How to defend the belief only men should be ordained?

Just because God did or didn't do something 2000 years ago doesn't mean he always intended it to be so.

When my wife thanks me for helping her with say a crossword puzzle, my in house joke to her is to say," It's my job as a husband to guide you, teach you and patronise you" When I say this I think of Paul's words "And if they will learn any thing, let them ask their husbands at home: for it is a shame for women to speak in the church."
This may have been acceptable 2000 years ago but surely it's not the case today. Your wife today may well have a Ph.d in Marine Biology or a DD in Theology.

Do Paul's words sound a bit patronising today?

 

That may be true, but if God intends to change things like that He will tell His Church (through prophets, for example). Surely the Lord GOD will do nothing, but he revealeth his secret unto his servants the prophets (Amos 3:7).The last time He made some changes, 2000 years ago, He left us with a bunch of written materials that helped us understand the changes. And there were a bunch of instances whereby He related the new understandings to us in unmistakable language: "Verily, verily I say to you..." Right now, though, the WO supporters have little more than, "Your way of thinking about women is outdated and chauvinistic, because society says so and because it seems obvious to us." Sorry, but that doesn't qualify as a word from the Lord, so the new push for WO is really based on a platform as stable as shifty sand.

No, the word of God does not sound patronizing to me. See, Christians believe it wasn't just Paul writing by happenstance and by his own human wisdom (or lack of it); he wrote as God inspired him with truthful concepts. If God wanted women to become priests, it would have been simplicity itself for Him to inspire Paul, John, James, or Peter to write something to the effect that in the last days God would do a new thing in this regard.

The reason why so many parts of the Bible message sound jarring (such as the Gospel, with sounds like foolishness to the unsaved) is because secular society has its ears attuned to the voice of the deceiver. Satan constantly whispers into people's minds reasons why the words of God cannot be (or can no longer be) true. The world we live in is so saturated with secular thought, and there are so few people who assiduously cultivate a close fellowship and intimate communion with God by the Holy Spirit, society is nearly bereft of godly wisdom and is morally bankrupt. The WO push is one more device of the enemy by which he intends to produce doubt, division, and deviation from the expressed will of God... and the enemy is succeeding admirably. Yea, hath God said...? (Gen. 3:1). It's the same old, worn-out tactic, and humans are still falling for it.

 

IF it was Paul who actually wrote it, yes and not just a bit patronising, positively patriarchal.
.

 

And if God had wanted men to smoke he would have put a chimney in their heads.

You are surely not saying that God had to write down in the Bible every NEW thing God would ever do, and if it's not written there then we can be assured that God wouldn't have ever allowed it. Is this "New Creature" male or female, answer me that? And if its gender is irrelevant by what right do we impose restrictions on how that creature should behave and what it's allowed to do, by God. It's you that's trying to stop what's new from happening, not God.
.

 

How do you feel about slaves? Or the abolition if the death penalty?

 

What does the word of God say? That's how I strive to 'feel' (believe, actually).

 

The bible plainly permits slavery, but has many passages one can use to argue against it.

The OT plainly permits the death penalty, most of Western Christendom outside of the US is in agreement the NT plainly condemns it. I'll leave it up to you to determine why one country seems to uniquely condition its flock to read turning the other cheek to mean anything but turning the other cheek.

The point of Botolph's question, I imagine, is that God did not make it clear He intended to change rules around slavery (and, perhaps, the death penalty - although I'd contest that). However if you listen to the Holy Spirit inside your heart today I'm sure you'll find no difficulty in seeing that slavery is quite repugnant to the Lord's Will. So, perhaps if Paul's endorsement of slavery is jarring it may be sensible to follow that thought and see where the Holy Spirit guides your reason. Sometimes you'll discover your instincts are wrong. Sometimes you might discover you're due for a new interpretation of what scripture is teaching you. If you blindly never explore your own intuitions, because God would tell you if He meant otherwise, then you might end up like the drowning faithful convinced God would save him, who ignored the three boats God sent him.

I think this thread has diverged quite a long way from aberrant devotions to Mary.

 

Self-refuting statement on the way…

Is that a joke? The priesthood of all believers, and the unique Mediatorship of Christ, have been central Protestant teaching since the Reformation. I don’t “get my theology” from liberal sources, just not Roman Catholic ones.

My sincere apologies.

I have simply seen none (to the best of my memory) that do not deny the premises that led to women’s emancipation in the first place. If those premises are true - and indeed we moderns accept them in literally every other arena - then such “cogent” theological reasoning that denies those premises is plainly false. C.S. Lewis had no trouble stating some properly theological reasons that actually are cogent (at least from a literary point of view), but they have not, to my knowledge, been repeated here. In fact, Lewis in general does not appear to be that popular on this forum.

 

That's one to the right, and one to the left, beautiful sidestep. You could be a politician! They don't answer questions either.

 

Just on the point of "priesthood of all believers", since I've studied it quite a bit. The concept is not originated in the New Testament, and has nothing to do with the laity being equivalent to the clergy. The term comes from the "priesthood of all believers" proclaimed by Ezra and Nehemiah upon the return from Babylonian exile. It is a clunky english translation of the hebrew "Mamlechet Kohanim". So in the book of Nehemiah you will find Nehemiah proclaiming the Hebrew people to be the "mamlechet kohanim". The New Testament merely quotes that, it does not alter the OT doctrine. As I posted a while ago,

https://forums.anglican.net/threads...men-should-be-ordained.2292/page-6#post-36427

This fulfills the prophecy from Exodus 19:6:

On the question of whether that universal priesthood applies to women, I said this:
https://forums.anglican.net/threads...men-should-be-ordained.2292/page-6#post-36433

One more thing I'd add to that is, that the priestly province was not only to read the Scriptures, but also to offer sacrifice, as Cain and Abel did. This is what the people of the Old Testament began to do after the return from Exile: they would travel to the Temple, and offer their prized livestock, their fattest calf, as a burnt offering to God. This is precisely the kind of priesthood which was continued by the Christian Jews of the New Testament: their job (our job) is to offer sacrifice unto God, the sacrifice of our "fattest calf", of our praise and thanksgiving. Thus a Christian church service is (more than anything else) the people's sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving, the people entering and offering their sacrifices unto God.

Thus performance of sacrifice is a priestly one. And in this twofold way (scriptures and sacrifice) are how the lay people may be considered to be in the royal priesthood. But that is altogether different from ordained ministry, whose job it is to bring us the Word of God, and the Manna (the body and blood of God). That function is only reserved to those in the line of Melchisedech, of which our ordained ministry is.

 

If the choice is really between upholding scripture and being able to condemn slavery and patriarchy, I, for one, am more than happy to uphold scripture at the expense of the latter. To assume that anyone/anything could be more moral and righteous than God and his divine law/commands set forth in Holy Scripture is preposterous. If the Lord ordered me to kill all of the Amalekites and "... slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass," I pray that I would due so unhesitantly. If the bible truly commands slavery, then I would not call it immoral. For who are we, to say to God that we have a better understanding of morality?


It would be hilarious to see Tiffy/Invictus screaming to God that he understands morality/sexism better then the creator of the universe does. Something tells me that wouldn't go over very well.

 

Nowhere in the Bible does it say, "I permit slavery." It is only accurate to say that the Bible describes practices of slavery. That's it, nothing more.

It is very similar to how divorce is merely mentioned in the Old Testament, but was taken by some Protestants as an OT permission to divorce. "If the OT mentions it, it means that God wanted it". But Edmund Bunnius mentions how this does not follow. Just because God described the Jews divorcing, nowhere means that he permitted it, let alone endorsed it. Marriage remains lifelong and unbreakable, in the Old Testament as well as the New.

The same with slavery. In each case where slavery is involved, the slave or the act of slavery is mentioned, but nowhere is stated God's permission let alone endorsement of it. Each man and woman is made in the image of God.

I'm sorry guys, but you just won't be able to make it work to discredit our sacred Scriptures, or for us to reverence them less. They are our Scriptures.

 

Such sentiments are as despicable as they are irrelevant to the topic at hand. I would think even a voluntarist could do better than invoke the Nuremberg Defense.

 

Mat 5:38 Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth:
Mat 5:39 But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.
Mat 5:40 And if any man will sue thee at the law, and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloke also.
Mat 5:41 And whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain.

You postulate that "turn the other cheek" means we should not have the death penalty. Jesus wasn't talking about justice being carried out on evildoers, He was telling individuals how they should respond personally when someone does them wrong. Yet even that is not to be read in an unlimited fashion, for "resist not evil" does not imply that you should yield your bare cheeks to be sodomized upon request or yield up your wife to be raped. We not only resist such evil, we also have the evildoers arrested, prosecuted, and sentenced. If we are to assume that "turn the other cheek" means to let the criminals do whatever they wish and offer them more to boot, then we cannot stop with wiping out the death penalty; indeed, we must wipe out prosecutions and arrests.

My point is this: the "turn the other cheek" scripture has zero bearing on the death penalty, and any interpretation that suggests otherwise is a mis-interpretation.

 

There are whole sections of the Torah that regulate relations between slaves and their master, as well as historical portions where the people were commanded to take slaves. Of course the Bible permitted and upheld slavery. To say otherwise is to imply that similar passages that discussed relations between husbands and wives, or parents and children, “neither endorsed nor permitted” marriage and the family.

 

I smelled the trap.

 

So if God permitted/ordered slavery was he immoral in doing so? And if so, what qualifies you to condemn God?

 

And your actual Biblical, chapter and verse proof texts for this male only assumption are: . . . . . . . . . ?

i.e. The qualifications for ordination are:
(1) . . . male = proof text . . . . . ChX, verses: x-xx etc.
(2) . . .
(3) . . .
(4) . . . etc.

Any takers?

 

Let’s be precise: the relationship of husband and the wife is related to Christ and the very Trinity itself. If that were absent, we could not with complete confidence say that those were divine institutions. The relationship of master and slave could have been characterized as that; if it were, then case closed. But it wasn’t.

Secondly, your word “regulate” is doing a lot of work here, a lot of equivocation. By “regulate” you are sneaking in a double modern meaning, “1. create rules, so as to 2. normalize”. It’s the second part that I deny. Nowhere does the Bible create rules “so as to normalize” slavery, no more than it “creates rules so as to normalize” monogamy. The normativity of monogamy does not derive from creation of rules around it, like in today’s positivist theory of law the mere regulation of Obergefell made gay marriage normal.

Making something normalized by creating rules around it is foreign to the natural law, and foreign to the scriptures. The normativity of monogamy does not derive from all the rules described about it. It comes from Christology, absent which monogamy wouldn’t be normative, no matter how many rules were made around it.

So slavery does have some rules as in, the master shouldn’t beat his slave etc; but nowhere in that is implied a statement that slavery is ok in the first place. Just that if a slave relationship occurs, the master should (at least) not beat his slave.

 

I think there must be a difference between 'condemning God' and observing that some of the words in the Bible were written by men who fully endorsed slavery and regulated its use within their society as a perfectly normal thing to do to other people, without any guilt of imorality whatever. The people who wrote that did not have highly developed moral concepts of any right to freedom of the individual. They also believed God inflicted punishment on the wicked, so slaves must obviously have been wicked or they would not be now being punished. I.e. false and illogical conclusions were rife. The Old Testament part of the Bible contains some half baked ideas about what God allows/demands and does not allow/forbids. It is only when we get to the teachings of Jesus that a more fully informed view of the character of God and His blueprint for universal human freedom and well being start becoming clearer and more accurately defined, through the teachings of Jesus Christ.

This is why the advocates of death penalty, slavery, subjugation of women and vaunted male supremacy always go back primarily to Old Testament texts to lend religious credibility and claim God's supposed 'endorsements' to their own preferred prejudices and ofttimes frankly immoral policies, but are really just the same dressed up Rt Wing, hard line, cold hearted religiosity that nailed Christ to a Cross and sneeringly spat on him as he died.
.