In 2:3&4 Paul says: “This is right and is acceptable in the sight of God our Savior, 4 who desires everyone to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.” He reminds us that there is only one God and only one mediator between God and humanity, Jesus Christ. So he first asks us to pray for those who don’t know Jesus, but then he goes on to tell us how we should conduct ourselves when we come together to worship. Some of what he says is for good theological reasons, but much has to do with presenting a face to the world that promotes the Gospel rather than undermining it.
He speaks separately to men and women. The issues are different for men and women. And the instructions he gives speak to both our public presentation and our inner being.
Men
He speaks first to the men in the congregation. He says he desires that in every place men should pray, lifting up holy hands without anger or argument.
So his first instruction is that men should pray. That sounds simple enough doesn’t it? It certainly fits the culture of the day. The men were the ones who led in worship. But notice how they’re to do it.
The outward presentation is with hands upraised. That was the culturally relevant way to pray. You stood to pray and you raised your hands to God in heaven.
But there’s more to it than that. Their inward life needs to be in accord with their outward presentation.
So they’re to lift up holy hands in prayer. What are holy hands? Well, they’re hands that haven’t done anything to make them unclean. The psalm for today asks the question:
“Who shall ascend the hill of the Lord: or who shall stand in his holy place? And the answer it gives? “Those who have clean hands and a pure heart: who have not set their soul upon idols, nor sworn their oath to a lie.” Holy hands here stand for a pure heart. There’s no point lifting our hands in prayer to God if they’re defiled by sin.
Notice that the sin he’s thinking of doesn’t just include what you’ve done with your hands, the physical expressions of sin. It also includes what you do in your heart and mind. Anger and quarreling are out if you want to bring your prayers before God. How can you pray to God if you have resentment or bitterness in your heart against another person or worse still against God himself? Do you remember Jesus saying that when you bring your offering to God, if you remember you have something against another person to leave your offering at the altar and go and first be reconciled with that person?
So holiness, love and peace are essential prerequisites for prayer. But what about holding up your hands? What do we do with that instruction? Do all the men who pray in church need to [become charismatics and] raise their hands whenever they pray? Should we stop this habit that some have of kneeling to pray rather than standing with their hands raised? No, there are other parts of Scripture where different postures for praying are mentioned – sitting, kneeling, bowing, even lying face down before the Lord. Clearly this is a culturally conditioned instruction that no longer holds any force for us. For Paul’s time it may have been important, particularly in a Church where the Jewish heritage was still strong. As long as our posture is appropriate to our culture and expresses the right attitude to what we’re doing, it doesn’t really matter whether we’re sitting or standing or kneeling - or waving flags for that matter.
Before we move on to the next set of instructions, I might mention that on our worship roster women outnumber the men 2 to 1 in the prayer section. I wonder whether the men have dropped the ball in the modern church as far as leading in prayer is concerned. Are we so busy doing stuff that we’ve left prayer to the women in the church?
Women
After that very short instruction to men he then goes on to a much more detailed set of instructions for women. Now it’s been suggested that there was a particular issue in Ephesus, connected with the Temple of Diana, which meant that women were causing problems to the orderliness of worship and that this was bringing the gospel into disrepute.
[It reminds me a bit of what happened in the 60s & 70s when women’s lib first took off. Naturally there was a strong reaction in some churches to the limitations that had been placed on women’s ministry and leadership, when the wider world was beginning to accept that women had the same ability and educational level as men. But the issue wasn’t always addressed in a helpful way. In fact it was often done with anger and argument rather than gentle persuasion or thoughtful argument. Mind you the fault was probably on both sides. But it may be that a similar thing was happening here with women insisting that they be given the same rights as men.]
So he gives them a set of instructions about how women should behave.
Modesty and Decency
First he insists that they dress themselves with modesty and decency. The word he uses actually means to adorn themselves: that is, to present themselves in a way that enhances their beauty. But it’s not to be in a flashy or suggestive way. There’s no suggestion that women shouldn’t take care of their appearance. In fact the opposite could be read into it. They should take care of their appearance but it needs to be in an appropriate way. [So a Lady Gaga outfit may not be a good idea.]
But then he says they shouldn’t braid their hair or wear gold, pearls or expensive clothes. Now this is probably an issue related to the way the temple prostitutes from the temple of Diana would have dressed, rather than a rule against having plaits or wearing gold earrings. Again, the issue is one of culturally appropriate behaviour. If you want the gospel to be seen in a positive light then the members of the church need to dress in a way that leads them to be respected in the community. We’ll see a similar consideration in a couple of weeks when George looks at the qualifications for elders and deacons.
But if these rules about the type of clothing and jewellery women should wear is culturally conditioned the next bit isn’t. He says they should adorn themselves with good works that fit with their worship of God. This last week I heard of two separate reactions to the fact that Janet Davies & Ruth Kernebone had been looking after the Alley kids while their mother was in hospital. Both people expressed admiration for the fact that people from St Thomas’ were going out of their way to look after them. Here’s the sort of recommendation of the gospel that Paul is talking about. Good works that speak loudly of our worship of the God of grace and mercy.
Submission
But then he goes on to speak about the way women behave in worship services. Here we come to one of the most controversial and most argued over passages in the Bible. The question we need to answer is this: how much of this is culturally driven and how much is a fixed order in the church?
He begins by instructing women to learn in silence with full submission. It seems these women were being anything but silent and rather than learning from the teachers the apostles had given authority to, they were in danger of committing Eve's mistake. What was Eve’s mistake? She listened to what the original false teacher, the Devil, said rather than asking Adam, who’d been given God's Word about what not to eat.
So what were they to do? Well, he does instruct them to learn. If you learn then presumably you’ll later be able to teach [and in fact that’s what women are told to do in Paul’s letter to Titus]. But at this stage there were only 2 sources of knowledge – the teaching of the apostles, entrusted to Timothy and the other elders, and that of false teachers like Hymnaeus and Alexander.
It’s interesting that Paul also uses the example of Eve’s sin in 2 Corinthians 11 where he’s facing the same situation of false teaching but in that case he warns the whole church not to be deceived the way Eve was.
So it’s clear that Paul didn’t want women to teach men. But then he also didn’t want any men to be teaching men unless they’d been authorised by himself or the other apostles.
He also doesn’t want women to take authority over men. The word used here is authenteo. It means to operate on your own authority. It’s the word from which we get authenticate. I authenticate something when I say it’s genuine. So there’s the suggestion that these women were setting themselves up as authorities in opposition to the elders appointed by Paul.
The other interesting thing is that here Paul talks about Eve being deceived, yet in Romans 5 he says it was Adam who first sinned. Clearly we need to understand what matters theologically in this particular context. Is it a difference in createdness that Paul’s thinking about when he refers to Adam being formed first? Well, no, because in Romans 5 he virtually equates Eve and Adam by referring only to Adam. No, I think he’s thinking about the revelation of God’s will, given to Adam before Eve was created, so that when she was tempted she didn’t have the full story. What she should have done was go back to Adam to check whether what Satan had told her was true and then made up her mind; or better still they should have made up their mind together!
[Just as an aside, one of the common arguments for maintaining this prohibition on women leading and even teaching is the idea that Paul is thinking about the complementarity of men and women in the creation story. The problem I have with that notion is that I can’t actually find any mention of complementarity in Genesis 2. All I can find is equality – “bones of my bones & flesh of my flesh” and “they become one flesh”. Complementarity only seems to appear in Gen 3 when they begin to blame each other or when God says that her desire shall be for her husband, and he’ll rule over her (Gen 3:16). So I think that’s a false conclusion.]
So how do we apply this in 21st century Melbourne? What are the culturally conditioned elements that we can dispense with and what are the principles we need to keep.
Well, the first principle is that anyone who teaches needs to have first learnt what the apostles have taught. We manage that by having theological colleges that teach and examine and certify people’s knowledge and understanding. In the Anglican Church we have Bishops who authorise ministers to preach and teach. As far as education and knowledge is concerned clearly the situation today is a far cry from Ephesus in the 1st century. Then women had no opportunity to be educated. Today women in ministry are equally qualified and in some cases far more qualified educationally than most male ministers.
But we also need to ask where does our authority as teachers come from? Do we just stand up and speak on our own authority? No, our authority rests entirely on the word of God. Whenever one of our preachers stands up to preach we need to be checking that what they say fits with what we read in the Bible. If it doesn’t we can ignore them. But if it does then we’d better listen because it’s God speaking to us through their words.
We have a clearly defined authority structure that designates those who are the appointed teachers who’ll be (we trust) faithful to the apostolic gospel and will preach it and defend it. Within that structure it seems to me it doesn’t matter whether the appointed teachers are male or female. What matters is that they do in fact remain faithful to the Scriptures passed down to us from the apostles.
One of the reasons Paul stopped women from taking authority in the Church may have been that it would have been seen by those outside the church as upsetting the cultural status quo. But today the opposite is the case. When the Church today refuses to let able women exercise ministry those outside the church see it as being totally unreasonable and unfair. So if the consideration is whether the gospel is promoted or not, the opposite conclusion seems to me to be necessary. Well taught, gifted women should be encouraged to use their gifts for the service of the gospel.
Before I finish, let me just say that too often when we think about women being placed in leadership, we imagine them ruling over others. But Jesus’ model of leadership is servant leadership, leading by example, leading through service. Again, it seems to me that women are probably better suited to that sort of leadership than many men.
Finally let’s not miss the little bit of irony that Paul throws in at the end. Women will be saved through child-bearing. How? Not by having children otherwise there’d be a lot of lost single women around. No, they, like us men, will be saved through the one event of child-bearing that brought the Son of God into this world. It’s only through the death of Jesus Christ that any of us will be saved. I think this is Paul’s way of saying to those ambitious women who can’t wait to be liberated by the gospel, “Just wait until Jesus returns and you’ll have all the equality you want.” And to those men who are worried about women getting above themselves he’s saying “Don’t forget it was the faithfulness of a woman that allowed you to be saved in the first place.”
Let’s pray that whoever ministers among us would do it in a way that’s faithful to Christ and that recommends the gospel to those around us.
