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 pastored as a woman minister in a society that takes it for granted that a pastor will be a man. So whenever I come to a passage like today’s, I find myself downcast at having to explain this issue yet again.

Jesus himself made no distinction on the basis of sex, and it grieves me that people living in this modern age take up that very question to say that a woman must not hold the office of pastor.

In fact, I have heard someone, a woman herself, tell me to my face that she could not accept me as a pastor because I am a woman.

More amusing still: I have officiated at eight weddings, and each time, because of the assumption that the officiant will naturally be a man, I see the surprise on people’s faces when I am introduced. They look at me as if to ask how a woman could possibly conduct a wedding.

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

Not only our country but every nation runs on such a system, so there is little room for a woman to squeeze through the gap and find a place to stand.

It may be unavoidable that the world revolves around men, but even those who have become new creations in Christ have not let go of that way of thinking. They still cling to the fixed idea that a woman must not become a pastor, must keep silent in the church, and must not teach men.

People justify their claim that women must not be leaders in the church by the words the apostle Paul wrote in his letters.

If Paul, who did so much to open the door for women to work for the gospel, wrote such verses, we must first find out why.

In his letters Paul cried out again and again that all are one in Christ. If a few lines of his are now closing the door women ought to walk through, then we must stop at least once and look into why he said such things.

Of course, I know that the verses the apostle Paul wrote are not words that set men and women apart, and so after today’s message I will not preach on this subject again.

Suppose, as many people think, that salvation were a system in which the whole family is saved only if the head of the household has faith, and in which people can be saved only if a man is the pastor. Then women ought to keep silent not only in the church but at home as well.

If salvation came only through the faith of the head of the household, women would have to submit unconditionally and live like servants just to keep their husbands pleased. After all, if the husband abandoned his faith, the whole family would fail to be saved.

The same holds in the church. If only men had the privilege of becoming pastors and teaching the word, the Holy Spirit ought never to give women the grace to understand the word.

If salvation could be received through someone else’s faith, then the question we are now taking up would have no grounds either.

But faith is an entirely personal matter.

Salvation is received only when I am united with Christ; and because of that, teaching about Christ is not something to decide by a person’s sex either.

The church today teaches that however strong the parents’ faith, children who do not believe cannot be saved, and that however happy a marriage, if one spouse has no faith, only the other will be saved.

Therefore, if a younger brother has no faith, his older sister must be able to teach him; and if a man in the church does not know the word, a woman in the church must teach him for the saving of his soul.

Otherwise that soul will fall into hell.

But the question of sex keeps coming up because 1 Corinthians 11 and 14, Ephesians 5, and 1 Timothy 2 appear to say that women must keep silent in church, must not teach men, and that office may be given only to men.

At this point I have a question for 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?

Will only men be able to hear the trumpet, so that women, unable to hear it, can be saved only if men tell them?

Then are unmarried women, and wives whose husbands went home to the Lord early, unable to be saved? We all know the answer is no.

Why, then, dig in so stubbornly over the question of giving women office in the church?

Jesus came and forgave the sins of all humanity, and now we live in an age of grace in which each soul is saved through its own faith. Why, in such an age, do people keep looking with disapproval on women who work in the church?

Pastors urged me to study theology, but for more than ten years I refused. I read the Bible more than a hundred times and prayed to understand the word. As time passed, circumstances took shape on their own, or rather, circumstances arose in which I had no choice but to study theology, and around that time my heart turned toward pastoral ministry.

But in ministry, every time I suffered some disadvantage simply for being a woman, my heart grew so heavy that many times I wanted to give it up.

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

I refused that path again and again; so why did he put me through fire upon fire to set me in this place?

Even now, when I see denominations that do not give office to women, I sometimes wonder: are they really right?

But the more I read the Bible, the more I come to think that theirs is a human judgment.

That is why today I want to preach from a book by the American pastor Gene Edwards, The Daughters of God. Pastor Edwards said that he wrote it after seeing that Scripture had been read through a male-centered lens, leaving God’s will in contradiction.

He explains well how the apostle Paul has been interpreted and what history tells us about the status of women, so I intend to draw on the theoretical part of his work.

Deacon Kim Eun-hee in our own church writes for broadcasting, and whenever writers write, their own ideas, leanings, and knowledge inevitably find their way into the text. So when I listen to a narrator on one of those programs, I often think that these are words only Deacon Kim could have written.

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

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

Jerome, who translated the New Testament, likewise did not render honestly what the apostle Paul said; he mixed in his own ideas bit by bit and so mistranslated the meaning.

This mistranslation, which began in AD 405, has to do with women, and it has been handed down unchanged through the centuries to this day.

Even a plain reading of the Bible shows that Jesus and the apostle Paul did not discriminate against women in the least.

They fulfilled their ministry with the help of women and gave women an equal standing. Yet later translators of the Bible, and those influenced by Jerome, suppressed the status of women.

From 300 BC on, after Greece conquered the Middle East, the Greek worldview had an enormous influence on Israel. Greek values shaped not only the Jews but, later on, Christians as well.

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

But the great heroes we know taught that woman was created in the first place as the result of a punishment sent by the gods, and that she existed only for sexual gratification.

All of them, moreover, held that a woman’s name should not be mentioned among men, nor should she ever 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 passed on into the Roman Catholic Church.

Jerome’s asceticism gave rise to the age of the monasteries, and those who took up his ideas strove endlessly to escape from women, whom they saw as the very center of evil.

Because their leaders thought this way, the women of Athens had to live hidden away. Men did even the marketing, and social life or simply going outdoors was unthinkable.

From birth, women received no education; they 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 wished to say.

The Greek philosophers taught that women must not look at, listen to, or ask about whatever they pleased.

If Jerome, who taught such ideas, translated the New Testament, he would have worked to keep the place of women in it as small as possible.

Sadly, though, the Roman Catholic Church raised Jerome to sainthood, and he became the most revered 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 translation of the Bible inspired by the Holy Spirit.

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

I tell you about Jerome in such detail because the very man who translated the Bible treated women as sinners to an almost pathological degree.

After him, among those who inherited Jerome’s view of women, Augustine, Martin Luther, and John Calvin all accepted Jerome’s translation, and none of them was generous toward women either.

More remarkable still, two women helped Jerome when he translated the Bible, and he recorded their labors. Later the church fathers found this, erased the two women’s names, and wrote in their place virtuous brothers.

It was out of such a society that pagan philosophers embraced Christianity, bringing their heathen ways of thinking with them.

One of them, Clement, put it like this.

A man, being born with reason, has nothing to be ashamed of.

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

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

He called woman the devil’s gateway.

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

Accordingly, on the strength of 1 Corinthians 14, Tertullian commanded women to be silent, and declared that a woman 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, among them the Confessions, On the Trinity, and The City of God, yet he still held women in low regard and taught that only Adam was made in the image of God.

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

Cyril of Alexandria taught that women, being as inferior as beasts, could not teach men. At that time there lived in Alexandria an outstanding woman named Hypatia.

When Hypatia proved Cyril wrong in mathematics and philosophy, monks who followed him are said to have killed her inside a church building, torn all the flesh from her bones, and burned it.

I describe this in such detail because only when we know how these leaders thought can we see how grave an error is being made today.

John Chrysostom, bishop of Antioch in Syria, is regarded as the greatest orator of the Eastern church. He said that woman’s low status was not merely a consequence of humanity’s fall; woman was an inferior human being from the very moment she was created.

He went on to say that the image of God must carry authority and that only man bears that image. Woman is under man’s rule, but man is under no one’s rule; and so, he said, for a man to seek a woman’s counsel is like seeking counsel from the lowest of animals.

This was the thinking of Christian leaders who held a pagan outlook.

In the early Christianity of the late first century, the place and the outlook of Christian women were highly valued and stood equal with those of men. But the views of women that philosophers carried with them into the faith when they converted polluted all of Christianity.

But the misfortunes of women do not end there.

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

Aquinas taught that woman is an imperfect and wretched creature, and that because man’s insight is superior, woman is by nature subordinate to man.

He reached that conclusion because of the verse that says a woman should have long hair. Aquinas, too, had no Bible to read but the one Jerome translated, and so he came under Jerome’s influence.

Pope Urban II proclaimed 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 classed their wives as concubines.

When church leaders made such decisions, people had no choice but to follow, and women were reduced, as a matter of course, to worthless human beings.

When a church council held in 1322 declared that women could not be buried in church cemeteries, the notion that women really were in the grip of demonic power became common sense.

Just then a book by Jakob Sprenger was published, The Hammer of Witches (Malleus Maleficarum), which laid out many ways of torturing women branded as witches in order to break them. As a result, a million women were burned at the stake or died under torture.

Women who had to suffer and die unjustly without even knowing why pinned a thread of hope on the Reformers who launched the Reformation.

To their misfortune, however, Martin Luther, who carried the Reformation through, also held that women were inferior and evil.

Luther rejected the idea that men and women are equal and shut women out of church leadership. He laid the blame for humanity’s fall on women and preached that women were far more likely than men to fall into superstition and mysticism.

Calvin, revered by Presbyterians, was likewise a contemptible man.

He said that God had entrusted the authority to rule the earth to men alone, and that because male clergy submit to God, women must submit unconditionally to men.

Later, King James, who produced the King James Bible, wrote a book against women about witches. He said that educating a woman and taming a fox produce the same result: teaching a woman or a fox only makes them more cunning. He even wrote a learned treatise on demonology and strongly supported the execution of women.

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

In the Greek original, whenever Priscilla and Aquila are named, Priscilla comes first in every case but one; yet in Acts 18:26 the translators placed Priscilla second and so reversed the order.

In 1 Timothy 2:11 they rendered the Greek word hesuchia as “silence” for women, as if women must never speak at all; yet the same hesuchia in 2 Thessalonians 3:12 they rendered “quietness.”

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

And when they came to the Greek diakonos, which in the New Testament is mostly rendered “deacon,” they translated it in Romans 16:1-2, where Paul commends Phoebe, a woman, not as “deacon” but as “servant.” It was a deliberate mistranslation, meant to treat women as lesser.

History, flowing this way, could only work against women. Though they had been forgiven and saved by Christ’s sacrifice just as men had, they were trampled beneath the authority of men.

People without sound faith taught their own human ideas, and Christian leaders took those teachings in whole without weighing them by the truth. Those leaders are still foolishly repeating the same words today.

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

When churches appoint pastors, they prize outward qualifications, and members, too, can receive an office only if they give money.

They no longer think of faith as the blessing; they think worldly riches are the blessing. Their very view of what faith is has changed.

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 age into which Jesus was born was not much different. Still, because salvation is not a privilege given to men alone, Jesus did not refuse to speak with women.

The Jews of that day despised the Samaritans as people of mixed blood and had no dealings with them.

Even so, Jesus deliberately went to Samaria and waited by the well for his disciples.

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

Even among the Samaritans she could not hold her head up, so she came to the well while everyone else was taking their midday rest.

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

In this way Jesus made no distinction of sex in saving souls.

At a time when men saw women as instruments for bearing children and called them lower than slaves, Jesus cared about this woman’s salvation.

He told her that the hour was coming, and was already here, when true worshipers would worship the Father in the Spirit and in truth, for the Father seeks such people to worship him. How many times she had been divorced did not matter to him; he cared only for the saving of her soul.

Jesus wanted her, who had lived wrongly until then, to repent and turn back, and he longed for her to live a life of faith once she had met him.

Salvation, then, whatever a person’s sex, is received by those who worship God in the Spirit and in truth; it means receiving eternal life and entering heaven.

Because Jesus came, the Spirit and the truth have been given to all, young and old, men and women alike; so what matters now is living by faith.

When the disciples saw Jesus talking with the Samaritan woman, they were astonished.

The reason was that 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.

Yet in Luke 24:22, Luke records the words, “Also, certain women of our company amazed us,” and gives the reason: 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 went on living out their 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 mistaken thinking of all those men. They did so because God, in Christ, saves by faith alone, without distinction between men and women.

In Luke 10:39 we find Mary sitting at Jesus’ feet, listening to his word.

As I said at the start, in the social order of the day this was utterly unacceptable, even unimaginable.

It was unheard of for Mary to sit among the men learning the word about the Kingdom of Heaven; but for her older sister Martha, busy preparing the meal, to complain that she alone was doing the work was out of the question altogether.

For a woman was expected simply to work, as though she were hardly there.

As this scene shows, Jesus was treating Mary and Martha as disciples, and he gave women the standing to speak their minds freely. This is how God looks at women.

He treats women not as beasts or property but as human beings, and he honors their dignity and worth. This same change later took place in the disciples around Jesus.

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

We know this because 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 served the Lord from their own possessions.

After Jesus rose and, forty days later, ascended, about a hundred and twenty people gathered in Mark’s upper room; and that number counted not only the men but the women as well.

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

When the Holy Spirit moved at that Pentecost, the power of the Spirit was poured out not only on men but on every woman as well.

God made no distinction between men and women for the saving of souls; he worked through both alike. That is why it is needless to argue in the church over whether women may or may not be given office.

Here I will close today’s message, the first sermon on ‘In Christ, Can Women Not Receive Office?’

In the second sermon, we will think further about the passages of Scripture used to oppose giving office to women.