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"I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she must be silent." (1 Timothy 2:12)
Why was he so adamant and are there any Christians who support this. After all, it IS in the bible, it IS contextual, and it can not be misinterpreted.
And please, let us not go with the cultural gambit one hears often. The Taliban use that one also.
Of course he liked women. Many of his closest friends in ministry were women.
Paul, I would say looked at it like this, without order there is chaos. That is was what I was displaying with the disrepectful son doing what he pleased and the dad displaying no authority and the mother trying to display authority to no avail. The man is head of household, not because he is better than his spouse but that there would be no order as both would be going off on their own tangents. The man and wife give all authority to God as both have the heart of the Lord and want to serve Him as well as each other but there has to be order.
The corollary is not that I am insane, but that the information that God placed them is wrong.
But the premise I put forth was dealing with the limitations that God did place. Perhaps I was not clear enough in setting up the abstract question I presented for consideration. My apologies.
But the premise I put forth was dealing with the limitations that God did place. Perhaps I was not clear enough in setting up the abstract question I presented for consideration. My apologies.
I guess I was not clear in stating that such limitations are artificial and make into a rigid form what is merely the preponderance of gender preferences. That there is such a variation indicates to me that any rule is not from God. Making rules that enforce such perceptions is not love because it fails to take into consideration that there IS a natural and reasonable variance that love and respect would allow.
I and many other theologians believe Paul was a latent, severely repressed homosexual. I believe the "thorn" he begged God to remove was sinful desires for Timothy.
Bishop Spong has discussed this issue more than once.
Prior to Paul, no man had ever written as much about the importance of women in his work. In fact, I dare anyone to find another man up to the 20th century who gave credit to so many different women.
There are about 29 women mentioned by name in the New Testament. Paul and his disciple Luke name all of them. Without Paul, the only New Testament women we'd know by name would be Mary, Mary, Mary, Martha, and Salome.
It was Paul who stated that husbands and wives had sexual equality, which was a jaw-dropper in that time and culture. It was also Paul who stated that an unmarried woman had the right to remain unmarried if that was her desire--another jaw-dropper. Paul had no ability to declare that men and women were equal in Roman society (it was not his mission to "fix" the Roman empire), but he did declare them spiritually equal--which was also a very new thing for that time and culture.
As has been mentioned already, Paul decleared Phoebe to be a deacon in the Church, and he spoke of Syntache and Euodia as striving by his side for the gospel. There is some disputed scripture that he called a woman named Junia an apostle. He spoke of his friend Priscilla in terms equal to that of her husband.
All of this was extraordinary for his time and place, and would have been extraordinary for a man in any time or place right up to the close of the 20th century.
Now, there are two statements all this "Paul is a myscogenist" talk derives from. The first is a clear misunderstanding of the times and terminologies.
The first is the issue of women as teachers. What was in Paul's mind when he said "teacher?" In Paul's time, the concept of a "teacher" was perhaps most similar to "sensei" today. It was an extremely close and authoritative personal relationship, with the teacher having utter disciplinary and doctrinal authority over the student. We can see this in the gospels in Jesus' authority over His disciples: Absolute.
Paul declared that he did not permit a man to be discipled under a woman in such a relationship. However, Paul also wrote that older women should be teachers over younger women. In other words, Paul prohibited "co-ed" teaching and wanted young men to be discipled under older men, young women under older women. Given the absolutely authoritative nature of "teaching" in that day, that was certainly reasonable.
"Teaching" in Paul's understanding did not include positions that lacked such authority. Someone who merely expounded the gospel (as Priscilla did to Apollos) was not a "teacher." A prophet was not a "teacher."
Let's go back to Phoebe for a moment. The context of Paul's commendation of Phoebe to the church in Rome suggests that Phoebe was the head of the delegation he sent there with the charge of hand-delivering the most important theological treatise he'd written. Certainly a woman did not make such a journey alone, and not even with other women. Phoebe--probably an older wealthy woman--would have been leading young men in the delgation to Rome. This was not the inherent authority of the master-disciple relationship, though, but a delegated authority.
The other verse was about women keeping "silent" in the church. Does this mean "absolutely silent?" Certainly not. Only a few verses before, Paul is talking about women giving prophesies during the service.
But he specifies "asking questions." This is significant because "asking questions" relates directly to the aspect of the master/discipleship relationship. Teachers taught by the Socratic method--asking questions of students and the students asking questions of their teachers. A student's understanding was measured by the depth of his questions.
Going back to the gospel of Luke, we see that Jesus astounded the lawyers and scribes of the temple by the quality of His questions to them. "Asking questions" was what students did of teachers.
In this case, by "asking questions" these women were insinuating themselves into a co-ed master/disciple relationship with male teachers that Paul had already prohbited. If they were married, they should have been asking questions of their husbands; if they were unmarried they should have been asking questions of their female teachers.
I think that's the premise: Paul's split-personality when it comes to women. On the one hand he seems to advocate woman's rights far as they go in that era, yet on the other hand, in Timothy he admonishes women to "keep their mouths shut" in church. How do you reconcile such scatterbrained, almost schizophrenic thinking?
it was not Timothy which Paul had sexual desires for but the vision Paul lust for women by the pesky demon spirit , and Jesus said that if you cannot do anything about that in your weakness Jesus would be stronger to help ``...See Paul said that His body is sinful and there is nothing He could do
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