Episode 121
· 42:53
Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Christ the King podcast. You are listening to our series on men, women, and the gospel. This is the last session of our time together. We've done a 5 part series.
Ashley:This will be the 5th part, which will be devoted entirely to a q and a. We're going to be responding to questions that have emerged throughout the course of our going through this content. Largely these questions we are grabbing from the live sessions that we did in person when we did this together in the church. And so you all submitted questions, those of you who were there for those sessions, and then we have taken those questions and tried to look for emerging themes or questions that really were a kind of good summary of a lot of different questions that people were asking along similar lines. And so we've narrowed it down to 5 and we're gonna be addressing those 5 questions in particular for this time together.
Ashley:That being said, if you have questions that are not being addressed in this time or live, and they really matter to you, we want you to know 2 things. 1, we really do value those questions. They're important to us. We might just not have had time or space to get to all of them either live or here, but we do want to be able to talk them through with you. So reach out to us.
Ashley:We always wanna hear from you. That's the other thing is we care about them, and then please reach out to us. So for today, we're gonna be going through these 5 questions. And when I say we are, I mean, of course, myself and our associate pastor, Isaiah De Builder, who is here.
Isaiah:Hello.
Ashley:It's great to be with you all, as always. Just to get us started, we're gonna start with our first question, which is this. What is the relationship between this view of women leading in the church? So the view that we've been advocating for throughout the podcast series, which is that women and men based on gifting, not gender, should be leading side by side in the church. What does that view have to do with questions about human sexuality?
Ashley:So I'll say it just one more time for clarity. What is the relationship between this view of women leading in the church and questions about human sexuality? So it's not uncommon for questions about or around issues of human sexuality to emerge in this conversation around women leading in the church Because in both instances, you're dealing with complex questions of biblical interpretation and issues that really matter in our real lives on a day to day basis. And so it's really out of a desire to be both clear and helpful. We wanna clarify for those of you listening, who have wondered the same that we do at Christ, the king have a conservative sexual ethic and a traditional view of marriage, meaning that as an Anglican priest, in light of my own convictions, I cannot marry same sex couples or affirm same sex sexual relationships.
Ashley:That would be true, not just of myself, but those in leadership alongside me. I have and we have, as you might imagine, a lot of really deep convictions on this topic. However, this isn't the time or place to get into those. We will, at some point in our life together, address it. This isn't the space or time, but it should be said nonetheless that we hold this conviction like all the rest of our convictions, I hope, with generosity and humility.
Ashley:Our convictions around women leading in the church have been shaped by scripture. We've said that just over and over again, as well as our experiences in the world. So it's not that that doesn't matter. It's both of those things. But the Bible is giving us examples of women leading and serving in the church in a way that we believe challenges the practice of excluding women from positions of leadership in the church today, which does happen.
Ashley:So there's biblical evidence. In other words, that like warrants explanation, warrants an investigation because there's a kind of, you might use the language of mixed witness. Although we wanna just make clear that for us, there is a consistent trajectory with respect to women leading and serving in the church. We think there's a consistent logic at play there or work at play there. And yet we also understand and wanna make room for really honest questions.
Ashley:Like what do you do with the fact that on the surface of it, some of these passages seem to contradict one another or at least compete with one another?
Isaiah:Yeah. So you're thinking of maybe, for example, in Corinthians where Paul says women should be both silent in churches, and then later he'll say, but they should also speak for God authoritatively and prophecy in the assemblies provided their head is covered.
Ashley:That's exactly right.
Isaiah:So what do you Yeah. It just seems to raise some questions. Like, how do those two things you know? And so we try to address those.
Ashley:That's exactly right. Or you have all of these women leading in the church in all these ways, and then you get to the epistles and seems to be at least on the surface of it. Or now it's like we've narrowed or we're limiting. And what do we do with that? At least that's how we feel about it.
Ashley:And when people raise those questions with me, like, I understand why when when they're reading the bible. And yet when it comes to matters of human sexuality, the Bible actually doesn't provide any kind of mixed witness. Meaning there are no positive examples or endorsements of same sex sexual relationships for us to consider or to grapple with. We have our human experience, our lived experience, of course, which matters again. But when we're talking about the Bible itself, the Bible and the biblical witness is actually consistently prohibitive.
Ashley:So anytime this issue of same sex sexual relationships comes up, it's consistently forbidding that kind of relationship. And that's true from beginning to end. And so the interpretive reach that some scholars are making in order to affirm same sex marriage and those relationships, we're just not able to make in good conscience based on our understanding of how we go about interpreting the Bible. Does that seem fair?
Isaiah:Yeah. I think that's what we're we're advocating for is really a consistent way of reading scripture, maybe sometimes called a a hermeneutic Mhmm. Way of interpreting. And, you know, we said this before, but, like, the way that we're encouraging, others and we ourselves read a passage like first Timothy 2 is consistent with the way that we would read the rest of scripture, you know, in context, considering language, cultural background, trying to get to the heart of what the theology, that's being shared and espoused by Paul or whoever the the human author is, of course, as inspired by the Holy Spirit as his word to his people. And so that's kind of the way that we would advocate for that.
Isaiah:And so what you're saying is is basically, right, when we read in those same kinds of ways Yes. We just don't find an affirmation, but rather a prohibition of same sex relationships. And so that's not so much even about our opinions. Yes. That's right.
Isaiah:Really, it's just about, like, our convictions as shaped by scripture and this reading of scripture.
Ashley:That's exactly right. Alright. We're gonna move on then to questions that were more directly maybe related to some of the things that we've been talking about, And these are kind of across the board. We're gonna go all the way back to Genesis and then all the way to Paul. So there are 5 questions I mentioned.
Ashley:This is number 2. How were maleness and femaleness understood in Genesis, and how should that inform or not inform how we understand it today? So one more time, how were maleness and femaleness understood in Genesis, and how should that inform or not inform how we understand it today? You never know exactly maybe what someone's asking, so I'm gonna go about this a couple of different ways maybe. In one hand, I hear someone asking about gender as construct, how we think about what it means to be male and what it means to be female in the world today versus maybe how they would have thought about those things for the original audience of Genesis, for example.
Ashley:And of course, you know, the short answer is differently. Those kinds of constructs are always informed culturally and by our time and place in the world. So that's just a really short answer is they thought about it differently. And yet the thing that maybe feels important to underscore clarify is we talked a little bit about in Genesis 1, how when God creates Adam out of the soil of the earth, he forms this human earth creature that we said, Adam and breeze into his mouth. And he stands up a living nefesh.
Ashley:And the point that we made is that later, when God goes to create Eve, the Adam is asleep and God moves over Adam and out of adam raises, draws out Ish or rather Isha. So that now we have these 2 corresponding figures, these two creations, 1 male, 1 female, 1 man, 1 woman. And so what really what we're trying to say is what the text is highlighting is the relationship of sameness between man and woman, between male and female. Now these two corresponding realities have emerged out of Adam. That is not to say that Adam was androgynous or non binary, even in the way that we would think about those things today.
Ashley:That would be just frankly, to go beyond the bounds of the text itself, as interesting as a conversation as that may be. That's not what we're saying. Really the point, however, that we are trying to underscore and highlight is this relationship of corresponding reality between what it means to be man and what it means to be woman, what it means to be male, what it means to be female, that they really are understood in light of one another. That really the text is more than even underscoring complementarity, the ways in which they are different. Really, in the text itself, this is celebration of, like, at last, bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh.
Ashley:Here is someone who is like me in a corresponding nature.
Isaiah:Yeah. That's right. It's like a common humanity.
Ashley:Yes.
Isaiah:And I think that point of, like, having that kinda single origin and seeing the role of human beings in the world that they're meant to co reign and co rule together with God and with one another.
Ashley:That's right.
Isaiah:And that they're perfectly suited to do that for one another.
Ashley:That's right. And so we wouldn't disagree or deny the fact that generally maleness can be talked about in certain terms and generally, femaleness can be talked about in other terms. But really that's tricky territory. Like what does it mean to be male in an ongoing, intrinsic, eternal sort of way? What does mean to be female in an ongoing intrinsic sort of way?
Ashley:It's not that that conversation doesn't matter and that debate isn't really important. It's just that in the text itself, really what we're what we're looking at, what's being highlighted is the partnership between these two beings. And so we may tend to want to focus on the differences, how maleness is different from femaleness, super important conversation maybe. But our point, at least for our purposes, even in the text itself, I think there's a celebration actually of, like, saying this, mutuality, and partnership. And that was really what we're trying to highlight.
Isaiah:Yep. And so that brings us to our, third question, which is, what are the implications of Paul's call to mutual submission in Ephesians 5 for marriages today? Which is, I think, a really great question.
Ashley:Great question.
Isaiah:So just to kind of refresh you, Ephesians 5, often read at wedding ceremonies. We read the longer passage, if y'all remember. So Ephesians 5 and 6 actually compromises, like, kind of a whole unit, particularly those first couple of verses of Ephesians 6. And so as we work backwards, we're gonna focus on the first verse, which is Paul's call to mutual submission, but then he begins to actually drop into something that's pretty familiar to his ancient context, the readers of the Greco Roman world who he's writing to, which is this thing called household code, which involves, the relationships of slaves and masters, children and parents, and wives and husbands Mhmm. All under this idea of the paterfamilia, which is a kind of a Greco Roman way of ordering homes
Ashley:That's right.
Isaiah:And households. Yeah. So that specific part of it is actually not necessarily a biblical idea at all. It's actually just an assumption kind of writ large in in the Greco Roman world. We talked about this already in the Paul podcast, so this is just kind of a refresher for you.
Ashley:Right. Paul's engaging with deeply held cultural assumptions. He's pointing at it. Right? Something that people already had in their existing imagination rather than prescribing something new for people.
Isaiah:That's true. And it's hard for us to tell because when we read it, we are not assuming that backdrop necessarily, but it doesn't take too long to read a little bit of Aristotle or Plato or any of those and realize, oh, woah. This is just how everybody thought.
Ashley:That's right.
Isaiah:So what's not new is that idea of the patteufamilya and that ordering of the household codes or whatever. What's new is actually what Paul does with that in terms of, like, his subversive gospel thinking Yep. You know, inspired by the Holy Spirit. You know?
Ashley:And his call to mutual submission.
Isaiah:That's right. And so what we wanna say about marriage in particular so what are the implications of Paul's call to mutual submission in Ephesians 5 for marriages today? That's a great question because he starts off that passage by saying, submit to one another out of reference for Christ. That would be the whole sale new bit of that entire rundown. That's right.
Isaiah:And I think it's really where he's going.
Ashley:So if we were to take a bit of that passage as something that is prescriptive for us as Christian believers, right? So the other thing that's something we're inheriting from our culture and our context. And so Paul is dealing with it and he's taking, as we've said, numerous times, he's now kind of like running the gospel through that existing construct. But for us now, if we're like looking for our world and our purposes and how we're thinking about marriages, man, that whole call to submit to one another as you submit to the Lord, there's a lot there.
Isaiah:There is. And just to say again, we did some work in Philemon talking about Onesimus and Philemon and just seeing the brilliance of Paul inspired by the Holy Spirit kind of working out a very similar parallel situation. So if you haven't listened to that podcast, go back and listen to that because we kinda did that in detail. But you can see that Paul is working both in Ephesians 56 and in a letter like Philemon that he is working towards this goal. And the goal in this passage, the way that we should read it, the lens in which we should read it through is this mutual submission.
Isaiah:But not just mutual submission, but mutual submission out of reverence for Christ. Indeed. So I actually wanna bring another text into the conversation before we drop back to this, the practical applications, because this idea of reverence for Christ is actually pretty unique in this letter, in this specific language. It's a pretty powerful statement. Mhmm.
Isaiah:So we'll talk about the submitting to one another in mutual submission. I wanna talk about the reverence to Christ part because I think it's it's actually really vocal. Yeah. So, ironically enough, first Timothy 2 we're not gonna read the the verses that we did already. We spent a lot of time in first Timothy 2.
Isaiah:But if you just bump up about 2 verses, there's actually this this saying which may even predate Paul. It might be something he's quoting. We're not really sure, but it's very possible that it was a saying among the early Christians. So, like, this little bit of theology that people could recite to one another and just confess truth.
Ashley:A lot like maybe Philippians 2 would
Isaiah:be another example. Yeah. There's these phrases in the New Testament that, you know, are part of the the worship and devotion of the early church. And so especially maybe in an illiterate society sometimes Yep. These are the kinds of bits that kinda stick in your heart.
Isaiah:You know, we similarly might memorize scripture today. That's right. So here's one right here. This is Paul in 1st Timothy 2 starting in the end of verse 5. There is one God.
Isaiah:There is also one mediator between God and humankind, Christ Jesus himself human, who gave himself as a ransom for all.
Ashley:Amen.
Isaiah:And so beyond just being this beautiful bit of Christology of truth about Jesus, the implications of this is that there is no other mediator, actually, between God and humankind. Right? That's the plain reading of this text. So as we drop into a verse like Ephesians 5 and we talk about reverence for Christ, we should be thinking about submission to Jesus as the one mediator. And so one of the things that feels very practical for me is, oftentimes, when I hear people talk about marriage in the Christian spaces, I think we maybe are not assuming this reality of the one mediator.
Isaiah:Mhmm. Sometimes it feels like
Ashley:gets muddied, maybe.
Isaiah:Does. I wanna be charitable here. I'm not sure that it's people's intention. Sure. But I think sometimes we end up kinda building sort of a chain or a ladder
Ashley:Yep.
Isaiah:So to speak, of hierarchy and authority, which, in one sense, kind of removes submission to Jesus in a way. It may not be our intention, but, functionally, that's often how it goes.
Ashley:And more specifically, you're referring to the idea that if women in particular have men or their husbands as their head over them and particularly as their spiritual authority.
Isaiah:That's right.
Ashley:Then the muddy bit is that, so what does that mean in terms of Christ as mediator Christ's unique role that he plays in our lives is our sort of direct connection to God. Whereas for women now, if a husband is meant to play this role that maybe we wouldn't use the language of mediator, but as authority, I think that your point is it gets pretty murky.
Isaiah:It does. Yeah. And if we're gonna follow Paul's statement here of submitting to one another at a reference for Christ, that mutual submission is really dependent on us submitting to Jesus together. And so it's not that one person submits to Jesus and the other submits to the other person.
Ashley:Yes.
Isaiah:And, again, that's maybe not the way that we always talk about it, but I think a lot of times we verge on that. You know?
Ashley:Well, it's implied even if I'm not saying it explicitly. And I think that's that's a thing. Right? Similarly, with the inferiority superiority thing, we don't wanna use that language. We stay away from it, and we would even argue that's not what we're saying.
Ashley:The sort of natural, logical outworking of those things. We've talked about this before when we were having the whole debate about being created equal and yet unequal in role. Right? If you really take that out to its logical conclusion, I think you're saying a similar thing, right? If, husbands are functioning as the spiritual head or authority over women, and you're just sort of like work that out in everyday life, then maybe at least at the very least creates an opportunity for some muddied and murky lived reality, lived theology around the role of Jesus.
Isaiah:Exactly right. And also to add to that, I mean, this word submission is kind of a a dirty word in the in the modern kind of day. Mhmm. And maybe not for everyone, but for some. And we just wanna say we're not, like, anti, like, this idea of submitting.
Isaiah:That's right. But we actually just wanna point with Paul, hopefully, here that we are submitting to one another as we submit to Jesus.
Ashley:That's right.
Isaiah:And so when it comes to marriage, this is the picture that we should be looking at, which is very much like the garden that we just talked about. You know, coruling, coreigning, walking with God, submitting to one another as we submit to the Lord. That's right.
Ashley:So if we're thinking about that then practically how that gets lived out in day to day life, then you're gonna use effectively the same theology, the same logic that would apply in the church. Right? So how we operate within the home would be based on our gifts and abilities, our personalities, who we are as people rather than primarily or privileging our genders. Right? And then based on whether we are male or female, we then assign certain roles or tasks based on our gender.
Ashley:That would be one way of approaching it. And what we're saying is, nope, we have a gifts based, not gender based approach to not just leadership in the church, but life really in general, more broadly than that.
Isaiah:Mhmm.
Ashley:Which means then that when it comes to how we live in the home, we're just like talk really practically now in the day to day life. And both of us would hope that our marriages reflect this reality.
Isaiah:Mhmm.
Ashley:Yeah. So I don't know about for you and Elise, but for Josh and I, that means that we're each gonna do the thing that we're good at doing when it comes to how we run or manage our house. I'm not trying to do the stuff I'm not good at doing and or that I'm just less interested in. Right? Animated by and similarly for Josh, maybe it's more helpful to look at the contrast, the view of that where, what we're gonna refer to as a complimentary and approach to marriage, maybe.
Ashley:Right? Mhmm. The roles within the home are prescribed based on gender and oftentimes end up, at least I can say for myself, it becomes pretty confusing as to how that actually gets meted out this whole idea of headship and authority. So for example, I will often hear people say that what it means for the husband to be the head of the house is that he's the one that primarily makes decisions. Right?
Ashley:So if there's a kind of impasse with respect to decision making, it always we defer to the the head of the house. The man makes the decision, or the finances that it will be the man's responsibility ultimately to be, chief of, the finances, for the home. Right? And then maybe kind of depending on your context, it can, like, work itself, all the way down in into other into other things.
Isaiah:That feels a little hard for me because what if what if the holy spirit didn't gift you? And this is this is more of a comment about a friend as being skilled with finances, not necessarily me per se. What if the holy spirit didn't gift you to be the the the financial, you know, member of the
Ashley:Well, then you and Elise are destined to be financially destitute.
Isaiah:That's that's rough.
Ashley:That's just gonna be the way that that works out.
Isaiah:Yeah.
Ashley:And so I guess so 2 sort of points we wanna make. This creates real practical challenges for those couples for whom maybe their gifts and abilities do not follow along those really prescriptive lines of division. Right? Yeah. It also we just need to say it, nowhere in the new testament are those kinds of specifics spelled out that now we have gone decidedly outside the bounds of the Bible and the text with how we're thinking about what those things mean for us now.
Ashley:And that's where I found just really even personally and practically just started to feel so not just ambiguous, but really inconsistent. Yeah. So for example, we were somehow connecting Ephesians 5 to whether or not the husband should always drive the car. Mhmm. You know?
Ashley:Or, to who speaks most in public or when you have friends over, kind of, like, depending on your context, these become real issues
Isaiah:for how you
Ashley:live out your life practically speaking. We were talking earlier about an a Nate Brugatsky bit that he does about mowing the lawn.
Isaiah:Mhmm. Yeah. And his his neighbors keep throwing shade on him because his wife wants to mow the lawn. And he's like, you can't do that because they think that I'm, like, subjugating you to do this. And I'm abdicating my role as the husband to do the yeah.
Isaiah:Yeah.
Ashley:Right.
Isaiah:Yeah.
Ashley:Yeah. Or god forbid that someone see the wife driving the car, or do you know what I'm saying? And this is where we get into this. We just need to say it. Extra biblical space where we are decidedly now talking about culturally informed realities.
Isaiah:Yep.
Ashley:And we put it all together, and we just have to admit on both sides of this, those things are not prescribed for us within the pages of the
Isaiah:new testament. They're not. And also just to say, it is also very possible that neither of you are skilled in a particular way. We can also grow in our abilities. You know?
Isaiah:And and so it's not a fixed position.
Ashley:You yet.
Isaiah:It's neither neither a binary based on gender roles, nor is it something that, well, you just have what you have and you can't grow in those things. And so I mean, I think that is maybe fairly obvious, but just worth saying in this conversation.
Ashley:To your point, when Josh and I first got married, you know, he just, like, wanted to make dinner in a way that I did not. And I just wanted to have more Bible based discussions in our home, you know, and think about ways that we could change up our devotional life or whatever. And so rather than just flipping it and saying, well, no. No. No.
Ashley:No. Because he's the man, he should be caring about those things. And because you're the woman, you should be caring about these things, which created a lot of real tension and pain, honestly, in our marriage in those early years. How much more liberating, actually, just to be able to say, wow. It's really great that I was able to be partnered with a person who's good at something I'm not good at, and I'm grateful for that.
Ashley:And I'd also like to grow in it, and I feel stronger in this area, and there's opportunity for you to grow with me here.
Isaiah:Yeah.
Ashley:What a beautiful gift.
Isaiah:Yeah. And the togetherness really sticks out to me there because I could just think of so many men that I know that I'm friends with and, you know, a lot of respect for who can feel very isolated and, like, the pressure is kinda all on them to make everything happen.
Ashley:Mhmm.
Isaiah:And I feel like the the heart of the Lord here is actually just something quite the opposite that we would actually together be looking to Jesus to help, like, lead us in these things that are really weighty. Mhmm. But we should we should be sharing them, not trying to bear them alone.
Ashley:Indeed. Alright. So this is question number 4. Why were Paul's requirements for elders and deacons gender normative, or were they? This is a great question.
Ashley:I think in large part, because it gives us an opportunity to speak to what I suspect is a question that a lot of people have, which is given all that we've said about the biblical witness for women leading in the church, why do there seem to be so many examples in Paul's letters in particular where men seem to hold these very specific offices and why aren't there examples in his writings and his letters, for women serving as elders, for example, And that history seems to have continued men primarily occupying those roles as we move into the, even now in the church. So really, I think that's the question at hand is what about elders in the new testament and, deacons? And I think maybe firstly, the thing we wanna just make sure that we're clear on is we've talked at great length. Actually, the new testament does spell out an example of women holding the office of deacon in particular, Roman 16, we've mentioned, a number of those places. So maybe more specifically, we're gonna focus on this office or role of, of elder.
Ashley:And we said this at least live, but when we're talking about the church now related to the church of the new testament, it's really just important to remember that there are ways in which the church then was both alike and unlike the church today. We've called the roles of leadership, for example, different things over time, embody them differently. And yet there's also this really informed and important continuity between the way that we organize things and structure things in the church now versus the way we did it and it is in the new testament. So for example, we're gonna talk about the role of elders, and it's just important, I think, to note that at least in the pages of the new testament, this role gets referred to a number of different ways with different language. So you can be referring to an elder, you can be referring to an overseer, you could be referring to a shepherd.
Ashley:And presumably we're talking about if not exactly the same thing, similar things, a position of, of leadership in the church. And it's true, that in places like first Timothy, for example, Paul's instruction for elders, He is addressing those instructions to men or to a man using a male elder as his example. So in the text it says that an elder needs to be the husband of 1 wife. And so people have raised the question, well, then elders must be men because they have to be the husband of 1 wife. And if Paul intended for women to be elders, he would have gone on to say so, or to have made room for, women similarly being the wife of of 1 husband or whatever.
Ashley:And so we just wanna maybe clarify that point. That gives us a kind of helpful opportunity to talk about the fact that something we've alluded to at least before, but maybe not clarify the way that we should have, which is that Paul's use of this male example in this instance, talking about male leaders or privileging that as his example, deferring to it anyway, doesn't necessarily mean that he is prohibiting women from ever holding this role. So in other words, the fact that he's using a man as his example, doesn't mean that a woman couldn't also ever occupy the same or fill the same role. He's deferring to male examples in a very similar way that we defer very we were talking about a singular person, for example, it was always he. And so that has been, normative across cultures.
Ashley:That idea of maleness as normative holds. We've talked about this before. Even after the gospel, the world is still sinful. The world is still largely deferring to these sort of patriarchal and holding to patriarchal assumptions and structures in the world. So you're gonna see in the similar way that Paul's grappling with that in other places in the new testament that we've already talked about.
Ashley:He's sort of acknowledging that and even, deferring to it in places like this in his letters.
Isaiah:It begs the question for me too, though, when he gets into the specifics of, like, the one wife, I think, well, Paul, and for this matter, like, Jesus, we're not married. So does does a literal reading of this passage in a certain kind of way prohibit them from leadership in the church? And, surely, Paul can't be doing that by himself or by Jesus.
Ashley:Mhmm. A great point, actually. So if marriage is normative, it's interesting that we're not really focusing on that, right, as being prescriptive. That just by virtue of the fact that Paul is acknowledging that an elder ought to have only been married once doesn't mean that he is saying, therefore, an elder must be married in the same way that he's using as an example that, an elder should be the husband of 1 wife. It wouldn't preclude a woman from holding that same office.
Ashley:Mhmm. We've talked a lot about culture and context. The divorce rate in emphasis was not that dissimilar from our divorce rate, which is I just think interesting to note. For Paul, it's arguably a presenting concern in all places, but maybe specifically example. He can describe a man as an elder without prescribing or even privileging men as elders always.
Isaiah:Mhmm.
Ashley:Just because that's the example that he's using. That's sort of our point there. So there are many instances, in his letters where he's describing social realities, existing social realities. Like for example, maybe greeting one another with a holy kiss, he says. That's an existing social norm, cultural norm that made sense in that time and place.
Ashley:Paul's describing it. He's not prescribing it for all places in all times, across time and how you make those distinctions and determinations is understandably a really complex and involved process. That's why the whole study and field of biblical hermeneutics and interpretation matters so much. It matters that we have people who are familiar enough with the context of the day, who are paying attention to original audiences and the text itself to do this work.
Isaiah:It's really important. And it is work that we are doing.
Ashley:Yes. Indeed.
Isaiah:So, you know, in most churches that I've been a part of, women are not necessarily silent or covering their heads.
Ashley:We're all doing the work of contextualization. Whether we are ready to admit it or not, the facts are we are all doing it. By virtue of the fact that women aren't covering their heads in all places or greeting one another with a holocaust, there are lots of examples of this, of course. Yes.
Isaiah:So many examples. Yeah. Length of hair. Indeed. We could we could go on.
Ashley:I'm gonna read a quote before we pivot to the next question. This is Linda Belleville, which I believe we've quoted from her before. We'll put the quote in the show notes. This is from 2 views on women in ministry. She writes beyond, quote, the husband of 1 wife, quote, there are no qualifications that are male specific.
Ashley:Elderly widows and female deacons, for example, are called to exhibit the same character and lifestyle qualities as their male counterparts. She's referring to 1st Timothy 3 verses 8 to 9 and 11. Some qualities, in fact, are more suitable to women than to men. For instance, hospitality would be more natural for Greco Roman women than for their male counterparts. The ability to care for one's household.
Ashley:And she goes on to give other examples. So Linda's point is that beyond this language of the husband of 1 wife, that's the only sort of gendered qualification. And if you're assuming that you could just as easily take that same logic and apply it to a woman and say, she needs to be the wife of 1 husband, for example, that it is at least as conceivable that Paul meant for that to be the thing that holds. To your point, it's not so much about the gender of the person as it is the number of times they've been married. And not so much about whether or not they were ever married, but really what we're talking about is this issue of divorce.
Isaiah:Yeah. Yeah. And what I hear from this and just to hear it as God's word to his people right now is an emphasis on character and gifting, spirit giving character and gifting. And so it's not to just say, oh, it doesn't matter who leads and who doesn't. But just to say that those prescriptions are not along gendered lines, but are, as we've been saying this kinda whole time, around this spirit imbued like character and gifting.
Ashley:Indeed. Alright. We're gonna pivot now to our 5th and final question.
Isaiah:Yeah. So in light of this, some of y'all have asked, if there was such amazing women leading and ministering in the early church after Pentecost and throughout the New Testament, why do we not see a continuation of women leading in the church, I think, historically and maybe specifically today?
Ashley:That's right.
Isaiah:Why don't we see a lot of women who are elders, lead pastors in positions of authority, bishops, overseers?
Ashley:Well, I mean, probably the first thing we just need to say is that question is, locating you somewhat. Right? It's gonna say something about where you are and the corner of the church that you've had the most experience of, because the reality is women are in fact, leading and holding positions of leadership in the worldwide church.
Isaiah:That's true.
Ashley:Yeah. And that just needs to be said, because we've talked about this whole issue of erasure. Right? That was true for both of us. One of the most sort of liberating things about, seeing the Bible differently was realizing, oh my gosh.
Ashley:There are so many people I just didn't see, women in particular that I didn't see
Isaiah:Yeah. That's true.
Ashley:Who are holding these positions leadership.
Isaiah:Yep. Yep. So the first I mean, the quick answer to this question about, like, why is there defaulting to complementarianism or patriarchy in the world? And the the quick answer to that is because there's sin in the world. And because, you know, the church, we all have blind spots.
Isaiah:We're part of the church. We have our blind spots. And yet we need to call those blind spots what they are, and they're they're sin and they're ways that the world influences the church. And so patriarchy is one of those ways that the world has kinda worked its way into the church. Mhmm.
Isaiah:And we've enshrined things that are not God's vision for how men and women should relate or how we should lead together. And, you know, sin always has its consequences, and it's a very painful thing. And some of you may personally have experienced a lot of wounding specifically because of this. Yes.
Ashley:And by sin, we're just always helpful to sort of zoom out. We really are referring to this Genesis 3 moment when the harmony and God's ideal design for creation and the created order becomes, vandalized or broken. Right? And so that reality post sin is now this broken creation, broken order. And that comes with, it really does inform all of the ways that we live in the world, not just, like, how we treat one another, Isaiah and Ashley, but also the systems that we build and our ways of organizing one another, our institutions, all of it is sort of infused with this potential, at least, for sin.
Ashley:And so there is a kind of default, in many spaces to what were norms that have existed for a long time, patriarchy being one of them.
Isaiah:Yeah. And I think being well intentioned doesn't mean that we don't still have the capacity to sin or to partner with something other than God's vision, you know, in our practice and faith. And so I think we just have to say what it is. You know? That's right.
Isaiah:And I would just include myself in that. Like, I have, at times, been someone who has promoted a view that men should be leading in a way that you know, it's my best reading of the Bible at the time, but now I would look back and say, you know what? I think I just I just had some blind spots. Yeah. That were informed by my culture, and I couldn't read scripture in the way that I think it was intended.
Ashley:That's right.
Isaiah:And so just need to kinda be humble about that and be gracious with folks who are in a different space. So hopefully, you hear us as charitable. We're not here to necessarily defend something or accuse other people. But because the question is pointed, I just wanna give a direct answer. That's right.
Ashley:So
Isaiah:that's the short answer to that. And I
Ashley:would add to that same for myself, because of the inherited worldview that I had, which is really a cultural one as much as it was a theological one. Mhmm. I read the Bible a certain way, and it was easier to read and interpret the Bible that way because of the wider context in which I lived, which was a patriarchal one primarily. And so you have to make room for that. That has just persisted even past the new testament.
Ashley:You know? Mhmm. There are other realities and factors at play here. Not the least of which is we've talked about this at least some, I think, in the live sessions. The church has evolved over time.
Ashley:Mhmm. Our ways of organizing, for example, have shifted and changed over time. So what begins as like indisputably a really like house church driven movement, right? Where you have people, yes. In positions of what we would call spiritual authority who are prophesying, right.
Ashley:And doing these things, holding the office of apostle, for example, that's always been there, the hierarchy, if you wanna call it that, that kind of spiritual authority, how we though organize around those positions of authority or what change over time, the kind of structures that we adopt, right? Change over time. So that by the time you get to the 2nd 3rd century, we have a far more, and I'm gonna use the word institutionalized church, then without argue or debate we have in acts, for example. There have been these changes and we are inheriting these structures, both from the synagogue and also from the imperial world around us.
Isaiah:Yeah.
Ashley:Those things do shape the way that we began to organize as church. That's not all necessarily bad. Inheriting existing structure is not bad. But it no doubt came with compromises. Mhmm.
Ashley:Right?
Isaiah:Absolutely.
Ashley:With those inherited structures that we're getting from the Roman world around us
Isaiah:Yep.
Ashley:Or the synagogue that came before. Both of them, of course, deeply steeped in patriarchy.
Isaiah:Yep.
Ashley:And their assumptions about leadership, their assumptions about hierarchy are baked into those systems and structures. And so it's really very little surprise that we sort of default back the more increasingly institutionalized we become. It's really obvious to see the more patriarchal that we become.
Isaiah:Yeah. And that's not to say that women weren't leading because, of course, the holy spirit didn't stop gifting women And to lead Yes. Giving them the character and the gifts to lead. And so we can look at the first especially 3 centuries of the church, you know, as that kind of like, the dust is settling and some of that institutionalization, both for good and for bad, is happening, especially around kind of the time of Constantine. But even prior to that, how does this Christian movement go from really the margins of the Greco Roman world, you know, and kind of increasingly on the outs with the Judeo community?
Isaiah:How does it go from those kind of persecuted spaces to being this kinda worldwide movement? That's right. And one of the answers to that question so, you know, sociologists and historians, people like Rodney Stark or Alan Kreider have pointed to the fact that, like, you know, there was a large number of women in these early Christian communities, and that continued for many, many centuries. Mhmm. And women are finding, like, a space to lead in the church and particularly to, like, serve the poor Mhmm.
Isaiah:And to spread the gospel. Mhmm. And even as they've come to faith, maybe in mixed marriages where, you know, their their spouse, their husband is not a Christian Yep. But then is won over by them because of their character and because of what God is doing in their lives. And so this is a really powerful thing.
Isaiah:And I do think we can look through church history and see that there's always been kind of these renewal movements. Whether women. Yeah. That's right. Whether it's the Desert Mothers or into the movements.
Isaiah:Absolutely.
Ashley:So I was that's what I was gonna say is to your point, you know, and this will probably resonate even, like, on a more personal practical level with people in the church now. So, growing up in the tradition that I grew up in, it was commonplace for female missionaries to have more freedom. I'm gonna use that word, to lead in the churches that they were part of in their foreign context. So we were less concerned actually about the office that a woman held or how her authority was getting meted out in those contexts, then we would have been at home, in a more institutionalized environment. So I do think just to say even now, there's still some degree of correlation between those more like, we're gonna say, I don't know, maybe lower church, less institutionalized environments Yeah.
Ashley:Where women's leadership looks like one thing there.
Isaiah:Yeah.
Ashley:Whereas if you were to take that same person, put her in a different context, maybe let's just say, a more institutionalized environment, Her leadership is going to look different. And we wanna make sure that we clarify. It's not that, again, the structures are bad. It's not that ways of organizing are bad or that hierarchy is bad. I've said this a number of times.
Ashley:Certain people are gifted by the spirit to lead in particular ways, and that's a good and right thing based on that gifting, not on your gender.
Isaiah:Yeah. And using hierarchy to subjugate someone else, which is not the purpose of authority, we would say is unequivocally bad. That's not Jesus's vision for leadership, which is, you know, really to to give yourself for others.
Ashley:That's right.
Isaiah:Like, to become like a servant. So think about that Philippians 2 piece. So just to say, when we say hierarchy is not bad, what we're saying is there is real spiritual authority in this world Mhmm. But that it functions to serve and power and equip others.
Ashley:That's right. And wouldn't a really like, we're thinking about the work of redemption. Right? Like, the gospel making right when sin is made wrong, is that we're eliminating that tendency towards abuse of power. Yeah.
Ashley:We're also simultaneously eliminating my need to be in a position of power in order to feel validated or of worth.
Isaiah:That's right.
Ashley:That the gospel is really gonna go at both of those things, our abuse of power and our, like, need for it in order to feel validated. Mhmm. Right? Or equal with another person.
Isaiah:Yeah. Yeah. And so those missionary movements, and I think of even in in recent histories, people like Laudie Moon Mhmm. Coming out of the Baptist space or someone like Gladys Alward. There's just so many examples of women on the front lines of mission in the last probably 2 decades and particularly in the church in Iran, the underground church.
Isaiah:It's primarily led by women right now, and there's been an explosion of the gospel in that space. It's been quite phenomenal to witness.
Ashley:Yeah. And we'll maybe end here. For those of you who are Christ the king or maybe in an Anglican space, this was meaningful to me, and so I'll leave it with all of you. When I came into Anglicanism, our tribe of Anglicans was under the spiritual authority anyway of the archbishop of Rwanda. His name was Emmanuel Collini.
Ashley:He was the leader of the Rwandan church, and he is the one who was willing to receive all these sort of like conservative clergy coming out of the Episcopal church. And then, you know, evangelicals like myself, we were making our way along the Canterbury trail in a really gracious and generous way. But one of his requirements, a sort of condition of receiving us was that we would make an allowance and a provision for the ordination of women, which was interesting, right? Because that wasn't necessarily the majority, position for these clergy coming in. And yet his thinking, his conviction really was that due to the genocide that had happened in Rwanda, I heard him say this to me and a group of people in person.
Ashley:He said there wouldn't be a church actually in Rwanda after the genocide were it not for the leadership of women. And so I'll never vote against them going forward. And that was really significant and meaningful, and I think a testament to your point, right, that women have been leading in all places around the world, really shouldering, not on their own or singularly certainly, or even primarily, but certainly right alongside men in leadership in the church. And that's a beautiful and wonderful thing. Alright.
Ashley:I think we're gonna leave it there. We've covered a lot of ground.
Isaiah:Yeah. We have. Thanks so much for listening and for adding all of your questions and everything. It's been a great time.
Ashley:It really has. A privilege for both of us to hold this space, both with one another, and with all of you. We are truly grateful. And for those of you who are with us at Christ the King, we'll see y'all at church. And for the rest of you, thanks so much for listening.
Ashley:Peace, everybody.
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