Dave

Reading the comments I was reminded of what happened to me in a Bible College far far away. The subject was ‘preaching’ and we had a woman (a strong comp) come in to lecture us on how to preach to women. She handed out notes that were headed as a “Lecture” given by her. Soon the conversation turned to whether or not a woman should teach/preach to men (we were a room full of guys by the way!). This female lecturer responded by saying that she “could not respect any man who thought it was ok for a woman to teach men, as they had not taken their Bible seriously!”

When we start making up the rules ourselves then we end up in a mess!

I have posted these comments on Mike’s blog…

I do not follow how listening to someone teach places you under their authority.

I do not follow how you can believe that teaching equates with authority as a comp and then be ok with your wife evaluating your teaching, as this would be placing yourself under her authority. Surely the person who accepts an evaluation of their teaching is accepting the evaluation with some degree of authority.

My spam word for this comment is “Wife”…this seems to be giving a lot of power to the “Wife”…

From what I could gather, the couple Piper talks about were influenced by HIS teaching. Piper says that this is not Complementarianism, but just “sick”. Yet this is part of the problem. When did it go from being comp to being sick? How does Scripture back up and show the line between comp and sick? It would appear the Piper defines it as sick not because of Scripture but because of some social influence as to what is “normal”.

I have always struggled with the comp perspective because if you follow it to the logical end it is sick! If you don’t want to follow it to its logical end you have a whole lot of decisions you need to make…women cannot teach Sunday School to boys of a certain age…but what age? Your wife must ask your permission as her “head”…but for how much?

Piper might think it is sick, but many Muslim men would not.

I posted this on Mike’s blog…not many people are posting over there 🙁

Mike, regarding 1 Corinthians 11:27, there is no universal law not to drink the Lord’s Supper in an unworthy manner. The reason that drinking the Lord’s Supper in an unworthy manner is a sin (in the context of 1 Cor) is because it was sinning against two universal laws, the law to love each other and the law to love God. It was also breaking other universal laws to do with greed and gluttony.
It is interesting that you use this example, because you have done with 1 Cor 11:27 exactly what yo have done with 1 Tim 2…makes a universal law where there is not one.

I guess I take the 1 Cor 11:27 thing as simply a specific example of a universal law.

My anit-spam word was “male”. It appears appropriate!

Thanks for the welcome Cheryl. I can see that blogging from Australia means I will be missing most of the action while I am asleep! Sadly there are not many Australian blogs dealing with the roles of women in the home and the church, so I will continue to read along for encouragement (and informative) purposes, but will probably be a bit slow off the mark in the commenting department!

I did want to say that a post on the meaning of the word “submission” would be very helpful.

Hi everyone! I have been reading along for a few days and have been very interested in the discussion. I am based in Sydney, Australia in a denomination that is very complementarian and have found the posts and the comments here very encouraging! I love the way you are all grappling with the truth.

Thanks for this post Cheryl. I love that little thing called context that helps us understand passages such as this the way they were intended.

Dave