The Plan To Smuggle in Women Pastors

With respect, that is precisely what you wrote, which is why I called it out.

My point was that it is both incorrect that Paul pretended man had not transgressed, and that even if it were so it is unhealthy to believe scripture says one thing and to then believe you know better. We should open our minds, struggle with the passage and try to better understand it - not reject it. There's plenty of passages I still can't really comprehend, but I'd like to think I'm getting better at understanding them every day. I won't improve myself if I just assume Paul was wrong to write some things and I'm more enlightened.

The rest of what you wrote is not contentious with me. I also don't think the passage should be used to block WO, and I don't oppose WO.

 

This paraphrase of St. Paul’s words could be taken in precisely the the opposite sense of what you’re suggesting.

The chapter begins with the plea:

This is a construction known in formal logic as a sorites. St. Paul uses these all the time. Another prominent example is Romans 8:29-30:

The implication of 1 Cor. 11:1 is that those who imitate Paul will also also imitate Christ. Likewise, if men are the image of God, and women are the image of men, then women are the image of God also. The construction is stating a relationship of similarity, not ontological subordination; i.e., men and women are subordinate to God, but not by virtue of being His “image”. They are subordinate by virtue of being created (see below). Were that not so, then the Arian retort that Christ’s being God’s Image implies subordination would be correct after all. Just to make sure we don’t read his words as implying ontological subordination, St. Paul states a verses later:

In the course of searching for properly theological arguments, we have found that the explicit anti-WO position has some rather suspicious parallels with Arian and Nestorian exegetical strategies. Combine that with the potential for committing the “blasphemy against the Holy Spirit” that we’ve noted earlier, and the anti-WO position actually has some quite serious problems, as it runs up against parts of the tradition that actually are defined in the proper sense.

That, and although I hate to be a broken record, and though literally no one seems to want to even acknowledge this let alone actually provide a substantive response to it, I am going to continue to point out that the real source of this problem is Roman Catholic notions of the priesthood that have found their way back into Anglicanism. Get rid of the Roman Catholic assumptions, and the anthropological objection disappears.

 

You will seriously struggle to find anything in the New Testament saying that spiritual gifts and calling are distributed separately between men and women by God. All can speak in tongues regardless of sex, all can prophesy regardless of sex and I think you will find that all of the other gifts are likewise avaiable as God decides for both sexes. (That is a matter you may have to take up with God yourself eventually in the next life). In my opinion, and I may be wrong, the only reason we did not have Women's Ordination previously was because it has been men who did the choosing, not God. In the entire history of the church it has not been God who said "No" to a woman seeking ordination. It has always been men.

(Acts 2:17, 18, 21). And it shall come to pass in the last days, saith God, I will pour out of my Spirit upon all flesh: and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, . . .
And on my servants and on my handmaidens I will pour out in those days of my Spirit; and they shall prophesy: . . And it shall come to pass, that whosoever shall call on the name of the Lord shall be saved. but men have added - (But I'll never let women even speak in church, let alone prophesy ). Priestly ministry is prophetic ministry.
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It’s not an RC assumption because you find it before Romanism in the Old Testament, with a conscientious exclusion of women from the altar despite widespread female priesthoods in all of the surrounding nations. And Christ’s disrespectful exclusion of women from his ordained ministers, on all 3 levels of ministry with the most obvious being The Twelve; appointing patently bumbling fools like Cephas despite being surrounded by the holiest women in history, Mary, etc. And St Paul’s disrespectful subordination of women to men in all spiritual matters. And the apostolic church conscientiously excluding women from all official church functions. And the Reformers conscientiously excluding women from the sanctuary during the most anti-Roman era of church history.

So you’re looking at a 4000-year old conspiracy. Was it Rome that infiltrated the Old Testament, or confused Jesus the Messiah the Incarnated Logos? Or was The Church just wrong in her understanding of human nature until the 20th century? There’s no way for pro-WO to win here.

 

You missed my double entendre there....

 

To make it clear what I actually said I will substitute the meaning of the Hebrew word translated as "Adam" and state the sentence once more.

The human race even tried to blame Eve(meaning Living), for men's own stupidity in being decieived by a woman and pretending we had not transgressed, when actually the human race had, and that's even the opinion of someone who wrote it down in scripture. 1 Tim.2:13-14.

But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence. For Adam was first formed, then Eve. And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was in the transgression. 1 Tim.2:13-14.

If Adam had authority over Eve by virtue of being formed before her, then how come Adam and Eve were given dominion over everything that God had made before them? Answer me that then.

If Adam was, as the author states, not decieved, then how was it that he was punished along with Eve who had been decieved and had also, (the author infers, unlike Adam), transgressed.

1 Tim.2:13-14 is an illogical argument which does not prove the author's point, which is "men have divinely bestowed authority over women by virtue of having been made first and by inference Adam had not transgressed, but Eve had". It is a false conclusion refuted by Genesis chapter one where both Adam and Eve are both given authority by God over everything that God had made, before them and were subsequently both punished for their joint transgression. Adam (the human race of males) had tried and failed to place the blame on Eve, and Eve tried to blame the snake, and the snake doesn't have a leg to stand on.
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We are looking actually at a conspiracy going back to the fall in the Garden of Eden and the entry of sin, division and dischord into God's good creation. And arrogant sinful men are perpetuating it in oposition to the Gospel.
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1Co 12:8 For to one is given by the Spirit the word of wisdom; to another the word of knowledge by the same Spirit;
1Co 12:9 To another faith by the same Spirit; to another the gifts of healing by the same Spirit;
1Co 12:10 To another the working of miracles; to another prophecy; to another discerning of spirits; to another divers kinds of tongues; to another the interpretation of tongues:
1Co 12:11 But all these worketh that one and the selfsame Spirit, dividing to every man severally as he will.
1Co 12:12 For as the body is one, and hath many members, and all the members of that one body, being many, are one body: so also is Christ.

According to the word of God, some may receive this spiritual gift and some may receive that gift and some another gift. It doesn't say that everyone will have a certain gift (let alone all of them) from the Lord. He divides them up severally, meaning separately and independently, according to His sovereign will. We should, of course, "earnestly desire the greater gifts," but it's up to God in His perfect wisdom as to how He wants to work through each individual.

If God had desired to have women ordained as priests (which is more than a spiritual gift, it's a ministry gift to which one must be called by God), why did he wait until the last century to do so? The accusation of male chauvinism presumes that no bishop for 1900 years was obedient to the Holy Spirit in ordaining women; that is a preposterous assumption. The idea that God is an "equal opportunity employer" with regard to gender is also preposterous; were He so, He would have called 6 women and 6 men as His Apostles. The fact that no women were so called or ordained for all those centuries is prima facie evidence of God's will for the Church in that regard.

 

It seems some people would prefer to follow an angel of light.

 

If you could show me even a handful of priests between 2000 B.C. and 500 A.D., I would believe the claim that it is "more a result of RC tradition." Absent evidence, that claim carries as much substance as an empty plastic grocery sack.

 

I said, God distributes His gifts to whom God decides should have them and you still have not shown that God witholds certain gifts from women because they are women. Show me the texts which say God does that. You can't! It is men, who deny such gifts from God can be received by women, not God.
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Priests before circa 32AD don't count anyway. They were all Aaron's descendants of an entirely different order of priesthood which is no longer relevant to the Christian Churches. Our priesthood is of an entirely different order and women are not excluded from it by scripture.

 

No, you show me the scriptures or early church texts which say God does ordain women as priests in the apostolic succession. You can't!

1Co 12:28 And God hath set some in the church, first apostles, secondarily prophets, thirdly teachers, after that miracles, then gifts of healings, helps, governments, diversities of tongues.
1Co 12:29 Are all apostles? are all prophets? are all teachers? are all workers of miracles? (The answer is "no.")

We can see evidence that God caused some women to be teachers, to be prophets, etc. But we just do not see any evidence in the Bible or in the early church writings (because there is none) that God caused women to be either apostles or priests in the apostolic succession!

 

...said the fellow who so vigorously defended the concept of "Christ's Church in the O.T." a few days ago...

 

I see we are still trapped in the ‘tradition as precedent’ mindset. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. The Gospel had implications for society, for the Church, and for the world, that are still being realized even to this day. If that were not so, there would have been no need for creeds or dogmatic definitions or canons of any kind. The fact that there were no female clergy until relatively recently (though not as recently as some on this thread keep claiming, despite evidence to the contrary), is wholly irrelevant. The Scriptures imply what they imply whether prior generations of Christians understood that or not. Precedent is nothing compared to proper theological argument based on the Scriptures, and I have seen no attempt on this thread to deal with the properly theological objections to the anti-WO position I have outlined. You cannot claim a precedent for something if the premises for that precedent turn out to be false. Otherwise, we would still be talking about the Donation of Constantine. All of the arguments against WO are based on the assumption that women are either (1) ontologically inferior to men, or (2) that women are somehow more culpable than men for the existence of original sin. Sound exegesis of the relevant passages shows that both these premises are false, so the so-called “precedent” (which isn’t actually a precedent since no judicial decision was involved), which is actually just the absence of one, is irrelevant. That’s a very basic point and I’m not going to keep going round and round on that.

I’m beginning to get the impression that this discussion isn’t being conducted in good faith, and that’s disappointing. I was once vehemently opposed to WO. It was my own research of the Fathers, the medieval Scholastics, modern (mostly traditionalist) theologians, and finally the Scriptures themselves that, much to my surprise, and contrary to my own intent, convinced me that the anti-WO arguments were wanting and actually entailed serious theological problems. It was not the conclusion I wanted at the time, but it is the one that forced itself on me, and I could not ignore it. I see very little such willingness to be open to such discovery here. If some of you do not want to be convinced that WO is even plausibly acceptable, nothing I have to say here will make any difference. And why should it? I’m just a person on the internet, like everyone else here.

 

I think that if you look at what I posted in #34 (I'll copy it here, next) you might observe that the case I make is not one of "tradition as precedent," but is actually "God's actions as precedent."

What are the Biblical precedents? God made Eve as a helper to Adam, after first making Adam. God called upon males to act as the priests to the Israelites. Even before that, God made Melchizedek a high priest before Him. Jesus incarnated as a male and acted as our high priest. Jesus called 12 males as His Apostles. The early church from the Apostles onward, being mindful of all these things, ordained males as priests. Whether men in those days were chauvinistic or whether they considered women to be second-class citizens is all beside the point. The point is, God established and taught the precedents, and we should be mindful of them.​

God has set the example. He has set the precedent. He exclusively called males to the role of intermediary between Himself and His people. He exclusively called males to become the first in the line of apostolic succession. Why do you continue to insist that we have only made a "tradition as precedent" argument? Our argument is "look at what God has done in His infinite wisdom"!

Melchizedek was a type of Christ. The O.T. priests were types of Christ. The N.T. priests are types of Christ (He is the antitype, the one whom they all reflect or, if you will, act as dim shadows). Christ is male. God the Father chooses to be viewed by us as a male father figure. That is why He only calls males to represent Him as priests. It's because they are mirroring the Greater One who chose them out of all the people and placed the heavy burden of servanthood upon them.

As Christ is the Great Shepherd, so the N.T. priest is called to act as a shepherd of a small flock. As Christ ever lives to intercede for us, in like manner the N.T. priest is called to make intercessory prayer for those whom God has entrusted to his care. As Christ baptized, the N.T. priest baptizes. As Christ offered the Apostles the first Eucharist, the N.T. priest offers the local flock the Eucharist. A female priest would distort the beautiful symmetry of God's design, for the simple reason that Christ is not female!

We who support a male-only priesthood are doing so out of a desire to honor what we perceive to be God's wishes, the grand design revealed to us by the pattern of conduct He set in place throughout the history of mankind. This transcends the traditions of men by a large order of magnitude. Tradition simply happens to coincide for the reason that we, on this forum, are far from the first ones to recognize that pattern of conduct by God. The early church saw it as well. And as Stalwart pointed out, the church has continued to see it in the centuries since!

 

I’m approaching it in good faith. If there’s a certain pace to my / our responses, it is probably because WO is such a contentious topic that I’ve been here dozens of times before. Some of those previous arguments stumped me, and I took a pause to study them (eventually they were disproven). If you say something that stumps me, I guarantee that you’ll see me take a step back rather than insist with arguments that no longer work.

So far I believe that I’ve conscientiously addressed your two main theses, that WO becomes acceptable either upon “rejecting Roman Catholicism”, or upon allowing into consideration the “modern assumptions”. If there is some other new defeater, I will consider it conscientiously.

Neither of those is mine. My assumption is a third option: that men and women are different. That’s it. Neither better nor worse. I’m not the head of my house because I’m better than my wife. The Hebrews were a chosen people not because they were better than everyone else (far from it). Cephas wasn’t chosen over Mary because he was better. Far from it! But why was he chosen over her? How is that fair? Look into that and you’ll see everything that we here stand upon.

Jesus is calling upon us, if we have a pious, fitted, utterly holy woman, instead of her to be willing to take a potentially bumbling fool, if no one else is available. Why?

Because he knows something most people today no longer do. That men and women are different: really; radically, different. That is the hidden assumption behind Christian anthropology, as backed by the brutal/relentless findings of all modern science. But that is precisely what Feminism forbids its adherents from accepting. And feminism has neither God not science nor reason on its side; all it has is peer pressure.

 

Oh dear... again. I find it a regrettable habit of some Progressive Christians (of which I occasionally find myself in the camp of, depending on the given day) that we over-analyse and over-interpret scripture to distort some message we find incompatible with our worldview. You are taking it to another level with this line of thinking, because you're not even looking for a different angle to view Paul's words. You're just rejecting them as incorrect. You don't need to be so harsh to 1 Timothy, your conclusion and the scripture are both correct, it's your premise that is flawed not the theological understanding of Paul.

To break down each response:

Even if we take the strictest interpretation possible of what Adam having authority over Eve means (and I'll deal with what I believe authority actually means in this context later), this is still a trivial concept. First, they were given dominion over what came before because humans are special and rocks are not. There is no gender or elder superiority intrinsic to a mustard seed, and even if there were a mustard seed hasn't the sufficient ego to exercise that superiority over others in the first place - humans are both special and egotistical.

On both Adam and Eve sharing dominion, whilst Adam holds dominion over Eve, there is also a plain answer. I have dominion over my property, but the state, and its laws hold dominion over me. We are both subjects of the Crown, that doesn't invalidate our dominion over things the Crown still ultimately holds supreme authority over. We are all subjects of God, God has dominion over everything Man (capitalised to avoid a similar confusion around humankind) has dominion over. They are not contradictory claims.

All of that presupposes Adam having authority over Eve, as defined in the Bible, implies some sort of coercive power structure we normally associate with authority in our hierarchical society. I'm not convinced that's necessarily true in the first place. The bible unequivocally states that "wives must submit to their husbands" (Ephesians 5.22). This can regrettably lead to some particularly toxic relationships, where an uneducated husband abuses a passage to demand a coercive form of submission, and assume a coercive form of dominance over their wife. But when we read just one verse earlier ("Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ.") and we read the second part of the verse in question ("Wives, obey your husbands as you obey the Lord") we realise that such an interpretation of submission is repugnant. So I extend to all claims of authority. We aren't talking about the secular type of authority, we're talking about the religious kind. God is not a tyrant, yet He still holds supreme authority. Submission to God is not the same as submission to Kim Jong-Un. Adam's authority over Eve was not the same as Nero's over Peter. (Also note: I trust we don't need to expand this further, this isn't making husbands into Gods. Such an interpretation is blasphemous, only one possible interpretation remains, that detailed above).

Well first, lets just clear up that we both agree that Adam, as Paul states, was not deceived. You implied so earlier when you claimed I must believe "Eve tricked Adam", which means you (correctly) don't believe Eve tricked Adam. The consequences of Adam being deceived are horrible, and would biblically justify the worst forms of sexism. But the bible does not say so in Genesis, and it's clarified in Timothy - Eve did not deceive Adam, women are not manipulative tricksters out to tempt good honest men, and all the woes in the world are not the fault of women, but equally of both men and women, no gender is to blame.

Adam was punished along with Eve because deception is not a necessary precondition to sin. If anything Eve's sin was a lesser sin, because Adam didn't need to be tricked to sin (this is an assertion by me, scripture - to my knowledge - never says being tempted by Satan is a mitigating factor).

Paul does not infer Eve unlike Adam had transgressed. Paul only states Eve had transgressed because she was deceived. This is a true statement, a direct repeat of the verse in Genesis I quoted earlier. Paul makes no comment on if Adam had or had not transgressed in this verse. If you read the KJV that way you clearly don't grasp the older writing style and should put down the Authorised Version in favour of something you can comprehend. If you read virtually any other English translation (or the Latin/Greek versions) such a conclusion is impossible to draw. In Romans, however, Saint Paul does say Adam had transgressed. When we read Romans and Timothy in tandem (it doesn't matter if they didn't have the same authors) to read Timothy in such a way would be to insert a contradiction - so such a reading cannot be correct. You acknowledge Saint Paul would not make such an obvious theological error. Why then do you accept the Paulians, immediate disciples who had spent their entire life learning from Paul, would? They also would not, and they don't. I'm confident all of them had read Genesis, it's not exactly a text someone can miss, even in the Early Church. I addressed this in more detail in my earlier reply.

If that was the conclusion you would be correct. It's not. You haven't uncovered a fundamental inconsistency in the sacred texts. You're reading into the verse something that isn't there. The conclusion is not that "the scripture tried to blame Eve for humankind's transgressions".

 

I wonder if Occam would see it the way you seem to?

Quite a lot of male headship nuts come to exactly that conclusion though, except they don't just think scripture is trying, they believe it is succeeding in proving their case.
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Of course, all this is premised on the notion that Adam and Eve were real, historical persons. I don’t think that’s a notion we can seriously entertain today. Remove it, and what is left of the argument? It’s an attempt to derive a legal principle from an allegory.