As In All The Churches...

1 Cor. 14:33-40 (ESV)
For God is not a God of confusion but of peace.
As in all the churches of the saints, [34] the women should keep silent in the churches. For they are not permitted to speak, but should be in submission, as the Law also says. [35] If there is anything they desire to learn, let them ask their husbands at home. For it is shameful for a woman to speak in church.
[36] Or was it from you that the word of God came? Or are you the only ones it has reached? [37] If anyone thinks that he is a prophet, or spiritual, he should acknowledge that the things I am writing to you are a command of the Lord. [38] If anyone does not recognize this, he is not recognized. [39] So, my brothers, earnestly desire to prophesy, and do not forbid speaking in tongues. [40] But all things should be done decently and in order.
As in all the churches, the women should keep silent in the churches.
O.K. I’m writing on this topic again. Last week I was too sick to really participate in a few conversations on women’s ordination going about on a couple prominent blogs. But I did read them.
It came to my attention that this has to be the most abused and distorted out right ignored passage of the Bible today. I read a man who wants to claim that this is just about being egalitarian, this whole bit about Women’s Ordination. Another man said that evangelicals who have a problem with women’s ordination are just misogynists.
For me it is quite simply a matter of God’s word. What does it say? I admit at times I can be a bit of a chauvinist. That isn’t the point. In fact I’ve read more demeaning things said about men in arguments supporting women’s ordination than I have read demeaning things about women in arguments against women’s ordination.
I have my speculations as to why Paul wrote this, and 1 Timothy 2:12. The history of women’s ordination in the church speaks volumes as to why it should be stopped. Once faithful congregations have become centers of goddess worship. Men have all but stopped going to these churches, and rightfully so.
But this passage, it is beyond me what people do to this passage of scripture in order to defend women’s ordination. I’m told Paul was dealing with a cultural problem in Corinth that doesn’t apply today, and was mostly local at the time.
As in ALL THE CHURCHES. As in all the churches, Paul prefaces everything he has to say about women in the churches with that phrase. This was not an admonition meant for the ears of Corinth only. This admonition was meant for all congregations everywhere and at every time. Sure Paul addressed this letter to Corinth specifically. It was there that this problem had arisen. It had arisen because the use of women as priests was all but universal in the pagan religions and temples for which Corinth was known. That is no one in Corinth, but perhaps some Jewish converts, would have had a problem with women priests. This was not Paul bowing to cultural pressure. This was Paul standing up to cultural pressure. The Corinthians would have thought it natural to have women priests, would have wanted women priests, which is why they were tolerating women teaching and acting as such. And this would have been a common sentiment throughout the ancient world. In fact it may have made Christianity even more popular, more acceptable. Of course Paul knew what the 20th century experiment with women’s ordination has proven true, that it would also spell the end of Christianity, the salt would lose its flavor.
When Sweden decided to allow women to be priests in the 1950’s bowing to political pressure, many of the greatest voices of that church, Anders Nygren and Bo Giertz to name a couple, predicted that it would be indistinguishable from a Gnostic sect within a couple generations. Well let me ask you, what do you make of an art exhibit displayed in the grand cathedrals of Sweden depicting Jesus as a transsexual? Gnostic sect indeed.
So it is a bit funny to hear Carl Braaten whimper about Gnosticism in the ELCA, all the while defending women’s ordination. Not to mention the irony there given the systematic theology he edited with Jenson, which I dare say has a great deal of Gnostic leaven in itself.
Paul knew what was at stake. He wrote as an apostle of Christ. That is his words were Christ’s words. Perhaps the best exegetical treatment of this passage is “To Believe as the Apostles” by Bo Giertz, translated and not yet published. In any case it brings out that no one can seriously read this passage of scripture and think that it was binding for Corinth only, or that it was due to cultural pressure to shut women up.
There is a serious need for the church today to start taking God’s word a bit more seriously than it has been taking it. When salt loses its flavor there is only one place for it to get its flavor back, the word of God.