10-2-5 The Basis For Authority

Mr. Duncan Heaster’s Response

Well firstly Jacquie, I would really like to thank you for so much of what you said. I appreciate so much of what you said, and we wouldn’t wish to be in any way destructive or anything like that at all in our response.

Many of the things that were said we would agree with. For example, that Eve was a companion to help Adam, yes we would absolutely agree with that, and a man and a woman are complementary in the body of Christ, we would agree that God intensely values women just as much as he values men, we would absolutely agree with that: that women should work in the church, yes we would agree with that. Jacquie rightly pointed out that there is a certain difference of mentality between male and female, and I would like to just pick that up because I would agree with that. As a school teacher one of my observations is that you put a question to a class, and the girls can intuitively sometimes get the answer, but they can’t always explain the steps that they go through to get there; whereas when the penny eventually drops with the lads, they can eventually explain the steps they’ve taken to get to their conclusion.

Now God knows as well as we do, even better than we do, the male/female difference of mentality, and I would say that that is perhaps related to why God has indicated that one particular sex, it so happens it is the male sex, should be the teachers in the Christian church. Now Jacquie spoke several times about women who felt they had been called by God and had been given certain gifts. She felt that they should be able to use those gifts in the church, and the implication was that if they felt gifted to stand up and teach a congregation, well that is what they should do: that is what God wants them to do.

Now this raises the whole issue of how exactly does God speak to us as his people; how does God call us to do something? Now the Bible is written, we are told, by inspiration so the words that you read are not the words of the men who wrote them but the words of the spirit of God. The words, which we read there in the Bible, are an expression of God’s spirit, his mind, and his power. Now I don’t believe that God would tell us in his word that women shouldn’t teach in the church, for example, and then zap comes the Holy Spirit on to some woman in the church and says, “Now you must stand up and teach in the church.” That just doesn’t hold water because we can’t make God contradict himself. If that is, in fact, how God works, that the spirit tells us one thing in the Bible and then tells us to do something contradictory to that, well then we have no basis for authority. We are going to end up feeling that we have been called to do this, that and the other, saying, “Well the Holy Spirit told me to do it. It doesn’t matter what God’s previous revelation was in the Bible, I’m justified in doing this.”

it’s significant that Jacquie used this word ‘felt’: that Florence Nightingale, for example, felt that she had been called by God. Well all sorts of people feel things, don’t they? They feel they’re doing the right thing for God, and yet it doesn’t necessarily mean that their feelings are the Holy Spirit telling them to do something.

Now some of the reasoning that Jacquie gave for her perspective seemed to hinge around the fact that women had the gifts to do certain things, and therefore they must be allowed to do them. Well, that all presupposes that in fact the Christian church today does actually possess the miraculous gifts of the Holy Spirit; for example, the gift of teaching, or preaching, or speaking in tongues or whatever, the gift of prophecy. And I would submit that there is no real evidence that the Christian church today does possess those gifts of the Holy Spirit. Therefore, even if, even if, women used the gifts of prophecy etc. In the church in the New Testament, that’s no reason for us to do so, because we haven’t got those gifts.

Now Jacquie was quite right to point out that in 1 Corinthians 11 it does speak about women having the gift of prophecy; and yet we have also seen in 1 Corinthians chapter 14 that women shouldn’t teach in the church. Now you can’t quote that just in passing, and use that as some justification for the whole rationale of people teaching in the church without examining it. Now Scripture doesn’t contradict. When it says women mustn’t teach in the church, it can’t contradict the fact that women did have the gift of prophecy. So how did they use it? The only alternatives open, it seems to me, is that they couldn’t teach other believers, other male believers, therefore they must have used those gifts either to teach unbelievers or to teach other women, and there are examples in both the Old Testament in the case of Miriam, or the New Testament in the book of Titus, of where women with the gifts used those gifts to teach other women. That principle of women teaching women, and women, if you like, being missionaries teaching unbelievers, is certainly practised amongst us.

Now Jacquie spoke a lot about the idea of ministry, when she said that women are called to certain ministry in the church, and I would agree with that. But what does the New Testament tell us about this idea of ministering? Well the word ‘minister’ in the Greek is this word ‘deacon’ or ‘diakonos’ and the idea of ‘deaconing’ is to minister. So how’s that used in the New Testament?

Well we read of “ministering to somebody in prison,” we read of the ministering women to the Lord Jesus, as Jacquie spoke about, but they ministered to Jesus “from their own money” we are told. We read of those who ministered to the church by running errands, of bringing money, and carrying messages around.

That was, that is, the limit of New Testament guidelines on this idea of ministering, and as Jacquie mentioned, Phoebe in Romans 16 is described as a deacon or a minister, an errand runner if you like, of the church at Cenchrea. You will notice it doesn’t say she was a deacon or a minister in the church implying she had an office; she was a deacon or a minister of the church. And that’s a significant difference, I submit. So this idea of ministering is connected in the New Testament with practical service. It is not connected with standing up and teaching doctrine or in any way teaching the male believer.