A Story of Redemption

If you know me, or if you've read the blog in the past, you may have noticed that I have a pretty strong opinion regarding women in ministry. God calls women, and they answer that call. He wouldn't call them if he didn't want them to use the gifts which he has given them.

The topic has been discussed on the blog before:

Paul on a Shelf (January 26)
Membership (July 20)
What is our Role (August 26)
What is our Role, Part 2 (August 28)
The Challenge by Jeff the Methodist (September 2) -- (Go read that one; it's terrific!)

You would think that I had explored this topic more than enough (never). Thanks to the blog 42, I found another post that I really like that discussed this topic -- Women in Ministry: Can we Change? by Stan Gundry. It is the story of one man's transformation from a believer in a hierarchical structure in a church, where women "know their place" to an egalitarian structure. Go read the post if you have time. It's long, but it's honest. It's well written, and I love the list of questions his wife had regarding his original beliefs.

What I really like about it is how Stan examines the question from a "whole bible" view, rather than from a single scripture view. Most of the ideas that I'm going to present here are from Stan's story, but I want to convey what struck me about what he wrote.

Let's start at the beginning. Let's take a look at Genesis (3:16). This verse occurs as Adam and Eve are leaving the Garden of Eden.

To the woman he said, "I will greatly increase your pains in childbearing; with pain you will give birth to children. Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you."

This is after the Fall. The Fall turned creation upside down -- it altered the creation from what the creator had meant it to be.

But the Bible -- the entire Bible -- is the story of God's redemption of his children. He does not leave us in sin. He does not leave us in our "topsy turvy" world (as Stan calls it). We were created as children of God -- both male and female in relationship with God, both granted stewardship of the earth, both with responsibility to follow and obey God, both loved by God. The fall changes that into a hierarchical relationship -- a patriarchal society. But God does not leave us that way.

The Bible is the story of transformation. Transformation from our broken, sinful, state to that which God created us to be.

Look at this verse, (also written by Paul) (Galations 3:28):

There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.

That verse in Galations is a statement of the ideal -- a return to life before the fall -- a return to how God imagined that we would be.

When the Bible is seen in this way, as a movement toward redemption, and when it is understood that part of that redemption is a return to the ideal stated in Galations, then verses like the one in 1 Timothy 2 (women be silent) can be seen as just what Stan calls "ad hoc," or what JtM calls a verse in which context matters. When we see the Galations verse as one of goals of redemption, then women such as Priscilla, Deborah, the woman at the well, Mary Magdalene, and Junia are not embarrassing exceptions to the rule, but are steps toward redemption. As Stan very eloquently states it:

When the Old Testament and Old Testament history are viewed from the perspective of this big picture, the Old Testament women who break the patriarchal paradigm -- Deborah, Jael, Abigail, Huldah, Esther, and the wise and virtuous business woman of Proverbs 31 are not embarrassing exceptions to some divinely instituted patriarchal creation order, as hierarchicalists are compelled to say. Instead, each of these women is an affirmation that the Fall is not the end of the story, that patriarchy is not the divine ideal, and that restoration of what originally was is coming once again.

As JtM states in the Challenge post, there are pitfalls to supporting one's view using a singular Bible passage. He's absolutely correct! Doesn't it make much more sense to view the issue from a total Bible view? I said before that when faced with 1 Timothy 2:8-15, my response is often "No No No." I think that is because it seems so contrary to me to the rest of the story --to the story of redemption, to the life of Christ, to God as I am in relationship with him.

Image: The sky from the VA hill one morning.