Adrian posted about the short and carefully reasoned booklet by Sydney evangelical John Dickson, in which John argues that, within the context of a complementarian understanding of gender and leadership, women ought to be allowed to give sermons. John argues that when Paul forbids a woman to “teach” in 1 Timothy 2, the activity he is prohibiting is the authoritative passing on of the apostolic traditions about Jesus, in the age before the canon of the New Testament was completed, and the New Testament was available as a written authority for churches. It is not the same as the preaching of sermons in our churches today.

John is a brother in Christ, a friend to many of us, and has been a blessing to many more through his writing and preaching ministry. He is also a careful and meticulous scholar. So when I downloaded this booklet, I hope I did so prepared to have my mind changed by the arguments in it. Lionel Windsor has given a response and John Dickson has responded to this.  

I am not persuaded by John’s arguments, and I want here to offer two very brief comments. These are not based on a thorough and detailed study of the arguments. Nonetheless, I hope they may contribute to the discussions.

1. My first observation is that it seems to me that, if Paul forbids women to do just this very specific, and time-limited activity, we need to come up with some theologically persuasive understanding of his reason. Why are women forbidden from this particular activity, but not from the other speaking ministries then or now? John says that, ‘When Paul refers to teaching in the technical and authoritative sense, he means not Bible exposition but preserving and repeating the apostolic deposit. While Paul was happy for women to engage in a range of public speaking activities, in 1 Timothy 2:12 he makes clear that “teaching” is a role only for certain handpicked men.’ In an endnote, John agrees that Paul’s reason for this is rooted in ‘the principle of male responsibility established at creation’. I may have missed something in John’s argument (and I hope he will forgive me if I have), but I don’t think he has given us a persuasive understanding of why Paul’s prohibition should be restricted to just this activity. The usual complementarian understanding, that Paul’s creation principle is one of male teaching responsibility and leadership in the churches of every age, seems to me to make more sense of this.
2. My second point concerns John’s precision in distinguishing “teaching” (in this limited sense) from the other New Testament speaking ministries. John refers to ‘numerous public speaking ministries mentioned in the New Testament – teaching, exhorting, evangelizing, prophesying, reading, and so on’. He goes on to say that ‘Paul restricts just one of them to qualified males’. My question is whether the speaking ministries are really so clearly distinguishable. I agree with John that when Paul allows women to prophesy (1 Corinthians 11), he must be referring either to a different activity, or at least to a different context, from the teaching activity of 1 Timothy 2. Even if we do not know exactly what prophesying meant in first-century Corinth, 1 Corinthians 11 does suggest that there are circumstances in which it is a good thing for women to speak to men and women in the church ‘for their strengthening, encouraging, and comfort’ (1 Corinthians 14:3). I agree with John that it would be good if this happened more than it does in some of our churches. But I doubt that each of the different speaking words refers to a precisely-definable activity, as if a speaker could say, “Now I am teaching. In the next sentence I shall be exhorting. In five minutes time I shall be evangelizing.” (I hope I am not being too mischievous in parodying it like this.) If most of the speaking words refer to different aspects of essentially the same activity, then the semantic arguments would seem to carry a lot less weight.

I remain persuaded that what we try to do in our sermons is essentially the exercise of pastoral teaching authority in our churches, and that it is consonant with Paul’s teaching in 1 Timothy 2 that this responsibility be entrusted to male pastor-teachers in our churches.