Theology in the Raw - A Raw Converastion about Women in Ministry: Dr. Sandy Richter

Episode Date: June 30, 2025

Dr. Sandra Richter (PhD Harvard) is the Robert H. Gundry Chair of Biblical Studies at Westmont College and, in Sandy's own words: "I'm Preston Sprinkle's best friend." Oh, glory! Sandy is also the author of several books including the incredible The Epic of Eden and an ongoing series of Bible Studies (written and video) called Epic of Eden Bible Study. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello, friends. Welcome back to another episode of theology. And around my guest today is a fan favorite, the one and only Dr. Sandy Richter, who has a PhD from Harvard university. She is the Robert H. Gundry chair of biblical studies at Westmont college. And as you know, I ask all my guests to put in their bio into my calendar. And that's kind of what I read from at the beginning of each episode. And Sandy put, you know, blah, blah, blah, chair of a book studies at Westmont college and the best friend of Preston sprinkle. So there we are folks move over Joey Dotson. Here comes Sandy Richter. Sandy is the author of several books, including the Epic of Eden, which is absolutely incredible. And an ongoing series of Bible studies, both written and video-based, called Epic of Eden Bible Study,

which I would highly, highly recommend checking out. My wife and daughters have gone through some of those and said they're absolutely amazing. So I would recommend checking that out. In this conversation, we talk about women in ministry, of course, women in leadership in particular, and I always love Sandy's thoughtfulness, wisdom, and grace.

So please welcome back to the show, the one and only Dr. Sandy Richter. Let's dive in, Sandy Richter. Let's talk about women in ministry. I don't even like that phrase. More specifically, like women, what does the Bible say about women in church leadership, specifically exercising leadership over men in particular? Because women can be in leadership over women. I mean, Complementarians would be totally fine

with that. Now, as you know, you've read parts of my manuscript for my forthcoming book. So I actually do officially have a view, but it's not public until the book comes out. So let's go back in your, I don't know how far back you want to go. When did you really start to wrestle with this question? I mean, you're, we're pursuing theology, wanted to be a teacher. Like, were you raised complementarian? Like, was it, was this something you had to kind

of like really work through or were you always, did you always read the Bible as supporting women in leadership or? Yeah, these are, these are interesting questions. So, I was raised Catholic, so I'd never heard the phrases complimentarian or egalitarian. And I was raised, I think we've had this conversation a little bit, I was raised in a really challenging home situation. My dad was military and he had five daughters

and he wanted five sons. So there was never any question in our household about mowing the lawn learning to work on your car Figuring out what to do with a socket wrench. That was that was just normative. So I honestly had never bumped into boundaries on who I was allowed to be until I went to Bible college. And when I got to Bible college, it was a college, so it was an academic setting and that's where I shine.

So my professors very quickly decided that I was good stuff. And so the issues there were not as profound. But when I graduated from Valley Forge Christian College and dove into ministry, I describe it as diving into Lake Michigan in early June. Virginia Beach is fine in early June. Lake Michigan will freeze your bones and drop you to the bottom. And that's exactly what happened to me.

I was stunned to find out that no one wanted my calling. No one wanted my calling. I went to get my credentials with the Assemblies of God and the district officials literally asked me what I was doing there. I took the exam. I'm here for my interview. They're like, yeah, but we know that you've got a boyfriend, aren't you getting married, what in the world do you need with credentials? They diagnosed me as being overly concerned about my personal status, and that's why I wanted credentials in ministry.

And so I won that argument eventually, which is a little hard when you're like 22 years old and the people sitting in front of you are old enough to be your grandfather and you have profound respect for them. And so they gave me credentials, but they gave me credentials on a probationary status. And if you know the assemblies and many other revivalist organizations, you'll get licensed first and then you get ordained later. So eight, nine years in ministry, somehow ordination never came my way. Eventually, I was asked to choose

between my academic ambitions and my ministry ambitions. So when I was accepted at Harvard for the PhD, which today's assemblies would be thrilled about, right, having an insider with those type of credentials. I was told by the executive presbytery that I needed to choose, do I want to do this PhD thing or do I want to maintain my status in the assemblies? And I knew what my calling was, so I chose. And so I am no longer a reverend as a result. Wait, no, like today or not ordained? Oh, not ordained. No, I'm just a doctor, not a reverend.

You're just a doctor. Just a doctor. People might assume that, wow, Harvard PhD, that seems like a big deal. I don't know if people can wrap their minds around how difficult it is to do a PhD at Harvard. To put it in perspective, my application, if I applied for a PhD at Harvard after my seminary,

I wouldn't even get, I mean, I wouldn't even get touched. Like just to get into that program and succeed, from what I can see is there's a really small percentage of people who can actually do that. It would that be, I mean, what was that program like? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I chart, you know, I chalk some of that up to hard work and talent, but I chalk most of it up to miracle.

Yeah, getting accepted is crazy. And getting accepted, I was accepted in the university as well. So getting into the Div school, forgive me, colleagues of mine who are listening, getting into the Div school is easier than getting into the university. And so my degree was Hebrew Bible in the Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations Department. And I just want to remind all of us that my undergrad

was from Valley Forge Christian College. So the seminary time at Gordon-Conwell was a wonderful opportunity to demonstrate ability and also Gordon-Conwell and Harvard were pretty closely aligned in those days. Oh really? Yes and I remember sitting down with Joanne Hackett who who was the extremely long title endowed chair of Hebrew Language and Northeast Semitic Inscriptions in my day, and also the first female professor I'd had since high school. Wow. I sat down with her during the interview process and asked her what weaknesses she saw in Gordon Conwell's students in their Hebrew language preparation.

And she paused and she said, there are no weaknesses. Wow. weaknesses. So chalk one up for those of us who love the scripture enough that our Hebrew language, our Aramaic, our linguistic training is excellent because we want to understand the scriptures. What languages did you have to learn for your PhD at Harvard? I counted once. There were seven total. So there's certainly Hebrew and Aramaic and Greek, but then there's historical Hebrew. So the hypothetical theoretical language that stands behind Hebrew. So- Paleo-Hebrew?

Yeah, Paleo-Hebrew. We talk about Northwest Semitic as a category of languages, and that category birthed Ammonite, Moabite, depending on whether or not you think Phoenician is a separate language. So we studied all of the languages of the Southern Levant, which we've got tiny little corpora of each of these various language groups. And then the parent language would be Akkadian, but now we're in Eastern Semitic.

And so Arabic comes in there as does Ethiopic and Ge'ez and all of those which are birthed from Eastern Semitic. And please don't think that I mastered all of these languages, but we learned enough to be able to do the comparative Semitics that are necessary to reconstructing the text and doing good text criticism and figuring out what the heck Job is talking about 90% of the time. So by the way, there are more cognates between Job and Ugaritic. Okay, that's a boundary language between Eastern Semitic and Western Semitic. There are more cognates between Job and Ugaritic than probably any other single language group.

The Ugaritians were conquered by the Sea Peoples in about, oh gosh, 1400. Their language closes and we've got cognates between the Book of Job and Ugaritic, which is pretty fun. And sorry, I said 1400, I should have said 1200. The Ugaritians are conquered in 1200. Yeah, we'll forgive you for that. Thank you. Thank you.

We'll forgive you for that mistake that 0% of my audience caught. I don't know, Marc Larocca-Pitts might be listening. He likes you. So go ahead. Okay. Okay. Women in leadership. What are the main reasons why you believe women should

and can, as long as they're gifted and called to leadership, that they should, biblically, should serve in all positions of leadership? And then I want to get to some of the problem passages that I'm sure you have had to think hard through and work through. Yeah. Well, first of all, let me give a shout out to Preston Sprinkle and Theology in the Rock. Because what you guys do regularly, and you do not do it perfectly, so for all the naysayers out there, is that you are more interested in what scripture has to say

than what culture has to say. And that's why I'm sitting here and I respect that so highly. So my short answer to why women should be in leadership is because scripture says so. I am not going to be, I'm not going to be a theologian, I'm not going to be a teacher of Bible

that is yielding the authority of Scripture to whatever culture is doing this week. Now granted, I'm influenced by my culture and granted the questions I ask and. Now granted I'm influenced by my culture and granted the questions I ask and the topics that I'm investigating are very much the result of my culture. But hopefully my training is good enough that I can do a half decent of job of putting my own presuppositions to the side at least, you know, partly to asking that question, what is scripture teaching? So, a couple of years back when we were sitting in exiles

and you asked me the question of whether or not I was complementarian or egalitarian. You remember that? First of all, I was a little surprised by the question because in my mind, I was there to talk about Deuteronomic law. But what I said to you is I don't like either of those terms. And I don't like the terms because they over categorize. They over categorize the arguments of Scripture. I don't like the file folders. And I don't myself and my own calling, which has been hard won for decades, I don't like being dropped into a file folder.

But I do recognize that having some sort of label on these different views can be very helpful in conversation. All right. So main reason for women in leadership, exegetically, what do you see as the primary biblical arguments? Yeah, so this is an argument that you know, that I've put out in the past, but I've refilmed a lecture

that takes a little over an hour. So we're breaking it down into three 20 minute segments and put out a bunch of sub stacks on it too. And I'm doing this with Seedbed because we wanna make it as available as possible. So my primary argument is that we need to do our hermeneutical homework. And we need to recognize that scripture

is not of a single voice on this topic. We have got a great deal of scripture out there that is super supportive of women being filled and empowered and called to lead. We've got it both in the Old Covenant, we've got it in the New Covenant. We've got our Debra's in the Old Covenant, who are both prophet and judge. And then we've got our Junias in the New Testament, who are both prophet and judge. And then we've got our juniors in the New Testament who are being tagged apostle. We've got folks like Huldah the prophetess

who's being called in to consult for Josiah, even though he's got Jeremiah in his back pocket. And then we've got folks like Priscilla who are helping to found the church in Ephesus where we've got one of our problem passages. So either we are dealing with a corpus of scripture where our spiritual leaders are having a schizophrenic moment or we're not doing our hermeneutical homework. So my hermeneutical homework and the terms I'd like to introduce to this discussion

are the difference between a normative passage and a situational passage. Can you expand on that briefly? Yeah. That's important. So normative passages are passages that by definition apply to all believers of all times, in all places. I would dare to call them covenantal passages, where God defines his relationship with humanity.

And if your audience knows anything about me, they know about Epic ofopal Eden and they know that the way I organize the Bible for the average believer and for the doctoral student is walking through the covenantal administrations, which is, by the way, a very reformed thing to do. But you also heard that assemblies thing in my background. They do it with dispensations. I do it with covenants, which again, makes me a little hard to define. So each of those covenantal administrations is that moment when the creator of the universe says,

this is what I want my relationship with humanity to look like. Here are the stipulations, here are the boundaries, here are the rules, and these apply to all of you who claim my name. Those are normative passages, yeah? And for our new covenant, passages such as neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free,

male nor female, or old nor young, are welcomed into this covenantal administration, those would be normative. Situational passages are passages that apply to certain believers in certain situations at certain times, and that's where they're supposed to stay. And one of the arguments I make in this soon to be released video is that typically we intuitively recognize the difference between a situational and a normative passage.

Very few of us are out there saying, okay, Paul told Timothy to take a little wine for his stomach, so I should be taking a little wine for my stomach. now you and I both know there are crazy websites out there that are defining Current diets based on this sort of stuff, but you and I generally recognize that's a situational passage the problem occurs when we either elevate a situational passage to normative, or we take a normative passage and we reduce it to situational. Okay, so a couple of the main prohibition passages, 1 Corinthians 14, 34-36, women be silent, as in all the churches.

To me, this, honestly, because I've just written chapters on that one and in 1 Timothy 2, the 1 Corinthians 14 one to me is actually not, I think it's clearer than people make it out to be. Anyway, why don't we start in 1 Timothy 2, because this one, you know, Paul gives the prohibition in verse 12, I do not permit, or I am not permitting, depending on how you render the present tense there, a woman to teach or exercise, neither teach nor exercise authority over man, not just in general, but specifically brings in man there. For, verse 13, Adam was created first, not Eve, and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and fell into transgression, however you want to translate that. Paul roots, bases his prohibition in the created order. So that seems to suggest that this is not simply a specific situation, but is going

all the way back to something that is creational in nature. How do you address that? Yeah, how do you address that? So I'm sure we'll talk before we're done about the mess that's going on at Ephesus. And I totally, first of all, I totally agree with you. If your premise is correct, that Paul is rooting this in the blueprint, the first covenant of Eden, God's ideal design for male and female, then yes, this is a normative passage. But you and I both know that there's not a commentator out there who is comfortable with what Paul's

doing. Especially if you move the Gordon Fee direction. He's like, oh my gosh, I have no idea what Paul is doing here. I'm going to argue that because of, well, let me rephrase this. I don't think this is Paul referring to creation to substantiate that women cannot teach or hold authority. I think he is referring to creation to correct the proto-Gnostic threads that have intertwined with the Artemis cult in the city of Ephesus. And I think he is reminding the believers in the city of Ephesus, what they believe, which undermines the idea, if you go the Artemis side, that Artemis is created first or is birthed first

and as the firstborn is preeminent. I think there's a bit of that mixed in, but I lean more toward the proto-Gnostic problem, which is that women are the source of creation. They are first, they are preeminent. And as Gnosticism will evolve, you know better than I do, that Eve did not actually sin by eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Rather, she wisely seized the gnosis that was made available to her and liberated both she and Adam in their revelation of the divine. I think these are the two heresies that have, and it seems to me they've gotten mixed up, or maybe not, maybe merged is a better term. You and I both know that the great

problem with the epistles is we only have half the conversation, but Paul's response is so odd Paul's response is so odd that this other side of the conversation was what makes most sense to me. Because yes, for Adam was formed first, got it. Who's he arguing with? Why does he have to tell the people of Ephesus that Adam was formed first? The only rational response to that is that someone is saying that Adam wasn't formed first. Where did we get that heresy? We get it from the Artemis cult. And we also get it from Gnosticism, which I fully affirm is emerging.

It has not emerged at this point. And then, and Adam was not the one deceived. Okay. Well, Paul would tell us that Adam and Eve were both deceived. In fact, every time Paul wants to bark at us, he very rarely names Eve. He talks about Adam and Adam's failures and how Adam represents the fallen human race. So he knows that both of them were deceived. Who's he arguing with? It was the woman who was first deceived. She became a sinner. And then this last part, which I know you struggle with as much as I did, but women will be saved through childbearing. Not only do we have so many women out there who are either

infertile or single and have embraced Paul's admonitions to stay celibate in 1st Corinthians. So now they can't get saved. Or heck, this is Paul we're talking about. Paul, who won't allow circumcision to help you out, get saved. But he'll allow childbearing to help you out, get saved. So I, yeah, go ahead. No, super, super good. And gosh, I literally just finished my chapter on 1 Timothy 2. It took me 18,000 words, which was short,

and I had to trim it down to about 14,000 words. I'm really buttoned up against my word, Matt. I'm 15,000 words over my, well, my contract was for 60,000. I talked my editor into making it 80,000. My manuscript is currently is at 95. So I need to, but I've got tons of footnotes that I could probably weed out. Anyway.

And those are only 10 point, right? So they don't count. They don't count. I wish. He said, my publisher says he count, it's just total word count. I'm like, yeah, but footnotes don't make the page number increase. I know. That's what I started to say, but he's not buying it. Anyway. Okay. So the proto-Gnostic argument. So Kroger and Kroger, is it Kath, Catherine Kroger and her husband? They made this argument years ago and it got

pretty widely critiqued by both egalitarians and complementarians, largely because they were relying on much later sources, third, fourth century sources and reading it back into the first century. I was going to say, she's a classicist. And interestingly, you'll like this, she actually was teaching at Gordon-Conwell when I was a student there. Oh, wow. And as is so typical of that era, it was almost impossible to find qualified women.

And Catherine Krueger was qualified as a classicist, but not as a biblicist. That I think had influence on how her argumentation progressed. So go ahead. Yeah. Well, so I, you know, I dabbled a little bit in this topic and I've, I've dialogued with Lynn Kohick, who's an expert in this stuff, um, to kind of say, Hey, am I understanding this correctly? And you do, you do have in Gnostic writing some really, as you said, as you said, some

really interesting stuff about the priority of Eve over Adam. And it's like, man, this, um, and it's stuff of the genealogy. I mean, it, it's really interesting. I guess I'm, my only concern is the late sources. Now, obviously, just because a source is written late doesn't mean there's not prior oral tradition that dates back much earlier. But is there, to your mind, is there evidence that something like these pro-Gnostic theories around Adam and Eve and creation existed in as early as the first century and were alive and well at Ephesus this time?

Yeah. Or is there a degree of speculation? There is definitely a degree of speculation. I know that the thought paradigms that created full-blown Gnosticism. And just to be clear for your audience, what Pres and I are both affirming is that full-blown Gnosticism is part of the collision of first-century Christianity and older dualistic thought processes among the Greeks. So Gnosticism doesn't really exist until it collides with Christianity. Are you cool with that? Okay.

Yeah, second century, yeah. I mean, Irenaeus addresses it directly. And so, the fact that it was full blown in the second, late second century, as far as I know, would suggest that, well, it didn't just come out of nowhere. There had to have been a running start, right? Right, right. And so, our early church fathers are going to spend, I think, a century trying to purge the church of Gnosticism. And one thing I find very interesting, my husband's expertise is in comparative theology. And so he cut his teeth on Christian science as a seminarian. And Christian science is Gnosticism, which is so much,

can I dare say fun to me that these heresies just keep re-emerging, right? And each time they re-emerge, they force us as Christians to clarify our own theology. And so they're good for us, honestly. It's that iron sharpens iron moment where we get serious about the incarnation and we get serious about the Trinity.

But I digress. Okay, so I would say from what I have researched, and I know I'm practicing without a license, right? I'm the Hebrew Bible, you guys are the New Testament people, but I'm friends with Lin Koik. Okay. So my understanding is that dualistic thought that really birthed Gnosticism among the Greeks starts emerging At least it can be tracked in about 200 bc So now we're going to wind up with Christianity emerging in the first century ce or ad depending on what you want to call it

And uh, we're going to wind up with folks like paul You know battling it out to keep Christian doctrine, emerging Christian doctrine pure. But to quote Lyn, there is certainly a conversation thread in Ephesus that shows this proto-Gnosticism emerging. And Gnosticism again is a mixed bag, just like so much of the pseudo-Christian heresies, cults, whatever you wanna call them, right now are a mixed bag, right? But what is consistent, certainly, is this dualism, that material is bad, spiritual is good.

And honestly, kind of an early feminism that tracks back to the birth goddess and tracks back to what I would call Gaia, the idea that earth itself is female and giving birth to the realities of this world. And it just gets, you know, it gets really confusing. But all that to say, yes, I think that these ideas are definitely circulating in the Greek world before Paul shows up with the gospel. And it seems to me that Ephesus, which again,

we both know is a crossroads, a really important city, a seat of government, a seat of religious influence, an important harbor and port city for trade. So lots and lots of influence, but also lots and lots of influences coming in as well. I think this is why Paul and Priscilla and Aquila wanted to hold it as well. That the church in Ephesus is so important

and all of these cross currents are moving everywhere. So honestly, if I were to tag the normative message I were to tag the normative message of 1 Timothy 2, and no one's gonna like this, is, hey team, you're small group leaders, the people who are leading Bible studies in your homes, you love to be a small group community, don't you? Well, they need to be trained. Yeah, they do.

They can't just be popular. And you know what else? Fooled ignorance is not a Bible study. If your people who are leading small group Bible studies in their living rooms can't define the incarnation, if they can't affirm the core theological truths of your church, get them out of leadership now. So I just made everybody mad. I love it.

I love it. Oh, I love it. Sandy Richter. Um, uncut. So the Artemis background. And you said that there might, there might be a merger, a blending of these things going on.

Protonostic ideas with ideas surrounding the Artemis cult. The Artemis cult, unlike some speculation that involves the pro-donostic beliefs at that time, we've got a lot of, I mean, stuff about Artemis in the first century and Ephesus. That's extensive archeological, epigraphic, literary. In fact, there's even a literary work called the Ephesiastica. I think it's called.

Ooh, I'm eager. Penned. Tell us. Yeah, I'm eager. So, Gary Hogue, he did his doctoral research on it. It used to be dated late, several hundred years after the New Testament. The scholarly consensus more recently is that it's actually a first century work penned in Ephesus. The author, Xenophon, is from Ephesus. And throughout that work, there are extensive literary linguistic parallels with 1 Timothy

2. In fact, the wealthy women that Paul addresses in verses 9 to 10, most of those words he uses are hapax legamina. They're only used here in the entire New Testament, certainly Paul. What's interesting is every single one of those words, braided hair, the elaborate clothing, all those words are found throughout the ecclesiastica in relation to women participating in the Artemis cult. Really fascinating. And I found some of that stuff as well. And this idea that the elite women of Ephesus were supposed to be, I don't even know what to call them, but premier members of the cult.

And on the high holidays of the Artemis celebration are supposed to be showing up. And in their clothing and their elaborate hairstyles, demonstrating themselves as patrons of the cult. Yes, yes, 100%, 100%. And the priestesses of the Artemis cult came from wealthy families and they wielded actually a lot of power in both the religious and civic and political life of Ephesus. And again, this is pretty well-established. This isn't like, we're not relying on like, oh, a fourth century source, and maybe this existed, this is like first century

stuff going on. And Artemis, as you know, yeah, first born, well, she was born just prior to her twin brother, Apollos, according to the myth. Who she helped birth, which, come on, that's pretty cool. she helped birth, which come on, that's pretty cool. Yes. Yes. And in some areas of Artemis mythology, yeah, she assisted her mother in giving birth to a twin brother, even though she was just born. But she was portrayed as like this divine midwife who protected women during childbirth. So, as I've wrestled with this passage, during childbirth. So, as I've wrestled with this passage, is it normative versus situational? Just a plain reading of the text, I don't like that phrase. I mean, if you just read the English version, I'm like, man, it looks like he's appealing to creation, looks like it's very normative. But when you get to verse 15, women will be saved through childbearing. That's clearly,

you get the verse 15, women will be saved through childbearing. That's clearly, can I say clearly? I know scholars aren't allowed to say clearly. I think it's rather clear that he is thinking of something, he is, I think clearly, combating some local, he's correcting some local belief. And it just so happens that Artemis, whose cult pervaded the fabric of the city, was known as a divine midwife who protected women in childbirth. So he seems to be, in verse 15, combating Artemis' stuff. Could he not be also addressing it in the prior verses? To your point. Well, and honestly, when I read that business of childbearing and the young widows who are, you know, going from house to house,

engaging in gossip and false doctrine and messing up the church. I'm hearing Artemis Parthenoi. That's who I'm hearing. That these young women have lost their husbands, probably older husbands, and have decided that they're going to be Parthenoid too. And for your audience, Artemis is served by a priesthood of virgins. And if those virgins fail to keep their commitments to their virginity, they could be sacrificed for the sake of, you know, cleansing the cult, this, that, and the other thing. And as you've already cited, these are women of status.

They have influence because the seventh wonder of the world, I don't know if it's the seventh, but it's one of the seven wonders of the world. Four times the temple at Arbatos is four times larger than the Parthenon, massive. Wow, I did not know that. So that's when I think about this blending right I'm hearing this business about maintaining your virginity not remarrying

Chasing after the Artemis cults the Elitism the wealth that goes into that But then I hear this business about Eve being deceived, and the implication of course is that she's the one who's brought about Adam's deception. I hear Gnosticism over there, and I hear Artemis with these wealthy women and the virgins. And let me just throw in here again for your audience. I talk a lot about this in my various lectures and writings. Marriage in the ancient

world was not romance and chemistry. Marriage was a career path for women in the ancient world. Marriage was a career path for women in the ancient world. So for a young woman to become widowed, and by young I mean she's still of childbearing age, and to refuse to remarry, and I'm assuming that offers are being made, that is the equivalent of your 32-year-old son living in the basement playing video games all day. Like, hey, dude, get off the couch and take a job. It might not be the job that you, you know, dreamed

about in your junior year of college, but it's a job. And that's what I'm hearing behind Paul's barking. Are you hearing any of that? Well, let me add to that. In 1 Timothy 5, I want to say verse 14, He commands widows to get married, manage their households, blah, blah, blah, which, if that's normative, that's a direct contradiction of what He says in 1 Corinthians 7, that if a woman is unmarried, it's better for them to remain unmarried. So, Paul's command to widows in Ephesus in 1 Timothy 5 to remarry seems to have a certain situational component, which again, we're speculating, we're piecing stuff together, but given the pervasive influence of wealthy, powerful, virgin priestesses in the Artemis cult that would have shaped the ideology of that city, it does make sense for Paul to, it seems like he's addressing

a specific situation there. Now again, that's chapter five, whatever, blah, blah, blah, but that's just, it does add more evidence that He is addressing certain situational things happening in Ephesus in 1 Timothy 2. And that's part of what I mean by this schizophrenic moment. Either we're left with scriptures that contradict themselves, or we need to start asking that question of normative versus situational. And if in the city of Corinth, which I've been there too, and granted, it takes a ferry ride, but they're both Greek cities, they're both Hellenistic by culture,

they're both dealing with the pantheon of the Greek and Roman gods, for Paul to tell one set of widows to remarry and tell another set of widows not to remarry, this has got to be situational. At least that part of the message. What do you do about the Greek word gar in verse 13? Four, which most often means the reason. The reason for women not teaching exercising authority over a man is because Adam was created first. Could you not have both things? Yes, he's addressing certain situational things, but he still does root it in creation.

I mean, if we say, well, yes, he's using the creation story to combat some creation story, whether it's pro-Denostic or something with the Artemis cult, it's still rooted in creation. Like does that not suggest something more normative? Do you still, let me ask, do you define that to be a strong argument for the complimentarian view, but just not determinative for that viewpoint in your mind? My problem with,

my problem with the conclusion, first of all, I find Paul's progression in this argument, a pretty rough ride, which is not unusual for Paul, right? And it's not unusual for the genre either. He knows exactly who he's talking to. This is conversational in tone. This is not a law code, right? So not necessarily cold and smooth and all sorts of things. So I do find it a rough ride. I agree with you that if he is appealing to creation for the sake of women can't teach, yeah, I've got a problem. But if he's appealing to creation for the sake of women who are affirming this false doctrine in the Ephesian church can't teach, then I don't have a problem. And here's

my gig. Priscilla taught in the Ephesian church. We know that based on Acts. We know that she was there for what, two years? And that Priscilla and Aquila are, you know, they're a famous teaching team all over the Mediterranean. They've done time with Paul. They've suffered with Paul, and they keep bouncing into each other in different setups.

In fact, I think this would make an awesome movie, by the way. But, yeah, but as, well, I'm thinking actually of their entire set of teamwork trying to transform the Mediterranean. But my point is, and you know this argument well, whenever their names are listed, her name always comes first. Not always, but like four out of six times.

Yes, that's true. Significantly it comes first. So what are we gonna do with that? Well, we're looking at Paul and his various co-laborers and we're seeing Paul and Barnabas, Paul and Timothy, Paul and Mark, and we are intuitively recognizing that Paul is the leading character in those teams. With Priscilla, and the fact that her name isn't always listed first, we're going to see a more egalitarian setup between she and her husband and their gifting

and their ministry, but her name does come first on a regular basis. Which is unique. That's odd for the women to be named. It is. It is odd. And so we can conclude that she is the more gifted of the two. We can conclude that she has a higher caste. Yeah, that's one of the arguments that can be leveled here. That she's wealthier, this sort of thing. But again, we're talking about Paul. And Paul couldn't care less what your caste is or how wealthy you are. So why is he listing her name first and why in the book of Acts is her name being listed first? If nothing else, we know that she is actively teaching in the Ephesian church.

Can we agree on that? Well, okay, so that's based on Acts 18, is it 26, where her and Priscilla and Aquila pull Apollos aside privately and explain to him the way of God more accurately. It doesn't use the word teaching there and it is in a private setting. This is the supplementary explanation. So do we know that she was actually publicly teaching men based on the fact that her and Aquila took Apollos aside privately and simply explained to him the way of God more accurately. It seems to come short of actually saying she was teaching regularly in the church.

Hmm. And do you buy that? I plead the fifth. Do you have to find out? Well, I can say fifth. You have to find out in my... Well, I can say that. Okay. You can find out in two seconds when I send you my chapter on those passages. But that is at least the...

That's the argument. The argument that it's going too far to say she exercise a public teaching role. So if she'd been teaching in someone's living room, she'd be OK just not teaching from a pulpit? Is that the idea? Well, I see what you're doing here, because all teaching was in a living room. There were no pulpits in the early house church movement. Well, and on top of that, Paul is pulling women

out of the living rooms in Timothy. He's saying no more living rooms, no more teaching at all. Right? In Ephesus, yeah. I mean, there is a question whether he's making a, is he putting a ban on all women teaching in Ephesus? Is it a certain select kind of women teaching? Is it the rich women? Is he have the kind of wealthy, like, you know, the wealthy women in first Timothy two nine to 15 that he's

thinking of, or is it all women? I think that those are questions that one needs to wrestle with. Okay, can we actually move? Oh man, I wish I had three hours with you Sandy. I do have another thing in 20 minutes. We can do another one. We need to do several. First Timothy three, the qualifications for an overseer seem to presume that an overseer will be male, because Paul says that one of the qualifications is that the overseer must be a husband of

one wife, or literally a one-woman man. He does not say, and also, if it's a woman, she must be a one-husband woman. Does the qualification of overseer presume that an overseer will be a man? And I guess my word presume is doing a lot of work there. Maybe that's where you're going to jump in. Well, I do think the assumption in the ancient world is that men lead. I think that's the assumption. I think that's the cultural and societal norm, which we still have an awful lot of that in our cultural and societal norms.

So in light of that, I'm going to turn your argument against you here. Do you like that? But in light of that, the fact that Paul is working with women on a regular basis as Romans 16, as deacons, as apostles, the fact that he's got women hosting house churches, I'm thinking Lydia, I'm thinking Joanna, the fact that he's got Priscilla and Aquila traveling with him and teaching with him should actually be shouting at us that this is a radical move against the norms of the day. I'm thinking back to a Billy Graham story, right?

When Billy Graham shows up in the deep South to give one of his great crusades and looks out on the audience and sees that there are velvet dividers between the white crowd and the black crowd. And Billy gets down off the platform and he takes down the dividers. Now today, if you go on half a dozen websites,

people will scream at Billy for being a bigot because he didn't go further. If you step back into the 1950s, early 1960s, what he did was radical and it was courageous. And it was the beginning of a revolution. When we look back on what Paul's doing in the first century, dare I say it was radical, it was courageous, and it was the beginning of a revolution.

So do you think it's fair to say that Paul at 1 Timothy 3 is presuming, I mean, it's just, it's kind of like, you know, a friend of mine compared it to, if in 1950, your friend recommended a doctor and you asked a question, well, is he a good doctor? And is he a good man? Is he faithful to his wife? He would say, yes, Is he faithful to his wife? He would say, yes, he's faithful to his wife. You would just assume the doctor was a man. In the 1950s. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think I just actually looked this up.

I think 5% of doctors in the UK at that time were females. So I'm 95% male. But there's a difference between presuming and prescribing. That's the question I think when we deal with the qualifications for overseer, is Paul thinking men, women, and is he proscribing, prohibiting women for occupying and overseer? Or is he just simply assuming that

those who would be qualified to be overseers in almost every case would be a male household head who would be married with children and therefore he must manage his children well, he must be faithful to his spouse, blah, blah, blah. But he's not deliberately prohibiting single men or single married men with only one child, you know, because he says, manage your children, plural, right? So, yes, he's presuming a situation that is largely true, but he's not prohibiting women from occupying that position. Would that be how you would...? And the reason I would say yes, but the reason I'm saying that is not based on that particular passage. Based on that particular passage, I can't tell.

But when I take Paul and I put him into the larger context of the New Testament, I see that either Paul is contradicting himself, and what are you doing to us, Paul? Or he must not have been prohibiting women in leadership, because we've got a Paul who is working with women in positions of leadership. We've got a Paul, and this transitions to our other problem passage, who in 1 Corinthians 12 through 14, and here's where the assemblies of God background comes in handy, is giving his Magna Opus on the spiritual gifts and how they're to be exercised

in the church. And in his Magna Opus, he has nothing to say about male versus female. He only has to say what the Holy Spirit chooses. And he is recognizing that the Holy Spirit can gift anyone that he wants. So we've got in, you know, 1 Corinthians 11, I know you know this passage, when women are prophesying, they are commanded to cover their heads. So, you only prophesy, well, in Paul's letter, you're only prophesying in a public arena. And I'm sure there are people out there who want to argue

that 1 Corinthians 11, women are only prophesying in private. Well, they don't know that. No, they're not prophesying. And 12 through 14, it's all about public ministry. And these women are prophesying all about public ministry. And these women are prophesying frequently enough that there's a dress code. Come on. Another thing that I learned in the assemblies, dress codes for women, always essential. I'm always intrigued by how extensive the dress codes are for women and how you guys get away with no patch pockets. How is that? Sandy, I want to wrap things up here, but can I keep you for a few minutes for our extra innings conversation? Yeah, yeah. I want to ask you some more personal stuff about this whole topic. Let's do it. Yeah. Yeah. So thanks

for being with us. Thanks for talking about these important issues and thanks to your audience. If you would like to listen to our extra innings conversation then head over to patreon.com forward slash theologyneurah to become a member of the Theology in the Raw community and get access to all the extra innings conversations and other premium content. This show is part of the Converge Podcast Network.