10-2-8 Women Keeping Silence

Questions From The Floor

Chairman

Thank you Jacquie.

We have quite a bit of time available to us according to our programme now, and we come to the point where we are going to have an opportunity for our speakers to answer questions that you, the audience, have put to them. I’d just like to tell you what I have done, and that is to empty the two boxes. They were marked clearly one for Jacquie and one for Duncan and I have them on the table here before me.

I would ask you to understand, Ladies and Gentlemen, that neither Duncan or Jacquie have seen the questions before, so therefore they will be answering them according to their understanding of the Scriptures, or according to their persuasion as they see the right way to answer. So if you would accept that they haven’t had a chance to see these questions.

In fact, I have been asked not to alternate the questions one to the other, as it is going to be very difficult to keep track of things. And so I am going to take Duncan again, and ask him some questions that have been presented by yourselves, the audience.

So are you ready Duncan to answer these questions? Thank you. You will appreciate also, Ladles and Gentlemen, that some of the writing is not as clear as it might be. I shall do my best and if you think that I have misunderstood or misinterpreted your question, then do please tell me. The first one I am going to ask Duncan is one I will put to Jacquie a little later because it is actually headed

Duncan/Jacquie:

“1 Corinthians 14 verse 35,” Duncan; “in what way is it a shame for a woman to speak in the church?”

Mr. Duncan Heaster

Well you can take that at face value: that Paul’s saying it’s a shame that a woman should speak in the church, and he defines what he means by speaking in the church; in verse 34 he says, “Let your women keep silence in the churches. . . it is not permitted unto them to speak.”

Now earlier on in this chapter he defines what he means by keeping silence. He tells a man that if he has a certain gilt, sometimes it’s inappropriate to use it, and he says (verse 28) if there’s no interpreter that man should keep silent in the church. So that clearly means not to publicly speak. That’s what silence means in verse 28, and in verse 34 he says women should keep silent, it’s not permitted unto them to speak, and in the context I’d interpret that as speaking publicly.

The idea of it being a shame may possibly be an allusion back to the Garden of Eden where Eve was naked as was Adam, and they walked in shame as a result of her leading Adam into sin. This is possibly, you might think, conjectural; it depends how open your mind is to the idea of typology; but we saw in 1 Timothy 2 that Paul bases his reasoning for why women should be silent, he bases that on what happened in Eden. Now if you like, in Eden you have got a woman teaching a man and the result was they both walked in shame. And so I would suggest that he’s possibly alluding to that here. He’s saying that if a woman teaches in the church now it’s going to bring shame, just like it did back in Eden.

Chairman

Thank you Duncan. My second question for Duncan is this:

“How do you reconcile events concerning, say, Huldah the prophetess and women prophesying and praying, with Paul’s commandment for women to keep silence in the church? There is in the Old Testament, Huldah the prophetess being allowed to prophesy and to speak; how do you reconcile that with New Testament teaching of the Apostle Paul?”

Mr Duncan Heaster

I think I have answered that point in my second speech.