Biblically Based, Open and Affirming…

When I was considering my choices for a career…no, that sounds arrogant… When God closed every door but the door to ministry, when He was on the threshold of kicking me through it, he stuck me in the middle of a preconception. In the PCUSA, women have been ordained for a generation. In the Seminary I was attending, the line in the sand of orthodoxy was that women shall not be ordained.

“WOMEN SHALL KEEP SILENT IN CHURCH!!!!!”

Paul said it, I was raised with it in the CRC (Christian Reformed Church-which has, by the way, fallen across this line into whatever lies beyond orthodoxy), it was built into my paradigmatic understanding of the interpretation of Scripture. I should also say I am a great believer in the inerrancy and literate truth of Scripture.

So there I am, getting what may be the best education in the Reformed faith that can be found, the best traditions of Old Princeton, a non-denominational yet Presbyterian-aligned Seminary, carrying on power from the Scripture that I have never found elsewhere. Teaching me Women Shall Keep Silent in Church. Arguing over whether women in the “non-pastoral” M.Div. tracks should even be allowed in the lowest level homiletics classes, “Gospel Communications”.

And I am attending the First Presbyterian Church of Metuchen, under the pastoral dynamic duo of Bob Beringer and Lucia Jackson. I would be in classes teaching about the non-preachability of women and hear the heart preached when Rev. Jackson was on the pulpit. Bible and life, orthodoxy and praxis, Christian academia and the Christian parish, duking it out in the mind and soul and body of this person.

The preacher won.

At Westminster Theological Seminary, I was a heretic in their midst. I didn’t boast about it, I wasn’t even in the M.Div. program, but I was watching and listening and learning.

Then something Paul said brought about a paradigm shift in my understanding of Scripture. “In Christ there is neither male nor female, slave nor free, Jew nor Gentile.” Or something like that. And every barrier of gender, socio-economic situation, racial ethnic identity was stripped away in the light of the Risen Son. And Paul says “Women will keep silent in church” and “Women shall not teach men” (which, by the grace of God that I was in a progressive Christian school that had banned caning did not get me beaten stupid when I proposed that verse as undercutting the authority of the lady who taught me in the sixth grade) and a few more things that establish gender hierarchies and gender barriers, and I am stuck.

Is the systematic repression of women from pastoral leadership what Paul is teaching the church today? Or is something else going on? Have we missed the inerrant, literate truth of Scripture in some way? I don’t reject Scripture because I agree with Paul. I fear some in the denominations where women are in the ministry have taken that path. But I can be confident in the authority of Scripture and my obedience to Biblical authority while celebrating the gifts that my female colleagues in ministry bring to the task.

And if there was a paradigm shift there, another one has brought me to the conclusion that homosexuality and ordination too are not excluded from one another in God’s Word. But that is for another post.