1 Timothy 2

From the December 2015 parish magazine, preparing for the arrival of Monken Hadley's first female curate.

Introduction

There has been a long tradition in the church for positions of church leadership and teaching to be restricted to ordained men – or so it seems. In fact, looking more closely one discovers women preaching and teaching throughout church history. The Roman Catholic Church which still does not ordain women as priests nevertheless officially recognises several women as “doctors of the church” including Theresa of Avila, Catherine of Siena and Hildegard of Bingen. The Church of England no longer reserves any ordained roles to men but it makes space for Christians, including church leaders, who believe that the Church cannot or should not ordain women into positions of church leadership. For some the concern is that a decision to ordain women should not have been taken by the Church of England apart from the Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Churches. Others believe that God has explicitly prohibited women from teaching and exercising leadership over men within the church. If that were so, we should of course heed God’s command. But I believe this is based on a misreading of 1 Timothy 2:11-15 and 1 Corinthians 14:34-35.

1 Timothy 2:11-15 and Women Preaching

The view that allowing women to preach in church is contrary to the Scriptures is based on two passages. This article explains why I do not think 1 Timothy 2:11-15, the more relevant of the two passages, should be read this way.

A first and maybe the most important observation is that women are engaged in teaching within the early church. To begin with, there is circumstantial evidence for this such as the commendation of Phoebe in Romans 16:1-2. Phoebe is the first listed in this intriguing chapter. She was the one to whom Paul entrusted his letter to the Romans; she would have been the one available to answer any questions the Romans had about the content of the letter. The next verse greets Priscilla and Aquila. The unconventional order in which the names are given hints at Priscilla’s importance. We read about their ministry, e.g., in Acts 18:26

[Apollos] began to speak boldly in the synagogue; but when Priscilla and Aquila heard him, they took him aside and explained the Way of God to him more accurately.

The role of teaching this new and fiery convert was shared by the wife and husband team. This is not surprising because in no place where the Holy Spirit’s gifts are mentioned is there any hint that they are different for men and women. The gifts are used for the benefit of all, e.g. in 1 Corinthians 14:26

What should be done then, my friends? When you come together, each one has a hymn, a lesson, a revelation, a tongue, or an interpretation. Let all things be done for building up.

The variety of contributions were offered in good order; not in ways suggestive of other motifs. Hence Paul’s instruction in the same letter (1 Corinthians 11:5)

any woman who prays or prophesies with her head unveiled disgraces her head—it is one and the same thing as having her head shaved.

There is no space here to discuss what lies behind the prohibition but it confirms that women were engaged in prophesying and in Biblical understanding prophesying clearly involves an element of teaching.

This means that 1 Timothy 2:11-12 does not offer a reminder of general Christian practice but is a new, a fresh injunction which apparently limits what women had been doing in this and other churches:

Let a woman learn in silence with full submission. I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she is to keep silent.

Expecting women as well as men to learn was common; the emphasis is on the learning to be done “in silence with full submission” which does not mean never opening one’s mouth. The more common sense of the word translated “silence” is “being at peace, enjoying solitude and tranquillity” (e.g., 2 Thessalonians 3:12) and being silent while somebody else was speaking (e.g., Acts 22:3). The phrase here characterises the learning as one that accepts the authority of teachers. This seems to have been absent and because of the absence of proper learning there is now a complete prohibition of teaching.

But there must be special reasons for the prohibition here, given that it does not reflect general practice. Maybe another letter to Timothy offers us a hint of the background (2 Timothy 3:6-7):

For among them are those who make their way into households and captivate silly women, overwhelmed by their sins and swayed by all kinds of desires, who are always being instructed and can never arrive at a knowledge of the truth.

There were also false teachers who were male and Paul instructs Timothy up very early on in the letter to shut up those men (1 Timothy 1:3 and see subsequent verses; cf. 1 Timothy 6:3). But it seems women were affected by a particular aspect of the false teaching which Paul addresses here. A similar singling out, in this case of a single female teacher, is found in Revelation 2:20.

I have this against you: you tolerate that woman Jezebel, who calls herself a prophet and is teaching and beguiling my servants to practice fornication and to eat food sacrificed to idols.

The reason why Paul prohibits women in 1 Timothy 2 to teach and “have authority” over men (the precise meaning of “have authority” is hotly disputed) is given in the following verses. But Paul’s appeal to Genesis is often misunderstood as if it were evidence that Paul saw the prohibition as universal. This relies on treating 1 Timothy 2:13-15 as offering three reasons:

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.

On this –mistaken– reading Paul says that women must not teach men firstly because Adam’s temporal priority shows that men should be pre-eminent and such pre-eminence is, presumably, threatened where women offer authoritative teaching to men, secondly, because the woman was deceived which, presumably, reveals that it is in women’s nature to be more easily deceived, and, thirdly, because women’s role in salvation is to bear children and this is, presumably, hindered when they start to teach men with authority.

But Paul does not say any of that. It may have been true in his world that women, being generally less well educated, were more easily deceived but he does not say so. Nor does he explicitly claim that Adam being created prior to Eve in itself indicates male superiority although this line of thought was pursued in Judaism. The apostle briefly re-tells the story in Genesis and I believe he does so because he saw revealing parallels to what was happening in the church in Ephesus whose situation is addressed here.

The woman in Genesis 2 acted autonomously, without reference to Adam standing next to her, and there was probably “a trend towards emancipation behind the women’s aspirations to teach” (as Howard Marshall observes).

The significance of Adam was formed first lies in this that Adam had received the command not to eat from the tree of good and evil. This appears to lie behind Paul’s statement that Adam was not deceived. Adam ate in the full know­ledge of transgressing a divine command. Arguably, the woman was deceived because she had not heard the divine command first hand which made it harder to resist the contradictory teaching she was offered by the serpent, and especially so with Adam standing next to her and keeping silent.

There is nothing in the text to suggest that her sex made Eve more liable to error and sin or less qualified to teach in the church, as some would argue. (E.g., Tom Schreiner believes that the gentler and kinder nature of women inhibits them from identifying doctrinal error and confronting false teaching.) It was rather the fact that she was a relative late-comer who listened to false teaching without respecting the one who had first received God’s command.

It was presumably a similar set of circumstances in Ephesus which concerned Paul. There were false teachers (serpents) who contra­dicted the teaching that had been received by the apostles. Some women were only too happy to listen to this teaching which promised a life that was less encumbered by family responsibilities. Arrogating upon themselves the role of teachers, they seem to have disdained the role of women as mothers, cf. the reference to liars forbidding marriage in 1 Timothy 4:3.

On the contrary, Paul says, salvation is not be found in autonomy and it is possible for a woman to be saved through child­bearing. Not of course as if giving birth is itself a way to salvation (although the reference to childbirth in Genesis and the salvation brought into the world through Mary giving birth to Jesus are relevant background). This would completely contradict what the apostle writes everywhere else. No, it remains necessary for the women to continue in faith and love and holiness, with modesty (which would be true for men as well).

For cultural and historical reasons, many more men were suited to becoming elders (presbyters, bishops) in the early church than women and job descriptions and qualifications were not written in gender-inclusive language, so we read in 1 Timothy 3:2 that an overseer (Bishop, Rector, lead pastor) must be “the husband of one wife” which is to say “married to only one spouse” or maybe “married only once”. I do not think that the church ever interpreted this to mean that clergy must be male and married. In fact, the apostle could easily have started off his list by saying, “Now a bishop must be male...” and we may ask why he did not do so, if, as it is alleged, excluding women from office was his concern in the preceding verses. He would have had the same opportunity in the letter to Titus but the fact is that nowhere in the New Testament do we read that clergy have to be male. 

An important principle of good biblical interpretation is that each passage is understood as part of the whole. This is what I have attempted to do here. I want to conclude by affirming Article 20 of the Thirty-Nine Articles:

it is not lawful for the Church to ordain anything that is contrary to God’s Word written, neither may it so expound one place of Scripture, that it be repugnant to another.

Ordaining women alongside men “contrary to God’s Word written” in order to conform to the norms of our wider society or “contemporary standards” would be arrogant and wrong. But what might look at first like a “common sense” interpretation of 1 Timothy 2 as a prohibition on women exercising authority by teaching Scripture in church has in fact significant problems in its reading of verses 13-15 and sits uneasily with other passages in Scripture. It should be abandoned in favour of a reading which agrees better with the narrative in Genesis and other parts of the New Testament.