In Christ, Can Women Not Receive Office?

2Now I praise you, brothers, that you remember me in all things, and hold firm the traditions, even as I delivered them to you. 3But I would have you know that the head of every man is Christ, and the head of the woman is man, and the head of Christ is God. 4Every man praying or prophesying, having his head covered, dishonors his head. 5But every woman praying or prophesying with her head uncovered dishonors her head. For it is one and the same thing as if she were shaved. 6For if a woman is not covered, let her hair also be cut off. But if it is shameful for a woman to have her hair cut off or be shaved, let her be covered. 7For a man indeed ought not to have his head covered, because he is the image and glory of God, but the woman is the glory of the man. 8For man is not from woman, but woman from man; 9for man wasn’t created for the woman, but woman for the man. 10For this cause the woman ought to have authority over her own head, because of the angels. 11Nevertheless, neither is the woman independent of the man, nor the man independent of the woman, in the Lord. 12For as woman came from man, so a man also comes through a woman; but all things are from God. 13Judge for yourselves. Is it appropriate that a woman pray to God unveiled? 14Doesn’t even nature itself teach you that if a man has long hair, it is a dishonor to him? 15But if a woman has long hair, it is a glory to her, for her hair is given to her for a covering. 16But if any man seems to be contentious, we have no such custom, neither do God’s assemblies.

For ten years now I have been in ministry as a woman pastor, in a social structure where a pastor is naturally assumed to be a man. So when I come to a passage like today’s text, I often find myself feeling low at always having to explain this issue.

It grieves me that people living in modern times take up the matter of gender, where even Jesus made no distinction, and say that women must not receive the office of pastor.

In fact, I have even heard someone tell me to my face that, though she is a woman herself, she cannot accept me as a pastor because I am a woman.

What is even more amusing is this. I have officiated at eight weddings, and every time, because of the prejudice that of course men are the ones who officiate, I see the surprise on people’s faces when I am introduced as the officiant. They look at me as if to say, how can a woman officiate at a wedding?

This society revolves around men, and even in companies we see that, however outstanding a woman may be, under the same conditions men are promoted much faster.

Not only our country but every country runs on such a system, so the room a woman can squeeze through the gaps to stand in is not very wide.

Even if it cannot be helped that the world revolves around men, even believers who have become new creations in Christ have not let go of that thinking. They have not let go of the fixed idea that women must not become pastors, that women must be silent in the church, and that women must not teach men.

People justify the claim that women must not become leaders of the church with words the apostle Paul wrote in his letters.

If Paul, who opened the door so wide for women to work for the gospel, wrote verses like these, we should first find out why.

In his letters Paul cried out so loudly that all are one in Christ. If a few verses of his words are now closing the door that women should go through, we ought at least once to look into why Paul said such things.

Of course, I know that the verses the apostle Paul wrote are not words that set men and women apart. So with today’s message as the last, I will not preach on this issue again.

If, as many people think, salvation were a system in which the whole family can be saved only when the head of the household has faith, and people can be saved only when a man becomes the pastor, then women would have to be silent not only in the church but in the home as well.

If people were saved only when the head of the household had faith, women would have to obey unconditionally and live like servants to keep their husbands pleased, because if the husband gave up his faith, the whole family would not be saved.

In the same way, if only men had the privilege of becoming pastors and teaching the Word in the church, the Holy Spirit ought not to give women the grace of understanding the Word.

If salvation could be received through someone else’s faith, the issue we are now trying to discuss would also have no validity.

But faith is a thoroughly personal matter.

It can be received only when I am united with Christ. That is why teaching about Christ is not a matter in which gender can be weighed either.

The church today teaches that however strong the parents’ faith may be, if their children do not believe, those children cannot be saved; and that however close a married couple may be, if one has no faith, only one of them will be saved.

So if a younger brother has no faith, his older sister must be able to teach him, and if a male believer does not know the Word, a female believer must teach him for the saving of his soul.

For otherwise that soul falls into hell.

Yet gender keeps becoming an issue because 1 Corinthians 11 and 14, Ephesians 5 and 1 Timothy 2 appear to record that women are to be silent in the church, are not to teach men, and that office can be given only to men.

At this point I would like to ask one thing of those who oppose women working for Christ.

When the trumpet of the Second Coming sounds, can women go to the returning Christ only if men take them by the hand?

Can only men hear the trumpet, so that women, who cannot hear it, can be saved only if someone tells them?

Then are unmarried women, and wives whose husbands were called home early, not saved? We all know the answer is no.

So why hold out so stubbornly over the matter of giving office in the church?

Jesus came and forgave the sins of all humanity, and we now live in an age of grace in which each soul is saved by its own faith. Why, then, is there such an unending negative view of women working in the church?

Pastors urged me to study theology, but I refused for more than ten years, reading the Bible over a hundred times and praying to understand the Word. As time went on, circumstances arose naturally, or rather circumstances in which I had no choice but to study theology, and around then my heart turned to the resolve that I must go into pastoral ministry.

But in ministry, every time I was put at a disadvantage again and again for being a woman, it weighed so heavily on my heart that there were many times I wanted to give ministry up.

Why did God lead my life onto the path of ministry?

Why did he put me through the fire again and again and set me in this place, when I kept refusing to go the way of ministry?

Even now, when I look at denominations that do not give office to women, I sometimes wrestle with the question: are they really right?

But the more I read the Bible, the more I think that it is a human judgment.

So today I want to preach from a book called ‘Daughters of God’ by Pastor Gene Edwards of the United States. Pastor Edwards said that he wrote the book after seeing that the Bible had been interpreted with a male-centered bent, so that God’s will had been made to contradict itself.

The book explains well how the apostle Paul should be interpreted and the historical facts about the position of women, so I intend to use its theoretical parts.

We have Deacon Kim Eun-hee in our church too, and when a writer writes for broadcasting, the writer’s ideas, leanings and knowledge are bound to be included. So when I hear the narrator’s words in a program, I often think that these are words only Deacon Kim Eun-hee could say.

And when I go to Deacon Cho Eun-hee’s concerts and listen to the music, I often feel as if I am hearing Deacon Cho Eun-hee speaking.

In the same way, when a writer writes or a musician composes, that person’s ideas, leanings and depth of knowledge are melted into the work.

Jerome, who translated the New Testament, likewise did not translate honestly, exactly as the apostle Paul had said it, but mixed in bits of his own ideas and mistranslated the meaning.

This mistranslation, which began in A.D. 405, concerns women, and it has been handed down unchanged through the centuries to this day.

When we read the Bible, we see that Jesus and the apostle Paul did not discriminate against women at all.

They carried out their ministry with the help of women and raised women up as equals. Even so, the position of women was suppressed by those who translated the Bible after them and by people influenced by Jerome.

After Greece conquered the Middle East, from 300 B.C. on, the Greek worldview had an enormous influence on Israel. Greek values influenced not only the Jews but also the Christians who came after them.

Socrates, the spiritual pillar of Greece, his disciple Plato, and Plato’s disciple Aristotle taught Alexander the Great, and Alexander the Great planted the Greek spirit throughout the world.

But these great heroes we know taught that woman was created in the first place as the result of a divine punishment, and that woman is a being needed only for sexual gratification.

And all of them held the view that a woman’s name must not be mentioned among men, and that a woman must not be praised.

Jerome, a disciple of Aristotle, was a thinker who taught that women should have sexual relations only to bear children.

This thinking of Jerome’s was carried on into the Roman Catholic Church.

Jerome’s asceticism brought about the rise of the monastic age, and those who took up his ideas strove endlessly to get away from women, whom they regarded as the center of evil.

Because their leaders thought this way, the women of Athens had to live hidden away. Even going to the market was done by men, and social activity or going outdoors was unthinkable.

From birth women received no education and had to marry a man they had never seen before, and because they were to see, hear and ask as little as possible, they lived without being able to say what they wanted to say.

The Greek philosophers taught that women must not see, hear or ask about just anything.

If Jerome, who taught such ideas, translated the New Testament, he would have made every effort to keep the place of women to a minimum.

Unfortunately, however, Jerome was made a saint by the Roman Catholic Church and became the most respected figure in Catholic history.

And in the fifth century the Roman Catholic Church proclaimed Jerome’s translation to be, from then on and forever, the only Bible translation inspired by the Holy Spirit.

After this announcement, the absurd thing happened that anyone caught reading a Bible other than Jerome’s translation was put to death on the spot.

I am telling you about Jerome in such detail because the very man who translated the Bible treated women as sinners to a pathological degree.

Later, among those who inherited Jerome’s view of women, Augustine, Martin Luther and John Calvin all accepted Jerome’s translation, and they too were never generous toward women.

What is even more interesting is that two women helped Jerome when he translated the Bible, so Jerome recorded their labors; but later the church fathers found this, erased the two women’s names, and wrote in ‘highly virtuous brothers’ in their place.

Gentile philosophers who lived against this social background accepted Christianity with their pagan way of thinking.

Among them, Clement said this.

Man is a being who has nothing to be ashamed of, because he was born with reason.

But he taught that woman is such a shameful being that she cannot even reflect on herself, and that women must cover their faces so that men would not sin.

There is a man named Tertullian who is highly respected in church history.

He called woman the road that leads to the devil.

He cursed women, teaching that it is because of woman that we receive the penalty of death, and because of woman that the Son of God died.

So, on the basis of 1 Corinthians 14, Tertullian ordered women to be silent and declared that women are beings who must not baptize, sing, pray or teach.

And Augustine, whom you know well, was a badly corrupted womanizer before he became a Christian.

After receiving Christ he published many works, including the Confessions, On the Trinity and The City of God, but he still held women in low regard and taught that only Adam was created in the image of God.

His mother Monica prayed with tears for her prodigal son Augustine, and Augustine received Christ in answer to those prayers. Yet he said that women are evil from birth and that the fall of humanity was entirely the fault of women.

Cyril of Alexandria taught that women cannot teach men because they are inferior beings, like beasts. At that time there was an outstanding woman in Alexandria named Hypatia.

It is said that when Hypatia proved Cyril’s errors in mathematics and philosophy, monks who followed Cyril killed her inside a church building, tore all the flesh from her bones, and burned it.

I am telling you this in such detail because only when we know what kind of thinking the leaders had can we see how great a wrong is being done now.

John Chrysostom, bishop of Antioch in Syria, is regarded as the greatest orator of the Eastern church. He said that woman’s low status is not simply the result of humanity’s fall, and that woman was an inferior human being even at the very moment she was created.

He also said that the image must come with authority and that only man has that image; and that since woman is ruled by man but man is ruled by no one, for a man to seek a woman’s advice is like seeking advice from the lowest of animals.

This is the thinking of Christian leaders who held a pagan view.

In the early Christianity of the late first century, the position and views of Christian women were highly valued and equal. Even so, the view of women held by philosophers who converted to Christianity polluted the whole of Christianity.

But the misfortunes of women do not end here.

Thomas Aquinas, who died in 1274, was a monk and the foremost theologian of the Catholic Church. His view of women entered Protestant theology and set Protestantism back even further.

Aquinas taught that woman is an incomplete and worthless being, and that because man’s insight is superior, woman is by nature subordinate to man.

He reached that conclusion because of the Word that a woman is to have long hair. Aquinas too could read no Bible other than the one Jerome translated, so he was influenced by Jerome.

Pope Urban II decreed that when a married priest died, his wife could be sold as a slave, and Pope Innocent III, in 1139, annulled the marriages of all priests and reclassified their wives as concubines.

When the church’s leaders made such decisions, people had no choice but to follow, and women naturally ended up as useless human beings.

When a church council held in 1322 proclaimed that women could not be buried in church cemeteries, the idea that women really are at the mercy of the devil’s power became common sense.

Just then a book by Jakob Sprenger called the Hammer of Witches (Malleus Maleficarum) was published, and it set out many ways of severely torturing women it deemed witches in order to break them. As a result, a million women were burned at the stake or died under torture.

The women who had to suffer and die unjustly without even knowing why held a thread of hope in the reformers who launched the Reformation.

But unfortunately Martin Luther, who carried out the Reformation, also held that women are inferior and evil.

Luther rejected the idea that men and women are equal and excluded women from church leadership. He blamed women for humanity’s fall and preached that women were far more likely than men to fall into superstition and mysticism.

Calvin, whom Presbyterians revere, was also a despicable man.

He said that God had delegated the authority to rule the earth to men only, and that because men, who are the clergy, submit to God, women must submit to men unconditionally.

After that, King James, who produced the King James Bible, wrote a book against women called ‘Witches’. He said that educating women and taming foxes lead to the same result, and that teaching women or foxes only makes them more cunning; he even wrote a scholarly treatise called Demonology and strongly supported the execution of women.

And King James’s view of women influenced not only the King James Bible but in effect every translation after it.

In the Greek original, whenever Priscilla and Aquila are named, Priscilla is always written first except once, but in Acts 18:26 this order was reversed by putting Priscilla second.

And the Greek word ‘hesuchia’ in 1 Timothy 2:11 was translated for women as ‘in silence’, making it mean that they must never speak, while the same ‘hesuchia’ was translated as ‘with quietness’ in 2 Thessalonians 3:12.

In other words, women are to keep silent, and men are to keep quiet.

And when the Greek word ‘diakonos’ was translated, it was mostly transliterated as ‘deacon’ in the New Testament, but in Romans 16:1-2, where Paul commends ‘Phoebe’, a woman, ‘Phoebe’ was rendered with the word ‘servant’ instead of ‘deacon’. This was a deliberate mistranslation, made with the intent of treating women unequally.

History flowing this way could only be against women. And though they had received the forgiveness of sins and salvation equally through Christ’s sacrifice, they were trampled underfoot by the authority of men.

People without a right faith taught with human thinking, and Christian leaders who accepted what they taught as it was, without judging it in the truth, are still foolishly saying the same thing today.

As you can see from the church today, once people who brought the world’s thinking in with them gained power in the church, the church came to focus on worldly power and material wealth rather than on the word of truth and on faith.

Even when appointing pastors, outward conditions are given importance, and believers too can receive an office only by giving money.

Their very view of faith has changed, so that they think the world’s wealth is blessing, and not faith.

John 4:9

9The Samaritan woman therefore said to him, “How is it that you, being a Jew, ask for a drink from me, a Samaritan woman?” (For Jews have no dealings with Samaritans.)

The times into which Jesus was born were not much different. Yet because salvation is not a privilege given only to men, Jesus did not refuse to talk with women.

The Jews of that time despised the Samaritans, who were of mixed blood, and would have no dealings with them.

Even so, Jesus went to Samaria on purpose and was waiting at the well for his disciples.

Just then a woman who had been divorced five times came to draw water.

This woman could not hold up her head even among the Samaritans, so she came to the well while people were taking their midday nap.

And to a woman like her, a man, and a Jew at that, spoke in broad daylight.

In this way Jesus did not discriminate by sex in saving souls.

At a time when men regarded women as tools for bearing children and said they were lower than slaves, Jesus was concerned for that woman’s salvation.

Jesus said that the hour comes, and now is, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in the Holy Spirit and truth, for the Father seeks such people. However many times she had divorced, he cared only for the salvation of her soul.

Jesus wanted her, who had lived wrongly until then, to repent and turn back, and he hoped that after meeting him she would live a life of faith.

So salvation, regardless of gender, is received by those who worship God in the Holy Spirit and truth; it is receiving eternal life and entering heaven.

Because Jesus came, the Holy Spirit and truth have been given to everyone, regardless of sex or age, and so what matters now is living by faith.

The disciples were greatly surprised to see Jesus talking with the Samaritan woman.

That is because they had not yet shed the Jewish way of thinking.

What is more, they were flustered to see Jesus talking with a Samaritan woman, who was not even a Jew.

But in Luke 24:22 Luke records that certain women of their company amazed them, because they had gone to the tomb at dawn and met the risen Jesus.

This record proves that even after Jesus bore the cross and died, women were living the life of faith together with the disciples.

At a time when men treated women as lower than slaves and more foolish than beasts, Jesus and his disciples rejected the wrong thinking of all men. For in Christ God saves by faith alone, without distinction between men and women.

In Luke 10:39 there is a scene where Mary sits at Jesus’ feet and hears his word.

As I said at the beginning, this was something utterly unacceptable and unimaginable in the social structure of the time.

It was impossible for Mary to sit among the men and learn the Word about the kingdom of heaven, but it was absolutely unthinkable for her sister Martha, while preparing the meal, to complain that she alone was doing the work.

For a woman was supposed only to work, as though she were not even there.

As this scene shows, Jesus was treating Mary and Martha as disciples and raised women up so that they could speak their minds freely. This is how God looks at women.

He treats women as human beings, not as beasts or property, and acknowledges their dignity and worth. This change later took place in the disciples who were with Jesus as well.

Jesus received the funds he needed for his ministry from many women.

For the Gospels record that Mary Magdalene, from whom seven demons had gone out, Joanna the wife of Chuzas, Herod’s steward, Susanna, and many other women together served the Lord from their possessions.

Forty days after the resurrection, when Jesus had ascended, about 120 people gathered in Mark’s upper room, and this number of 120 counted not only the men but all the women too.

There Peter stood up among them and spoke of Jesus’ ministry, and the Bible calls the men and the women alike brothers.

When the Holy Spirit worked at this Pentecost, the power of the Holy Spirit was poured out on all the women as well as on the men.

God did not distinguish between men and women for the saving of souls; he worked in them alike. That is why arguing in the church over whether women can or cannot be given office is unnecessary.

Here I will end today’s first sermon, ‘In Christ, Can Women Not Receive Office?’

In the second sermon we will think further about the Bible passages that oppose giving office to women.