The Plan To Smuggle in Women Pastors

It would only look like that to someone who:
(1) Does not understand scripture or the way it came to be inspired literature.
(2) Does not think Adam transgressed, when we all know in fact he did. Even though whoever wrote it seemed to think he didn't.
(3) Thinks that Eve tricked Adam rather than just shared some mystical 'knowledge fruit' that had been pointed out to her and appealed to her.
(3) Thinks that Adam passed on God's instructions he'd received to Eve accurately but Eve got them wrong, (just like a woman ).
(4) Is apparently convinced, by tradition, without much actual proof, that Paul was actually the author of 1 Tim.2:13-14. Like Parry, Lock, Meinertz, Spicq, Jeremias, and Simpson. Who all disgree with Harrison, Scott, Easton, Dibelius, along with Falconer, who proposes a somewhat complicated literary analysis, allowing some Pauline fragments.

I rest my case M'lud.
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Mark 16:9-14.

Men!
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The first woman ordained to the priesthood in the Anglican Communion was Florence Li Tim-Oi, who was ordained on 25 January 1944 by Ronald Hall, Bishop of Victoria, Hong Kong, in response to the crisis among Anglican Christians in China caused by the Japanese invasion. To avoid controversy, she resigned her licence (though not her priestly orders) after the end of the war.

Information provided for completeness and accuracy.

 

The church has always been ready to allow women to put themselves in danger of martyrdom in service to Christ and the church. Why not allow them to have authority of leadership when no men are having the courage to come forward for the position?
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1 Timothy 2:13-15
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, provided they continue in faith and love and holiness, with modesty.​

I think Tiffy's argument here is that the argument presented in 1 Timothy 2:13-15 is not an argument that would be well received in any contemporary academic forum. It is a weak exegesis of the Genesis passages, which have a lot more to offer this. Ultimately would would have to consider it an argument from Patriarchy rather than for Patriarchy.

I do not wish to remove it from the canon. I recall in raising children I never warmly received the argument 'It wasn't my fault, XYZ made me to it!' and it does remind us we can resort to being very childish when try to absolve ourselves from responsibility for our actions. It is easy to forget that Paul was a human being, and a product to the cultural environment that gave him his foundations.

It seems to me that one of the weaknesses of Paul's argument here is that when I read Genesis 3 I am not convinced that Adam was not deceived.

 

I'm not even convinced that it was Paul who wrote it, (Not that that should exclude it from the canon).

The fact that 1 Timothy shows knowledge of all 10 Pauline letters and fails to appear in some important early lists is an indication that it or some parts of it were written by someone else after Paul's death. That someone else might have had rather less apostolic credentials than did St Paul and consquently his theological reasoning was not so much 'up to scratch', so to speak.
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Absolutely. Well said.

Is that true? That’s news to me! What Reformation texts specifically are you thinking of? Can you cite perhaps, Bilson’s “Perpetual Government of the Christian Church” (1593)? Or Saravia’s “The Diverse Degrees of the Ministers of the Gospel” (1590)? Or “Of the Honor due to Priests and Prelates of the Church” (1591)? Take a look at Gibson’s “On Ecclesiastical Benediction” and let me know if he would agree with you.

One of the clearest counter-arguments is them referring to the esteemed clergy as “fathers”, which becomes near-mandatory when referring to the bishops.

Bilson makes a repeated argument that a Church derives it’s validity from an adherence to the pattern of the Church of God in both the Old and New Testaments. For him the Old Testament is just as relevant to the constitution of the Church as the New. He sees the OT male-only levites, priests, high priests in contrast to the female priestesses of the Greeks. He sees the NT male-only orders of ministry in contrast to the millions of female priestesses of the Roman Empire. To him females in the sanctuary is the sign of absence of Christianity, and presence of paganism and idolatry. And looking at the history of Anglicanism since the first WO, can you deny that?

That’s silly You know this. The original word is presbyteros, i.e. presbyter, which becomes prester in Middle English (Chaucer), which becomes priest in Early Modern English.

 

Well I can testify that it would not only look like that to someone who thought all five of those things, as I think none of them. The way it was written makes it seem like you both thought it was Paul's opinion that Adam had not transgressed (it's not), and that Paul is wrong and you are right. Paul said Adam was "not deceived", and he was not. Eve did not deceive him when she offered him the fruit, and that is something you agree with because you accused me of thinking the opposite ("that Eve tricked Adam"). He said that Eve was deceived, and that is true, even by Eve's own words (Genesis 3.13). He said Eve became a transgressor because of that, and that is also true. At no point does he say that Adam had not transgressed he simply says:

1. Adam was not deceived
2. Eve was deceived
3. Eve sinned

It is plain and obvious to all that Adam was also a transgressor, and that includes Paul and (presumably) the Paulians (Romans 5.12). But if it were the case that Paul did indeed write that Adam had not transgressed and all blame lies with Eve, then your comment passes off that you think you have better guidance to offer than a biblical epistle. Which is a discomforting show of arrogance. I was hoping your response might have showed I misread your intentions in quoting the passage, but it seems from your follow up that's not the case.

For clarity, in case yourself or others read this, and also later read me saying Paul in one of the contested epistles - I, like most people in the modern age informed and interested in scripture enough to frequent an Anglican Forum, am aware Paul was most likely not the author of all of the Pauline Epistles. But the letter was certainly written from the perspective of an actor we call Paul. So even though the actual letter was most likely written by multiple Paulians, it's far more readable to just say Paul instead of "the unknown Pauline author(s), probably", like we might say John when referencing the person who gave testimony in the Gospel of John instead of "the disciple whom Jesus loved (who could be the apostle John, who may or may not be the same John as the other Johns)".

God says to Adam "Because you have listened to the voice of your wife..." (Genesis 3.17), which means if Adam was deceived he must have been deceived by Eve. I don't see much evidence Adam was deceived by Eve.

 

The word πρεσβυτεροσ (presbuteros) may have been the origin of the English word priest, but it does not mean priest as we use the term today in the context of the bible. It refers to a wise person/elder, not necessarily someone who is ordained, and was a common word used by Greek writers outside biblical writings. A presbyter could be ordained or not ordained, it was a title not a role, which is a significant departure from how we perceive a priest today.

The NT only discusses two ordained roles: διακονουσ (diakonous - deacons) and επισκοπον (episkopon - bishop) ~ 1 Tim 3.1-13

 

Actually even the deacon was not considered a title for an ordained role. The Emperor Nero is called the deacon of the Lord (Romans 13:4). And “episkopoi” were widely used in secular Greek as well.

From this Lancelot Andrews derives the ingenious conclusion that these titles were not used by Scripture to indicate holy orders, but functions (secular and sacred alike). And to look for the actually ordained three orders of ministry, you need to look for other NT labels.

https://forums.anglican.net/threads/roman-catholicism-denying-that-episcopacy-as-a-separate-order-basically-presbyterianism.4192/#post-44204

In the patristic era, those three ranks of holy orders get assigned the heretofore secular functional labels of deacon/presbyter/bishop.

 

There seems to be broad consensus among scholars today that St. Paul didn’t write 1 Timothy. However, I don’t think that entails that the epistle shouldn’t be in the canon, or that it is less inspired than the works that Paul did write. After all, there are plenty of other non-Pauline works in the NT whose canonicity has never been questioned.

Where I think we need to be careful is in assigning too much weight to Genesis, i.e., treating the book as though it’s literal history, when even 1st c. Jewish and Christian writers understood based on its canonical placement in the Law (rather than among the Prophets or the Writings), that it had a primarily moral and pedagogical purpose.

 

Since ZachT dealt with the priest vs. presbyter issue, I’ll note that by way of your citation of the other sources in your post, that principles can and often do have implications that their formulators not only did not anticipate but would flatly deny. That’s what happens when plain-sense, strict-construction is applied to texts consistently, as it should be. It is, for example, highly unlikely that if the Reformers (or perhaps even the Apostles) got in a time machine and arrived in the year 2021, that they would approve of WO, and my argument has been that this doesn’t matter at all, as tradition is useful as a positive confirmation, but not as a negative one. What they taught and wrote had implications that transcended the cultural norms of the time in which they wrote (otherwise it’s not really the Gospel, is it?), and once applied outside those norms, paint a very different picture than the one they might have anticipated. If you go through the arguments of the Fathers and later ecclesiastical writers on this subject, what you find is that they all assume an outdated and discredited anthropology, and that, when modern assumptions about the equality of men and women are applied to the same texts, different conclusions result.

Again, none of this would be an issue had it not been for Roman Catholic notions of the priesthood being smuggled back into Anglicanism, notions which (1) carry the theological implication that God must in some way be male, a notion which proponents of the RC/EO theory of priesthood steadfastly - and inconsistently - deny, and which (2) imply a sort of Nestorianism about the nature of priesthood (see previous post). The properly theological arguments all fail here. And without the premodern anthropology to support it, the theory of a male-only clergy collapses.

 

And there is the key. Because I don’t accept the modern assumptions. Simple, right? I believe that the husband is the head of his household. As Saint Paul teaches, man was made in the image of God, but woman was made in the image of man.

Feminism goes against science and against anthropology, against the evidence of all human societies, the philosophy of human nature, and the psychology of sex and gender.

Feminism is an ideology, something it’s adherents believe “must be right”, contrary to all evidence, science, reason, and revelation.

So you’re right, WO is not a question of Scripture or exegesis or history. (On that there is no question.) It comes down to us, to the individual people looking into the question: do we want to import the modern ideology of feminism?

It’s only when you import modern categories, that WO becomes a possibility, and yeah, all of Christianity has to be utterly re-interpreted.

But feminism is evil, and I say that as a happy married man with a darling lovely baby daughter. She will not be taught about the glories of feminism in this household.

“choose you this day whom ye will serve, whether the gods which your fathers served that were on the other side of the river, or the gods of the Amorites in whose land ye dwell. But as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.”
-Joshua 24:15.

 

The only reason Jesus appeared first to Mary Magdalene is, she was up early (taking spices to the tomb).

"The early bird gets the worm." If I'd been around, I would have been sleeping in and getting up late...

Wouldn't we have a difficult time adjusting to "Father Brenda" or "Father Lisa"?

 

"Scholars today"..... modern 'scholarship' can be rather scary. Yikes! In this 'information age' I think there prevails a smug sense of intellectual superiority, a feeling that we are so much wiser and so much closer to the truth than any who came before us. I'm not sure this is the reality of the situation. Those modern 'scholars' have come up with some pretty funky ideas.

 

but...but.... Junia was an Apostle!

 

It's not a good sign to have to start denying Pauline authorship to justify a modern innovation in the face of 2,000 years of church history. If you include the Jews in church history, it goes a lot further than 2,000 years.

Question: Why do you think that WO was not a thing untill the 1900s? Was the "spirit" not moving in that way yet, or were evil men repressing the call of women?

 

Whether either I or Paul thought or think Adam transgressed is not relevant to what I wrote though. What is relevant is what men think now concerning Adams transgression. There may be some anti women's ministry 'enthusiasts', (if you can be enthusiastic about not doing something), that seem to have it in their heads that women are unfit for ministry because their ancestor Eve transgressed. Their objections to WO are not usually articulated thus, but illogically, theologically, that may be their main objection, and they may think it might be God's also.

This is of course true and because of its truth I agree with you, technically. Technically Satan did not deceive Adam. Whether Adam was deceived by Eve scripture does not tell us. Gen.3:6. It may be interpreted that Eve had not told Adam that fruit was from the forbidden tree of "The Knowledge of Good and Evil". That though does not mean that Adam was not equally culpable of direct disobedience to God's command or that he had not been deceived. Only that Adam had not been deceived directly by Satan and then only in a purely technical sense. Adam chose to be equally as deceived by Satan's lie, as had Eve, because Adam believed his wife who passed on forbidden fruit piked on Satan's, say so, lie, (and its deadly consequences), for them both. In any event Eve's transgression is no basis whatever for the forbidding women's ordination.

If my wife sends me an internet URL which has offered her unlimited wealth if she will only hit it and give over all her bank details, and I then hit the same URL on my computer screen and offer my bank account information, then I have been equally as much 'scammed' by some digital thief. Equally as much deceived and equally as much transgressed the normal, common sense, rules of intelligent behaviour on the internet. And I would equally, (as a total idiot), justly suffer the same consquences for doing so.

Yes, but . . . they both became transgressors because they had both transgressed God's command. So Eve was deceived, so was Adam and both sinned.

I hope I have clarified the matter sufficiently to complete your understanding of my position on this. I am unconvinced that the writer of the reasoning in 1 Tim.2:13-15 actually made his point in any truly logical manner, only confirming his theological ineptitude by what he wrote in 1 Tim.2:15. (Paul would never have written such a contradiction to his entire theological position on salvation). I will only accept this nonsense if it is interpreted as "By the birth of the child" - meaning by the incarnation of Christ Jesus. Otherwise it is theological heresy to say all women obtain their salvation from childbirth.
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I think the subjugation of women in most societies, both religious and secular is the most universally identifiable symptom of human sin disease, resulting from the fall. That and slavery and of course murder, (particularly of its saviour).
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What to you falls into the category of subjugation of women, if I may ask?