Interpreting Women’s Roles: A Study of 1 Timothy 2 in the Modern Church

Don Carson examines the often contentious interpretations of 1 Timothy 2 in relation to the role and authority of women in the church. He explores various viewpoints, from those dismissing the text as culturally limited to others arguing for its timeless application. Carson delves into the scriptural arguments surrounding the creation order and the fall, aiming to provide a thorough theological understanding of the passage and its implications for church teaching and authority.

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“Therefore I want the men everywhere to pray, lifting up holy hands without anger or disputing. I also want the women to dress modestly, with decency and propriety, adorning themselves, not with elaborate hairstyles or gold or pearls or expensive clothes, but with good deeds, appropriate for women who profess to worship God. A woman should learn in quietness and full submission.

I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man; she must be quiet. For Adam was formed first, then Eve. And Adam was not the one deceived; it was the woman who was deceived and became a sinner. But women will be saved through childbearing—if they continue in faith, love, and holiness with propriety.”

This is the Word of the Lord.

You know as well as I do how hotly contentious people become over this passage. Those who do not have a high view of Scripture do not feel bound to obey it, so they tend to see the passage does impose some kind of limit on women. In other words, in terms of trying to understand the passage, there is often more agreement between those who are complementarian and those who don’t have a high view of Scripture than with those who by contrast have a high view of Scripture but are not complementarian.

Because they do not feel bound to submit to this text, those with a low view of Scripture sometimes argue Paul here shows himself to be a misogynist; or more likely, Paul didn’t write it in any case, but the drift of Christianity moved from a kind of openhearted, open-mindedness to increasing misogyny in the church, and it just gets worse after this as you move into the Patristic Age.

Those with a high view of Scripture, however, cannot write the passage off. So if they are egalitarians, what they spend most of their energy doing is trying to show the text is not laying down a universal pattern but a culturally limited one that has little or no bearing on our lives today.

For example, one scholar who shall remain nameless has gone on published record as saying that “I do not permit …” surely opens things up. (Verse 12) This is a negation. This is what I don’t require; therefore, there are lots of other things that could be slipped in. The logic in this case is really bad, because “I do not permit” is, in fact, a prohibition.

If you say, “I do not forbid to do something,” that opens things up. If you say, “I do not permit something,” it closes things down. More commonly, there are endless disputes over the verb authenteo. “I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority, usurp authority, domineer,” for the verb is, in fact, quite a rare one.

There are only (even this is disputed) approximately seven instances of the verb known from about the time of Paul back. Three of them, at least, are disputed as to their meaning … they’re in scraps of papyri … so this is an ongoing discussion. Certainly, by the time you get to the end of the second century and on it simply means to exercise authority, to assume authority, or something of that order.

But, it is argued, if this text means, “I do not permit women to usurp authority over men,” or, “I do not permit women to domineer men,” or something like that, then this is not talking about women who are exercising authority in a non-domineering fashion or a non-usurping fashion, but it is focused in a particularly narrow, nasty kind of framework.

In fact, in the latest issue of the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, the lead article is one more essay on this subject where another piece of evidence has been adduced to argue it really means, “I do not permit women to exercise authority,” or something of that order. One of the things you have to see, however, is even if it has the more negative overtone then the strange thing is it is directed only against women.

Supposing this really does mean, “I do not permit women to usurp authority,” why are they the only ones who are not permitted to usurp authority? I mean, elsewhere Paul is pretty clear he doesn’t like the false apostles in Corinth usurping authority. He doesn’t like men or women usurping authority whatsoever. Why just pick on women?

In other words, it seems to me one of the entailments of the tighter view … that is, usurp authority, domineer, something like that … is it should be aimed just against women. That really would be misogynist. Where somebody is doing something wrong, Paul doesn’t want people to do it, men or women. On balance, however, I still think the balance of evidence lies on the side of, “I do not permit them to exercise authority.” The question, then, becomes.… Is this two things … teach and exercise authority … or is it just one? We’ll come back to that in a moment.

Above all, however, a lot of energy has been expended in trying to think through what the appeal to Adam and Eve means, first to the order of creation and then to the order of the fall. After all, what complementarians often say is the argument the apostle makes is tied pretty heavily to something than which it is impossible to imagine anything less culturally bound.

That is to say the order of creation is not bound up with some small-minded, geographically narrow, culturally well-defined event. It is something that touches all humankind, and the fall, no doubt, brings sin into the equation, but the order of creation itself before there is any sin makes the sweeping grounding universal.

In other words, one of the arguments complementarians here use is the reasons (whatever they mean) to which Paul appeals for this limitation (whatever the limitation is) seem about as universal as you can possibly imagine. So a great deal of debate has circled around that argument.

John Jefferson Davis, for example, in a couple of papers he wrote for the Priscilla Papers, argues this stance, “… fails to take into account the way in which the apostle Paul draws implications from creation texts in ways that are specifically related to his pastoral and theological concerns for specific churches and congregations.”

For example, in Romans 5:12–21, Adam is singled out not Eve, and it is Adam’s sin that has introduced guilt into the entire race. In other words, in a different pastoral setting, Paul can focus the blame, he says, on Adam rather than on Eve. Again, in 2 Corinthians 11:3, Paul does not want the Corinthians to be deceived as Eve was deceived, but the point is the deception of Eve then is applied as a warning to the entire congregation, not just to the women of the congregation.

So he adduces more examples of this sort and says, thus, Paul’s appeal to the creation patterns, both order of creation and the fall, can be applied in a lot of different ways, and we should not, therefore, think it is more culturally transcendent than any other argument; it clearly is shaped by the congregation to which Paul is addressing himself.

With respect, I think that’s a bad argument. To say Paul can apply what happens with Adam and Eve to different pastoral situations is one thing; to say the actual basis of the argumentation is thus culturally relativized is quite another thing. In other words, Paul is not saying, “The argument for the order of creation works in this cultural setting, and it doesn’t work in that cultural setting.” It’s a different argument in Romans 5. There, he is appealing to Adam as a kind of representative head of the entire human race.

He’s not making a different argument from the order of creation or the order of the fall. He is not saying he was right in this place, but it was merely an ad hoc argument that suited his context. Now over here it’s an ad hoc argument that suits his context. At no point does the diversity of pastoral applications overthrow the argument Paul makes here, as if he’s going to relativize his own basis. I think it is a bad argument. Moreover, we spent quite a lot of time in yesterday’s first session trying to think through what the Genesis 2 account really does say.

The fact of the matter is, after having established in Genesis 1 both men and women are made in the image of God, the Genesis 2 account expands in great detail to show the man was made first, names the creatures without his wife, and is declared to be alone. Then a woman is drawn from him to be his partner, one with him, the two different halves, as it were, joining together in a one-flesh union to create this institution we call now marriage, and she is made to be a helper suitable for him.

We then went through some survey of what helper means in that context and the flow of the argument. In other words, there is an entire sequence that is being developed. When the woman is deceived first, it’s not because there’s any hint in the text she’s got a lower IQ or is more subject to her emotions or anything of that order. Rather, what you find in the text is a complete reversal of the pattern already established in creation.

That is, instead of God speaking to the man and the man then finding the woman, not only his partner but his helper, and the two of them then together ruling over the entire creation.… Instead, the woman listens to the created order. The man listens to the woman and not to God. Neither of them listen to God. The entire pattern is reversed. That’s the significance of the woman being deceived first in chapter 3 of Genesis.

Within that framework, then, when Paul applies these two things, the order of creation and the sequence of the fall, it’s not just numbers … one comes before two. As we pointed out yesterday, pigs were made before both Adam and Eve. It’s not just sequence. It’s the sequence as the sequence argument is developed in chapter 2 of Genesis. Because of the sequence, she was made for him. In the sequence of the fall, it’s not mere sequence. “This happened first; therefore, she has the greater blame.” That’s not the point at all.

Rather, the overthrow of the entire created order is precisely why in chapter 3, verse 17, God rebukes Adam for listening to his wife as opposed to listening to God. In other words, there are textual markers, as we saw yesterday, right through those three chapters that envisage the fall as the reversal of the entire created order. It seems to me, once again, the argument to limit whatever is being said here is, at the end of the day, grounded in something that is tied to the universal perspective Genesis 1, 2, and 3 give us.

Some point to 2 Timothy 3:6–7 as another way of limiting the text. In this passage we’re being warned about false teachers in the last days. “People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money …” and so on. “These are the kind who worm their way into homes and gain control over gullible women, who are loaded down with sins and are swayed by all kinds of evil desires, always learning but never able to come to a knowledge of the truth.”

If there are some particularly gullible women, weak-willed women, then perhaps that’s the kind of demographic Paul has in mind in 1 Timothy 2. He’s not making a prohibition against all women, but he’s just talking about weak-willed women or gullible women, stupid women. Where you have intelligent women and well-trained women and strong women, then you should use their gifts. The prohibition is only against women of a certain sort.

The problem is that sort of argument has a stinger in the tail. It’s not only the fact that in the context of 1 Timothy, chapter 2, there is no hint the focus is on weak-willed women or gullible women. The problem is deeper. Incidentally, it’s not at all clear that 2 Timothy is written to the same crowd as 1 Timothy, but in 2 Timothy, chapter 3, there is a reference both to these corrosive men and to these corrosive women.

Most of us have been around in the ministry long enough to recognize when a minister of the gospel gets sexually embroiled with someone in the congregation, it’s rarely a matter of sex only. Often there are complex dynamics of wanting to be approved, of power speaking to powerlessness. There’s a whole social dynamic that is really ugly.

When you get somebody in a position of power who lusts to be acclaimed and then you get someone in a position of weakness wanting to attach herself to a position of strength, then it’s not just the hormones that are operating. There’s a huge dynamic that is going on that is really painfully ugly and massively destructive.

The thing is in 2 Timothy, chapter 3, both parties are roundly condemned. This is not saying all women are gullible any more than it’s saying all men are false teachers and exploitative. Where you have the two coming together, it can be a really nasty scene that is full of sexual usurpation and corrosion on many fronts. None of that seems to be an issue in 1 Timothy, chapter 2.

It seems to me 1 Timothy, chapter 2, sounds on the face of it to be far more sweeping. I just do not see the warrant for trying to bring passages like 2 Timothy, chapter 3, back into 1 Timothy, chapter 2. Let me, instead, follow the flow of a reasonably plain reading of chapter 2, first of all, the entire chapter, not just verses 11 and following. The chapter begins with a logical connector, then or therefore, depending on our translation. “I urge, therefore, first of all, that petitions, prayers, and intercession be made.”

My father used to tell me, “Whenever you see a wherefore or a therefore, see what it’s there for.” Of course, the logic here is pretty strong. Chapter 1 ends with a declaration of the glorious gospel, this wonderful gospel that is so transcendentally important. “Therefore, in the light of this transcendental gospel, I urge, then, first of all, that petitions, prayers, intercession, and thanksgiving be made for all people …” Verse 2. “… [in particular] for kings and those in authority.”

To what end? First of all, “… for the sake of stability, that we may live peaceful and quiet lives in all godliness and holiness.” Where there is this transcendental gospel, it is important that it be proclaimed. It is important that it be lived out. In situations of massive anarchy and rising violence, it’s really difficult for such promulgation to take place. “I urge, therefore, that there be prayers for all men and women, for all people everywhere, and in particular for leaders and those in authority,” because Paul wants stability.

Then the second reason is adduced in verses 3 and 4.

“This is good, and pleases God our Savior, who wants all people to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth.” In other words, there is a gospel outreach tied up with this desire for stability. It’s not just, “We want a stable society so we can make a lot of money, invest in our retirement plans, and make sure we have a nice cottage by the lake.”

Rather, it’s stability precisely so there is a freer avenue for the gospel to be promulgated, because God wants all anthrōpoi, all men in this gender-neutral way of thinking of them … all people, men and women … to be saved. That brings us to verses 5 and 6. Such sweep is grounded in monotheism and the sole mediatorship of Jesus. “God wants all people to be saved and come to a knowledge of the truth.” (Verse 4)

“For …” Verse 5. “… there is one God and one mediator between God and mankind, the man [anēr] Christ Jesus, who gave himself as a ransom for all people.” We are so used to monotheism, we sometimes fail to reflect on how much monotheism was, for early Christians, an incentive to mission. Where you have polytheism from the human side, you cannot rightly devote all of your allegiance to just one god.

That is to say, you might want to devote a lot of allegiance to the god of love when you’re courting, but when you want to make a sea voyage in order to conduct your business, then you want Neptune in the Greco-Roman world to be on board, as it were. If you are going to give a speech somewhere or start teaching, then you want one of the gods of communication, Hermes, to be on your side. You can’t possibly devote all of your energy to one particular god.

But supposing there is only one God. Only at that point does the commandment from Deuteronomy 6 become sensible. “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and mind and strength.” That’s why that commandment is bound up with the Shema. “Hear, O Israel: The Lord your God, the Lord is one.” Now it’s within that context you say, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and mind and strength.”

Now look at it from the other side. Not only are there many gods in polytheism, but the many gods in polytheism are associated with different peoples with their own creation myths and their own identification. There is a kind of threefold tie that binds people, god, and land together. The people, their gods (their religions), and the land.

That’s the way things worked, which is why in ancient regional superpowers like the Assyrians and the Babylonians, there was a tendency then to take away the people from the land. You’re actually removing them from their gods. If you capture a new territory, there is always the danger of fomented rebellion. There is always a threat to your empire, and you can’t leave a large standing army there all the time. It’s just too flaming expensive.

So one of the things you do is you take away about 10 percent of the population, all the intelligentsia and all the politically savvy people and the nobility and the priestly class and the trades workers, and you take them somewhere else. Once they’ve been taken somewhere else, they’re removed from the land, and the gods are bound up somewhere with that land. It’s far less likely then they’ll be able to rebel.

By the time you get to the Medo-Persians, of course, there is a recognition there’s a downside to this sort way of pacifying the countryside. Namely, you’re destroying the tax base. You’re taking away the most productive people and you’re sending them off to some new corner of the world where they become dirt farmers all over again, which is pretty hard on your tax base.

So the Persians decided it was all right for everybody to go back again, that would make everybody happy, and then you would increase the tax revenues. That was a theory behind it. The end of the exile in God’s providence fulfilled promises to Israel, but it wasn’t just the Israelites that came; the Moabites came back too. This was a reversal of imperial policy. By the time you got to the Romans, they had another way of addressing the whole problem.

When they took over a new turf, what they insisted upon was a god swap. When they took over a new turf, then they insisted the locals adopt some of the gods in the Roman pantheon, and the Romans themselves adopted some of the local gods. That meant if you had a rebellion you could never be quite sure which side the gods were on anymore, which again damped down some of the tendency toward rebellion. It was another way of addressing the same sort of thing.

All of this sort of thinking turns on a vision of relationship of gods to local peoples, gods and certain kind of tribalism and territory, but it’s just massively different once you come to monotheism. If there is but one God, he is in some sense the God of all. It just seems so obvious to us, but that was revolutionary in the ancient world. If he’s the God of all, he’s calling all men and women everywhere to repent.

Not only so, but in the fullness of time you have come to this place where fulfilling all of these patterns of mediating priests and the Levitical order and all of these sacrifices God has ordained in the revelation of the old covenant. You’ve now come with all the strands, all the trajectories, all the typologies coming together in Christ himself. Christ himself as the temple, Christ himself as the priest, Christ himself as the Passover Lamb, Christ himself as the sacrifice of Yom Kippur, or Yom Kippurim, as it really is.

It’s all bound up with Christ. “There is one mediator between God and human beings, the man Christ Jesus.” Within this universal vision of the entailment of monotheism and of one-mediatorship, then there’s this passion for worldwide ministry, this cross-cultural vision of one God, one mission, one basis of salvation. It’s bound up with monotheism.

This, then, becomes the core message of Paul’s own apostleship. “For this purpose …” Verse 7. “… I was appointed a herald, an apostle—I’m telling the truth, I’m not lying—a true and faithful teacher of the Gentiles. Therefore …” Another illative, another consequential connector. “… so then, this is what I want.” First to men, “I want the men everywhere to pray, lifting up holy hands without anger or disputing.”

The content of their prayer is not worked out here. It’s probably reflecting back on what was said a little earlier in verses 1 and 2. What the emphasis is here, however, is the manner of praying, “… without quarreling and disputing.” There is a kind of way of doing religion, doing church, doing prayer that is not much more than scoring points and keeping track and one-upmanship and the like. How does that finally help in the promulgation of this glorious gospel that is going to all people?

No, what must take place is such a transformation of people’s character, even in their religious observance, in their praying, in their passion for people, there is a spirit about them that is massively different. This is picking up on some of the themes we tried to develop yesterday in terms of living under the cross and so on, which are tied, as we have already seen, to the house tables.

Then, for the women, what Paul wants is laid out in verses 9 to 15.

First of all, it’s transparent from Paul’s perspective their issue is not anger management but presentation, conduct, demeanor. They are to be proactive in doing good. Vanity and self-promotion hinder gospel holiness. “I want the women to dress modestly, with decency and propriety, adorning themselves, not with elaborate hairstyles or gold or pearls or expensive clothes, but with good deeds, appropriate for women who profess to worship God.” Then comes our disputed paragraph.

In other words, this seems to be in the context of Paul’s passion for worldwide evangelism, for mission, for living out what it means to bow to the supremacy of God and the sole mediatorship of Christ under the authority of the apostles. It’s a pretty sweeping kind of vision that is bound up with the glorious gospel of chapter 1.

What does Paul want? “A woman should learn in quietness and full submission.” We should observe in the first place she is to learn. It’s not as if she is being relegated to ignorance. “We don’t want women to take our programs, thank you. They just have the business of cooking and bearing children. That’s it. Full stop. They don’t need to learn how to read or write.” No, a woman should learn.

What about the submissiveness? Again, we spent more time on this yesterday to examine how hypotassomai works in the New Testament. Let me remind you in the New Testament children are to submit to their parents. Slaves are to submit to their masters. Wives are to submit themselves to their husbands. Christians are to submit to those over them in Christian leadership. We are to submit ourselves to God, and as part of that godward submission, we are to submit to governing authorities.

Moreover, it’s not just in the area of human relationships this submission language is used. We are also told all things have been subjected to and will ultimately submit to Christ, whether willingly now or in great fear and dread on the last day, but every knee will bow. Demons submit to the rule of Christ. The church is to submit to Christ as her head, and when all things have been made subject to him, Christ himself will submit to God the Father.

There is a huge sweep of submission patterns in the New Testament, but I mentioned yesterday one of the things that is obvious about the hypotassomai word group is it is submission always, invariably in some sort of ordered array. It is the pattern that has to be observed. Barring the disputed passages, it’s not ever in a context where there’s sort of a mutual submission all around. Then we spent time yesterday on allelous, and so on, in Ephesians 5. I won’t revisit that.

Within that framework then, it is also important to remember what we saw yesterday about cultural overtones we bring to the category of submission. Whether you’re submitting in a wrestling match, which means you’re giving up because the other player is superior and you want no more pain and humiliation so you submit, or you submit to Christ, the church submits to Christ, joyfully, gladly, voluntarily, happily, because she knows it is for her good.

The associations you connect with submission, it seems to me, are really important in this discussion. If submission necessarily implies inferiority, if it necessarily does, then of course we’re back to the arguments we saw yesterday about Christ submitting to his Father. Does that mean he is necessarily inferior? No, at the end of the day, we ought to have positive associations with this term submission in the right sorts of contexts.

In this context we must ask, “To whom are women to be submissive? To God? To sound teaching? To the teachers?” I think the argument runs something like this. The words in quietness appear at the beginning of verse 11 and the end of verse 12 like bookends. They underline the main point about the conduct of women in this passage, a point which in some ways has already been made about the quiet, godly life Christians are to lead, verse 2.

The two things commanded in verse 11, to learn and do so in all submissiveness, pair up and contrast with the two prohibited activities in verse 12, to teach and exercise authority over a man, respectively. That helps to answer the question. The circumstances of their learning and the prohibition against having authority over men point us to some of the details of their submissiveness.

The setting, thus, is the Christian gathering. After all, elsewhere women certainly do teach. They are encouraged to teach other women. They are encouraged to teach children. Moreover, there are instances where women teach quite powerfully in the context of the early church life. What do you do with a Priscilla and an Aquila, teaching a young man by the name of Apollos who has remarkable gifts in this regard? For Priscilla’s name to appear first is probably significant.

Whatever the prohibition is here, it seems to be in the context of the gathered church, which is why someone has called this prohibition (however it’s finally teased out) as the church-recognized public teaching authority of women over men. He wants to say that is prohibited rather than the flexibility of individual contact and encouragement or informality and so forth. It is restricted in certain kinds of ways.

Since not all men have responsibility to teach and lead the congregation as we go on to find out in chapter 3, Paul is not saying all women are to submit themselves to all men all the time in this passage. Rather, women are to be submissive in church, in assembly, when the teaching is happening, to what is taught, and to those men who are teaching it. In other words, in practice it seems to me the limitation, on a straightforward reading of the text, is women are not to be authoritative teachers of the gathered household of God.

The second question to ask of this passage is whether there is one restriction or there are two, to teach or to assume authority over a man. One of the more important books on the entire subject is the book written by Kostenberger, Baldwin, and Schreiner, especially in the second edition, where a lot of those questions are addressed in great detail regarding the syntax. I recommend the book to you. I don’t have time to unpack it here now.

What I would say, however, is the authority issue in the early church is itself bound up with teaching. It’s not that a pastor/elder/overseer says, “Hey, I’m the boss. When I say jump, you jump and ask how high on the way up.” It’s not that at all. The authority is exercised precisely through the ministry of the Word.

Even here, the church, as it’s clear, for example, in 2 Corinthians 10 through 13, has a responsibility to listen carefully and well, and when false teaching is being given, there is no preservation for the man’s authority just because he’s got the job or the title. At some point the church then has to turf the blighter out.

Paul says if the church won’t do it, when he gets there, he’ll do it for them. So there is no authority that is bound up with a man because he’s a man or the man because he’s an elder. It is bound up with this teaching function of the Word of God. Thus, it is Christ reigning through the church through his Word.

It’s at this juncture Paul gives his rationale. “For Adam was formed first, then Eve.” Again, I insist that’s not mere sequence. It brings in all of the theology we worked out yesterday from Genesis 1, 2, and 3. “And Adam was not the one deceived; it was the woman who was deceived and became a sinner,” which is certainly not trying to exonerate Adam.

Elsewhere, Paul himself shows because of Adam’s sin guilt came upon the entire human race. We’ve seen that already. No, it’s picking up the pattern that was already observed yesterday in Genesis 2. It was a reversal of the entire order of creation, and that must not happen now in the assembly of the church.

Then we come to verse 15, which, as you can imagine, has also seen its share of spilled ink. “But women will be saved through childbearing—if they continue in faith, love, and holiness with propriety.” Some have suggested this means Christian women who are truly pious and submissive will be kept safe in childbirth, spared undue pain that resulted from the fall. Talk about interpretations that sort of escape any observations of empirical reality.

It may be my wife is particularly ungodly, but all I know is she was in labor with our first child for 40 hours, and then they did an emergency C-section. She had the worst of all possible worlds. In the Lord’s mercy they did do the C-section because the umbilical cord was tied tightly around my daughter’s neck and she would’ve died or been permanently brain damaged if she had come out the birth canal.

As I say, it may be my wife is particularly ungodly, or maybe she’s not a Christian after all. On the face of it, it seems to me empirical evidence suggests this is not the most likely interpretation here. The fact of the matter is godly women die in childbirth and pain-free, drug-free labor this side of Genesis 3 is an oxymoron.

Does that mean, second interpretation, in some ways Paul is advocating salvation by works? “Bear a child and get saved.” That’s going to be really hard on the single women. That one doesn’t make any sense at all, although it has been strenuously advocated in some circles. There are two more common options. There are a lot of variations. Both have some things going for them, but I think the last one is more likely.

Some people have argued childbearing here is actually a reference to Christ, “She will be saved through this childbirth, through Christ,” and the text is picking up on Genesis 3:15 where the seed of the woman will eventually bruise the Serpent’s head. In that case 1 Timothy 2:15 means even though she was deceived and became a sinner, Eve will be saved through the birth of Christ, since he defeated Satan.

Like Eve, women generally will be saved if they continue to live lives of faith and love and holiness with self-control. This interpretation has the benefit of connecting verse 15 with the reference to Eve that immediately precedes. That’s its strength, but when you look at the letter as a whole, I’m not convinced this quite works.

This language of saving yourself, and the like, has different associations elsewhere. Look, for example, at chapter 4, verse 16. “Watch your life and doctrine closely. Persevere in them, because if you do, you will save both yourself and your hearers.” Clearly, in one sense if you push that language too far it’s not true. It’s not suggesting Timothy becomes his own savior or he himself actually saves people without reference to any other source.

Timothy does not actually save his hearers. Paul is clear only Jesus can do that. He’s the sole mediator. That’s already clear in chapter 2, but by faithfully discharging his responsibilities of godly living, true teaching, Timothy ensures neither he nor those in his charge will depart from the truth and shipwreck their faith. Thus, their faith would be preserved, and the very real spiritual dangers besetting it would be avoided. Thus, in this way he saves the people and himself.

I think this helps us to understand what Paul means likewise in reference to women in 1 Timothy 2:15. I don’t think Paul is talking about childbirth being a means of salvation but about Christian women being spiritually preserved or saved from the temptations and fate of Eve and the dangers of false teaching, “… if they continue in faith and love and holiness with self-control.” Childbearing is a part of that, and for most women it is a distinctive part of that.

If Paul had wanted to talk about the birth of Christ here, there are a lot of other ways he could have said it that would have been unambiguous, but the fact is, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s efforts in Junior notwithstanding, men do not and cannot have babies. Childbearing remains the most distinctive difference in the responsibilities of men and women. It just is.

We’re a little removed from that today, precisely because of the pill. Of course, when most women are getting married and seeing that as part of their destiny, their part in multiplying and being fruitful and increasing the race, that which men cannot do, then it is bound up in huge part with women’s identity.

Today it is much less bound up with women’s identity, partly because there are more choices available, owing to the pill, partly because many couples prefer to become DINKS (double income, no kids), which, of course, is why in the industrialized world birthrates are falling so massively in some cultures now it is not possible to sustain growth into the future. We just haven’t caught up with that yet.

In Europe there is not one country, Western Europe, Central Europe, Eastern Europe, with a birthrate of 2.1 or better, which is what is needed for self-sustaining. The average is about 1.6. In the Czech Republic it’s 1.1. Japan is 1.1 or 1.2. In 50 years their economies, unless this changes, will be absolutely destroyed. There will not be the workers to handle it.

The only thing that can reverse that economically, of course, is immigration, which is also happening. In Italy the Italian population birthrate is about 1.6, but the Muslim population from North Africa in Italy, which makes up about 10 percent of the population, is about 3.5. You do the mathematics, and in 50 years the population will be fifty-fifty if present trends continue. They almost never do, but nevertheless, you do the math and that’s the way it works out.

There are entailments and stingers around where we disconnect marriage from having children and procreation and so on all in the name of economic advance. There are stingers in the tail our culture has not yet addressed, which is why in some countries like Japan, in Germany as well, people are now being offered huge tax incentives to have babies.

None of that, of course, would’ve been on anybody’s mind in the ancient world. There was no pill, and so the connection between being a woman and bearing children would’ve been much more cross-culturally accepted. This does not mean, of course, all Christian women must have children. Rather, it does suggest women are to be content with the roles and responsibilities God has ordained exclusively for them. That might include children; it might not. It might include marriage; it might not.

However their lives unfold, women are to be content with the patterns of relationship between men and women God has instituted from creation and through the patterns of the fall for their good and the broader culture. In other words, verse 15 assures Christian women their faith will be kept safe if they embrace their particular God-given responsibilities and delight in them.

One of the reasons why this sort of reading, which to my mind is on the surface of the text, is because it feels so inequitable in our culture, where equality of importance, equality of significance, is often bound up with exercising authority and the right to be in charge. Then we return to the kinds of things we saw yesterday, not only the pattern of Genesis 2, but even the patterns in the Godhead.

Let me come back to something I briefly introduced yesterday but did not push. There is a long dispute going on in the literature today over whether or not Christ’s submission to his Father is bound up with the ontological Trinity or is restricted to the economic Trinity, in more popular terms whether it’s bound up with the very nature of relationships in the Godhead as the Godhead is, even in pre-creation existence or it is tied instead to the way God has manifested himself as triune in revelation supremely in the incarnation of Jesus Christ.

In the incarnation of Jesus Christ, transparently Jesus is subject to his Father. So, it is argued, if you draw comparisons between Jesus’ submission to his Father and a woman’s submission to her husband, you have to recognize the first part of this parallelism is a temporary thing that is bound up only with the incarnation. It’s not part of who God is in and of himself, and it’s not part of how it will be at the consummation when Christ finishes his mediatorial work and turns everything over to his Father and there is sort of a kind of oneness all over again.

So the literature goes on and on about whether or not there is any subordination within the Godhead where the Godhead is seen ontologically and not in economic terms. Of course, there is a vast literature from the end of the second century on which is trying to show Jesus truly is God. It comes to a certain climax at the end of the third and the fourth centuries with the great creeds.

There is a concern to show Jesus, the Son of God, is not in himself inferior to God in every way. There is an equality of authority and of ontology, of being; otherwise, you don’t have Trinitarianism at all. You move gradually toward some form of Arianism, and all today’s Jehovah’s Witnesses will be pleased. In my view a fair bit of this discussion is misconstrued for two reasons.

First, the Bible actually gives us very little information about the ontological Trinity. The Bible actually spends all its focus on God as he has actually disclosed himself in space-time history. So you are bound up with the promises of the coming of the son of David, who is also the mighty God, the everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace. Then you have the actual descriptions of the incarnation and Jesus in the days of his flesh. You even have some very obscure and difficult passages like Jesus not knowing certain things. He does not know when he’s coming back.

How does that work out? Do you work that out in some sort of kenosis theory on the one hand, or on the other hand, do you work it out as Warfield does so you’re talking about the description of the divine nature of Jesus over against the human nature of Jesus, which you could use to run right through all the gospel passages, but then you’re in danger of an almost schizophrenic Jesus? You are tied to a lot of these difficult discussions when you work through the biblical texts, but they’re all in terms of the economic Godhead.

Where are the passages that give us any insight into the relationships of the ontological Godhead? In my view the closest you come to explicit passages on that sort of thing are passages that hint at the way the eternal Son was sent. The Father sent his Son into the world. You shouldn’t make too much of that.

But the fact of the matter is unless you are saying the word Son only refers to the eternal Word once he has become incarnate so God sent his Son into the world, John 3:17, really means God sent the second person of the Godhead who became the Son once he was in the world, which is a pretty tortuous way of reading the text, then before the incarnation takes place, the Father sends the Son.

I think what limited information we have that suggests in the ontological Godhead there is not only perfect equality but a difference in roles. I just don’t see how you can escape that. Perhaps more important, I think the wisdom of Clark here is right. When you have comparisons drawn between, as we saw yesterday in Ephesians 5, Christ and the church and husband and wife (and by now we’ve seen they’re drawn pretty often), in every case it is the economic Trinity that is in view.

In other words, there is no escape by going back into eternity past, to the ontological Trinity. No, husbands are to love their wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself for her. That’s the cross. That’s the incarnate Son of God. The pattern is established from, what the theologians call, the economic Trinity, not from some ill-defined but somehow more egalitarian ontological Trinity. The pattern is established from how Christ lives and operates as the eternal Son of God who goes to the cross on our behalf.

It seems to me if we have a high view of Scripture and we play fairly with the text there are some restrictions here imposed. These are not restrictions on all women teaching in any context whatsoever, but there is a headship in the family that belongs to the man, even as there is also a call to the man to love his wife as Christ loved the church, which means self-sacrificially for her good.

Here there is a restriction on the church-recognized teaching authority of the woman over the man. I don’t see how to get around that. In fact, I’m going farther and saying I don’t want to get around it, because if it is from the Word of God it is good and it is grounded not only in the creation account of chapter 2 but in the reversal of all of the creation order that is bound up with the fall in chapter 3 of Genesis, and we will fight that to our spiritual and social damage.

Now then, that’s the text. There I’m quite comfortable talking. I’ve worked hard at trying to understand it. I’m open to being corrected on any of the points. Just give me the evidence; I want to bow to the Word of God.

Now I’m going to venture out just a little bit in terms of application and the way you might want to think about these things further. Here I am less certain of myself because I cannot so easily apply texts.

First, I would argue anybody who holds a complementarian position, who presents this primarily as keeping the little woman down or busily saying no to everything, while that person may be rightly defending something that needs to be defended, the tone, the implications, the structure are all wrong. I’m interested to note, for example, the Anglican Diocese in the world that is strongest on preserving complementarianism, namely the Sydney Diocese, also has the highest number of paid pastoral staff workers who are women. Isn’t that interesting?

They are not permitted to become vicars or rectors in their local churches, but there are huge contexts in which they are encouraged to study and get their theological degrees at Moore College primarily, Sydney Missionary and Bible College, and are taken on in local churches doing all kinds of useful evangelism, instruction, teaching, and so on.

Local churches try to work out exactly what that looks like in the context of their churches while still being utterly fair with the text. The danger, of course, is in the name of pushing the limits as far as we can we suddenly break what the text says by slipping through the back door by a slippery kind of exceptionalism. You don’t want to do that either.

Yet, at the same time just as we saw yesterday, the submission and the love pattern in the family does not tease out a whole lot of what it looks like, but the principle is grounded in the cross and has huge bearing for both men and women. The way it will work out will differ quite a lot in different societies, so also the way this will work out in the context of the local church may vary quite a bit.

For example, does it mean a woman can’t teach a Sunday school class? Or is it okay for a Sunday school class and not for the whole congregation? Or for the whole congregation when it’s having a party, but not for the whole congregation at 11:00 on Sunday morning? Or is it okay in the whole congregation, provided she’s under the authority of the local pastor?

The short answer is the text doesn’t answer those questions. Provided you find Christian leaders who really do want this text to work out in their local church as well, I’m prepared to be pretty flexible on how it works out. I have my own preferences, my own ways, my own judgment calls on a lot of these sorts of questions.

At the end of the day, I don’t want the hard cases to be an excuse for overturning what the Word of God says, but I also don’t want what the Word of God says to become an excuse for some kind of really strict legalism. Somewhere between those two, you have to make some judgment calls. In the Anglican Diocese of Sydney so far, they have worked it out quite stunningly so as churches begin to grow, usually a woman pastoral worker of some sort is the second or third person added to the staff.

So I dare ask, in the context of the Free Church, how many women doing some kind of Bible-teaching ministry within the constraints of what the text says do you have in your church? If complementarianism means nothing more than saying no, then it’s as ugly as if interpreting headship in chapter 5 means nothing more than keeping the little woman down when we’ve been constrained to love our wives as Christ loved the church. That’s the first thing I’d say.

The second thing has to do with distortions in our perception that are in many ways culturally driven by some painful and ugly things in our history. I don’t now refer to overt acts of misogyny in the past. We know about those; I’m not going to give you a survey of that sort of thing. There are other things too that have really complicated issues.

World War I killed about 10 million males, relatively few females. World War II, apart from those killed in genocide where you had males and females killed with equal abandon, but in terms of the fighting, killed millions more men than women again. That meant in World War I there were 10 million women who were not going to find husbands, and then we produced millions more.

This is a kind of reverse of what has happened in China where men are more valued than women, and so you’ve had a kind of genocide by selective abortion, resulting in far more men being around than women. That’s the obverse side of that. Thus, until about 1900 when you had mission organizations sending people out cross-culturally, men went out singly; men and women went out as pairs; but when women went out, if they went out singly, they were almost always connected with some family or the like. There were exceptions but not a lot of them.

Now after the impact of two world wars and rising women’s rights issues, the right to vote, and so on, suddenly in the twentieth century, you had more and more women going overseas as missionaries and in that context often teaching people. Then the question arises, “So they can teach people over there, but when they come home, they can’t teach here, huh? How does that work out? Doesn’t that sound a bit patronizing?” All those difficult sorts of issues have come about because of war, mayhem, and the like.

Added to that was the feminization of the church in the West so for all kinds of reasons we targeted children first and women next and men last. When I was a seminary student a long time ago now, I was constantly given figures of this sort, and they were duly researched by the best researchers. All the stats and the methods were brought forth.

Questions like these were raised. “When do people become Christians?” I don’t remember the exact figures now, but it was discovered in evangelical churches in North America 70 or 80 percent of people who become Christians, become Christians before the age of 18. Very few people become Christians over the age of 50. Therefore, build Sunday schools, VBS’s, do children’s evangelism. It sounds like an infallible argument, doesn’t it?

The trouble is I was brought up in French Canada, so I had a different perspective on things. I started visiting in seminary all of these English churches where I noticed big Sunday schools (that’s beginning to change now too) and many churches with as many as twice as many women in as men.

I was brought up in Quebec. It wasn’t like that. In Quebec there was so much antipathy against the gospel and so much of a patriarchal society, you could never ever begin a church with a Sunday school. They’d never let you have their kids, and you couldn’t get women to come apart from the sanction of the husbands. Rarely, there would be the odd time, but not very often. But if you got the man, you got the man, the woman, the children, and the pocketbook. That’s how we built our churches.

Then when Reformation began to hit French Canada, my father was part of the lean years from 1935 to 1972, a grand total of about 35 churches, all Baptist or Brethren, in a population of six and a half million, most of these churches with 40 people or fewer. It was pretty grim after decades and decades of work.

Suddenly, between 1972 and 1980, we grew from 35 churches to almost 500, many of them with hundreds of people. It was spectacular growth, and do you know what? Of the converts, 75 to 80 percent were young men. We were having trouble finding women for the young men to marry. I started telling my friends in the US, “Why don’t you move to Quebec and become a missionary? There might be extra advantages.”

Because I was brought up with that kind of background, I had some big suspicions about these stats that were being fed to me at seminary; otherwise, I wouldn’t have seen it. Then it became obvious. I became pastor eventually of a church in Vancouver. It was a church with a large Sunday school. We had maybe 65 to 70 percent women and not many men. I said, “Now what’s going on here? This is what I’ve inherited. How does this come about?”

Then I started looking at the people hours, the worker hours. We had workers for nursery and toddlers and preschoolers and little kids and then bigger kids all the way up to college and careers. Then we had women’s outreach, women’s Bible studies, and so on. What did we have for the men? A deacons’ meeting. You put all of your energy into going after kids and women; you’re going to get more kids and women. Hey, I’m Reformed, and I still think that’s the case. God may have his elect, but he also has his means.

One of the things I did in my first two years was abolish some children’s stuff. It caused quite a lot of flak, but it freed up some people so we could start doing other things. Because I was single in those days, I had to be a little more careful how I did things with women. We had lots of capable women in the church. I focused my evangelism on men. By the time I left, we were getting more men converted than women, and I’m Reformed.

Sometimes we have borne ugly fruit in our churches precisely because we’ve seen the results of war or distortions from DINKS and the pill and our bad evangelistic outreach visions, so many things that have fed into these issues that have given us a whole lot of distorted figures in the church. We’re a long way from New Testament patterns, not because we’re just pawns in a society and this is just the way it is, but rather because we ourselves have participated in really bad moves.

Thirdly, at the same time I do worry a bit about women’s ministry and men’s ministry. There’s something to be said for it, and sometimes you have to target particular groups, but have you noticed how many women’s conferences there are that focus on the book of Ruth and the book of Esther so the whole conference is about women? Now we’re getting men’s conferences, men’s conventions.

I know I speak at them; they trouble me just the same, these men’s conferences where the whole aim is to be a hunk for Jesus. Unless you really like UFC, you’re definitely second class. Greek scholars need not apply. I spend a lot of time at these men’s ministries talking about my son. He’s a Marine, and he’s one tough dude. When he comes home, we go shooting. Yes, because men are hunks, and we want hunks for Jesus. I understand we’re trying to fight the feminization of the church and all of that, but there’s something ugly about that too, isn’t there?

At The Gospel Coalition women’s conference we’re having next June.… Am I allowed a bit of free advertising here? It’s not about women. It’s a women’s conference, but it’s about the gospel for women. Likewise, you want to have a men’s conference which is all about Jesus, the gospel, the kingdom that is growing, living in the light of eternity, and what you do in your home, all flowing from the gospel, not a conference about men. It’s about the gospel for men.

You want to say something similar about singles’ ministry and the like too. It’s not as if there is no place for singles’ ministries. Clearly, there’s a place for single people in ministry where it can actually be an advantage to be single. I was single for a long time in ministry. I was really slow. I got married late. What can I say? Paul lays out the reasons why it can actually be an advantage to be single in ministry.

That’s also true, but it can also be an excuse for a certain kind of selfishness, self-focus. You belong to this vast crowd now of people who can’t make decisions and can’t quite grow up. Tim Keller tells me the biggest pastoral problem he and Kathy have as they face their thousands of people, average age of 32, 70 percent of them unmarried, is in their converts, getting young men actually to see Christian young women and choose and get on with it and get married and be stable.

“Well, what about her? She’s a lovely Christian.” “Yeah, but there’s no chemistry.” They’re always looking over their shoulder to see if there’s a hotter chick coming along behind. There’s something really ugly about that too, and we’re all expressing our freedom and not growing up, for goodness’ sake.

Those are also parts of the dynamics that start making us want then sub-Christian structures right across the board, sub-Christian structures in the family, sub-Christian structures in the home, sub-Christian structures in the church, and you don’t fix those things merely by being an authoritarian male. That’s a component, a godly Christian authority where men are functioning as they were designed to be within God’s created order, taking responsibility.

It also means Christian men being gentle. I don’t care whether you’re for the UFC; I care whether you’re for your wife, and within that framework then, we need to be casting a vision of a Christian subculture, a Christian anti-culture culture, a Christian counterculture that is massive and is not constrained merely by debates on the roles of men and women.

Those passages are there; I don’t want you to use these larger arguments to domesticate what I’ve been saying for the last few hours. On the other hand, you must see it’s not a question of forbidding something or other to women and then we’ll be all right. The issues are much more massive than that and finally bring us to teaching and preaching the whole counsel of God. Let us pray.

Grant to us, merciful God, such an overwhelming reverence for your most Holy Word, that we will fear to misinterpret it and hunger not to domesticate it and want passionately to understand it and with our hearts to love it, with our wills to obey it.

We pray this will not become for us merely a question of conformity to propositions, as important as those propositions are, but learning afresh what it means to live under the cross as redeemed people already possessors of the Spirit as the down payment of the promised inheritance, living in the light of eternity, men and women, co-heirs of the gospel of Jesus Christ, no doubt with distinctive roles but pressing on that we might be conformed to the likeness of Jesus. In whose name we pray, amen.