corinthians. After having preached on it for the last fifteen plus months I now know what he meant by that. The apostle Paul, when he wrote the letter to the church at Corinth two thousand years ago, covered so many topics that were controversial both back then and today. Certainly today s text is no exception it s definitely a hot potato, because in it Paul addresses the role of women in the church. Now before of where we are Mississippi and because so many of the people who attend Grace are from church backgrounds where you are accustomed to men and women having different roles inside the church, it may not feel like this is a hot potato or controversial to you. My guess is that many women even who will attend Grace this Sunday aren t worried about this and accept that the Bible teaches it and you re fine with it. You grew up in churches where the pastor, the elders, the deacons, were all men, all the decisions were made by men, and women had virtually no role in worship services (besides singing) they could keep the nursery, chair the flower committee, and teach children s Sunday school, and that s about it. But you re fine with it. Now if you are here this morning and you are one of those who really dislike the notion of assigned gender roles in the church, then I know that for you this is a controversial text, maybe an infuriating text, and gender roles is for you just about a deal-breaker when it comes to joining a church. Kathy Keller wrote a book on this issue a couple of years ago titled Jesus, Justice, and Gender Roles (I read it to get ready for this sermon and it helped), and at her church in New York City which her husband, Tim Keller, serves as pastor, they believe and practice that men and women do have different roles inside the church. And it s been a shock to many women over the years who were on their way to becoming members when they learn this. She writes in the book that one woman who had been attending Redeemer and had been loving it came to Kathy in tears when this woman learned that Redeemer would not ordain women as pastors. She told Kathy, It was like finding out on the night before your wedding that your fiancé is a child molester!
2 Maybe your reaction isn t quite so visceral, but if that s you I want to address you for just a moment. If you come to Grace and are naturally uncomfortable with the idea of gender roles inside the church, you re not alone. You may think you re the only person at Grace who wrestles with this but you don t. You re not alone and I m so glad you re here. I am so thankful that, for whatever reason, you ve been able to attend a church like Grace where all the men are elders. And one of my main goals in writing this sermon is to reassure you that Grace can still be a place for you, even if we disagree on this. Two points: first, what Paul is not saying about the role of women in the church. Second, what he is saying. Then, some application. First, what Paul is not saying about the role of women in the church. Let s re-read verses 33b-35: As in all the churches of the saints, 34 the women should keep silent in the churches. For they are not permitted to speak, but should be in submission, as the Law also says. 35 If there is anything they desire to learn, let them ask their husbands at home. For it is shameful for a woman to speak in church. What s Paul not saying? He can t be saying that women are forbidden from making a sound during a church service. And by the way even in the most culturally conservative churches I m aware of women are permitted to at least sing in church, which means by definition they re not being silent. But must we draw that conclusion? Three reasons: first, examples of women elsewhere in the Bible. We read throughout the Bible that women have taken active, speaking roles in the spiritual life of the church. In the Old Testament, we read about Deborah and Huldah, two women who are described as prophetesses. They almost certainly taught the people of Israel the word of God. And we can even read the content of Huldah s prophecy in 2 Kings 22 she begins it with the same: Thus saith the Lord formula that the male prophets do. In the New Testament, we have examples of this as well. In Acts 21, we read how the evangelist Philip had four unmarried daughters who prophesied. They probably weren t doing it in a closet but inside the local church there in Caesarea. In Acts 18, we read how Priscilla and Aquila, her husband, together taught Apollos the way of God. And of course the big one is in 1 Corinthians 11, which we studied back in May, where Paul talks about women in the church praying and prophesying. Now Paul cannot talk about women prophesying in church in chapter eleven (let alone all these other examples of women teaching in the Bible) only to contradict three chapters later by saying that women must never utter a sound in church. We can disagree about precisely what the nature of prophesying was, but here are some things I think we all must agree on: prophesying, whatever it was, wasn t done silently. It wasn t a telepathic activity; prophecy was spoken. Women were prophesying, and they were even prophesying inside the context of the local church. That s an unavoidable conclusion from 1 Corinthians 11. Also, prophesy had to have had some kind of teaching or
3 instructive component to it. It wasn t some kind of ecstatic or mindless phenomenon. And, finally, when the women prophesied, on occasion at least, men listened. There s no indication whatsoever in the Bible that when the women prophesied at church, the men got up and left the room in protest. Never in the Bible are we told that women were only permitted to instruct other women and children. It seems clear from 1 Corinthians 11 that men and women were together in the same room when women prophesied. Now, I can imagine the questions: Well, then, J.D., what in the world did Paul mean by women should keep silent in the churches? In order to know that you must know the second thing: how worship services were structured in the early church. Our verses for today follow Paul s instructions for orderly worship in the church in verses 26-32. The teaching time in a worship service in Corinth two thousand years ago would have been different from the teaching time today. Today what happens in a worship service is that when it comes time for the Bible to be taught, one person gets up and teaches it. At Grace, most of the time, that s me. The elders at Grace think it s a good idea to set aside one man, let him study the Bible all week, and come forth each Sunday with a word of instruction and exhortation for the people. Two thousand years ago, though, they didn t have a completed Bible. They were still writing the Bible. The Holy Spirit was still active in giving Scripture to the people. So it made more sense for multiple people to get up and teach each Sunday, because you couldn t ask one person to sit down and study the Bible all week because they didn t have it yet. Therefore a worship service in Corinth two thousand years ago would have been less like what we re doing right now and more like a small group meeting or a community group gathering. They would have had multiple people men and women talk and contribute to the discussion. But there was a big potential problem: there was no guarantee that each person that got up every Sunday was actually going to teach the truth of the gospel when their turn came. Some might get up and teach falsely. Others might get up and try to sell Amway. And remember there was no New Testament, no written record of Jesus teaching and the apostles teaching, against which to judge what the people were hearing. So each week in Corinth there was a time where the prophecies that had been spoken would be judged, would be sifted, and the prophets would questioned on their teaching. We see this in verse 29: Let two or three prophets speak, and let the others weigh what is said. It was vital that this weighing take place to keep false teaching out of the church. Third, the culture and women. In the ancient world, it was seen as improper for men to address a woman in public. If you remember John 4 where Jesus spoke to the Samaritan woman at the well, everyone s surprised. The disciples are surprised, the woman is surprised, because that sort of thing was done. But what absolutely shocked the consciences of people in ancient Greece and ancient Rome was when women spoke directly to other woman s husband. Speaking in public was improper, perhaps indecent, but addressing some man you weren t married to was scandalous. It would be like a
4 woman today going up to man married to someone else, throwing your arms around him and planting a really aggressive kiss on his lips. One Roman statesman, Cato the Elder, said this not long before Paul wrote 1 Corinthians (and to me it s remarkable how much it resembles verse 35): Indeed, I blushed when, a short while ago, I walked [in Rome] through the midst of a band of women. Had not respect for the dignity and modesty of certain ones (not them all!) restrained me I should have said, What kind of behavior is this? Running around in public and speaking to other women s husbands! Could you not have asked your own husbands the same thing at home? Are you more charming in public with others husbands than at home with your own? It was a shocking thing, in that culture for women to speak this way. So Paul comes up with a compromise. In the church, he s not going to prevent women from prophesying, from teaching, as the Holy Spirit leads. But in order to keep Christianity from getting the worst possible reputation in the surrounding culture so that inquirers might stop coming and hearing what they must do to be saved, Paul offers this one concession: he says that when the time comes to judge the prophesies, women must be silent. They can t grill the men on their teaching because that would be too much for the people of the time. The men will judge the prophets not because women weren t capable of doing it, but as a concession to the culture. Fast forward to today: a woman speaking directly to another woman s husband is not a problem in our culture. So this command for women to be silent in the church was bound to that culture two thousand years ago and doesn t apply to us today. Women can and do evaluate and challenge the comments of other men in our community groups at Grace, for example. Attend one tonight and you might see it happen live. But what some Christians want to do with these verses and others like them that address the role of women in the church is to say that all of them were bound to that culture and that none of them apply today. So women are permitted to do and should be encouraged to everything that men can do inside the church. Women shouldn t just be able to teach. They should be ordained, should serve as elders, should serve as pastors, because all gender roles applied only to ancient culture and no longer apply today. Is that what Paul s saying? That gets us to the second point. Second, what Paul does say about the role of women in the church. Verse 34: [T]he women should keep silent in the churches. For they are not permitted to speak, but should be in submission, as the Law also says. A lot of scholars think that Paul here refers to Genesis 2, which we read earlier, where we read that at creation Adam was created first, then his wife, Eve, as a helper suitable for him. Paul makes the connection explicit in another passage on the role of women in the church in 1 Timothy 2:11-13, where he writes to Timothy, the pastor of a church: 11 Let a woman learn quietly with all submissiveness. 12 I do not permit a woman to teach or to
5 exercise authority over a man; rather, she is to remain quiet. 13 For Adam was formed first, then Eve The best way to understand these verses, the best way to take them seriously, is to understand Paul as saying this: even two thousand years ago women were teaching in the church, but they had to be silent when it came to addressing the men directly. That silence was bound up in the culture of the day that said it would shock the conscience for a woman to speak to a man she wasn t married to. But when that culture changed (as it has for us) that prohibition no longer applied. What still applies today, however, is this principle, grounded in creation, that inside the church women are to be in submission in some way to men. That is a creation ordinance that will not pass away no matter what happens in the culture. I think that s the best way to reconcile all the relevant verses we ve looked at this morning, and several others we haven t. Let s look back a 1 Timothy 2:12 I can totally imagine someone saying, J.D., how can you say that women can teach men when Paul plainly says, I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man? Here s how: many commentators, by no means all (in fact, if you have an ESV Study Bible, you ll see the notes on this verses take the contrary view), but many commentators and scholars say that Paul is not excluding women from two activities (all teaching and exercising authority over a man) but one activity: the single activity of authoritative teaching by women. What does that mean? You ve heard me say over and over again in this series in 1 Corinthians that you can be a part of this church and disagree with what I m teaching in certain areas when it comes to spiritual gifts, when it comes to tongues and prophecy, things like that, we can all agree to disagree on much of what Paul is saying in 1 Corinthians 12-14 and still be a part of this church. When it comes to the various views of the end times we can agree to disagree on just about all of that and still be a part of the same church. And when it comes to the role of women, you can disagree with what I m teaching today and still be a part of the church we don t want you to join the church only to lead an insurrection against the leadership of the church on this issue, but barring that we can agree to disagree. But there are some areas of doctrine where we can t agree to disagree and all be members of the same church. We can t agree to disagree on the inerrancy of God s Word. We can t agree to disagree on the fallenness of humanity. We can t agree to disagree that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, fully God and fully man, who died on a cross for our sins, was buried, three days later he rose again, he ascended into heaven, and he sat down at the right hand of God the Father Almighty, from thence he will come to judge the living and the dead. We can t just agree to disagree on that if you disagree on those issues you can t be part of this church.
6 Who gets to decide that where to draw those lines? Who has the authority? This will vary from church to church, but at Grace, it s the elders. We came together a couple of years ago and adopted a statement of faith and by doing so we drew those lines; the church gave us the authority to do so. What Paul says in 1 Corinthians and 1 Timothy is that somehow this principle of women being in submission to men must be expressed in the local church, and the way we ve done it at Grace is to reserve the office of elder, the role of authoritative teaching, for men. Women can and do teach at Grace Bible Church, they can even teach men, they can in fact do anything a man can do at Grace who is not an elder, but like unordained men they cannot take part in the authoritative teaching that goes on at Grace. Now, at this point I can imagine two objections from those of you who have a real problem with women being barred from anything because they are women. The first objection might go like this: that s not fair. It is not fair if women cannot be pastors. It s degrading to women, it s an assault on the dignity of women, to keep them from ordination. That s a totally understandable objection, but it gets us straight to the heart of the matter, because the foundational reason why there are gender roles in the church is found in the nature of God. In 1 Corinthians 11 and in Ephesians 5, gender roles are grounded in the Trinitarian nature of God that God exists in three persons, Father, Son, and Spirit, each person is God, yet there is but one God. And in Philippians 2:5-11 we read this: 5 Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, 6 who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, 7 but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. 8 And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. 9 Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, 10 so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, 11 and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. A very famous passage what does it have to do with gender roles? Do you see what Jesus did? Jesus is every bit equal to the Father, very God of very God. Yet rather than hold onto his glory as God he humbled himself and became obedient to death, to ransom us for our sins. Another way to put it is that Jesus practiced submission to the Father. God the Son, totally equal in every way to the Father, yet willingly submitting himself to the Father s leadership when it comes to God s plan to save mankind from their sins. And no one argues it was unfair or an assault on the dignity of Jesus for him to do that. Friends, men and women are absolutely equal in the eyes of God. One is not superior to the other at all both have equal claims to dignity and to the position of being made in the image of God. That s Galatians 3:28: 28 There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.
7 But if the submission of women to men is grounded in the nature of God himself, and if Jesus is not degraded by his submission to the Father, then it cannot be inherently degrading for women to practice submission in the church. It cannot be an assault on the dignity of women as human beings made in the image of God. Plus, I think a lot of the feeling that drives the it s not fair objection comes from importing a worldly understanding of authority into the church. In the world, authority means having all the power, having the perks, and the people over whom you have authority exist to serve you. But Jesus completely turned that notion of authority upside down. Jesus exercised his authority by washing his disciples feet. Jesus said, You know that those who are considered rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them. 43 But it shall not be so among you. But whoever would be great among you must be your servant, 44 and whoever would be first among you must be slave of all. 45 For even the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many. Mark 10:42-45. If we use the world s definition of authority, then yes, women are getting a raw deal. But if we use Jesus definition of authority, where in the church the ordained men are using their authority to serve and love the people around them and care for them, I think the it s not fair objection loses a lot of its power. Second objection: that s not safe. It s not safe for women to be prevented from doing anything a man can do, because men have historically held all the power and have very often abused it. Women have suffered because men have held the power and used it for their own good and their own pleasure at the expense of women, so to protect women from that kind of thing men and women must be treated absolutely equally. And in response I say that you re absolutely right to feel that way. History is replete with examples of men abusing their power; I can t deny it. I d be a fool to try. But there are protections. The first and main one is this: submission under the law doesn t mean that all women submit to all men, or that all professional fields are closed to women. Not at all the Bible says that only in two areas, the church and the home (that s Ephesians 5), are women to practice submission. You may be here this morning and not like the idea of women being CEO s, or attorneys, or surgeons, or Army officers, or the President of the United States, but if you think that just know there s nothing in the Bible backing up your views nothing. Outside the church and the home, the Christian view is that the world is unisex. Men and women are interchangeable in all these fields. Plus, if you re a woman you can always scope out a church before you join it to see if you feel like you can trust the men who lead it. I mean, I think you can tell before you join whether or not you can be heard, whether or not the elders, the pastors, would try to abuse this authority. Go to the pastors, ask them tough questions about the role of women in the church, and if they blow you off you ve got your answer. There s no requirement to join a church where you can t trust the leaders. Hopefully you can find a
8 church that does practice submission in some way yet respect, values, and encourages women to use their gifts. And finally I actually think that it s unsafe if always treat men and women as if we were unisex creatures. Like I said, we have to be unisex out in the world. But that doesn t mean it s going to be enjoyable or even good; it s just the lesser of evils. Illustrate this: back in the 1980 s, Harrison Ford and Melanie Griffith starred in the movie Working Girl. And in it there s one scene set at this after hours Wall Street cocktail party, and all the women who work on Wall Street are there but they are dressed in business suits and pantsuits, but Melanie Griffith shows up wearing an actual dress, a feminine piece of clothing. And Harrison Ford walks up to her and says, Finally, a woman who dresses like a woman at one of these parties, and not the way she thinks a man would dress if he were a woman. That s just one small, silly example of how the line between genders get blurred or even obliterated in the world, and usually it s the feminine side that gets the worst end of it. God could have made us unisex creatures, he could have created us as hermaphrodites instead of male and female, but he didn t. God made us male and female for a reason, and because all God s creation is good then there is real goodness and glory in our differences. C.S. Lewis wrote at one point: One of the ends for which sex [and gender] was created was to symbolize to us the hidden things of God [in the church, when we practice gender roles] we are dealing with male and female not merely as facts of nature but as the live and awe-full shadows of realities utterly beyond our control and largely beyond our direct knowledge. By God s grace the church and the home can be two refuges for our male and femaleness in what is otherwise a very unfriendly world, and teach us more about the character of God. Third, some implications and applications. First and most important one is this: all-male pastors in the church does not in any way imply that women are less gifted than men. Not at all. Women can be just as gifted as men, often more so, and that includes teaching. Anyone with any sense at all recognizes this. Among ordained men my age in the PCA Presbyterian Church in America they have a saying: The best preacher in the PCA is a woman Paige Benton Brown. Many of you will know who Elisabeth Elliot is. At one point she was a professor at Gordon-Conwell Seminary, and during one lecture she announced to her class of both men and women that she had better gifts for being a pastor than most of the men in the class, possibly the entire seminary. She knew the Bible in multiple languages, had vast experience [teaching] it, had the maturity bought through suffering to speak with compassion to others, and on and on. However, she said, God has not called me, as a woman, to exercise those gifts in a pastoral role. I am called to use them, but why should they only be valuable if used in one particular role, the ordained ministry? Jesus, Justice, and Gender.
9 Second, since women can teach, and are gifted by God to teach, the church needs to provide platforms for them to teach. Certainly women are permitted to hand out bulletins, take up the offering, keep the nursery, but also they can teach Bible studies, community groups, Sunday school classes, seminars women can and have taught all of them at Grace. And I can easily imagine a scenario where a female speaker might address the whole church. I know a few years ago at Second Presbyterian Church in Memphis they brought in Paige Brown to teach a church-wide Sunday school class basically, the entire adult Sunday school program shut down that day and they all gathered in the auditorium to hear Paige teach. But when she got up, she began by making it very clear that she was there at the invitation and under the authority of the allmale elder board of that church. Beth Moore used to be a member at Second Baptist, Houston, Texas, and she taught a huge Sunday school class, and both men and women attended. I once had a man ask me, Is it okay if I watch a Beth Moore DVD study? And I said, No, you will turn to stone if you do! Of course, it s fine learn the Bible from whomever you can. I d rather you read a book by Elisabeth Elliot than just about any male author I can think of. Women are gifted to teach, too. Third, for the last many decades and perhaps centuries the church in America has been in such a privileged position in our culture that we could coast along without really encouraging half the people in the church (women) to develop and exercise the full range of their spiritual gifts. But those days are over. In the 21 st century it s going to be all hands on deck, and we need men and women digging deep into God s Word, thinking God s thoughts after him, and teaching and instructing others in the church, serving with their full range of gifts to build up the body of Christ. Fourth, and finally, I want to address everyone in college or younger, especially those of you in high school or middle school, young men and women (but especially women). No one ever told me growing up what I m about to tell you. I want you to know that studying and teaching the Bible is by far the most intellectually stimulating, satisfying, and challenging activity I ve ever been a part of. I used to be an attorney, and what I do know is a hundred times more satisfying intellectually than anything I did as a lawyer. I mean no disrespect to the lawyers in the room; they probably agree with me anyway. We have some bright minds in the church and more of them need to be devoted to this task, especially women. All of our brightest don t need to go into medicine, or accounting, or finance. Some of you need to consider the ministry, even though the money s not as good. Now, as I ve already said, I don t think you can be an ordained pastor if you are a woman. But you could still make a career out of it. You could teach college or seminary, and have a huge impact for the cause of Christ. You could be on staff at a church as a teacher, teaching seminars and classes. You could be a writer, writing curriculum, writing books. But here s the point: the church needs you. The church needs you and increasingly I pray the church wants you. And I just want you to know it s an option. I ve got two little boys and two little girls, and I want all four of them especially my girls to know that in some capacity what Daddy does and finds so satisfying, studying and teaching the inspired Word of God, is available to them. PRAY