the feminine mystake

chapter one

the two ditches

There is a road here, and on either side of it there is a ditch, and almost everyone who takes up this subject ends up in one ditch or the other. I want to name them both before we take a step, because the whole of this booklet is an attempt to walk the road and stay out of both.

The first ditch is on the right, and it is the one the church has fallen into most often. It is the error that will not let a woman do anything. It takes the two genuinely closed things and stretches them out into a thousand closed things, until a woman may not teach a Sunday school class with a man in the room, may not lead a Bible study, may not pray aloud, may not serve as a deaconess, may not so much as read the Scripture from the front. This ditch silences women far past anything the Bible silences them, and binds where God left free, and it has done real harm, and real harm to real souls. I will use a hard word for it, because it earns the hard word: it is both legalistic and, in its effect, demeaning to the very daughters of God it claims to protect. It shuts them out of ground the Word of God threw wide open.

And I will not pretend to you that this is abstract for me, because it is not. I am a woman who does this very work, who sits with the Hebrew and the Greek and the commentaries and labors over the text, and I have felt the edge of that ditch myself, more than once. There are men in the church, sincere men, brothers I will meet in glory, who would look at me doing this and tell me I have stepped out of my place, that a woman has no business handling the Word this way, that the study itself is a kind of rebellion. They are wrong, and I can show you from the Book that they are wrong, and I will before we are done. But I will not stand here and tell you the misogyny is imaginary, that no one is really kept small, that the over-binding is only a story women tell. It is real. I have tasted it. There are men, and women too, who would keep the daughters of God in a smaller room than He built for them, and calling that what it is is not bitterness and it is not the other ditch; it is simply honesty, and honesty is the whole business of this series.

The second ditch is on the left, and it is the fashionable one now. It is the error that says a woman may do anything a man may do, the pulpit and the eldership included, that there is no difference of role at all, that the verses which say otherwise were merely the prejudice of an ancient culture and may be quietly set aside. This ditch is the spirit of the age dressed in Sunday clothes, and it fails on two counts at once: it is not biblical, for it must explain away the plain words of the text, and it is not even biological, for it denies the real and good difference God built into us. It does not honor women; it erases them, by pretending the design was never there.

What you must see about the two ditches is that they are the same mistake made in opposite directions. The one adds to the Word, building the wall higher than God built it. The other subtracts from the Word, tearing the wall down where God set it. Both have let something other than the text decide where the line falls, the one its suspicion of women, the other its surrender to the culture. And the road between them, the only safe road, is the one this whole series keeps coming back to: you go to the Bible yourself. Not to your favorite woman teacher with the conference and the book deal. Not to the angry voices online. Not to what your grandmother assumed or what the magazine says you should want. You go to the text, in its own languages and its own context, and you do the patient work of finding out what it actually says, and then you submit to that, wherever it lands you. That is the road, and it is the only one that does not end in a ditch.

Both have let something other than the text decide where the line falls: the one its suspicion of women, the other its surrender to the age.

chapter two

what is actually closed

We must be exact about the two closed things, for the whole argument depends on naming them precisely, and almost all the confusion comes from naming them sloppily. The two things closed to women are the office of elder, and the office of pastor, which is to say the governing and shepherding authority over the gathered church. That is it. That is all that is reserved. And to see it clearly we must look at the words the New Testament actually uses, for the English flattens what the Greek makes plain.

There are three words in the Greek, and they describe one office from three angles. The first is episkopos, which we render bishop or overseer; it is from epi, meaning over, and skopeo, meaning to look or to watch, so that the overseer is the one who watches over, who superintends. The second is presbyteros, which we render elder; it carries the dignity of the seasoned and the mature, the one whose years and steadiness fit him to lead. And the third is poimēn, which we render pastor, and it means, simply and beautifully, shepherd. These are not three different offices. The New Testament uses them of the same men, the overseers who are elders who shepherd the flock, one office seen as oversight, as eldership, and as shepherding all at once.¹

And mark what a shepherd is, for the whole matter is hidden in that word. A shepherd is not merely a teacher of sheep; he is the one with authority over the flock, who leads it and guards it and rules it and answers for it. When Peter writes to the elders, he gathers all three words into a single charge, and you can see the one office shining through all of them.

“The elders which are among you I exhort: Feed the flock of God which is among you, taking the oversight thereof… neither as being lords over God’s heritage, but being ensamples to the flock.”

– 1 Peter 5:1–3

There they all are in three verses: the elders, the presbyteroi, are to feed and shepherd, the work of the poimēn, taking the oversight, the work of the episkopos. One office, one authority, one shepherding rule over the flock of God. And Paul does the very same thing when he calls the Ephesian elders together and stacks all three words upon the same men in a single breath, calling the presbyteroi to take heed to the flock over which the Holy Ghost had made them episkopoi, that they might shepherd the church of God. And when Paul lists who may hold this office, in his letters to Timothy and Titus, he describes that man in terms that assume he is a man, the husband of one wife, and lays upon him a long and searching list of what he must be.²

“A bishop then must be blameless, the husband of one wife, vigilant, sober, of good behaviour, given to hospitality, apt to teach.”

– 1 Timothy 3:2

Now I want to stop you before you race ahead, because there is something here the right-hand ditch always skips, and it is only fair to say it plainly. The office is not reserved for any man who happens to be male. It is reserved for the qualified man, and Paul spends his ink on the qualifying, not the maleness, a long catalogue of character the man must actually possess, blameless, temperate, not given to wine, not greedy, ruling his own house well, of good report. And I will tell you the truth: a great many men standing in pulpits this very Sunday do not come within a mile of that list. The Word that closes the office to women does not fling it open to every man either; it hands it only to the qualified, and judges the unfit man as surely as it orders the woman elsewhere. This is not a loyalty to males. It is a submission to the text, and the text is no respecter of persons.³

chapter three

it was never about teaching

This is where most of the fighting happens, and most of the confusion lives, so I will go slowly and get it exactly right.

Pick up nearly any argument about this subject and you will find that both sides have made the same mistake without noticing it: they have assumed the issue is teaching. The one side says women must not teach, and so it shoos them out of the Sunday school room and clamps a hand over their mouths in the Bible study. The other side says women may surely teach, and so it concludes they may therefore hold the pulpit and the eldership too. Both have taken teaching to be the thing in question. And both are wrong, because teaching was never the point in question. Authority was.

Go and look at the verse everyone quotes, and look at it with your eyes open.

“Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection. But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence.”

– 1 Timothy 2:11–12

Now the word rendered usurp authority is the Greek authentein, and it is a strong and particular word; it is not the ordinary word for influence or for instruction, but a word that carries the sense of holding sway, of exercising governing power, of taking dominion over another. Paul has joined two things in that sentence, teaching and the having of authority, and we have spent centuries prying them apart wrongly or fusing them wrongly. The teaching he forbids to the woman is teaching of a particular kind, the kind bound up with this authentein, the governing, ruling, this-is-the-doctrine-of-this-house teaching that belongs to the one set in authority over the flock. He is not forbidding a woman ever to open her mouth and explain the Scriptures to anyone alive. We know he is not, because the same Bible, breathed out by the same Spirit, shows us women doing exactly that with full blessing, and we will meet every one of them before we are through.⁴

So hear me, My Friend, for this is the hinge the matter turns upon. A teacher and a shepherd are not the same thing. A teacher instructs, and she may have enormous influence, and influence is a real and weighty thing for which she will answer to God. But a shepherd governs. A shepherd holds authority over the flock, leads it and rules it and stands accountable for it as one who must give account for souls. That shepherding authority over the gathered body of Christ is the thing reserved, and it is the only thing reserved. The woman teaching a roomful of teenagers on a Wednesday night holds no such authority over anyone; she is not the shepherd of that congregation; she governs nothing and rules no one. There is teaching in that room, and there is influence, but there is no authority, and so there is nothing in it that the Word of God forbids. Not one thing.

A teacher instructs. A shepherd governs. It was never teaching that was reserved. It was authority.

Let me say the sober half of it too, lest the freedom be mistaken for a small thing. To teach without the office is not to teach without weight, for the same Scripture warns that those who handle the Word will be judged the more strictly.

“My brethren, be not many masters, knowing that we shall receive the greater condemnation.”

– James 3:1

The woman who teaches, then, carries no authority, but she does carry real accountability, and the two are not the same. She does not govern the flock, and she does answer to God for what she pours into the souls in front of her. That is not a reason to be silent; it is a reason to be faithful. The freedom is wide, and it is weighty, and both things are true at once.⁵

chapter four

the order from the garden

Now someone will say, and say it triumphantly, that all of this was merely cultural, a rule for one backward century that we have happily outgrown. And if Paul had grounded his teaching in the customs of Ephesus, they would have a point worth answering. But he does not. He grounds it in the garden, before there was a single human culture to blame, and that is a thing the left-hand ditch can never get around, however hard it digs.

“For Adam was first formed, then Eve.”

– 1 Timothy 2:13

There is the ground he gives, and it is not Ephesus and it is not the first century; it is creation itself. Adam was first formed, then Eve. Paul reaches all the way back past the fall, past every culture, to the order in which God made them, and rests the matter there. And when we turn back to that account in Genesis, we find the order was real and was freighted with meaning from the start. The man was formed first, out of the dust. The command concerning the tree was given to the man, and given to him, the text shows us, before the woman was ever fashioned, so that he held it first and bore the keeping of it. The woman was made afterward, from his side, as a help meet for him, the Hebrew ezer kenegdo, a helper corresponding to him, his match and his counterpart, no lesser creature but a distinct and answering one.⁶

I must guard this carefully, because the right-hand ditch loves to hear order and immediately read worth, as though first-formed meant better and second-formed meant lesser. It means nothing of the kind, and I will not let it. The woman is as fully the image of God as the man, equal in worth, equal in dignity, equal heir of the grace of life. The order is not a ranking of value; it is an arrangement of role, and the two are entirely different things. A thing can be equal in worth and ordered in role at the very same moment, as the Son is equal with the Father in the Godhead and yet orders Himself under the Father’s will. Difference of role is not difference of worth, and anyone who turns this truth into a contempt for women has stumbled out of the road and into the other ditch entirely.

Difference of role is not difference of worth. The one who turns this truth into a contempt for women has simply fallen into the other ditch.

But here is what the ground of creation does, and why it matters so much. It takes this teaching out of the reach of the it-was-only-cultural argument forever. A rule rooted in a passing custom passes when the custom passes. A rule rooted in the order of creation, established before the fall, woven into the design of man and woman as God made them, does not pass, because creation does not pass. This is why the church has always drawn its very pattern of authority from this creational order, and why the matter cannot simply be voted out by a more enlightened age. It was not built on the sand of culture. It was built on the rock of how God made us, in the garden, when everything was still good.

chapter five

eve was deceived

Paul does not stop at the order of creation. He gives a second ground, and it is one we would perhaps rather he had left unsaid, but he did not leave it unsaid, and we do not get to skip the parts of the Word that sting. Right on the heels of Adam first formed, then Eve, he writes this.

“And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was in the transgression.”

– 1 Timothy 2:14

Adam was not deceived; the woman, being deceived, fell into transgression. Now we must read this with great care, for it can be twisted in both directions. It does not say the woman is incapable, or unintelligent, or worthless, or that she sinned worse than the man. Indeed the heavier reckoning of the fall is laid, throughout the rest of Scripture, upon Adam and not upon Eve, for it is written that by one man sin entered into the world, and that one man is Adam, who was not deceived and sinned with his eyes open, bearing the headship and the heavier guilt. This is no license to despise women. But neither may we wave the verse away, for it says something, and the something is this: in the matter of the fall, it was the woman who was deceived, drawn in through the serpent’s cunning, persuaded by the craft of him before ever Adam ate.⁷

Now hold this beside the rest of Scripture and be honest, for honesty is the whole business of this series. The Bible warns every soul, man and woman alike, against deception; not one of us is exempt, and the man who thinks himself too clever to be fooled is the surest fool of all. That is true, and it must be said, and I say it. And yet, having said it, we cannot pretend the Spirit did not lay a particular emphasis here upon the deceiving of the woman, in the very passage where He orders the matter of authority in the church. The emphasis is His, not mine. He set it there. And when I look out at the world, I do not find it contradicting Him. The cults and the high-control groups, the charismatic deceivers who gather followers by feeling and fervor, draw women in markedly greater numbers than men, and it is no slander to say so, for the sociologists who study these movements have documented it for decades. There is something here that Scripture names and the world’s own patterns echo.⁸

The emphasis is His, not mine. He set it there.

Let me say it the way a sister says a hard thing to a sister she loves. We women have a characteristic place where the enemy finds us, and it is this: we are prone to let the emotions run ahead of the discernment, to be moved and swept and persuaded by what feels true before we have asked whether it is true. It is not that men have no weakness; they have their own, and lust is the great and obvious one, the place the fall presses hardest on them. But ours is this, and pretending otherwise has never protected a single woman from it. I include myself; I am a daughter of Eve as much as any of you. And naming the weakness is not an insult. It is the first act of love, for you cannot guard a door you refuse to admit is there.

Naming the weakness is not an insult. It is the first act of love, for you cannot guard a door you refuse to admit is there.

chapter six

feelings were never truth

Which brings us to the guard, for a weakness named is a weakness that can be watched, and this one has a single sure defense that I want to put into your hands. If our characteristic danger is the emotions running out ahead, the defense is to refuse, on principle and as a settled habit of the soul, to let the feeling be the final word, and to take every matter back to the Word of God instead.

For feelings are real, and feelings are God-given, and I am not at war with them; we are made to feel, and we will speak of that more in another booklet. But a feeling is not an authority, and it was never the truth. The thing may feel right and be a lie; the thing may feel wrong and be the very command of God. The question is never finally what I feel about a matter, but what the Word says about it, and the feeling must be brought to the Word and made to bow there, not the other way around. This is the very thing we see in our Lord in the garden of Gethsemane, who felt with His whole soul that He did not want the cup, and who said nonetheless, not my will, but thine, be done. He felt the feeling fully and did not let it rule, because above the feeling stood the will of the Father. That is the pattern for every daughter of Eve who would not be deceived.⁹

You can see the failure of this guard everywhere in our day, and nowhere more plainly than in the strange new thing the screen has made of us, this pouring out of the heart’s affection toward people who do not know we exist, the obsessive devotion to a distant face, the feeling of a closeness that is not real and never was. It is the emotion fastening hard onto something and being allowed to drive, untested by any truth. And it is only the loudest modern instance of the oldest danger, the heart persuaded by what it feels before it has asked what is so. The woman who has learned to take her feelings to the Word and hold them there, who has learned to say of even her strongest sense of a thing, but what saith the Scripture, has built the one wall the deceiver cannot easily climb. Feelings were never truth. The Word is truth. Keep them in that order and you have guarded the door.

Feelings were never truth. The Word is truth. Keep them in that order, and you have guarded the door.

chapter seven

the wide-open house

Now I have spent four chapters on the two closed doors, and if I stopped here I would have done you a great disservice and fallen halfway into the right-hand ditch myself, for the closed doors are two and the open ones are past counting. So let me swing the lamp now over the wide-open house, and show you how vast the field is that God has thrown open to the daughters of Eve, lest anyone tell you the Book that closes two offices closes anything else, for it does not.

Go back into the Old Testament and find Deborah, who was a prophetess and judged Israel, who sat under her palm and rendered the LORD’s judgment to the nation, and to whom even Barak the warrior would not go to battle without. Find Huldah the prophetess, to whom the king’s own priests came to inquire of the word of the LORD when the lost book of the Law was found, and who spoke that word with authority to the highest men in the land. These were no silent and hidden women; God raised them up and spoke through them to His people.¹⁰

Come into the New Testament and the field only widens. Find Priscilla, who with her husband Aquila took the eloquent Apollos aside and expounded unto him the way of God more perfectly, a woman helping to instruct a gifted man in the deep things of doctrine, and named first of the pair as often as not. Find Phoebe, a servant of the church at Cenchrea, whom Paul commends and trusts, by every good account, to carry the very letter to the Romans into Rome. Find the daughters of Philip who prophesied, and the women Paul names without embarrassment as his fellow labourers in the gospel, who laboured with him in the work. Find that it was women who were last at the cross and first at the empty tomb, and that the risen Lord sent them to carry the news of the resurrection to the apostles themselves, so that women were the first to bear the tidings of the rising of Christ.¹¹

And hear the standing command that the older women are to teach, for it is written into the very pattern of the church.

“The aged women likewise, that they be in behaviour as becometh holiness… that they may teach the young women to be sober, to love their husbands, to love their children.”

– Titus 2:3–4

There it is, a direct charge that women teach, woven into the life of the church by the same Paul who closed the eldership to them, which alone should prove that teaching as such was never the thing forbidden. So see the house as it truly is. A woman may prophesy, may teach the Scriptures, may instruct the young and the new and the searching, may disciple, may evangelize, may carry the gospel to the lost, may lead in a hundred ministries, may show mercy and govern her household and counsel and write and labor in the work of God in ways beyond all numbering. Two doors are shut. The whole rest of the mansion stands open, lit, and waiting. Anyone who tells you otherwise is adding to the Word, and the adding is as much a sin as the subtracting.

chapter eight

but god has used women pastors

Now we must meet the one objection that comes up every single time, the one you may even be forming in your mind at this moment, and we must meet it head on, for it is sincerely felt and it deserves a real answer. Someone says: but I have seen a woman in the pulpit through whom God plainly worked. I have heard a woman preach and have watched souls saved and lives changed and people grow. Surely, if God used her, He must approve of it. Surely the fruit proves the calling.

And I will not begin by denying the fruit, for I do not deny it. I believe God can and does use women who preach and teach, that He can save souls through them and grow His people by them. I will grant it freely. But hear me, because the conclusion does not follow from it at all, and the Bible itself shows us why with a hundred examples. That God uses a thing has never once meant that God approves a thing. The two are not the same, and to confuse them is to walk straight off a cliff that has no bottom.

Consider the whole line of Christ, and weep over it and marvel at it together. Consider Abraham, the father of the faithful, who took Hagar and made of his house a polygamous ruin, and whose grief came home to roost in a strife that troubles the world to this day. Consider Jacob, with his two wives and their two handmaids, his house a misery of jealousy and favoritism, and God used him and named a nation after him. Consider David, a man after God’s own heart, with his many wives, and the sword that never departed from his house because of it. Polygamy was never the design; God made them one man and one wife in the garden, one flesh, and He never once approved the breaking of that pattern, and the breaking of it brought ruin every single time. And yet He used these men mightily, and kept every one of them in the line of the Messiah. Consider Rahab, a harlot, who is in the very genealogy of Christ, used of God, named in the roll of faith, and her harlotry was never thereby made clean.¹²

“From the beginning of the creation God made them male and female. For this cause shall a man… cleave to his wife; and they twain shall be one flesh.”

– Mark 10:6–8

Do you see it now? God used polygamists without ever blessing polygamy. God used a harlot without ever blessing harlotry. The use never sanctified the deviation; the grace that worked through the sinner never baptized the sin. And it could not be otherwise, for we do not sin merely because we slip into it now and again; we sin because we are sinful by nature, every one of us, and God’s gracious use of sinful people is simply God being gracious to what we all are. When a woman stands in the office that was never hers to hold, and God in His kindness still works through her, that is not God overturning His Word. It is God doing what He has always done, bringing good out of His people’s disorder while never calling the disorder good. We cannot take His grace and read it as His approval, or there is no sin left in all the world that His mercy could not be twisted to excuse.

God used polygamists without ever blessing polygamy. The grace that works through a sinner never baptizes the sin.

chapter nine

all of it, or none of it

We arrive, then, at the root of the matter, which was never really about offices at all, but about a far larger question that this one only brings to the surface: whether the Bible is the Word of God, the whole of it, or whether it is a thing we may pick through, keeping the parts we like and quietly setting down the parts that press on us.

For watch how the escape is always made. It is never said outright, I reject the Word of God. It is said softly: well, that part was just cultural; that was Paul’s opinion; that belonged to their time and not to ours. But the moment you take up that knife, you cannot control where it cuts. If the verses about the eldership were merely Paul’s culture, then why not the verses about the resurrection, which the same age found just as absurd? If you may set aside what offends you here, another may set aside what offends him there, and a third what offends her elsewhere, and there is no Bible left at the end of it, only a mirror in which each of us sees our own preferences reflected back and calls it God. Either all of it is breathed out by God, binding and true even where it cuts against us, or none of it is, and we are only choosing a religion that flatters us and calling it Christianity.

“All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness.”

– 2 Timothy 3:16

You do not get a buffet, where you fill your plate with grace and skip the dish of submission because it does not suit your palate. It is one table, and it is all His.

All Scripture, the verse says, not the comfortable parts of Scripture. The word rendered given by inspiration is the Greek theopneustos, God-breathed, breathed out by the very mouth of God, and it is laid upon all of it without exception. You do not get a buffet where you fill your plate with grace and skip the dish of submission because it does not suit your palate. It is one table, and it is all His, and you sit at the whole of it or you get up and leave, but you do not get to pretend that the picking and choosing is anything but the setting of yourself over the Word that was meant to sit over you.¹³

And it is such an old, old folly, this fixing of the whole heart upon the one forbidden thing. Think of our mother in the garden. She was given a whole world, every tree of it good and lovely and hers, an abundance beyond all reckoning, and one tree only was withheld. And what became of all that abundance? It faded from her sight entirely, until the one tree she could not have was the only tree she could see, and the wanting of it undid her, and undid the world. Do not do as Eve did. Do not stand in a whole open mansion of calling and gift and labor, and fix your eyes and your grief and your war upon the two shut doors until they are all you can see.

Do not stand in a whole open mansion of calling and gift and labor, and fix your grief upon the two shut doors until they are all you can see.

And this, in the end, is why I will not soften this one or call it gray. It is not only about who may stand in a pulpit. It is about whether we will bow to the counsel of God when it crosses us, or only when it pleases us. The woman who can submit to the Word here, in the very place it presses hardest against the spirit of her age, has learned the deepest lesson the Christian life has to teach, which is that the Word is Lord and we are not. And the one who cannot has not really won an argument about offices; she has only revealed that, on this point at least, she means to be her own authority. The truth is there for any who will do the work, the long patient work of knowing the Book entire, the Hebrew and the Greek, the garden and the apostles, the context and the whole. It costs something to find it. But it is there, and it is plain, and it is good.