I have addressed and responded to several criticisms of and challenges to my book Icons of Christ and its arguments in favor or women’s ordination and women’s equality through several essays on my blog. However, there is one crucial passage that I have not yet addressed at length – Paul’s assertion in 1 Timothy 2:12: “I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man; rather, she is to remain quiet” (ESV). I have made occasional references to this passage, particularly in addressing hermeneutical issues, but I have not discussed it in detail. So with apologies for a lengthy delay, I now turn to this passage.

Preliminary Reflections

Before examining the passage, some initial issues need to be addressed.

First, the disagreements about this passage are not primarily about exegesis, but about hermeneutics. I had addressed this in previous essays. For example, in a previous essay, I made a crucial distinction between “master passages” or “master stories” and “paradigms.” A “master passage” is a passage of Scripture that is crucial for one’s own understanding of an issue, and a “paradigm” is the interpretive key to the interpretation of the “master passage.” My previous essay to this makes clear the master passages that are central to my understanding of what Scripture teaches about what it means for not only men but also women to resemble Jesus Christ, and the corresponding “paradigm” is one of cruciformity, mutual service, and mutual submission.

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Since publishing two books recently, I have learned that the only thing that I can be certain of as an author is that the things that I spend the most time worrying about when writing the book will largely be ignored, and the things that I think relatively unimportant, and on which I spend less time, are the things that others will think are the most important, and will devote all of their time to when reviewing the book.

In the book I recently published (with my colleague Joel Scandrett) on the doctrine of the Atonement, the chapter on Anselm’s doctrine of satisfaction was, for me, one of the least interesting chapters. I wrote that there are currently two very different (and conflicting) interpretations of Anselm, but concluded that Anselm’s real significance was as a transitional figure. Anselm was more important for what later writers did with his views, and I ended up focusing more on successors like Thomas Aquinas, Karl Barth, and Thomas Torrance on the one hand, and John Calvin and Charles Hodge on the other. I was surprised when an otherwise generally positive reviewer complained that our book had not paid sufficient attention to Anselm’s doctrine of satisfaction, and that the reviewer really did not seem all that interested in those later writers to whom we had devoted much more attention. Of course, the reviewer’s own understanding of the atonement largely coincided with Anselm’s satisfaction theory.

Similarly, when I wrote my book Icons of Christ on women’s ordination,¹ I included as an illustration in what I regarded as the least significant chapter in the entire book, an informal logical syllogism which I knew at the time was not a formal syllogism, but whose point I assumed was self-evident, and which, regardless, was nothing more than an illustration along the way to making a point that was not directly related to the formal validity of the syllogism (15-16). To my surprise (and frustration), a reviewer focused on that syllogism almost as if it were the most important point in the book, with the consequence that a social media flurry broke out, the point of which seemed to be that my book could be disregarded because I had based my entire argument on an invalid syllogism. To the contrary, that illustration took up a paragraph, could have been entirely removed from the book, and nothing in my argument would have been affected.

If one were to ask me what was the point of giving the title Icons of Christ to a book arguing in favor of ordaining women to church office, what were the key biblical passages that supported my argument, and what were the most important chapters in the book, I would have responded that the key issue of the book has to do with how it is that not only ordained officers of the church, but all Christians, resemble Jesus Christ – thus the title Icons of Christ.

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