I Do Not Permit a Woman to Teach
You can be sure there’s a kind of soft-antinomianism* in play when you detect a reticence about dealing with certain parts of the Bible. One such part is St. Paul’s admonition to Timothy: “I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man, but to be in silence” (I Tim. 2:12). Most mainline churches have scuttled this requirement altogether, having given way to the ordination of women sometime within the last 50 years. But our LCMS remains a holdout, still holding to the requirement that only men serve as pastors. Yet because there’s always a cultural push toward the feminist agenda, it’s not surprising to find some incremental steps toward making even this stalwart synod into another equal opportunity employer, so-to-speak.
One such step I detect is an increasing openness to female teachers of theology. And in this there’s what I see as a remarkable sleight-of-hand trick.
There are plenty of feminists who’ll say that the Apostle’s proscription does not specifically mention ordination into the Office of the Ministry, and since it doesn’t, we’re free to contend for women’s ordination, because (they say) the ministry shouldn’t be authoritative anyway, and hence when Paul says he doesn’t permit a woman to teach or to have authority, he really isn’t forbidding women’s ordination at all. A fine twisting of the text that is!
But then on the other hand, we also find them saying that it’s fine for women to teach theology because they’re not ordained. They aren’t pastors, so it’s permitted, they’ll say.
And somehow, this makes everything ok for them, even though while ordination isn’t mentioned in this passage, teaching is!
And of course, Paul was not thinking of a Christian mother’s duty to teach her children, which he commends in the same epistle (I Tim. 1:5), nor of schoolteachers giving grammar lessons and such, which are outside his purview, namely of the teaching the Gospel to the Church. But what’s bothersome is the evidence of precisely that: the ascendency of women as teachers of theology for the church, for adults, even for pastors and seminarians. The Large Catechism kerfuffle of 2023 arose partly out of this concern; and there have also arisen several troublesome instances of it at the 1517 website, which is a troubling thing because of the inroads they’re making among confessional Lutherans, as my recent article on this pointed out. There are women robustly teaching theology over there, being interviewed about theology, being theological interviewers, explaining things of catechetical importance, etc. They may not be ordained, but they sure carry on as if they were.
None of the women they list at 1517 as contributors are ordained (at least I don’t think they are, though it doesn’t say), they are evidently smart enough to know that having ordained women in that list would be a clear red-flag warning to confessional Lutherans who’d still like to think the group is Biblically orthodox . They’d never get away with that, and to be fair, maybe they wouldn’t want to. Maybe they agree that I Tim. 5 prohibits women’s ordination, even if there are other feminists who disagree. But at the least, I’d be willing to wager that they wish he wouldn’t have written that. Because, well, that’s just the kind of thing antinomians sometimes wish.
The women they do list as contributors have impressive looking degrees in theology, and have written theological books, and are giving theological lectures and interviews. In abstraction we could perhaps say that there’s nothing wrong with a woman having a degree in theology, or writing a theological book, or even giving a theological lecture. But something isn’t right, there’s a line crossed somewhere, when you see a woman teaching theology to the church. At least that’s what Paul would say, right? It’s what he did say: I do not permit a woman to teach or have authority over a man . . .
(Incidentally, if anyone thinks Paul would not object to women teaching women because it says “authority over a man,” let him look at the Greek. It says authentein andros, literally “to have authority of a man.”)
But why doesn’t Paul permit a woman to teach? Well, here’s his answer to that: “For Adam was formed first, then Eve. And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived, fell into transgression” (I Tim. 2:13-14). Paul doesn’t go into any more detail, for he assumes we know the Genesis narrative. And we should also know the fulfillment of the Genesis narrative in the man Jesus Christ, whom Paul refers to as the Second Adam. The reason he chose only male apostles was not culturally conditioned.
And presumably no one among us would cry, What misogyny! The horror! And that’s because we know it’s in the Bible. We have among us no overt rebels who want to scuttle this part of Scripture altogether. But at least those who do are being honest! It might even be worse to accept the text and then try to massage it and work around it somehow to justify your women theology professors and teachers.
Further, when one sees women publicly teaching theology, there is no question that what he’s seeing is something that was unheard of just a few generations ago. Things changed concurrently with the ascendency of feminism. So if you really expect me to believe that now we have women teaching theology because we just happened to discover that they could after all, and that this has nothing to do with the women’s movement, well then you might as well try to sell me some real estate in Arkansas while you’re at it.
The phenomenon is not only historically new; it’s clear evidence of the feminization of the Church. And that trend is at its root demonic, dating back to the serpent beguiling the woman in the Garden. It’s of a piece with a failure to come to terms that Jesus Christ is a man. Not just a human being. A man. A male. The second Adam.
I can already hear the howling objections to what I’m saying here. And that has to do with the fact that I’m not massaging the text. It’s pretty hard to get around: I do not permit a woman to teach.
And so we find more evidence of the leaven of 1517 . . .
*Soft antinomianism is sneaky, because it’s not hard-core antinomianism, which would be an outright rejection of the laws and commandments of God in the life of the Christian a la Luther’s enemy Agricola, but rather a tendency to lean in that direction, all under the guise of service to the Gospel. For a good definition and analysis of soft antinomianism, which I believe to be a term coined first by Mark Surburg about a decade ago, check out his own helpful explanation of it. One of the dangerous things about antinomianism is that it’s in the theological DNA of all of us who rejoice in the Gospel and the mercy of Christ. But St. Paul’s letters are full of exhortation toward leading a godly life, and there’s no tendency at all in his epistles toward antinomianism; in fact he strictly and routinely warns against it, although his term is the Greek anomia, which means essentially the same things as antinomia. Anomia is usually translated “lawlessness,” and there are plenty of Biblical warnings against it, including from Jesus himself (See Mt 7:23; 13:41; 23:28; 24:12).