The Woman's Role In The Church
10 Pages 2488 Words
Passage 1 Timothy 2:11-12
I. Statement of the problem
This passage is on of the most controversial passage from the Scriptures because it talks about the woman’s role in the Church. There are two proposed solutions: some consider that woman has the right to exercise teaching and preaching in the Church while others totally disagree with this view.
Proposed Solutions
A. Egalitarian:
The Egalitarian view says that men and women should be regarded as equals in authority in the home and given equal access to all positions of leadership in the church. The egalitarians claim that the verses in 1 Timothy that says that women cannot be teachers in the church really meant that this was because the women there in Ephesius all happened to be unlearned and ignorant women. The problem was not their gender, it was their lack of education. Now that women are permitted to graduate from seminary, they can become pastors since they are not unlearned anymore.
A common explanation runs along the lines of women cannot have authority because of Eve's mistake. God punished Adam and Eve, and one way of punishing humanity for what they did was to set up male dominance along with slavery to sin. As Christ sets us free from the bondage to sin, God is now finally getting around to setting us free from the bondage of male dominance (http://www.rationalchristianity.net/women.html). Egalitarians claim that the Holy Spirit moved in the Christian churches in the 20th century to wake them up to this new aspect of Christianity
They believe that Galatians 3:28 tells us there is no such thing as male or female in God's eyes but that all of us are one in Christ Jesus. Therefore it doesn't matter if a pastor is a woman or a man. Secondly, some would argue, admonitions in Scripture for wives to submit to their husbands (Ephesians 5:22) and for women to not teach or exercise authority over men (1Timothy 2:12) were written by the Apostle Pau...