Revisiting 1 Timothy 2

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In this series:

• Women and the church: an introduction
• Revisiting 1 Timothy 2
• The Holy Household: Ephesians 5

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In the previous post in this series I laid out some hermeneutical basics regarding scripture. If you haven’t read that, go there first because if we do not start from an agreeable hermeneutic (method of interpretation), we won’t get very far. For this post, I want to start with 1 Timothy 2. No theological engagement with the topic of women and the church would be complete without looking at this text. The verses in question come at the end of the chapter:

¹² I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she is to keep silent. ¹³ For Adam was formed first, then Eve, ¹⁴ and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor. ¹⁵ Yet she will be saved through childbearing, provided they continue in faith and love and holiness, with self-control.

1 Timothy 2:12-15 NRSVUE

I want to do my best to briefly present how I’ve understood this passage in the past in complementarian circles — including some perspectives that may not have a direct bearing on the complementarian-egalitarian debate, but have been a regular part of complementarian interpretation. My goal in this section is to faithfully represent this position such that complementarians would approve and find support here. Please, bear with me. Even if some of the statements feel cringey. Interpreting the bible is important work and worth the effort.

Initial understanding

When looking at this passage, immediately, there are several questions:

• What specifically is being forbidden? (v.12)
• Why? What is the rationale for this restriction? (v.13-14)
• What is the provision offered? (v.15)

I do not permit… what?

There are different interpretations in complementarian circles on what is being restricted here. On a “plain reading” this passage seems to restrict two different activities: (1) teaching men and (2) having authority over men. In churches that understand this as two different activities, authority and leadership roles are not permitted to women. Regarding the function of teaching, women are allowed to teach, but only other women and children. If they are to teach a mixed audience, they require a “covering” and thus would teach with a male. The implications of this view are so far reaching (not only in classroom/Sunday School settings, but also community/small group settings would also be included) that most people I knew in complementarian circles understood it as a single function.

Those that understand this as a single function, read the prohibition as a hendiadys (from the Oxford dictionary, a hendiadys is the expression of a single idea by two words connected with “and,” e.g., nice and warm, when one could be used to modify the other, as in nicely warm.). Thus they understand “to teach or to have authority” as authoritative teaching, in other words, the teaching as an elder in the church. In this understanding, teaching is not forbidden to women, rather it is the authoritative teaching that comes with eldership. Kathy Keller illustrates this in Jesus, Justice, & Gender Roles by comparing two scenarios: If someone (any gender, thus women included) in the church who was not an elder was teaching and you walked away from that teaching opposing it and thinking that teaching was wrong and stupid, nothing would happen to you; you are free to disagree. But if an elder of the church was teaching and you had the same negative response, there are real consequences; the elders could initiate disciplinary measures (for your welfare) such as deny membership, suspend communion, formal admonishment, even to the point of excommunication. Kathy Keller describes this as “teaching with teeth.” For Keller, this kind of authority is what is restricted to men; all other kinds of teaching are allowed to women. At Redeemer they would say, “Anything that an unordained man is allowed to do, a woman is also allowed to do.”

I counted myself among those who believed it to be a single restriction on eldership, and in my time in complementarian circles, I attempted to live up to that same summarized statement, “Anything that an unordained man is allowed to do, a woman is also allowed to do,” but I often found cultural and practical obstacles in exercising that belief to the full. I will get to those obstacles in a later post because they are more pragmatic. For now, I want to now turn to the rationale given in the next two verses for this understanding of male-only eldership.

Because creation ordinance.

Complementarians hold to this belief not because they like it, but because they find it reflected in the text. I often found in my conversations with other complementarian ministers that while they personally would like equality across the board, their “submission to the text” required that they uphold the complementarian view. The next two verses lay out what is often described as a creation ordinance: the reason why this restriction exists is because this was God’s intention when he created man and woman. The text appears to appeal to God’s design and thus the prohibition applies for all times and cultures.

In the creation narrative, woman came from man^[1] and she ought to defer to and respect her source. Problems occur when this deference and order is not maintained; complementarians would often quote Genesis 3:17, showing that God curses the ground because Adam listened to his wife and sinned; he reversed the created order.

There are numerous angles connecting the Genesis narrative that I could never exhaust here (e.g. Who was actually deceived and who did the deceiving? Who willfully disobeyed and who unwillingly disobeyed? Does it follow that one is more susceptible to deception than the other? Is there a claim being made about gender roles based on nature?). Answering any of these questions leads to any number of anthropological ramifications that are beyond the scope of this humble host. For now, it is enough to say that the grounding for complementarians for this prohibition is from creation, sustained throughout history, and reiterated in this prohibition in 1 Timothy in the early church.

Women’s realm of flourishing.

I want to now turn to verse 15. I need to say at the start that this is an extremely difficult verse to interpret and complementarians are not unified in how it is understood and applied. Commentators and scholars from every perspective of the complementarian/egalitarian debate admit the awkward and unclear nature of this verse. What kind of salvation (“will be saved”) is in focus? Who is doing the saving (it’s in passive voice)? How is the saving related to childbearing? Looking at Greek prepositions and combing through Pauline usage is beyond the scope of this post. If you’re interested in that level of detail, commentaries abound. In this post I will try to articulate what I found to be the most clear and acceptable complementarian position for this verse when I tried to make sense of it while serving at a complementarian church.

This final verse in chapter 2 can be seen as a contrast to the prohibition introduced earlier; because women are not to lead and teach in the church, they are called to good character and the flourishing of the home. 1 Timothy 2 seems to prescribe meaning and purpose for women using childbearing as a paradigm for family, demonstrating faith, love, and holiness to those around her. The language in verse 15 that “she will be saved” is passive, meaning she is receiving salvation from another — God. Her part in the people of God is enacted through fulfilling her role in being a nurturer. God created order and structure and in living into that God-designed order is how Christians are to live life abundant.

Now I understand that many modern sensibilities would cringe at such a statement. I get it. In many Christian circles, an emphasis is made about dying to ourselves so we can live into God’s will for us. For complementarians, this teaching of dying to ourselves would be applied here. Men who do not feel a natural affinity to lead are encouraged to lean into leadership anyway and find that the Spirit helps us in our weakness. Women who do not feel a natural affinity for domestic activities are encouraged in a similar way in hopes of discovering that God’s design is better than our own. I suspect that language is not foreign to most who were brought up in complementarian circles.

A personal interlude.

As I wrote out my take of the complementarian understanding above, I found my heart moved in certain ways. Parts of it felt comforting and familiar. I even started to worry that I may have done too good a job! I know that more thorough scriptural engagements for the complementarian view exist which include cross references with other Pauline works and deep diving into word studies and discussions on prepositions; I’m not doing that here. If you’re so interested, those treatments are not hard to find.

While I no longer hold the complementarian position, I know that there are many good, Jesus-loving churches and communities that believe in the complementarian view on gender. My change of view is in no way a condemnation of the people who hold this view. Gospel communities are created and sustained by more than a group’s stated doctrinal beliefs. I might add that many communities may have formed despite what they believe on paper. I’m know I’m not the first to observe how a group’s stated beliefs can be misaligned with a group’s practice (for good or for ill). But what do we do when we recognize this misalignment? I want to spell out more of that misalignment and how my theological framework for complementarianism started to unravel.

Misalignment

For myself, this misalignment had different forms.

In my local faith community at the time, I noticed that while the complementarian position was our doctrine on paper and church leadership, very few of the church members lived that way. I didn’t feel a need to address this discrepancy, because it didn’t feel wrong. People were doing well in family, work, and community. The complementarian doctrine became functionally irrelevant in most people’s daily lives. And I started to wonder, Why the people around me in complementarian circles, whether they knew they were in a complementarian circle or not, seem to not live this way in their daily lives? Did they instinctively know that it was wrong and thus lived differently?

The other place I felt misalignment was in the greater church. It seemed that everywhere I looked, the structures built on complementarianism were permitting abuse and protecting those in power. High profile and well respected champions of complementarian beliefs were openly and boldly giving advice that were harmful under the guise of theological faithfulness to scripture. I’m not saying it’s everyone; there were certainly highly respected ministers that did not seem to cause harm, but enough of the complementarian enterprise was producing bad fruit that I started to wonder if there was rot somewhere at the root. If this is the prescription of scripture — God’s design for how we ought to live — why was it not leading to flourishing in the churches that seemed to uphold it more faithfully? Why was it causing more harm?

A convergence of questions

A combination of my church work and my own curiosity led me to revisit the position that I thought was so clearly spelled in 1 Timothy 2. These realizations spanned several years. I will get back to the text in a minute, but I need to mention that various streams came together that led to my change in convictions; they were formed out of a faith lived with others. It would be disingenuous to say that this came directly out of bible study. But there were authors and books that helped spur conversation.

These included works by Aimee Byrd, Rachel Held Evans, Kathy Keller, Carolyn Custis James, Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Sheila Wray Gregoire, Beth Allison Barr, Philip Payne; there was also a series of essays by women in the complementarian circles (mostly PCA) in a book titled, Co-Laborers, Co-Heirs: A Family Conversation. These were not all egalitarian authors/works, but they offered perspectives that I had not been exposed to before. The conversations that arose from my engagement with these works touched upon purity culture, friendship (especially across genders), “biblical manhood and womanhood,” and cultural/ethnic minorities. Our discussions around our church experiences led us to collectively long for a church that had a better hope for those who did not fit the typical “stay ‘pure’, get married, have kids” model. I’ll write some reflections on these some other time, but for this post, I’ll return to 1 Timothy 2.

Not a plain reading.

I revisited 1 Timothy after spending some time preparing a series of bible studies for Ephesians and doing my own background reading about Paul’s partnership with women in Gospel work. Some of this info made it into the work I was producing for the church, others I withheld because I was afraid they would invite charges of heresy because some positions may hint at a position that the PCA did not approve of. In studying Ephesians (the region where Timothy was sent) I learned more about the city of Ephesus, its commercial and economic power, the influence of cultic religion (especially around the goddess Artemis), and historical cultural studies around the “New Roman Woman.” It was these contextual details that put to question whether the “plain reading” I described above were to be applied to the church in all times and places or specifically to the audience of the letter.

The social influence of the New Roman Woman.

When I started to consider the “New Roman Woman” and the social movements in Ephesus, the puzzling aspects of this passage started to make more sense. The New Roman Woman was a proto-feminist movement of sorts; one that celebrated the agency and freedom that women were enjoying in Roman society at the time.^[2] Women found that they could have status and power in society apart from family structures. Many were forgoing the cultural expectations of marriage and bearing children. Of all places in the Roman empire, the New Roman Woman movement flourished in Ephesus due to the influence of the Artemis cult that was already present there. It’s not difficult to imagine how these newfound freedoms became entangled with some of the same freedoms that the Christian faith was teaching.

It’s about false teaching not behavior control.

This helped make sense not only of Paul’s overarching concern of false teaching, but the particular nuance he leans upon in this letter: Godly households (1:4, 3:12), moderate^[3] dress (2:9) childbearing (2:15), fidelity (3:2), additional specificity for women deacons (3:11), marriage (4:3), widows (a giant block in ch5 seems to indicate the reality of a complex social issue).

When I compared the plain reading prescription to silence with the other New Testament accounts of Paul’s practice, the plain reading of this passage seemed out of place. Women were clearly active in non-silent ministry around Paul. They prophesied, instructed, corrected (other men too!^[4]). Paul clearly mentions women who were partners with him in ministry by name: Junia, Phoebe, Chloe, Lydia, just to name a few! These women were benefactors, hosts, ministers, co-workers, spiritual mothers. Some of these women were given titles of apostle or minister, tasks that necessitated their authoritative instruction of men and women.

I began to see Paul as a caring pastor, giving Timothy practical advice for dealing with false teaching that was difficult to unravel from the freedom we have in Christ. The worst false teaching is the kind that carries a bit of truth in it. It seems like Paul is taking away freedoms in order to bring the church to order; an overcorrection in order to bring stability to a church plagued by confusion that resulted from false teaching that sounded true.

Our inconsistent use of creation ordinance.

The creation ordinance rationale also started to unravel for me. Does an appeal to the creation narratives imply a rule that must be followed for all time? The closest Pauline text that parallels 1 Timothy 2 in content and rationale comes from 1 Corinthians 11. The subject about the primacy of man and the deference of woman is also found there. But the command based on creation ordinance is about head coverings and hair length. I personally know of no church that takes this passage as a permanent rule for all believers. They properly understand this rule about head coverings to be contextually-bound despite its appeal to the creation narrative. At the very least, I can say that we are inconsistent regarding our application of the creation ordinance rationale. This leads me to wonder if perhaps the command in 1 Timothy 2 is also contextually-bound and whether we are properly understanding how the authors were utilizing the creation narrative to support their commands.

Furthermore, while the passage in 1 Corinthians makes the case of a woman’s respect for man because woman came from man, it also speaks of all men coming from women. This seems to imply the opposite of what complementarians often understand from 1 Timothy 2. The respect that women are to give to men is bidirectional; men are also supposed to respect women. The primacy of man as the first of creation does not mean authority over woman for “all things come from God” (v12, which aligns quite well with Paul’s other teaching about mutual submission in Ephesians 5; more on that another time).

One last thing about the creation ordinance rationale: Wayne Grudem, who co-founded The Council of Biblical Manhood and Womanhood (a complementarian organization), has argued that while believers are called to show his headship of men in the realm of church and home, men and women do not have such restrictions in business and politics (i.e. women can lead in the workplace and in politics, just not at church and home). At one level I find this concession to be helpful for complementarians navigating the secular world, but it also undermines the power of the creation ordinance rationale. One would expect that if the rationale is based on God’s design and purposes for our intrinsic nature, it should apply in all places where God’s people are called to live into God’s will. At a practical level, even for complementarians, the creation ordinance is inconsistently applied.

A missing article.

As I was diving into these studies, I was also directed to look more and more at the texts in their original languages. In the past, I mainly looked into the original text if something seemed odd in the English translations, but I started to learn that sometimes oddities in translations are not always obvious. On the subject of women I learned that a translating team’s biases can strongly influence the English rendering.^[5] In 1 Timothy 2, I was repeatedly directed to look at a missing definite article before “childbearing” in verse 15; it’s there in the Greek but often absent from English translations. Thus it should read: “Yet she will be saved through the childbearing.”

This makes much more sense. Without the article, it seems to say that childbearing was the means of women’s salvation; With the article, the flow of the text continues to follow the Genesis narrative introduced in the previous verse rather than suddenly making a statement about “a woman’s place” because a rather important promise in the Genesis narrative is highlighted by the inclusion of the definite article. In Genesis 3:15, after Adam and Eve sinned, God curses the serpent, saying, “I will put enmity between you and the woman and between your offspring and hers; he will strike your head, and you will strike his heel.” This is known as the proto-evangelion, a promise that a savior will come who will destroy the curse of sin and death. 1 Timothy 2 is saying that though women have become transgressors today by being deceived, just as Eve was in Genesis, women are still saved through the childbearing. The latter part of that verse, “faith and love and holiness, with self-control,” are in contrast to the ethos of the New Roman Woman that this injunction sought to correct.

Now what?

At this point based, I know what I’ve written is not “proof” of egalitarianism; I’m not sure if I’ll ever get there to be honest. But it at least “de-centers” the complementarian interpretation of this passage to some extent. There is more going on in this passage than is apparent in English translations and this process has humbled me from taking any interpretation and lording it over others; conviction, yes; lording over others, no. It would not be elevated to a distinguishing mark of orthodoxy to judge or exclude anyone — in any capacity — in a faith community.

This is just one part of many realizations that led to my change in theological conviction. I hope to lay out other parts soon… and I hope they won’t be as long as this one!