Let Her Learn
A Grace Hill Library Paper
Let Her Learn
What Paul’s letters to Timothy and Titus say about women pastors
I sat down with a young church planter in San Diego several years back. He wanted to share his vision about the kind of church he felt God was calling him to plant, and pretty soon the topic of women pastors came up.
“I see one of our country’s biggest problems is the passivity of men. My commitment to complementarianism stems mostly from that. I feel like God wants me to focus solely on men stepping into leadership, and if we allow women to take these roles, the men won’t show up.”
I’ve heard that one before.
I responded that I sympathize with that viewpoint — I also think that passivity is a major discipleship issue. But I pushed back on his theological grounding:
“But where do you see that in Scripture?”
“Well, it says that Paul doesn’t permit women to teach or have authority, right? That’s good enough for me.”
This conversation highlights an important frame for me. I know not everyone has exactly the same motives as this church planter, but it was very telling to me that his primary motivation was cultural in nature and driven by expediency. He felt called to disciple men, and his response was to prohibit women. There’s a prevailing idea that allowing women to lead will encourage men to abdicate their own responsibility. My response to that? If men can’t lead in the presence of a capable woman, we don’t have a women-leadership problem—we have a male-discipleship problem.
Another observation this brings up for me: that church planter started with his cultural observation — not enough men are leading — and found one proof-text to ground his conclusion that women should not lead. But what if even that text can be shown to teach something quite different?
Throughout this series we’ve been building a strong foundation of women leading and acting as equal counterparts alongside men from Genesis to Revelation and into the early church. Last time we looked at the confusion of 1 Corinthians 11 and 14, two of the first texts often cited in this discussion. Today, let’s unpack several more of the passages most likely to show up when “women pastors” is discussed. Paul still has something to say to today’s church.
Paul is counseling the young pastor, Timothy, as he leads the church in Ephesus. My plan is to dive deeply into 1 Timothy 2:11-15, but we’ll need to set that up by looking at the entire letter Paul wrote. We’ll also spend time looking at the qualifications and leadership designations in the Scriptures to see what they say about women in leadership. We turn now to 1 Timothy.
Paul’s first letter to Timothy at a glance
Right teaching and right understanding are the heartbeat of this letter. 1 Timothy begins by correcting wrong teaching and promoting right instruction. That is the very first item of business: Paul urges Timothy to stay in Ephesus to instruct “certain people” not to teach a different doctrine, and he clarifies that “the aim of such instruction is love.” (1:3-5). Paul talks about would-be teachers of the law who lack understanding (1:7). He relates his own past ignorance before finding the truth of Christ (1:13)—Paul knows firsthand what bad theology does to a person, because he once persecuted the very gospel he now promotes.
The other major theme in this letter is peace. Paul describes the people resisting Timothy’s instruction as having a “morbid craving for controversy and for disputes about words.” (6:4) He opens chapter 2 by calling the community to pray for kings and everyone in high positions, with the hoped-for result of “a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and dignity.” (2:2) Hold on to that word “quiet.” It’s going to matter in a few verses.
One more piece of context before we dive in. Timothy is in Ephesus, and Ephesus was home to the great temple of Artemis—one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, and the center of a religious culture where female religious authority was the norm rather than the exception. I don’t want to hang the whole interpretation on background history. But something does seem to be going on with some of the women in this community, and the Artemis connection keeps suggesting itself. Keep it in the back of your mind as we read.
A Shared Standard: 1 Timothy 2:8–10
Paul began the chapter pointing out potential division between believers and the powers that be; now he plays mediator for the conflict inside the community itself. The men are told to stop arguing and to come together in prayer, lifting up holy hands “without anger or argument.” (2:8) I love the physicality of that instruction. Rather than simply saying “don’t go to bed angry” (my loose paraphrase of Ephesians 4:26), Paul tells these men to lift up hands in prayer right alongside the brother they’ve been quarreling with.
Then the conversation moves to the women in verses 9 and 10. It seems some of the women were using their freedom in Christ to advance their position through the way they dressed and conducted themselves—braided hair, gold, pearls, expensive clothes. Their newfound freedom was fracturing the community in its own way. Paul urges them to stop “putting on” wealth and to start putting on good works, as women who profess godliness.
That word “godliness” is worth slowing down for. The Greek term eusebeia—devoutness, piety, godliness—is one of 1 Timothy’s favorite words for the ideal Christian life. In 2:10 Paul uses a synonym, theosebeia, with virtually the same meaning. Here is why that matters: at first glance it looks like Paul is shifting standards mid-paragraph—conduct for the men, appearance for the women. But that word theosebeia shows that Paul’s goal for the women is the same goal he has for everyone in the rest of the letter. The women are not being held to a different standard than anyone else. Each exhortation targets a specific issue in that community—the men were fighting, some of the women were flaunting—but the application for both is godliness.
The Only Command in the Chapter: 1 Timothy 2:11
Now we arrive at the heart of it, and I want to point out something it took me years to notice: there is one, and only one, imperative (command) verb in all of 1 Timothy chapter 2. It is not “be silent.” It is not “submit.” It is “Let her learn.”
Grammatically, that is the thrust of the whole passage. Whatever else we say about these verses, we need to start where the grammar starts. The rest of this chapter has been used—I would argue abused—to subjugate women and refuse them leadership in the church. But the one thing Paul actually commands is that women be taught. Which raises a question worth sitting with: could it be that women in Ephesus were not being allowed to do even that? There was a time when even my own school, Fuller Theological Seminary, did not allow women to pursue an MDiv, the standard degree for pastors — perhaps the primary application we should have been drawing from 1 Timothy 2 was, “let her learn.”
How are they to learn? The NRSV says “in silence with full submission.” (2:11) Those words sound heavy in English. But the word translated “silence”—hēsuchia—is the very same word Paul used nine verses earlier when he prayed the whole community would live “a quiet and peaceable life.” (2:2) It does not describe a gag order; it describes calm, settled quietness, the kind Paul wants for every believer. And “submission”—hypotagē—is about taking one’s proper place in a structure. Which is to say: the posture of any respectful student. I teach art at my daughter’s elementary school each month, and quiet attentiveness is what I hope for from every student in the room, boys and girls alike (they are only second graders, so it is hit or miss). Nobody calls that subjugation; “submission” is simply how the student-teacher relationship has always worked.
Paul does not command “Be silent!” or “Submit!” He commands “Let her learn”—and then describes the way anyone learns.
A Word Found Nowhere Else: 1 Timothy 2:12
Verse 12 in the NRSV reads, “I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she is to keep silent.” Two things put a straight reading of this in question.
First, a translation note. Keeping with translations like the CEB and the NIV, the opening phrase should read “I do not permit a woman…” with the negative attached to “permit” rather than to “woman.” The NRSV’s “no woman” makes the sentence sound like a universal decree in a way the Greek doesn’t require. That may seem small, but listen to the difference between “I don’t permit a woman to teach” (a statement about what Paul is doing here, in this situation) and “I permit no woman to teach” (a ruling for all women everywhere).
Second—the word I promised you. If Paul wanted to talk about authority in this verse, there was a normal Greek word ready at hand: exousia. It is all over the New Testament—used of Jesus’ authority to forgive sins, of the authority He gives His disciples, of governing authorities, of Paul’s own apostolic authority. But 1 Timothy 2:12 doesn’t use it. It uses authentein, a word that appears exactly once in the entire New Testament, right here. The standard Greek lexicon defines it as “to assume a stance of independent authority, give orders to, dictate to.” It carries a domineering, controlling flavor that exousia does not have. The CEB picks this up when it renders the verse as not allowing a woman “to control” her husband.
If the last article taught us anything, it is that Paul’s word choices are not accidents. Paul reached past archē when he called man the kephalē (head) of woman, and the choice mattered. Here he reaches past exousia and chooses a word whose flavor is not rightful authority but undue control. “I do not permit a woman to dominate a man” reads naturally, fits the context, and matches the backdrop of a city where female-dominated religious authority was a live problem.
Notice how this reading flows with everything around it. In verses 9 and 10, some women were putting themselves forward in unhealthy ways. Verse 12 continues speaking to the same problem—women exerting undue control (authentein). And then chapter 3 opens with detailed instructions about what it takes to become an overseer or a deacon in Christ’s church. Put the sequence together: Paul stops the grab for undue authority, commands that the women be taught, and then lays out the path by which anyone receives rightful authority. I would assume that if these women were taught, as verse 11 mandates, and called by God, they certainly could assume authority—exousia—in the future. Put simply, Paul is not describing the legitimate exercise authority in this passage, he is correcting an aberration. The chapter isn’t slamming a door on women’s leadership; it’s describing the right pathway toward it.
Moving beyond reading this passage as merely an indictment against women allows us to recover a vital critique that many within my own “camp” need to hear today. There are church leaders on both sides of this issue, and in every denomination, who treat their calling as if it were more about them than the God they serve. They are breaking the qualifications of an elder and overseer in more ways than one, and they are using their so-called authority to domineer rather than build up. I’ve experienced elders who led through bullying and spiritual abuse, and this goes for men and women. Paul focused on the domineering contingent of women in Ephesus, because that was the problem that needed to be addressed on the ground. But recovering the context of this letter as we have tried to do allows us to apply Paul’s command and qualifications to any who might aspire to lead God’s church. That’s what is at stake when we minimize and trivialize Paul’s words to be merely a question about the biological sex of whoever God may call.
The Confusing Bits: 1 Timothy 2:13–15
Verses 13–15 comes next, and give many readers pause. “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…”
Start with what this can’t mean. It doesn’t make sense to assume Paul is placing all the blame for sin on women. Paul is equally capable of saying that sin came through Adam when it suits his purpose—he does exactly that in Romans 5:12. And Genesis 3:6 specifically places both parties at the tree. Whatever Paul is doing here, it is not a theology of female guilt.
Nor does “formed first” mean “ranked higher.” We covered this ground back in The Origin Story: in Genesis 1, both man and woman are equally made God’s image-bearers and given dominion together, with no sense that order of creation is a factor. In Genesis 2, the woman is created as Adam’s ezer—a noble Hebrew word used most often in the Hebrew Scriptures with God Himself as its subject. To read this as if women were “second best” would push against everything we’ve seen so far in this series.
So why does Paul reach for the creation story at all? There is good reason to think he is correcting a piece of false theology circulating in Ephesus—a teaching that claimed woman was created first. In the shadow of the female-dominated Artemis cult, that is not a strange idea to imagine taking root. And then we have Paul’s use of the word “deceived.” The reference to Eve being deceived connects us back to Paul’s one-and-only command verb—let her learn. It’s as if Paul is saying, “Remember what happened when Eve did not learn God’s command, and was therefore tricked by the serpent.” Paul is not absolving Adam, only highlighting Eve to make his point: deception is what happens to people who are kept from learning. The remedy for deceived women is not silenced women. It is taught women.
Then verse 15: “Yet she will be saved through childbearing.” I’ll be honest with you the way I was honest about “because of the angels” in the last article—this is the most perplexing verse in the chapter, and no reading fully satisfies me. Two interpretations are worth naming briefly before I tell you where I land. One connects to the false teaching circulating in Ephesus: in 4:3 Paul rebukes teachers who “forbid marriage,” and if that same pressure was pulling women away from family life, “saved through childbearing” may be less about eternal salvation and more about encouraging them back toward raising a family—women meeting God through by the ordinary faithfulness the false teachers despised. Another leans into the everyday range of sozo: this Greek word often refers to eternal salvation, but it can simply means rescued or kept safe. Ephesian women regularly sought Artemis’s protection during childbirth; Paul may be redirecting their trust from a fertility goddess to the God who actually saves.
The reading I find most compelling begins with a small but telling detail in the Greek. Paul doesn’t write “saved through childbearing,” but “saved through the childbearing”—a definite article that points toward a specific birth rather than the general experience. In article 2 of this series, The Origin Story, I made the case that while sin entered first through the woman, God promised that the one who would crush the serpent’s head would be born of a woman—Genesis 3:15, the proto-gospel, pointing toward Christ before the curse had even been fully described. It would be entirely like Paul to close this passage by recalling that promise. Read this way, the last word in a section commanding women to learn is not a restriction. It is a reminder that the child who saved us all was born of a woman. Which makes the question write itself: why would you stop women from studying the Word of God?
What Exactly Is a Pastor?
The next objection I often hear is, “But didn’t Paul assume pastors must be male — a husband of one wife?” Before we get to this specific qualification, I want to back up and ask a question that is even more fundamental for this debate: what exactly is a pastor? We assume we know. The term “pastor” has become ubiquitous, and it is the most common title for leaders of churches—mine included. But that has not always been the case. In my last article, I pointed out that Paul might just as likely reach for terms like “prophet” and “prophecy” when we might use “pastor” and “preach.” I recently did my own study on what words the Bible uses for leadership roles, and what I found surprised me.
The New Testament has three main words for the leaders of a local church. Presbyteros—“elder.” Episkopos—“overseer,” the word older translations render “bishop.” And poimēn—“shepherd,” which comes into English by way of Latin as “pastor.” Whole church polities have been organized around these three words; my own tradition is even named for one of them—Presbyterian. So it’s worth asking how the Bible itself uses them.
The story starts in the Hebrew Scriptures. In Numbers 11, Moses is buckling under the weight of leading Israel alone, and God instructs him to gather seventy elders: “they shall bear the burden of the people with you, so that you may not bear it yourself alone.” (11:17) That is the original job description—burden-sharers. And keep reading, because something wonderful happens a few verses later. The Spirit falls on the gathered elders and they prophesy—but the Spirit also falls on two men, Eldad and Medad, who never made it to the meeting. Joshua wants them stopped. Moses answers, “Are you jealous for my sake? Would that all the Lord’s people were prophets, and that the Lord would put his spirit on them!” (11:29) Hold on to that wish. We’ll come back to it.
That term, “elder,” can refer simply to “elderly people,” but it naturally took on the role of wise counselor and decision maker. Elsewhere in the Hebrew Scriptures, the elders are the trusted ones who sit at the city gate—where business is transacted, disputes are settled, and wise counsel is given. This is the scene in Ruth 4, where Boaz settles the question of Ruth’s redemption before ten elders at the gate. Ezekiel lists the elders alongside prophets and priests as the ones people seek out for counsel (7:26). Elders were not distant officials. They lived in the midst of the people, and the people trusted them.
The other two words carry their own background. “Overseer” is rare in the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures—it shows up for army officers and for the supervisors of Josiah’s temple repairs (2 Chronicles 34:12). “Shepherd” carries the richest freight: Ezekiel 34 indicts Israel’s failed leaders as shepherds who fed themselves instead of the flock, and promises that God Himself will come to shepherd His people. Every time we call someone “pastor,” that promise stands in the background, whether we know it or not.
Now to the New Testament. Presbyteros is the most common of the three for the church’s core leaders, and you can almost watch the role take shape across the book of Acts. In Acts 11:30 the believers send famine relief “to the elders” in Jerusalem—the word still feels like Ruth 4, respected senior believers rather than an institutional title. By Acts 14:23, Paul and Barnabas are appointing elders in every church to continue the ministry they started. By Acts 15, “the apostles and the elders” gather to decide whether Gentiles must keep the law—and I love the detail in verse 22, where the decision seems good “to the apostles and the elders, with the whole church.” Even at the church’s most consequential meeting, the elders are not a ruling class sealed off from the body. The whole church is in the room.
A couple of translation notes worth knowing. When 1 Timothy 4:14 says Timothy was commissioned “by the council of elders” (ESV), the Greek simply says the elders laid their hands on him—“council” makes the group sound more institutional than the text does. And when 1 Timothy 5:17 speaks of “the elders who rule,” remember that presbyteros most simply means “older one”—Paul uses the same word for older men and older women in general earlier in the same chapter (5:1–2). Verse 17 distinguishes the older believers who carry the leadership calling from older believers generally, and then notes that some of these elders labor in preaching and teaching while others serve in other ways.
What about “overseer”? In Acts 20:28, Paul tells the Ephesian elders—the same city Timothy now serves—that the Holy Spirit has made them episkopoi “to shepherd the church of God.” Notice the words piling up in a single verse: the elders are overseers who shepherd. Titus 1:5–7 does the same thing: Paul tells Titus to appoint elders in every town, then immediately gives the qualifications “for an overseer,” equating the two mid-sentence. And 1 Peter 5:1–4 stacks all three roots back to back—Peter exhorts the elders to shepherd the flock of God, exercising oversight, living as examples until the chief Shepherd appears. If we said it in English: elders are to pastor and give oversight. In the New Testament these are not three offices on an org chart. They are three angles on one calling.
And here is the strangest part, given how we talk today: “pastor” as a title—a noun applied to a church leader—appears exactly once in the entire New Testament. Ephesians 4:11 lists the gifts the ascended Christ gives His church: the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds + teachers (the Greek more closely links these last two, with teacher as a close sub-set of the broader shepherd group). Everywhere else we find shepherd describing the action, not as a title. In fact, this is true of all the terms the New Testament assigns to believers — a Christian is a follower of the Way; a disciple is an apprentice; an apostle is someone sent with a message. We’ve categorized and institutionalized terms into static titles that were once dynamic and active participation in the mission of God.
One shepherds the flock; one is not called “Shepherd.” Scot McKnight made this point well in a recent essay: the distinction we draw between the office of pastor and the function of pastoring would have puzzled the first generation of the church. What the New Testament describes are Spirit-empowered functions—shepherding, guiding, teaching—given for the sake of the church and exercised by whomever the Spirit equips to exercise them.
I want to be careful here, because there is another fine line to walk, and the tension is worth naming honestly. On the one hand, it is more historically accurate to say that none of the titles we now fight over—pastor, elder, bishop—existed as settled offices in the first generation of the church. The words were descriptive, and so the real argument should be about role and function, not title. On the other hand, if we are going to use the New Testament to establish those titles—and nearly every church tradition since has done some version of this—then we should let the New Testament fill them with meaning. And when it does, nothing in the way these words are used stops a woman from receiving them. Either way you resolve that tension, the conversation about women pastors does not disappear.
“A One-Woman Man”: 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1
This brings us to the elder qualifications, because no conversation about women pastors goes long without someone quoting “the husband of one wife.” (1 Timothy 3:2; Titus 1:6) Doesn’t that settle it? If an overseer must be a husband, an overseer must be male.
The Greek sentence reads, literally, that an overseer must be a “one-woman man.” The grammar does technically mean “husband of one wife.” But the emphasis falls on the oneness, not the maleness. Greek, like Hebrew, has no gender-neutral word for “person” or “spouse.” There is, quite simply, no way to say “a person faithful to their spouse.” The terms do not exist. And the standard practice of the language was to use the masculine when referring to a mixed-gendered group. This is exactly why many English Bibles render the Greek “brothers” as “brothers and sisters.” Nobody reads “let the brothers love one another” as excluding the sisters. It is similar to how we might still call out to a mixed group with, “Hey you guys!” (At least that’s still the slang in California).
In the same way, I submit that it would be most natural to assume the phrase a “one-woman man” is referring to the fidelity within marriage — the oneness — rather than the sex of the leader in question. In a gendered language like Greek, the phrase itself does not indicate whether I’m speaking to a group of only men, or to a mixed group. If Paul really wanted to emphasize the sex of the leader, he would have had to add a separate clause stating, “The elder must be male.” As it is written, the qualification is about marital faithfulness, not biological sex.
The Pattern Across Both Letters
There is an echo of this in the way both letters use the word presbyteros—“elder.” Both 1 Timothy and Titus use forms of this word to refer to both men and women, though it doesn’t always come through in our translations. 1 Timothy 5:1-2 refers to the presbyteros (masc.) and presbyteras (fem.), although this is often simply translated “older men” and “older women.” Then within the same section, 5:17, we read, “Let the elders who rule well be considered worthy of double honor, especially those who labor in preaching and teaching.” It is true that presbyteros in verse 17 is masculine, but it is just as likely that the same convention is at work here — throughout the chapter Paul moves back and forth between older men and women, widows, young men and women; then, addressing a mixed group, he converts back to the conventional masculine. I don’t see anything in the passage that unambiguously proves Paul meant to single out one sex in verse 17.
Titus makes the point even cleaner. In Titus 1:5 we are told to appoint elders in every town. The whole chapter is devoted to the kind of ministry and teaching they are to perform. Then in 2:1, still on the same theme Paul reminds these leaders to teach sound doctrine before directly naming both presbyteros and presbyteras in 2:2-3. Verse three ends with, “they are to teach what is good.” The only reason this is obscured is because many of our translations use “older men and women” in verse 2-3 instead of elder.
When Peter greets the “brothers,” we all know he was referring to brothers and sisters. When Paul writes that we are all adopted as “sons,” we all know he means both men and women adopted into the family of God’s Son. When Paul writes to the elders, he is referring to any who are called to serve in that role. It is as simple as that.
Who Stepped Into These Roles?
These first leaders of the church were shepherding, overseeing, teaching, prophesying, and sharing the burden of the people long before the church settled on the titles for those same roles. The natural next question: who does the New Testament actually show doing those things? We might first look at prophecy in the Bible, which remember, is not mere future-telling. The prophets were preaching God’s Word into their contemporary context, calling people back to the Torah and confronting the injustice of their day—and Paul uses the term the same way: “those who prophesy build up the church.” (1 Corinthians 14:4) Prophecy, in many ways, is the Bible’s word for “sermon.” In English we reach for the term “preach,” when the Bible would more likely use “prophesy.”
Now hold that next to the record. Anna the prophet was proclaiming Jesus in the temple before He could walk (Luke 2:36–38). The women of Corinth prayed and prophesied in the gathered assembly, with Paul’s full assumption that they would (1 Corinthians 11:5). Philip had four daughters who prophesied (Acts 21:9). If prophecy is the closest thing the New Testament has to our word “preaching,” then women preaching is not an exception we have to explain. It is a pattern we have to account for.
And it isn’t only prophecy. Priscilla, with her husband Aquila, took the brilliant Apollos aside and “explained the Way of God to him more accurately”—teaching the man who would become one of the early church’s great preachers (Acts 18:26). Phoebe was a diakonos of the church at Cenchreae, entrusted to deliver (and likely teach) Paul’s letter to the Romans—and 1 Timothy 3 itself pauses midway through its deacon qualifications to address “the women.” (3:11) Junia was “prominent among the apostles.” (Romans 16:7) Lydia, Nympha, and Chloe hosted churches in their homes—and as we saw two articles back, hosting a church in that world was nothing like volunteering your living room. Even 1 Timothy knows an enrolled, qualified order of widows, with a list of requirements that reads remarkably like the elder list two chapters earlier (5:9–10).
The most important message the world has ever received, and the central reason any leader of the church exists, has always been to proclaim the gospel — “Jesus Christ is risen.” God first entrusted that vital message to the women at the tomb. There is nothing more important in my own calling as pastor than to continue in their footsteps and tell more people of that good news.
Which brings me back to Moses’ wish. “Would that all the Lord’s people were prophets, and that the Lord would put his spirit on them!” Centuries later, Peter stood up at Pentecost and announced that the wish had become a promise fulfilled: “I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy.” (Acts 2:17, quoting Joel) The Spirit Moses longed to see poured out on all God’s people has been poured out—and Scripture goes out of its way, twice, to say the daughters are included.
I want to take the strongest pushback seriously, because many careful readers land elsewhere. Some argue that authentein is a neutral word for exercising authority, and that its pairing with “teach” points to the ordinary teaching office rather than an abuse of it. Others hold that “Adam was formed first” grounds the instruction in creation rather than culture—and what is grounded in creation does not expire with Ephesus. Still others note that every named elder in the New Testament is a man, and take the pattern itself as the rule. These are serious arguments made by serious people, and I have felt their weight. What keeps bringing me back is the cumulative picture: a letter consumed with false teaching, a chapter whose only command is “let her learn,” a word for authority that Paul never uses anywhere else when plain exousia lay ready to hand, and a Bible full of women—Deborah, Huldah, Priscilla, Junia, Phoebe—whom God kept calling to lead and teach without apology. The more of that you have to qualify or explain away, the more strained the restrictive reading becomes.
Putting It Together
Read inside its own letter, 1 Timothy 2 stops functioning as a universal ban on women teaching. The letter is about right teaching in a community where teaching had gone badly wrong. The chapter holds men and women to a single standard—godliness—while addressing the specific ways each group was fracturing the peace. Its one command is that women be taught. Its prohibition targets domineering control, not rightful authority, using a word chosen for exactly that flavor. Its hard verses push back on a local false theology, and even the strangest verse in the chapter remind us of God’s Genesis 3 promise that the woman would bear a Son.
And what about the question in this article’s subtitle—women pastors? Here is where I land. If “pastor” names a Spirit-given function more than a fenced-off office, the question becomes whether the Spirit gives that gift to women—and we have just seen that He does; if “pastor” was already becoming a title of office in the New Testament, then nothing prohibits women and men from receiving it. When chapter 3 lists what qualifies someone to lead Christ’s church, the list is about character: temperate, sensible, hospitable, an apt teacher, gentle, faithful to one spouse, managing a household well. Every item on that list is about the kind of person an overseer must be. If a woman has been taught, and called by God, and bears that kind of character, 1 Timothy gives me no reason to refuse her—and one beautiful imperative that started her on the way. “Let her learn” was never the end of the journey. Learning is what students do on the way to becoming teachers.
Where This Leaves Us
Next time, we shift our focus to what is known as the household codes—Ephesians 5 and 1 Peter 3. “Wives, submit to your husbands” in Ephesians 5:22 may be the most quoted line in this whole conversation, so here is a preview of the kind of surprise we have come to expect: verse 22 doesn’t actually contain the verb “submit.” You have to go searching for it. What that does to the meaning of the passage is worth an article of its own. These passages are more directly about marriage than any we’ve seen so far, but they are often pulled into the conversation about pastoral leadership; we’ll look at it from both angles.
If you’ve been following this series from the beginning, you know the trajectory by now. The more carefully these passages are read in their own contexts, the more coherent the picture becomes. We’re not recovering a novel reading of Scripture. We’re recovering an original one.
A Grace Hill Library Paper
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