The Blue Parakeet, 2nd

by Scot McKnight

  For it is God’s will that by doing good you should silence the ignorant talk of foolish people. (1 Peter 2:15, emphasis added)

  But how is it to your credit if you receive a beating for doing wrong and endure it? But if you suffer for doing good and you endure it, this is commendable before God. (1 Peter 2:20, emphasis added)

  So then, those who suffer according to God’s will should commit themselves to their faithful Creator and continue to do good. (1 Peter 4:19, emphasis added)

  Over and over the apostle Peter, building on Jesus, says we are to be people noticeable for doing good. Which means what? In context, these terms referred to public acts of benevolence—caring for the poor, compassion following disasters, forming public policy for the common good, and the like. These in the Bible’s Story are expansions, spillovers, inevitable consequences of the people of God having learned to be just with one another. In the Bible, learning justice in the people of God precedes practicing justice in the world, but the latter is an inevitability for those who have learned to be just in the church. Why? Because the church folks’ character has been transformed by God’s Spirit to become just, and being just means being just always. I believe that secular or social justice is an echo of redemptive-based justice among God’s people.

  PART 5

  WOMEN IN CHURCH MINISTRIES TODAY

  A Case Study in Rethinking How You Read the Bible

  There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.

  The apostle Paul, according to Galatians 3:28

  I have become all things to all people so that by all possible means I might save some. I do all this for the sake of the gospel, that I may share in its blessings.

  The apostle Paul, according to 1 Corinthians 9:22–23

  When I was a professor at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (TEDS) from 1983 to 1995, the debate about women in church ministries was one of the hot topics. In writing here about “women in church ministries,” I want to emphasize that I am not talking only about senior pastors and elders and preaching and teaching from pulpits on Sunday mornings, but about anything God calls women to do. Much of the debate about women in ministry, of course, revolves around the word “ordination” and senior pastors and public preaching. But we have a wider scope than that kind of ministry.

  As a young professor, I made two decisions—one subtle and which I regret, and one enduring and about to be documented in the next few chapters. The subtle decision I regret is that, because the issues were so inflammatory and anyone who thought otherwise about women was held either as theologically liberal or intellectually suspect, I made the decision not to enter into the public debate at Trinity. Class preparation, some other writing projects, a young family, and an income that didn’t make life anything other than a monthly chase did not give me the time to be proficient enough to enter the fray. (I now wish I had.) But I listened and learned.

  The discussion itself led me into many hours of thinking and deliberating with students, but rarely with colleagues. What I concluded then was that I simply didn’t read the Bible as did those who opposed women in church ministries, especially teaching and leading ministries. Some of the public debaters have the habit of calling anyone who moves in a different direction a liberal and of suggesting that those who differ must be denying inerrancy. Some announce that those who differ with the traditional view are on a slippery slope into theological liberalism. The facts are against this announcement. Many who do disagree with the traditional view are not in fact liberals. I could give you a list of them. Most of them are card-carrying evangelicals. I am one of them.

  What I realized as I listened to the debates was that I read the Bible as Story (though that was not the term I was using at that time), and I thought (and still think) that many of the traditionalists read the Bible as a law book and a puzzle. Perhaps a gentler way of putting this is to suggest that I think traditionalists read the Bible about women in church ministries through tradition instead of reading the Bible with tradition. The latter challenges the tradition while the former does not. In this instance, the tradition got it wrong.

  There are times for conservation and there are times for innovation.1 When innovation is not organic to the tradition, it is called revolution, and there is no reason to consider revolution in this discussion. Of course, it deserves to be said: one person’s conservation is another person’s innovation, and one person’s innovation is another person’s revolution, while some of us think the revolution is actually a case of conservation! In my Anglican Church of North America context, I have seen two major innovations, both of which were wise. The first was the decision that continuing cooperation with The Episcopal Church of America (TEC) was causing too much pain for those who adhered to the Great Tradition of the church, that is, to classic orthodoxy in its many elements—inspiration of Scripture, the Bible’s reliability to tell truth, the deity of Christ, the necessity of personal salvation, and a number of moral issues like homosexuality. The decision was to break from the TEC to form a separate North American “province” called the Anglican Church of North America. (I know, the debates between Christians of this magnitude too often have turned ugly—on both sides.) It is nothing short of an astounding innovation to break from one’s province to form one’s own province, and to do so not with the recognition of the central leaders (in Canterbury) but with recognition of other church leaders (in Africa).

  A second innovation is seen in how Anglicans have defended nonordination of women. The deep tradition was that women were ontologically subordinate and inferior to men. Any reading of church history will put you in touch with church theologians of the deep past who said nothing less than vile things about women.

  But an innovation occurred in the middle of the twentieth century in the Western world: women were seen as ontologically equal to men but were seen as having roles of subordination. That, as one informed scholar has proven beyond doubt, is nothing less than an innovation.2 I agree: Yes, it’s an innovation among Anglicans and it had to be made. But it didn’t go far enough.

  This is where part 5 in this book is located. It will argue that innovation, organically connected to the Bible and to the church’s tradition bringing those passages of the Bible into full view, is needed if we want to be faithful to the Bible. Women are not only ontologically equal to men but women are called to all ministries in the church. That’s another innovation we need.

  Now, before I get to this approach to women in ministry, a view I believe is more biblical and one that encourages us to expand the ministries of women, I want to sketch where I have come from.

  How I Changed My Mind

  Fundamentalism

  I grew up in a fundamentalist Christian home and church in the Midwest. Our home was traditional in this sense: my father and mother lived their lives within what might be called traditional roles. My father was a public school teacher, and my mother was a housewife until my sisters and I were old enough for her to begin working to supplement the income. My mother was (and still is) an ambitious and talented woman who, had she been born thirty years later, would have become a successful businessperson or leader of some kind. My father called the shots but my mother ran the place, though I can’t say I paid much attention to such things. I absorbed this way of living as natural.

  Our church was traditionalist. We had no women in any kind of public ministry other than my mother, who was the choir director. I am reasonably certain no woman ever preached from our pulpit, though women did sing and give testimonies. The one exception was female missionaries who came through at times to report on their missionary efforts. They did not preach or teach; rather, they gave witness or reports and at times their stories were gripping. The difference between teaching and giving witness was important, even if mistaken.

  However, the windows were slightly open in our fundamentalist church because one of our neighbors, Dorothy Libby, was a Sunday school teacher for
young adults—post-high-school, college-age adults—even though she was a woman. She loved to study the Bible, had a mind of her own, read what was available in commentaries, books, and Bible dictionaries, and overall did something that technically was against the silent code—women were not to teach male adults.

  Education

  I went off to a fundamentalist Christian college, where the same ideas were present. I had a brilliant Western lit teacher named Diana Portfleet, who had a keen perception of theology and church history, but she did not teach Bible or theology. Dr. Portfleet at some level opened the window for me even more. I do not recall women in church ministries being an issue for me either when I was in college or when I was in seminary.

  During my doctoral days in England, this issue came up in a variety of ways, and while my recollection is that I was a quiet and shifting traditionalist with more than a willingness to think about the problems, my intellectual interests were about other topics. I was focused on gospel studies and how Judaism worked. But one day riding my bicycle in Cambridge, England, I observed that the person riding a bicycle next to me was none other than Professor Morna Hooker, the great Methodist New Testament scholar at Cambridge University. In an odd sort of way, my heart was strangely warmed.

  After exchanging pleasantries and fighting off the temptation to engage in nonstop prattle with her as we rode together across Cambridge, something occurred to me that opened the window more. I realized how much I had learned from Morna Hooker’s exquisite and insightful scholarship. Most importantly, this moment of bicycle riding with her drove me to the conclusion that anyone who thinks it is wrong for a woman to teach in a church can be consistent with that point of view only if they refuse to read and learn from women scholars. This means not reading their books lest the women become their teachers.

  Some people think it is pedantic to equate reading-to-learn with a teaching ministry. I don’t, and I stand by it until someone can convince me that reading-to-learn is different from listening-to-learn. Right then and there, while riding a bicycle next to Professor Hooker, I realized that my own view was about to undergo a major change. I became convinced that teaching is teaching and learning is learning, and that reading her books is learning from her. If men could learn from a woman scholar’s writings about theology and the Bible, if men could learn from a New Testament expert, a woman, who gave substance to their sermons and ideas and theology, then these men were being taught—call it what you want—by a woman.

  Teaching

  By the time I began teaching at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, I cannot say that my mind was clear in all regards or that I had become consistent in my own head, but I can say that the genesis of change was in the past. I was a traditionalist at some level, but all I needed was an opportunity. Teaching students, especially women, became that opportunity. My change was gradual, and what most changed it was the study of the New Testament and the realization that I believed the New Testament—all of it—emerged from and therefore was shaped by the first-century Jewish and Greco-Roman culture, including what it said about women. Within a year or two I had become convinced that the traditionalist view was misreading and misusing the Bible. I taught at Trinity for more than a decade. Apart from classroom discussions, I did not get into these issues in public.

  Writing this has led to some soul-searching. I read through what I wrote on Galatians 3:28 and 1 Peter 3:1–6 in my commentaries on those books—one passage about “neither male nor female” and the other about women submitting to their unbelieving spouse.3 Those commentaries were written as I was making the transition from Trinity to North Park University in Chicago. They were the first time I went public with my views. In both commentaries I sketched how I thought we should read the Bible—as a culturally conditioned revelation of God’s Word that needs to be worked out in a modern context. My views have developed since then, but the foundational argument was present in both commentaries. I regret that I did not engage traditionalists at that time, even though the views I was taking gave me a foundation to engage in the debate.

  In the process of being interviewed to teach at North Park, two of my future colleagues, Sonia Bodi and Nancy Arnesen, took me to coffee. Nancy, a gentle, fair-minded woman and one firmly entrenched in a Christian feminist perspective, asked me my view of women in church ministries. I won’t forget what I said: “I’m for women in ministry.”

  “But what about Paul?” she asked back.

  “Paul’s directions to his churches were culturally shaped,” I replied. We spent time discussing that point of view. The window on women in ministry was open for me (and so was a teaching post I enjoyed for seventeen years).

  I now teach at Northern Seminary in Lisle, Illinois, a seminary whose first graduate was a woman called to preach and teach. At Northern we are firmly committed to women in ministry, and I have a talented female colleague in systematic theology, Cherith Fee Nordling. She can teach, the students say, but she can preach even more! And she can. I am so proud of Northern’s stance as one it has maintained for more than a century.

  Before I go on, I must confess that I believe I (and my colleagues) failed our female students at Trinity, that we should have engaged this debate “tooth and claw,” and that had we done so the Evangelical Free Church as well as that seminary may have been a much more liberating institution than it is today. I want to confess to the many female students that we (and I) were wrong and I am asking you to forgive us (and me). I can only hope the recent hire of women like Dana Harris and Ingrid Faro will lead to more women on the Trinity faculty. I also hope such appointments come with an official confession and invited responses by former women students.

  I have loads of respect for my friends and colleagues at Trinity, not the least of whom were my teachers, Walt Liefeld and Grant Osborne. Both Walt and Grant took a stand for women’s ordination against the grain at Trinity and helped me in many ways to see the light on this issue, but none of us fought the battle as fiercely as was required for the time. I don’t want to make it look as if I was simmering or seething under a tightly stopped-up lid of oppression. I could have done more; we could have done more. Walt and Grant did far more than I did.

  Finally, I want to call attention to the many women students we had who endured traditionalist teachers. Unintentionally or intentionally, these women were suppressed from exercising their gifts and have been barred from ministries—some of whom, to my great delight, like Sarah Sumner and Alice Shirey, have found their way into careers of teaching, speaking, pastoring, and writing while others have had to pursue other careers in spite of a calling from God to teach and preach.

  Since I’ve mentioned Sarah and Alice, I also want to mention two outstandingly gifted women who have never found a sacred space among evangelicals, Cheryl Hatch and Jane Goleman. These two women, and I could mention others, were some of the best students I have ever taught and some of the most gifted. But their own commitments to evangelicalism have kept them among evangelicals who, sadly, silence blue parakeets.

  I want to tell more of Cheryl’s story, but that will begin our next chapter.

  CHAPTER 14

  THE BIBLE AND WOMEN

  Women in Church Ministries 1

  In one of my early classes of teaching at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, I had a fantastic student named Cheryl Hatch. She had already flourished for a decade as a campus minister with “Crusade” (her name for Campus Crusade for Christ, a ministry to college students). She had a firm grasp of both the Bible and Christian theology, she had exceptional interpersonal skills, and her mature faith was obvious. In my class of “exegeting” 1 Peter, each student was assigned to summarize how they would preach a given passage. Cheryl’s “sermonette” stood head and shoulders above all the others. Not only was Cheryl mature in faith and competent theologically, she was also gifted to preach.

  But when Cheryl graduated with her master of arts in religion with an emphasis in New Testament, she could find no church willing to c
all her as a preaching or teaching pastor. Why? She was a woman. She received offers to serve as a children’s pastor or a youth pastor or a women’s ministry pastor, but no church—zero—even considered her to stand behind a pulpit on Sunday morning to preach the gospel and expound the Bible even though she was gifted and competent and willing and felt God had called her to preach.

  The irony of this haunts me. Cheryl is a gifted evangelist. One moment’s reflection on the significance of evangelism, from which gift (to my knowledge) women have never been barred, should lead us to some about-face changes. If a woman is given the freedom to explain the gospel and persuade others to respond to the gospel, and if the message of evangelism shapes how a person will eventually live as a Christian, consistency would demand that we either bar women from evangelism or permit them to teach and preach as well. Anyone, so I would say, who permits women to evangelize ought to permit them to preach. After all, what is “preaching” in the New Testament if it does not include evangelism?

  Cheryl returned to Washington, DC, where to this day she enjoys a full life of federal employment, participates actively in her local church, and perseveres in the ongoing development of her own theological studies. Kris and I remain friends with Cheryl. She appears to harbor no bitterness. I am willing to now say that the evangelical church missed out on someone who could have been a dynamic pastor.

  Cheryl was a blue parakeet. Blue parakeets, the church was saying at the time she was “on the market,” are to remain in their cages and keep silent. But are they? Let’s look in the next few chapters how many people have discerned what we now are to do with blue parakeets, the women who believe they are called to sing and fly in the ministries of the church. I will argue that we should let the blue parakeets sing and fly, that in reading the Bible with tradition instead of through tradition, we are set free to respect and challenge that tradition. The direction of the Bible itself encourages us to face the future by expanding the place of women in church ministries.