06 The Debate over Women Teaching in Church (1 Timothy 2:9-15)

Krisan Marotta: Welcome back to the Wednesday in the Word podcast. I'm Krisan Marotta, and this is my podcast about what the Bible means and how we know. 1 Timothy 2, verses 9 through 15 has produced more books and papers and church splits than almost any other passage in the New Testament. And today, you'll meet the three schools of thought fighting over what it means. This overview explains the major interpretations, the biblical arguments behind them, and the questions you should consider before forming a conclusion. This is the sixth talk in our series on the book of 1 Timothy, and we will be studying 1 Timothy 2, verses 9 through 15. Thanks so much for listening. Well, this little section is one of the most controversial and debated chapters in the New Testament. There is an enormous volume of literature written on this passage and on the subject of women and authority in the church. The debate is fierce, complicated, and voluminous. And I will tell you right now, I probably won't settle it for you. My goal today is to give you an overview of each side and how they approach this passage. And then next week, I'm going to go through the passage verse by verse and give you my understanding for whatever that's worth. I have avoided teaching First Timothy for a long time just because I didn't want to get into this debate. I had it settled in my mind what the passage meant, but I didn't want to wade into the controversy. And about 10 years ago, I heard a brand new interpretation that rocked my understanding, and I've spent the time since then trying to prove it wrong, and I can't. And now I've become convinced of this new view, and I decided it's time to wade into the controversy. So here goes. Generally speaking, the debate falls into three schools of thought: egalitarian, hard complementarian, and soft complementarian. And my purpose in this talk is to just summarize how each side approaches the passage without commenting on the relative strength or weaknesses of their arguments. Well, I'll try not to comment. I might end up commenting anyway, but I will try to leave that evaluation to you. As we get into the debate, I want you to keep three things in mind. First, all sides of the debate defend the essential equality of men and women. It is unfair to charge one view, one side in the debate, with a low view of women and claim that the other side has a high view of women, because that is just not true. If you hear someone dismissing one side of the debate by saying they have a low view of women, they are presenting a caricature of that side. Both complementarians and egalitarians affirm that men and women are equal in essence, dignity, and value before God. Where they differ is on the role and function of men and women within marriage and church leadership. But both sides, all sides agree on equal worth and that both male and female are created in the image of God. The second point to keep in mind is that people on all sides of the debate believe in biblical inerrancy and seriously seek to follow the Bible as the source of truth. You cannot dismiss one side by assuming they're playing fast and loose with the Bible or ignoring the Bible. Now, it is true that some individuals have taken a position that has claimed, well, Paul was just wrong, but that is not the majority view. While some individuals have argued for their side by saying the Bible has errors or they can ignore a verse, it's just not true of the vast majority of people in the debate. There are sincere, Bible-believing Christians on all sides of the debate who are wrestling with the issues and trying to obey what the Bible says. And three, the third point to keep in mind is there is no magic bullet. And by that I mean there is no one grammar rule that's going to magically solve the debate. There is no one cultural practice that will magically solve the debate. There's no word study that will solve the debate. There's just not one piece of evidence out there that's going to magically end the debate for everything. The only thing that will truly solve the debate is if the Apostle Paul shows up and says, hey, this is exactly what I meant. Everyone agrees that certain commands are culturally specific. The question is not whether culture influences the instructions of scripture, but how it influences them in what way. And grammar and language are flexible, and different scholars are going to understand them differently. For me, this debate is personal because I am a woman who loves to study and teach the Bible. And when I first began studying the scripture, these were some of the first passages I studied because I wanted to understand how and where I could teach. And I've always tried to act out of that understanding of what the scripture says. From my perspective, this is one of those topics we have to get right. In other words, every church needs to take a stand. We can't sit on the fence because the issue affects half the church directly and the other half indirectly. If we get it wrong, half the church won't be using their gifts at all, or half the church will be using their gifts incorrectly. And this is just one of those issues we have to understand. I don't think anyone's free to ignore it. I have a lot of respect for churches that wrestle with the passages and take a stand, even if I disagree with the stand they take. If they're seeking to apply their reasoned and studied view of Scripture, amen. Where I don't have any respect is for churches that take a stand because they want to be hip or cool, even if I agree with the stand they end up taking. If they have no biblical basis for their choices and are just trying to appeal to the culture, they are ignoring God's word and woe to them. Whatever we do, whatever position we take, we need to take it from a sincere, humble wrestling with Scripture and seeking to follow it. A few years back, we had new leadership in my church. They decided they wanted to expand the role of women in leadership, so they formed a committee to study the issue. Before their first meeting, I contacted one of the committee members and offered my help. Because under the previous pasture, I had been on a committee charged with studying this issue, and we had produced a 75-page paper with our conclusions and recommendations for how to apply them in our church. I offered this new committee a copy of the paper, and he said, No thanks, we don't need it. We already know what we're going to conclude. I couldn't believe what I was hearing. How could leaders in the church have no interest in understanding what the Bible has to say on a topic? As I questioned him further, it became clear that their entire goal was to find a way to use Scripture to justify what they wanted to do. They didn't want to find out what Scripture said and then figure out how to apply it in our church. They knew what they wanted to do and they wanted a way to sell it to the congregation as biblical. Well, I have no respect for that kind of approach. Even though they ended up taking a stance I agree with, I couldn't support them because I knew they were following their own will and not seeking to apply God's will. Everyone needs to wrestle with the text. Read it, study it, think it through, and then in good conscience make an informed decision. Now my advice on this issue is the same advice I give on every controversial issue, and that is three things. First, know what you believe and why you believe it. If you have a position, you should be able to articulate from scripture why you think it's the right one, not proof texting, but actually understanding the passages in question. Number two, you should strive to know the other side well enough to know why it doesn't persuade you. I think it's very valuable to be able to articulate the position of those who disagree with you well enough to know where your thinking diverges from theirs. You should be able to make their case as well as they could make it and know exactly what in their case fails to persuade you. And third, and this one is perhaps the most important, keep in mind that you might be the one who's wrong. Hold your beliefs with humility. It's just as likely that you're the one who's in the wrong as it is the other person is wrong. People who sincerely trust the Bible and try to follow God can and do reach different conclusions on many topics. All right. That said, let me give you a summary of the major views. I have lots of information and resources on my website if you want to explore these further. I will put a link to that in the blog version of this episode, because this summary is really going to just scratch the surface. New books, papers, and blogs are coming out every year, and many, many, many books and papers and sermons have been preached and written on this subject already. Because the debate can be very complex and very nuanced, I may be guilty of over-generalizing in this summary, but at least this overview will get you started and orient you to the main issues in the debate. I am condensing vast amounts of scholarly debate into a very high-level broad stroke view. I'm trying to be fair and give you the big picture, but there is lots of room for detail and nuance. And within each view, there are differences in interpretation and understanding. Okay, first let me read the passage. This is 1 Timothy 2, 9 through 15. Likewise also that women should adorn themselves in respectable apparel, with modesty and self-control, not with braided hair and gold or pearls or costly attire, but with what is proper for women who profess godliness with good works. Let a woman learn quietly with all submissiveness. I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man, rather she is to remain quiet. For Adam was formed first, then Eve, and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor. Yet she will be saved through childbearing if they continue in faith and love and holiness with self-control. All right, the major interpretive schools on this passage divide along the lines of whether Paul is arguing for a creation-based, transcultural order of authority in the church, or whether Paul is addressing a temporary, localized problem in Ephesus. In other words, did Paul mean to lay down instructions for women teachers in the church for all time everywhere, or was he addressing a particular problem in Ephesus that doesn't apply to us today? The more traditional view is the complementarian view. Complementarians believe that Paul appeals to a permanent creation-ordained restriction. Women are not to teach or exercise authority over men in the church. The name comes from the idea that they have complementary roles, but those roles are different. They argue this passage deals with public worship within a church, and they argue that the question of men praying in the first part of the chapter refers to public prayer in the church. So when Paul says likewise and addresses women, he's talking about how they conduct themselves in public worship. And then the next section goes straight into the qualifications for elders or church leadership. So they argue both chapters are addressing corporate worship. They argue this phrase in 2.8, in every place is a clue that this is corporate worship wherever it takes place, in the temple, in the synagogue, in the home, in a public place, etc. And they cite 1 Corinthians 14 as a parallel passage where Paul clearly adds in the church. They further argue that this is a universal prohibition because he gives commands in verses 11 and 12, and then he grounds those commands in the pre-fall order of Adam's formation before Eve and Eve's deception. They argue that Paul does not appeal to Adam and Eve as merely an illustration, but as a paradigm that applies to all men and women throughout history, and therefore this is not culturally limited. The word translated authority in 12, I think it's 12, is taken as a neutral term for the exercise of authority, and that Paul is prohibiting women from holding authoritative teaching offices in the church. They argue that Paul appeals to Genesis precisely to prevent the restriction from being dismissed as merely cultural, and they reject his claim that this only applies to ancient Ephesus because they note in other New Testament passages that deal with local problems, Paul does not appeal to creation. He does not appeal to Genesis. The complementarian views also cites that they have tradition on their side. The early church fathers, medieval theologians, and proponents of the Reformation uniformly upheld male leadership and church governance. Now, within the complementarian view, there are two camps, the hard complementarians and the soft complementarians. Hard complementarians hold to a more restrictive view of women in leadership in the church. They typically allow women to teach only children and other women. They would not give a woman the title of pastor or elder or allow them to preach on Sunday. Hard complementarians hold that scripture establishes permanent creation order distinctions between the roles of men and women that bar women from any position involving authoritative teaching or governance over men in the church. Consequently, they don't allow women to serve as elders, pastors, or preachers to mixed congregations, nor may they hold any office that places them in direct authority over male members. So teaching by women is restricted mainly to other women and children. Soft complementarians affirm the same basic principle of male headship and the distinct roles of men and women, but they permit women a wider range of non-governing ministries. So they hold a less restrictive view on the role of women in the church. They typically only prohibit women from holding the top position of authority in the church. That might be elder or senior pastor, but they would allow them to teach women, children, and men, and in some settings teach on Sunday mornings. They allow women to serve as deacons, to lead certain ministries under male oversight, to teach to mixed groups like Sunday school or small groups, provided ultimate authority remains with male elders. Soft complementarians think women are prohibited from being elders, but depending on the circumstances and the authority a position holds, they could hold many other roles in the church or be barred from them depending on the authority. The newer school of thought is the egalitarian school, and it gets its name from the idea that men and women are equal and there are no distinctions between them and their roles whatsoever. This view typically has no restrictions and would allow women to hold any and all positions of leadership in the church. The egalitarian position emerged as a distinct theological school only after the rise of feminism. I think it got a bad rep because some of its first proponents called it biblical feminism, and they took a very low view of scripture and a very low view of the Apostle Paul, and that kind of gave the movement a bad rap. But since then, scholars have emerged that take a very high view of scripture and have argued for the egalitarian position, assuming the Bible is true and Paul knew what he was talking about. Critics claim that egalitarianism represents a departure from long-standing tradition and the way the church has always understood the creation order and male headship. But the fact that it's newer doesn't mean it's wrong. By that same measure, the Protestant Reformation is newer, but many people see it as a corrective to bad theology that developed in the church. Egalitarians argue that the prohibition for women in authority is limited to a specific situation in Ephesus. They argue the passage does not refer to public worship at all. Many argue the passage concerns private or domestic relationships, especially within a marriage, rather than in the public gathering of the church. They emphasize the possible translation of the word man or on air as husband and claim that the creation argument is meant only for marriage. Others conclude there is some public setting in this passage, but limit the prohibition to a specific local crisis in Ephesus, so to false teaching by certain women at the time. In this view, they argue Paul is giving a temporary situation-specific command rather than a normative rule for all corporate worship for all time. They point out that the Artemis cult was a matriarchy, and that view was likely brought into the Ephesian Church along with the false teaching in heresy, and the situation likely involved false teaching associated with Artemis worship with women asserting dominance through heretical instruction or disruptive behavior and worship. They understand Paul's appeal to the creation narrative as an illustration. His concern is to correct a local inversion of roles rather than establish a universal principle. They typically understand the word authority in this verse as a negative or have a pejorative meaning as usurp authority or domineer. So they see it as having this negative connotation and Paul is correcting that negative abuse of authority. They point to other examples and verses in Scripture and use them to assert that the New Testament imposes no permanent restrictions on women holding authoritative offices or teaching roles in the church, particularly Galatians 3.28. So they argue that 1 Timothy 2.12 reflects a temporary cultural accommodation rather than a creation order principle, and they interpret Galatians 3.28 as establishing functional equality in all ecclesiastical roles. I realize that was a lot of information and that any one of those statements needs to be explained and explored. If you haven't studied this issue much, that summary may not make much sense to you. So let me try to summarize it another way for those who aren't familiar with the debate. You can generalize the debate into three core points of disagreement on three interpretive questions. So the first interpretive question is the scope of the creation argument in verses 13 and 14. Complimentarians argue that the creation order, the fact that Adam was created first and Eve was deceived, establishes a normative pattern for men and women rooted in the order of creation itself. They argue that God created men and women to have different roles within marriage, and those roles within marriage have implications for the leadership of the church. They argue that God established the man as head of the family and that leadership in the church should come from the leadership of families. Egalitarians look at the same verses and they understand it to be a local analogy meant to correct Ephesian women who were repeating Eve's error by listening to false teachers. They claim the text would read differently if Paul intended a timeless rule and that he is appealing to Genesis. As an illustration, not as a normative timeless principle. So that's the first interpretive choice you need to make when wrestling with this issue. The second interpretive choice you need to make is over the meaning and the force of the Greek word authentane, which is the word translated authority, and the fact that it's in the present tense. This Greek word is translated authority in 212, and I don't want to go into the grammatical weeds, so I'm going to keep this brief. Complimentarians read the verse. I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over men as general authoritative teaching. When a pastor or an elder or an officer in the church teaches a congregation, they're speaking with the authority of their office. So their teaching has an official weight behind it that, say, a small group leader would lack. Any Bible teacher can say, This is how I understand Ephesians 3, but the elders, the pastors in the church, because of their office, can say, This is how I understand Ephesians 3, and our church is going to apply it this way. They have that extra authority of their office to set the practices of the church in a way that regular teachers do not. And that is precisely the kind of authority Paul is prohibiting, the authority that comes from an office. Egalitarians argue that the verb carries a negative nuance. They would translate it something like seize authority or impose authority. And they argue Paul is not talking about the general authority of a church office, but the specific problems of inappropriately seizing authority where you have none. They argue Paul's prohibition is circumstantial, and we should treat it like other circumstantial New Testament instructions, like greet one another with a holy kiss. Now, this word that is translated authority is used only once in the New Testament, right here in 1 Timothy 2.12, and it is not used in the Septuagint at all. So that's the next decision you have to make. What kind of authority is he talking about? And then the third big interpretive issue is the views differ in how much weight they give the surrounding context and the internal logic of the passage versus other more clear texts in Scripture. So egalitarians say, well, this first Timothy text is subordinate to the broader trajectory of something like Galatians 3.28, where Paul says there's no distinction between male and female. So, in a sense, they are taking the position that we let clear passages of Scripture influence and interpret the unclear passages. They look at how Jesus treated women, at Paul's own commendations of women in ministry, and they say those texts are more clear and they should guide us, they should take priority. They argue that Paul argues for the equality of men and women elsewhere, and since he doesn't contradict himself, that requires 1 Timothy 2 to be limited to Ephesus. Now, I have probably oversimplified that argument, but that's the gist of it. On the other hand, complementarians reject that argument because Paul appeals to creation. They argue that creation teaches different roles for men and women in marriage, and that those roles have implication for leadership in the church, and that nothing in Paul's teaching implies a derogatory view of women, nothing in his view undermines the equality of men and women, there's no conflict. So they place more weight on the appeal to Genesis and say that has to be a timeless argument, a cross-cultural rule for all time. Sometimes egalitarians appeal to what Paul does not say. They claim the restriction of women in authority can't be universal because Paul does not explicitly say this command is for all churches in all times. They note that he does not repeat this prohibition in any other letter. They argue that if he had meant it to be a permanent rule, he would have worded it differently or repeated it elsewhere. And that's an argument from silence. It treats the absence of certain clarifying statements as positive evidence that the command is temporary. I don't put much stock in arguments from silence. The complementarian reading, by contrast, does not need to speculate on what Paul failed to say. It just looks at what he wrote. So those are the big interpretive debates and an overview of the views. Next, I want to introduce you to some views that don't fit neatly into either the egalitarian or the complementarian box. And first, there is N.T. Wright. Wright has proposed a more nuanced view. He leans egalitarian, but it is a more nuanced view of the egalitarian argument. And at this point, I would say his view is a minority view. Now I'm going to base this summary on his commentary, Paul for Everyone, The Pastoral Letters, which was written in 2004. You may know that Wright is a very prolific writer and he sometimes changes his mind. So I don't know if he still believes this, but at least back in 2004, this is what he argued. Wright treats verses 9 through 15 as a single situation-specific pastoral instruction addressed to the crisis in Ephesus. He argues that certain women in the congregation, probably recent converts from the Artemis cult or false teachers mentioned in the first chapter, were disrupting orderly worship by attempting to teach in a domineering or heretical manner. So he argues, I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority is therefore not a universal rule, but a targeted correction to Ephesus. These particular women must learn in quietness and full submission before they are permitted to teach. And that's the nuance that's new. Once a woman has been properly instructed in the gospel, Wright holds that the prohibition no longer applies. He would translate the word authority with a strong negative nuance to domineer or to seize control. So the verse prohibits only abusive exercise of authority and not all teaching and not all leadership of women. Unlike some thoroughgoing egalitarians, Wright still takes the prohibition seriously as a real command that applied in Ephesus. He does not dissolve it entirely into the cultural background. He simply limits it to the scope and duration of the circumstances that occasioned it. The next view I want to introduce you to is Rick Warren. A few years ago, Rick Warren waded into the controversy. He's the author of A Purpose-Driven Life and was the pastor of Saddleback Church. He ordained three women as pastors in his church, which is unheard of since his church is part of the Southern Baptist Convention or SBC. And the SBC is hard complementarian, as I understand it. Warren says he changed his position because he came to believe that Jesus' command to go and make disciples, baptize and teach was given to every disciple, both men and women, that Acts 2 describes both sons and daughters prophesying, and that Jesus commissioned Mary Magdalene to announce the resurrection. So right there you have a woman teaching men in a sense. Warren reasons that these passages demonstrate divine authorization for women to teach and proclaim the gospel, including to mixed audiences. Now I could not find a detailed view of his understanding of 1 Timothy 2.12, but from the comments I did find, I think he understands Jesus' universal command of go and make disciples as placing limits on how we could understand 1 Timothy 2.12. So he believes many women could be called and gifted to teach, lead, and pasture. And he argued that the SBC should treat the question of women in leadership as a secondary doctrinal disagreement, one which we are free to disagree on, say, like how you handle communion or something, and remove it from being a condition of denominational cooperation. Well, in February 2023, the SBC Executive Committee removed Saddleback Church from its fellowship because the church had ordained three women as pastors. And then in June 2026, at their annual meeting, the SBC explicitly reaffirmed the denomination's long-standing complementarian position without opening the matter to debate. I was very disappointed that the SBC did not use Rick Warren's church as an excuse to have the debate. To me, that seems like a missed opportunity. But to be fair to them, I think they would say that they have already had the debate and they don't need to reopen the issue. As I understand their perspective, they decided Rick Warren's views do not introduce a new third view, but reflects just the egalitarian reading that they have rejected in past years. However, a new third view has been proposed by Dr. Jack Crabtree, professor emeritus of Gutenberg College, and a prominent Greek scholar. Now I'm basing my summary of his views on lectures he posted online. Like N. T. Wright, his view is a minority view that doesn't fit neatly into either camp. Crabtree upholds the roles of men and women in marriage as complementarians do, but he argues on this passage with the egalitarians that Paul is not forbidding women from teaching in the church. However, unlike the egalitarians, he does not think Paul is speaking to a cultural issue. He argues chapter 2 does not address the church at all. The passage is not about women teaching scripture, holding teaching offices, or speaking in church. It is about a wife's attitude toward her husband within marriage. He argues that Paul appeals to Adam and Eve as the prototype of marriage, and that Paul is prohibiting women from taking the role of head in marriage. In his view, Paul is not discussing public teaching of the Bible at all, but the relationship of husbands and wives. He argues that the context requires wife and husband, because Paul appeals immediately to Adam and Eve and the structure of marriage, and he understands the verse to forbid women from being the head of a marriage, and that the issue of the church is not in view at all. Now remember, my summaries are not a full explanation of any of these views, and no one argues for their position on the whole issue of women and authority from 1 Timothy 2 alone. There's a lot more that could be said about the debate around 1 Timothy 2. And if we're really going to tackle the question of what should a church do with women in leadership, we also need to study 1 Corinthians 11, 1 Corinthians 14, Genesis 2, and Galatians 3.28, among others. We would want to examine the pattern of male leadership in the Old Testament. We would need to understand what's going on with female prophets like Miriam or judges like Deborah. And we'd want to understand the role of various women in the New Testament that are mentioned, like Priscilla and Junia. So understanding 1 Timothy alone is not going to settle all that larger debate. Ultimately, whatever we think, preach, and practice has to make sense. It has to take into account all the biblical evidence that we have and look for the way it all fits together. Now, over the course of my lifetime, I've watched the role of women in the church go from women can't teach it all to women can teach everybody. I've seen some churches make that change because they sincerely wrestled with scripture and are seeking to apply their best understanding. And I've seen churches make that change simply because they want to be hip, cool, and keep up with the times. And I've seen churches avoid that change simply to hang on to tradition without seeking to understand Scripture. Whatever position we take, I think we need to be able to argue it from Scripture, and we need to be able to argue the other side well enough to know why we disagree with it. And then we need to hold our views humbly, realizing we could be the one who is wrong. I heard a speaker once say he no longer asks people if they believe in God, because everyone believes in God. But when pressed, you find out the God they believe in is themselves. They just want to do what they think is right. So instead he asks them, Do you believe in a God who has given you a text that ought to rule and govern your life? Because that's a more revealing question. And that's the question we ought to ask ourselves. The Bible is absolutely the authoritative, inerrant word of God. It is God's revelation to us, and we need to let it guide our lives. It is the text that ought to rule and govern our lives. As R. C. Sproul once said, you are required to believe, to preach, and to teach what the Bible says is true, not what you want the Bible to say is true. So next week we're going to walk through the passage verse by verse, and I'll give you my good for nothing, worthless opinion because I realize I may be wrong. I'm continually going back to Scripture, and one day I may learn something that swings my view in a different direction. But until that day, I will tell you what I think and recognize I could be wrong. Thank you for listening to Wednesday in the Word, the podcast that explains not only what a passage means, but shows you how to figure it out. The blog version of this podcast is on wednesdayintheword.com slash 1 Timothy 6. You'll find all the episodes in this series on my website, wednesdayintheword.com. There's no charge, no spam, and no end. Just free resources to help you grow in your understanding of scripture and learn how to study it for yourself. If you've been blessed by this podcast, I'd be grateful if you'd leave me a positive review and follow it wherever you listen. But most importantly, tell a friend what you learned and where you learned it. Our theme music is graciously provided by Reggie Coach. You can hear Reggie's music on heartfeltmusic.org. Thank you for joining me today. I'm Krisan Marotta, and I'll see you next week at Wednesday in the Word.