The Blue Parakeet, 2nd

by Scot McKnight

  It’s All in Our Passage!

  First Timothy 2:9–15 is aimed directly at women, especially the young widows, who are following the new Roman woman in public behaviors and who don’t know enough theology to teach sound doctrine.

  Paul, ever vigilant about the reputation of the gospel, urges these women to wear modest clothing, to exercise sexual restraint, and to do good deeds. Yet more than that—and often ignored—Paul utters something that should completely shift the focus of this passage: “A woman should learn in quietness and full submission” (1 Timothy 2:11, emphasis added). Paul’s focus here is not on what women cannot do, which unfortunately is how the silencers of blue parakeets read this passage, but on what these women must do: learn. He is not concerned with silence in general but with silence in order to learn. In light of the Story and of how we have answered WDWD, we conclude that the silence Paul talks about in both 1 Corinthians 14 and 1 Timothy 2 is a temporary silence—temporary until these women have learned.

  The teaching that Paul prohibits, then, is unorthodox theology. Until these young women are informed and until they are formed in character, they need to be learners. (The same can be said for men who, in Paul’s world, had more opportunities to learn.) So when Paul says they need to “learn in quietness and full submission,” he is speaking here of deference to the wise teachers, the elders, who are orthodox and godly, not to a permanent condition of utter silence. Once they learn, they will be ready to teach and to travel from house church to house church to impart wisdom and demonstrate godliness.

  Paul’s two comments about silence are actually consistent, then, with the story and plot of the Bible. Women, who have always been gifted by God to speak for God and to lead God’s people, were doing just those things in Paul’s churches. But women who had not yet learned Bible and theology or who had not yet learned how to live a Christian life were not to become teachers until they had learned orthodox theology.

  What drives 1 Corinthians 14 and 1 Timothy 2 is a principle that much of the church tradition has nearly smothered when it comes to women: “Learning precedes teaching.” When churches today ask leaders questions about the Bible and theology and when pastoral search committees ask about the education of candidates, they are living out what Paul was saying in these two passages.

  What about Scripture? What about Today?

  Some are surprised by what they learn when they read explanations like this. Some want to throw away their Bibles and say, “Only the experts can do this!” Some find liberation. Some say they almost threw away their Bible until they learned the Bible too emerged out of a context. They say, “Show me how to do this on my own!”

  Both of these groups believe in the Bible.

  Perhaps you disagree with my reading of these silencing passages. Let me then put it another way. We can at least begin with two basic options: either we have a general prohibition of women teaching and leading with some exceptions (the hierarchical view, through the many layers of church tradition), or we have the possibility of women teaching and leading with some restrictions (the mutuality view, with [and perhaps against] tradition). There is no ground, however, for total silencing of women in the church. Total silence makes Paul a total contradiction between what he teaches and what women were doing in his churches—about which he says nothing when they pray or prophesy, or are deacons or apostles, or when they are more or less the leaders of house churches.

  When we consider these two options, does it not strike you that, at the very least, women can sometimes teach and lead? In the Bible, women did lead and women did teach. Some today want to take back what women did, while others (I include myself here) want to expand what women can do today because we live in a different world. Those who are taking back the teaching and leading ministries of women are fighting the Bible, not embracing it. They are silencing blue parakeets. They are saying, “We know what women did in the Bible, but that’s not for today!” Let me ask you a question: Is this being biblical? Is this following the clear expansion of ministries from Pentecost on? I believe a post-Pentecost reading of the Bible encourages us to give the blue parakeets a chance to sing!

  You might ask me, “Why do you think we can expand the ministries of women?” Very simply: the plot of the Bible, the redemptive world created by the King and His Kingdom Story, and the behaviors of women in that Plot and Story reveal to me an increasing expansion of women in church ministries. Some of the restrictions were based on respectability and culture. If those restrictions have changed, then I see no reason to limit the ministries of women to the sensibilities and cultures of that time. God spoke in those days in those ways, and I believe he is speaking in our days in our ways.

  But I have no desire here to suggest this expansion of the role of women is for all in all places. I return to Phil Towner’s observations—and here he brings in the unique combination of not only an expertise on our text but also decades of experience on the mission field. Phil and I generally agree on how to read this passage. But he offers us this caution: “What this means for Christianity in traditional Asian or Muslim contexts is that too much too fast could endanger the church’s witness and credibility. But in much of the Western world, too little too slow could neutralize the church’s impact in society just as effectively.”5

  What we need is discernment.

  The Pauline Principle of Discernment

  If any words in the Bible capture the essence of this book, they can be found in the first letter Paul sent to the Corinthians. What I’m not sure we always ponder, perhaps because it will attract a yard full of blue parakeets, is just how creative, liberating, and forward-looking this passage is. Here are Paul’s words from 1 Corinthians 9:19–23:

  Though I am free and belong to no one, I have made myself a slave to everyone, to win as many as possible. To the Jews I became like a Jew, to win the Jews. To those under the law I became like one under the law (though I myself am not under the law), so as to win those under the law. To those not having the law I became like one not having the law (though I am not free from God’s law but am under Christ’s law), so as to win those not having the law. To the weak I became weak, to win the weak. 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.

  Here’s a question I hope you can toss around with your friends: Do you think Paul would have put women “behind the pulpit” if it would have been advantageous “for the sake of gospel”? I believe Paul would exhort us to open the cages and let the blue parakeets fly and let them sing.

  What Paul states in 1 Corinthians 9 forms the core of how we have to learn to read the Bible. Paul himself adapted the gospel to every situation he encountered: a Jewish expression for Jews, a gentile expression for gentiles, and a philosopher’s approach when on the Areopagus (Acts 17). What Paul did is simple: he knew the Story and the Plot, he listened to God and was open to the Spirit, and he discerned how to live out that gospel and speak that gospel into each cultural setting. Paul’s mode was renewing and always renewing.

  Recently in a class session of college students, I sketched three options we have in reading the Bible (the three views I sketched in chapter 2): read and retrieve it all, read the Bible through tradition, and read the Bible with tradition (including challenging the tradition). After class, a fine student pressed me, with intellectual articulation and heartfelt passion, that if we choose the third option we are led to hundreds of views with no real unity. How can we let everyone read the Bible for themselves? Won’t that lead to millions of readings?

  My response? No, it won’t lead to millions of readings, but it will lead to many readings. Culturally shaped readings of the Bible and culturally shaped expressions of the gospel are exactly what Paul did and wanted and practiced: what occurred in Jerusalem was not what happened in Corinth, and what happened in Corinth was not what happened in Rome. That’s exactly what Peter and the author of Hebrews and John and Jame
s and the others were doing. Culturally shaped readings and expressions of the gospel are the way it has been, is, and always will be. In fact, I believe that gospel adaptation for every culture, for every church, and for every Christian is precisely why God gave us the Bible. The Bible shows us how.

  The Waterslide Again

  God has given us his Word, the Bible. That Word provides for us the gospel. That gospel is the waterslide, banked on one side by the Bible’s canon and banked on the other side by the wisdom of the church, the Great Tradition. The water running down the slide is the Holy Spirit. We are called to enter the slide at the top (Genesis) and ride it all the way down—safely protected by canon and conversation with Tradition—to the end (Revelation). If we ride it properly, wetted down as we are by the Holy Spirit and cheered on by the communion of saints, we will land in the water where we need to be—in our day and in our way.

  F. F. Bruce

  In the spring of 1981, as a doctoral student in Nottingham, England, I piled Kris and our two kids, Laura and Lukas, into our small car and drove to Buxton. Professor F. F. Bruce, perhaps the most widely known evangelical scholar of the previous generation and a specialist on Paul, had invited our family to his home for late-afternoon tea. When we arrived, we were welcomed into the home by Professor Bruce, and we sat in the living room for about two hours. During that time our son managed to spill a glass of orange squash on the Bruce’s rug, which Professor Bruce dismissed with a “whatever can be spilled has been spilled on that rug.”

  During a break, as Kris was talking to Mrs. Bruce, I asked Professor Bruce a question that I had stored up for him (and I repeat our conversation from my memory): “Professor Bruce, what do you think of women’s ordination?”

  “I don’t think the New Testament talks about ordination,” he replied.

  “What about the silencing passages of Paul on women?” I asked.

  “I think Paul would roll over in his grave if he knew we were turning his letters into torah.”

  Wow! I thought. That’s a good point to think about. Thereupon I asked a question that he answered in such a way that it reshaped my thinking: “What do you think, then, about women in church ministries?”

  Professor Bruce’s answer was as Pauline as Paul was: “I’m for whatever God’s Spirit grants women gifts to do.”

  So am I. Let the blue parakeets sing!

  CHAPTER 19

  NOW WHAT?

  We’ve covered lots of ground in The Blue Parakeet, but that is only because the question—“How, then, do we read the Bible?”—deserves our attention. There are enough passages in the Bible—and I began to sense this when I was a young Christian—that, when we read them, make us think all over again about how we are reading the Bible. I call these passages the “blue parakeet passages.”

  Blue parakeet passages are oddities in the Bible that we prefer to cage and silence rather than to permit into our sacred mental gardens. If we are honest, blue parakeet passages often threaten us, call into question our traditional way of reading the Bible, and summon us back to the Bible to rethink how we read the Bible. Though we could have chosen other themes or ideas, the issue of women in church ministries was our test case for how we both read the Bible and how we bring it into our world.

  So, how then do we read the Bible? I’d like to sum up what this book has said.

  The Big Temptation

  Many of us will be tempted to take the shortcuts when we read the Bible and especially when we encounter a blue parakeet passage. Instead of reading each passage in its storied context, we will zoom in on getting out of the Bible what we want. Once again, the shortcuts we have all learned in reading the Bible are:

  • to treat the Bible as a collection of laws;

  • to treat the Bible as a collection of blessings and promises;

  • to treat the Bible as a Rorschach inkblot onto which we can project our own ideas;

  • to treat the Bible as a giant puzzle that we are to puzzle together; and

  • to treat one of the Bible’s authors as a maestro.

  We have only one other genuine option, to read the Bible from front to back as a redemptive message shaped by the King and His Kingdom Story. Before we summarize what we said about the Story, let’s see what’s wrong with each of these shortcuts. Yes, strategy will guide us to something true about the Bible: there are laws, there are blessings and promises, there are moments when we see in the Bible something about our own lives, there are parts of the Bible that we are challenged to puzzle together, and there are maestros—many of them. But there are problems with each of these:

  • The Bible is more than laws, and each law is connected to its context.

  • The Bible is more than blessings and promises; there are some warnings and threats as well.

  • The Bible is something that comes to us from God and not something onto which we can impose our wishes and desires.

  • The Bible is a story to be read, not a divinely scattered puzzle to be pieced together into a system that makes sense of it all.

  • The Bible is a collection of wiki-stories of the Story, and each author, each maestro, is but one voice at the table.

  It is tempting to return to the safety of our former reading habits. But if we listen to the blue parakeet passages in the Bible, which are there at God’s discretion, and if we think about how we are reading them, the Bible somehow unfolds before our eyes as a brilliant Story.

  The Story

  God chose to give us a collection of books, what I call wiki-stories of the Story, and together these books form into God’s story with us and God’s story for us. Acts 7 is a good example of how to read the Bible as Story even though Stephen’s speech in Acts 7 is only one wiki-story of the Story. Again, each author in the Bible is a wiki-storyteller and each book is then a wiki-story, one story in the ongoing development of the big story. These are the major elements of that story:

  Theocracy

  1. God and creation

  2. Adam and Eve as Eikons who crack the Eikon

  3. God’s covenant community, Israel, where humans are restored to God, self, others, and the world

  Monarchy

  1. Israel as God’s covenant people who desire a king; God grants them a king but this does not solve Israel’s problems; God uses the kings and the prophets and the sages to anticipate the one true king, prophet, and sage.

  Christocracy

  1. Jesus Christ, who is the King of the Story and in whose story we are to live

  2. The church as Jesus’s covenant community

  3. The consummation, when all the designs of our Creator God will finally be realized forever and ever

  What we discover in reading the Bible is that each telling of the Story, each wiki-story, was a Spirit-inspired telling of the Story in each person’s day in each person’s way. God spoke through Moses in Moses’s ways for Moses’s days, through David in David’s ways for David’s days, through Jesus in Jesus’s ways for Jesus’s days, and through John in John’s ways for John’s days. God always speaks a “contemporary” word. The genius of the Bible is the continuity of the Story as each generation learns to speak it afresh in its days and in its ways.

  Furthermore, each wiki-storyteller, each author in the Bible, tells a story that will lead us to the person of the Story: Jesus Christ. As Moses and Isaiah look forward to that person, so Paul and Peter and the author of Hebrews look back to that person. Jesus Christ, then, is the goal and the center of each wiki-story. The Theocracy worked through a Monarchy, but the whole Story was aimed at the Christocracy, the rule of the Messiah as the world’s one true Lord.

  This leads me to a major strategy in reading the Bible. Every author in the Bible was divinely directed through God’s Spirit to tell a true story of the one Story. This means that our task in reading the Bible is to “map” the elements of the Story in each wiki-story. If we keep our eyes on the seven elements of the Story as outlined above, we will have all we need for reading the Bible. The
se seven elements govern the story of the Bible and each book focuses on one or more of these elements.

  Living Out the Story Today

  We must never make the mistake of exalting the paper on which the Bible is written over the person who puts the words on that paper. Our relationship to the Bible is actually, if we are properly engaged, a relationship with the God of the Bible. God gave us the Bible as a person who speaks to you and me as persons through words. God gave us the Bible so we could be transformed and bring glory to him by living out a life in this world that God designs for us. How do we do this?

  We are summoned by the God who speaks to us in the Bible to listen to God speak, to live out what God directs us to live out, and to discern how to live out the Story in our own day. One way of saying all of this can be found in Moses’s original words and in what I call the Jesus Creed version of Moses’s words: we are to love God and to love others. If we love God and love others, we will listen to God in the Bible, live out what God calls us to live out, and discern how to live out the Story in our world today. Discernment, of course, calls for some special attention.

  I used the image of the waterslide in this book for how we discern how to live today. Graced by the watery gift of the Spirit, we sit on the gospel and are constrained by the Bible and guided by the wise mentors of the church (reading the Bible with tradition), and we ride this all so we can land in our world with a gospel for our day shaped in our way. What we need are two things if we are to do this well.