10-2-1 The Bible And Equality

Mr. Duncan Heaster’s First Speech

Jacquie, Ladies and Gentlemen, Good Evening.

I believe that there’s a lot of very sincere people here tonight. We are sincere Christians, I assume, all of us here. The question that I would like to put to us to start off with is, are we really serious about our relationship with God? Do we really take our Christianity seriously? Because if we do, then we are going to want to know what God’s message for us is, about these issues that we are talking about tonight. And so that immediately raises the question of where are we going to go as an authority to find guidance on these issues.

Now there’s a lot of very, very confused people in the Christian world today: people who are genuine people but who are so disturbed and so confused about which decision to come to on this issue of women in the church. With absolute respect to Jacquie I would say that there’s no good looking at church leaders to give you any guidance, because some are saying one thing and some another. For example, there are a number in the Church of England who are saying that the Holy Spirit is guiding them to ordain women to be priests in the church. And yet it was only two or three weeks ago when I was contacted by an Evangelical Group here in Dudley, who said they would like to come along, because they felt the Holy Spirit was telling them that in fact it was wrong for women to speak in the church at all.

And so we have sincere people each feeling that the Holy Spirit is telling them something actually contradictory. So what are we going to do about that? Well, the perspective we want to give to you tonight is a fundamentally Biblical perspective because we don’t think there is any point in just saying, “Well I feel the Holy Spirit is telling me this,” and “She feels the Holy Spirit is telling her that.” We need somewhere to go to find an ultimate authority; we need a touchstone, and we submit that that is the revealed word of God in the Bible.

Now one thing is quite plain from even a cursory reading of the Bible, and that is that in no way are men able to use the Bible to in some way make themselves superior in any sense to women. We submit that the Bible has often been misused in that way.

So we believe then that, in terms of salvation, man and woman in the church are completely equal, and yet we also believe that (as the New Testament teaches) within the church the man typifies, or represents, the Lord Jesus Christ, and the woman represents the church. And the same positive, dynamic interaction that there is between Christ and his church should be seen between male and female within the church.

We are very concerned that there seems to be a lot of radical, feminist philosophy creeping into mainstream Christianity and mainstream Christian thinking. We would submit that throughout history the views of a corrupt world have entered and corrupted true Christianity. The growth of this feminist philosophy throughout this century has been paralleled in orthodox Christianity, by increasing pressure for male and female to have exactly equal roles within the church.

Now I would like to quote the words of a leading feminist; she says, “The most remarkable achievement of feminism is the breakdown of family. The family is not sacred, the family unit must be disintegrated.” Yet I put to you that the family is a Bible taught, divine institution. Therefore there is something radically the matter with feminism as a philosophy, and it is our concern that feminist philosophy is entering Christianity unchallenged; we would expect to at least see a few warning bells being sounded.

So there’s a lot of talk about equality, and the Orthodox Church of England Christian position now seems to increasingly be that male and female roles in the church are completely equal, completely equal. Therefore if a man can be a priest, so can a woman. And yet we would severely question whether the New Testament actually teaches that male and female have equal roles in the church. We are not saying that a man has got a better role than a woman. Far from it. We are saying there are different roles, not equal roles.

Now, for example, if we are going to say that man and woman have got exactly equal roles in the congregation of God, there are some difficult questions I think we have to answer. For example, why then in the letter of Peter is Sarah held up as an example to female believers in that she called Abraham her husband, “her Lord”? Why was Eve given a different punishment to Adam if man and woman were created totally equal? Surely their punishments were related of their intended roles. Peter again speaks of the wife as “the weaker vessel,” and he encourages the husband in Christ to treat the woman in Christ accordingly. God created Eve, we are told, to be a help for her husband. And he told her (Genesis 3 v 16), “Thy desire shall be to thy husband and he shall rule over thee.” Now that doesn’t sound to me like equal roles within the congregation of God.

Talking still about this idea of equality, I would like us to think about 1 Corinthians 11 v 3 where Paul says, “The head of the woman is the man,” and in the same way he says. “The head of Christ is God”. So then in the same way as God is the head of Christ, and yet in some ways God and Christ have certain elements of equality: in some sense Christ and the Father are one, in the same way there are certain elements of equality between male and female in Christ, and yet we know that ultimately the Son (as we are told in 1 Corinthians 15) will be subject to the Father and that God will be all in all.

Now in passing, one of the themes that I would like to come out of this dialogue is that our attitude to basic doctrine is reflected in practical issues such as the place of women in the church.

Now if Jesus is directly equivalent to God, if Jesus is God, then it follows that there is a direct equivalence of role between male and female. Now we don’t believe that Jesus is God himself; he is the Son of God, and that therefore in the same way, that relationship between God and Christ is reflected in the relationship between man and woman in Christ. So then, the man in Christ is to be the head of the woman in Christ.

There has been a lot of discussion amongst feminist theologians about what that word ‘head’ really means. But it just means what it really implies. The Greek root that it is from, ‘kapto,’ occurs in quite a lot of well known words; for example:

Caption, a heading, a head over; capital, a head city; captain, a leader.

What I want to do is to go through the Bible and have a look at the Biblical perspective on women. And what we are going to see is that from Genesis, through the Law of Moses, through the Prophets, through the teaching of Jesus, through the New Testament church, there is no indication, none whatsoever, that the attitude of the Bible concerning women is influenced by the surrounding culture regarding women at the time in which it was written

So let’s start in Genesis. God created Adam. Now God is a real personal being, he is not a puff of smoke up in the sky somewhere, he is a real personal being. And as such, God invites us to see him as having gender. We are left really in no doubt as to what that gender is: “God the Father,” can really mean nothing else. Now the angels, which are the most common form of God’s manifestation in the Old Testament, are always described as male, and Jesus who was the express image of God’s person, was also male.

Now it seems to me that if we are going to argue for a complete equality of role between male and female, then we are forced to reject this idea of God’s personality, and we are forced to rewrite the Bible excluding these references to God as a Father, to God as a male figure. So God created Adam the first man in his image and likeness, and the woman, his wife, was later taken out of the side of the man, and later God ordained that the man should rule over the woman. And so Paul comments on that in Ephesians 5; he says the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church. And in 1 Timothy chapter 2 w 1113 Paul talks about the fact that Adam was first formed, and then Eve. And he gives that as a reason for the woman learning in silence with all subjection, and the woman not teaching in the church. Now that’s a crucial point. Paul’s commands there, speaking by inspiration we believe, Paul’s commands there concerning the silence of women in the church were not culturally determined just at the time he was writing. He was basing his reasons on the typology of Genesis, which stands for all time.

So then, what we have got to do then in the church is to live out this typology. The man to typify Christ and the woman to typify the church of Christ. So it is not a question of the man lording it over the woman in any kind of oppressive way. I mean let’s face it; Christ doesn’t do that to his church, does he? The same sort of dynamic, positive interaction that there is between Christ and his church should be seen between male and female in Christ. I believe it is true, that that is what happens when you have a good biblical foundation for what you are trying to do.

But our attitude to the silence of women in the church, in church meetings, does not just rest on typology. There are explicit New Testament commands concerning it, one of which we have seen already, and secondly, there’s Old Testament precedent. So we have looked at Genesis. Let’s go on now to the Law of Moses. And we want to show that the commandments of the Law of Moses, which were an expression of the spirit of the mind of God, were actually radically different to the surrounding culture concerning women.

Now under the law both male and female could offer sacrifices. In the surrounding cultures religious sacrifice was largely male oriented. Under the Law of Moses a woman could come and offer a sacrifice to God without the husband’s presence or without even his approval, and that was something radically different from the concept of a woman’s place in the surrounding world. God commanded that if Israel went to war and they took a female captive she was to be given a very high level of moral and ethical protection. For example, immediate intercourse with her was absolutely forbidden and indeed she could only be married after quite a lengthy procedure, and that was absolutely different, a far cry, from any surrounding attitudes concerning women. In the surrounding culture a woman could be divorced just as quick as that, and yet under the Law of Moses she could only be divorced for highly specific reasons with the issue of a bill of divorce. All the people, male and female in Israel, were in covenant relationship with God. And again we point out that the local religions didn’t have that feature. The covenant was between the god and the male leaders of the nations.

So we should have established the point that the attitude of the Law of Moses was quite disregarding of the attitude towards women in the local culture at the time in which it was given. Despite that, despite the fact that God was obviously not concerned about fitting in with the surrounding views about women, the priests were strictly male; indeed there was the death penalty for anyone else who tried to be a priest. That’s just worth thinking about in the context of ordaining female priests.

Now the priesthood of the Old Testament pointed forwards to the eldership or the teachers of the Christian church. In the same way as the Old Testament priesthood was definitely male, so you find the same basic idea in the New Testament. So the spirit of God reveals a consistent attitude concerning the place of women within the congregation of God. And it is worth noting that the standards of the Mosaic Law concerning women were not changed throughout the Old Testament history of Israel.

Now what we are being asked to accept by theologians today in the Church of England is that in fact God’s commands concerning women change over time, in accordance with the attitude of the surrounding world. But that has never been the case in the past. Towards the end of Old Testament history there lived Plato. He was pushing very strongly this idea of complete equality of role for male and female. And yet God didn’t suddenly decide that because that’s what people were starting to believe (they were starting to believe that male and female were absolutely equal and there was no role difference within any organisation) he didn’t then change the laws of his people. God is not influenced by the surrounding views of people concerning women.

Now throughout Old Testament history, the surrounding culture was to not mention women, was to really not emphasise the place of women in society. And yet the Old Testament actually abounds with accounts of women of distinction. The mention of women is not suppressed in the Old Testament, whereas in contemporary literature it certainly is. Esther, Ruth, Deborah, Miriam, many, many prominent women are mentioned.