Voices: Inerrancy and a woman who pastored children

This is the seventh in a multi-part series. Tap/click here to start at the beginning of the series.

A confession

I hold the authority and the inerrancy of Scripture as dearly as anything I believe. They are not bargaining chips for me. And it is precisely because I hold them so dearly that I have come to the conviction I will lay before you now, with some fear and a great deal of prayer.

I believe the path the Southern Baptist Convention has taken does not protect those two doctrines. I believe it endangers them.

I know how that sounds. I know to many, anyone who questions the new restrictions on women is already suspect, already drifting, already soft on the Bible. So, I will not ask for your trust. I will show you my work and let you judge it.

The question comes down to one contested word

Last week, we saw the verse speaks of teaching, not preaching, and Paul had the word for preach and chose not to use it. This week, we go further into the kind of teaching he actually forbade. Because out of more than 31,000 verses in our Bible, this whole conversation now circles one word.

The word is authentein. It appears exactly once in the entire New Testament, here and nowhere else.

When a word appears only once, we cannot compare Scripture with Scripture to settle it. We are left to weigh its rare uses in other ancient texts and to listen for what the rest of Scripture tells us as we seek to understand and proclaim the truth. And on this word, there is significant, legitimate disagreement.

This is not a liberal talking point. The most thorough scholarly study of the word, written by complementarian H. Scott Baldwin, concluded only context can decide its meaning, because the word carries a whole range of senses. And what a range.

Our English Bibles, every one of them produced by faithful translators, cannot agree. Some render it “exercise authority,” a neutral act. Others render it “assume authority,” “usurp,” “domineer,” “lord it over.” Those are not neutral at all.

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The same Greek word lands in our most trusted translations as both an innocent thing and a sinful one. Respected evangelical scholars who hold Scripture without error land on both sides of it. That is simply the honest state of the question.

There is no universally acknowledged plain reading of this verse. The word, and phrase around it, is too contested for that, and the scholars who have studied it hardest are the ones who say so most plainly.

My conviction on it

That said, I have my own conviction. I believe Paul means the domineering kind, the seizing of authority, not the neutral or generic use of the term. My position rests on several of the classic pathways for interpretation Baptists and other sincere expositors have used for generations.

First, the strongest reason is the word itself. When Paul wants to speak of ordinary authority, he has a word for it, exousia, and he uses it constantly across his letters. He does not use it here.

Here, and nowhere else in anything Paul ever wrote, he reaches for authentein. Paul almost always uses exousia when he intends ordinary authority. His decision to use the otherwise unknown authentein instead should at least make us slow down before assuming he meant the ordinary exercise of authority. The change is the signal.

Second, there is the message of the letter itself. Paul is making war against false teachers in Ephesus who were grasping control that was not theirs, and the Lord behind the letter called all authority servanthood and forbade every disciple, including men, from “lording over” others. In that context, the word points to domineering, not to the ordinary exercise of a gift.

Third, the broader story of the New Testament pushes me over the edge. And even if you are not sure I am right about the word, this larger argument does not need me to be right.

The strongest reply

I owe the other side one more thing before we go on, because there is a reply here stronger than any objection I have answered yet, and you should have it at full strength.

The most careful complementarian scholars do not finally rest their case on the lone word; they rest it on the sentence.

Paul writes that he does not permit a woman to teach, and then, joined by a single small connector, to exercise authority over a man. The argument runs that when this construction binds two activities, it binds two of a kind, both regarded the same way, both good or both bad, never one of each.

Teaching, they note, is a good thing all through these letters. So, the activity tied to it must be good as well, ordinary authority rightly held, not the sinful seizing of it, and the word need never mean “domineer” at all. It is a serious argument, made by serious people who love the Bible, and it deserves better than a wave of the hand.

Here is mine. The rule about binding two of a kind, even granting it, cannot tell us which kind we have until we already know how Paul is using “teach,” and that is the very thing in dispute.

So, look where this letter lives. From its opening page, it is a war against teaching of the wrong kind, against those who want to be teachers of the law but understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make their confident assertions (1 Timothy 1:7).

Paul warns of a different doctrine, of myths and endless genealogies, of households ruined by what is taught in them. A letter this soaked in bad teaching does not hand us “teach” as an automatically golden word.

And if the teaching Paul has in view in our verse is the unauthorized, self-appointed instruction of the Ephesian troublemakers, then the very rule the other side invokes now works for the reading I am defending. Two of a kind, indeed, and both stained by the same disorder: a teaching that was never theirs to give, and a grasp at authority that was never theirs to take.

So, the sentence does not settle it any more than the word did. We are returned to where the most honest scholars on every side keep landing. The word will not decide this alone, and neither will the grammar. Only the whole of Scripture can. So, let us go there.

Letting the rest of Scripture speak

When a single word is genuinely uncertain, the Baptist way has always been to let the rest of Scripture speak.

First Timothy was among the last letters Paul ever wrote. By the time he wrote it, the church had been alive for 30 years, and his earlier letters were already circulating on three continents as inspired instruction. The pattern was already set.

We have walked those decades together these seven weeks, generally in the order the early church experienced them: Joel’s promise that sons and daughters would prophesy. Mary’s Magnificat, theology the church has sung for 2,000 years. Jesus seats Mary in the disciple’s place over Martha’s protest. He sends Mary Magdalene as the first herald of the resurrection.

The women are in the room when the Spirit falls, and soon in the streets preaching Christ to the nations. In that very moment, Peter declares what these women are doing is the thing Joel foretold, fulfilled before his eyes.

Luke tells us Philip’s daughters are prophets in the early church.

Paul himself assumes women will pray and prophesy aloud in the gathered assembly and tells them only the right way to do it, never that they must stop. Phoebe, Priscilla, Junia, Lydia, each is commended for real work.

This is the order in which the first church experienced the ministry of women and affirmed it. The pattern came first, established and blessed by Paul’s own hand, before the letter to Timothy existed.

So, whatever 1 Timothy 2 means, it cannot mean something that erases what Jesus had done, Peter had affirmed, Luke had recorded, and Paul himself had already ordered into the worship of the church.

A later, contested phrase must be read in the light of the clear and settled pattern. It is simply not legitimate to rewrite the first 30 years of the church’s life in order to force them to conform to your preference among one of two possible readings of a single sentence written around A.D. 62.

This, I believe, is the hermeneutical mistake at the center of our conflict. It makes no sense to settle on one arbitrary conclusion about 1 Timothy 2 and then retrofit the rest of the New Testament to conform to it. It feels to me like reading the Bible backward.

The other verse

I said at the start, this comes down to one contested word, and someone will object that there is a second verse, the one in 1 Corinthians about silence. Let me take it up, because it does not work against me. It makes my case for me.

“The women should keep silent in the churches,” Paul writes. “They are not permitted to speak” (1 Corinthians 14:34).

Read by itself it sounds total. But it cannot be read by itself, and the reason is simply that Paul wrote it.

Three chapters earlier, in the same letter, to the same church, he takes for granted that a woman will pray and prophesy aloud in the gathered assembly, and his only concern is how she does it, not whether she does it (1 Corinthians 11:5).

A man does not forbid in his 14th chapter what he assumed and regulated in his 11th. If “silent” means a woman may never make a sound in worship, Paul contradicts himself inside a single letter, and we are back to a Bible at war with itself.

So, “silent” cannot mean that. It means what the whole chapter is about: order. Paul is governing the weighing of prophecy and the noise of interruption. In the same breath, he tells tongue-speakers to be silent, prophets to be silent and yield the floor, and the disruptive to carry their questions home (1 Corinthians 14:28, 14:30, 14:34-35).

Three groups are told to be silent in that one chapter, each inside a particular disorder, and not one of the three is silenced for life.

The second verse turns out to teach exactly what the first one does. A local trouble, addressed. A manner corrected, not a gift revoked. Two texts, one lesson, and it is not the lesson the amendment drew from them.

The real danger

Now, take the hard reading of I Timothy 2. Say the verse means a woman may never teach or hold any authority over a man, ever. Now, watch what you must do to the rest of your Bible.

You must explain away Priscilla, who took the gifted preacher Apollos aside and taught him the way of God more accurately, with Luke recording it as a good thing.

The Christians reading Paul’s letter, and Timothy himself, knew Priscilla and Apollos. They knew she is named first, and that she corrected the theology of a powerful preacher. None of them would have raised a hand to ask Paul whether Priscilla and Aquila should be put out of the church.

The generation reading 1 Timothy had watched women prophesy in worship for 30 years. No one imagined Philip’s daughters should suddenly fall silent, or that they had somehow been prophesying authoritatively for the women in the room but not the men.

And Prescilla does not stand alone, though she alone would be enough. You would still have to explain away Huldah, to whom the high priest and the king’s own officials were sent to receive the word of the Lord.

You would have to explain away Deborah’s leadership, Joel’s prophesy, Peter’s sermon, Philip’s daughters, Paul’s own earlier words, and the Lord himself seating Mary where disciples are trained to teach.

The hard reading does not just strain one verse. It sets Paul against Paul, and all of them against the Lord’s own choice to place Mary at his feet, and it makes the Bible contradict itself. And a Bible that contradicts itself is not an inerrant Bible.

Many believe they are guarding Scripture by holding the hard line. They are doing the opposite, letting one disputed phrase overrule the clear voice of the whole counsel of God. The other reading requires fewer exceptions and better preserves the larger witness of Scripture.

It lets every passage tell the truth at once. That is not the liberal reading. It is the one that takes the Bible most seriously.

The verse, read both ways

So, here is the whole verse, read the two ways, and you can feel how much rides on that one word.

Read as ordinary authority, it says: “I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man; rather, she is to remain quiet.”

Read as domineering authority, it says: “I do not permit a woman to teach a man in a domineering or self-asserting way; rather, she is to have a quiet and settled spirit.”

One forbids the woman. The other forbids the domineering. Both come from faithful translators working from the same Greek, and the verse alone will not tell you which Paul meant. Everything we have walked through these seven weeks tells me it is the second.

Why Eve

Someone will point to what Paul says next, that Adam was formed first, then Eve, and that Eve was deceived. Surely, they say, that settles it.

But look at what Paul is doing. He has just said, “Let a woman learn.” Then he reaches for Eve, whose deception stands as Scripture’s great warning about the danger of being misled. Why? The flow of Paul’s argument naturally invites the reader to see learning as the remedy to deception.

The lesson Paul draws is not that women cannot be trusted. It is the very thing he just commanded: Let her learn, so she is not deceived as Eve was, so she is not easy prey for the false teachers tearing through Ephesus. The remedy for deception is not silence. It is education. Paul points to Eve, not to lock the door, but to explain why he just opened it.

But notice where the other reading has to go. If Paul is saying women must not teach because Eve was deceived, then he is saying women as women are more easily fooled, more prone to error, less to be trusted with the truth. That is a hard thing to put in print, but it is exactly what the reading requires.

And it cannot be what Paul means, because the same Bible that records Eve’s deception also records the risen Christ entrusting the very first proclamation of the resurrection to a woman, sending Mary Magdalene to carry the news to the apostles themselves.

God does not hand the gospel’s first and most important proclamation to a sex he considers too gullible to be trusted with it. The deception of Eve was a tragedy of the untaught. The commissioning of Mary was a declaration of confidence in women.

The heavier word

And let no one mistake this for a women’s issue. It is the gospel. If the verse warns a woman against grasping a control that is not hers, the men should feel the floor shift, because the same Lord lays the heavier charge on us.

Husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her. Leaders, do not lord it over the flock. The domineering heart is a sin in a woman and a sin in a man, and it is as often men as women who need to hear it.

Without the interpretation I have just put forward, we do not have a clear text that warns women of the danger of misusing power, and we know this is a temptation that comes to us all.

Her name

I came to Kaufman needing two people to shepherd, one over our students, one over our children. Two I had discipled out of that first youth group agreed to join me in Kaufman to do the work, each with nearly a decade of experience. I called the young man our student pastor.

And I turned to the woman who had prophesied in that clapboard room, founded a ministry, learned and then taught, and earned a congregation’s trust across 10 years, and I called her what she already was. I did not call her overseer or elder. She was neither. I called her our children’s pastor.

What else would have been honest? There are no coordinators or directors in the New Testament. There are shepherds, and she was shepherding. I could not, in good conscience, hang a lesser word on her to satisfy a rule I cannot find in God’s word.

I care little for titles and offices. Jesus seemed wary of how we hunger for them. A church needs an overseer, a first servant willing to lay his life down for the flock. After that, we are organized around gifts and the leaders our people have learned to trust.

Honestly, in that same moment, would you have called Steve the student pastor and Beth the children’s director? And then told your church, in good conscience, the Bible reserves the word “pastor” for men, when the words it actually reserves are overseer and elder? I could not. I cannot today.

After 10 years of ministry among us, Beth died at 36 of pancreatic cancer.

I officiated her funeral. I sat with her mother, her husband, and her children. I watched a church full of grown men and women weep over a children’s pastor, because that is what she was to them, and there was no other word for it.

The children she taught to love Jesus are teenagers and young adults now, and some of them are walking with God today because a young woman opened a Bible and showed them they were loved and bought by Christ.

So, hear me carefully, because this is no longer abstract to us. As the Lord is our witness, we will not stand before the God who gifted her and call the ministry he empowered before our eyes a problem to be corrected. Her church family was not confused about what we saw.

She was a gifted pastor. She functioned as a pastor. I was her God-empowered and church-entrusted overseer. There is no scriptural ground on which to condemn that work, or to demand we call what she did “directing,” or any other word the Bible never gave us for it.

The hand I am holding out

The conviction I have set before you has been our church’s for 26 years. After 140 years, we are 12 months from no longer being a Southern Baptist church. Now you know why.

It is not because I trust the Bible less than Wayne Grudem or Al Mohler, or because I am less careful with Scripture or less in love with Christ. It is because I read the same Bible, with the same seriousness, and cannot in good conscience go where the SBC has gone.

Our church never affirmed the 2000 Baptist Faith and Message, and what we feared then has come to pass: A confession built around a use of the word “pastor” that Scripture does not support has now been used as a knife to divide instead of a vision to inspire.

If the authors meant “overseer,” that is the word they should have used. It would have prevented these errors and spared good women across the country and around the world indignities they have not deserved. It gives me no joy to have been right. It only grieves me.

But I am not writing in despair. I am writing because I love our Texas Baptist family, and I believe we can hold both an orthodox faith and a generous spirit. Unity in essential matters and purpose. Freedom in nonessentials and preference. And the benefit of the doubt in everything between.

We have always been a different people, doggedly committed to giving each church the dignity of its own decisions.

Mary Hill Davis, Betty Criswell, Kay Warren, Tillie Burgin—all Texans, all turned loose to pour out their gifts because someone had the wisdom not to stop them.

Your church has women pastoring, teaching, leading, launching, and prophesying right now. Whatever you call them, however you send them, that is your decision, not ours to make and not ours to police. You see what we cannot, and you hear God about the needs in front of you in ways we never could.

I am not asking you to agree with me about every word. Deny Jesus as the only way to God, or reject Scripture as his word, and we would have something to settle. This is not that.

Almost exactly 300 years ago, a few hundred refugees crowded onto a nobleman’s land in Saxony and called the place Herrnhut. They came from everywhere. Lutherans, Reformed, Schwenkfelders, Pietists, and the scattered children of Jan Hus, people who agreed on Christ and little else. And they fought.

For five years, they argued over doctrine and practice and whose way was right, until the young count who had taken them in, Nikolaus von Zinzendorf, had seen enough.

He did not hand them a creed. He gathered them around a simple agreement about how people who love Jesus ought to live together, and on a spring morning in 1727, they signed it and laid their quarrels down for the sake of Christ’s mission in the world. They turned their focus to praying for a lost world.

Months later, at a Communion table, the Spirit fell on them as surely as he fell at Pentecost. And out of that small, unlikely, finally united village, God lit the modern missionary movement, a fire that has been spreading toward the ends of the Earth ever since.

That is the path that has always borne the most fruit, and it has never been the easy one. It cost those believers their certainty about a hundred secondary things. In exchange, it gave them a mighty witness to the nations.

So, I am holding out my hand, because there are too many in Texas and around the world who are lost and facing an eternity in hell without Jesus Christ.

We cannot afford to give our time and energies to these squabbles, and we need every Baptist man and woman to rally to the need of this hour. Our differences are small. Let’s shake hands and recommit to pursuing the work God has given us.

This is the final installment in a multi-part series. To follow the full conversation, read these posts in order:

Brent Gentzel gives leadership to First Baptist Church in Kaufman. The views expressed in this opinion article are those of the author.