teknomom

As I said in the other post, Slick made a very big deal about “authority” in a “church” setting, especially “the pulpit”. The word “pulpit” or its equivalent is not found in the NT at all. Neither are “pastors” ever shown as having authority. And in the link to my message board there’s a good discussion on the fact that Elders are not “preachers” or people having authority **over other believers**.

This is the most fundamental flaw in all complementarianism: “lording it over”. Of course they say they don’t do this, preferring instead to call it “servant leadership”, but actions speak louder than words. They are **usurping authority** that does not belong to them! It’s part of the larger problem of hierarchy in the churches, where a clergy class is invented from thin air. The NT never hints at any such thing.

It’s all about Pride. How can “submit to one another” be twisted to “women must obey men”? How can it not be called Pride to put one half of the Body of Christ over the other? That is not “leadership”, it’s domination, and it’s against what Jesus said and did and what the apostles taught.

Dr. Rebecca Groothuis made an excellent case against such hierarchy in her book “Good News for Women”, especially in quoting the phrase “hermeneutical gerrymandering” to describe the imaginary line these prideful men draw around women’s activities in the church. (see This Link for my review of her book)

Press Slick to define from scripture where these lines of authority are drawn. Ask him where it says certain men have authority over other men. You already tried to get him to prove that all women are forbidden to teach “authoritatively”, which he simply asserts and does not prove, but he has not yet shown where the Bible defines “authoritative teaching” in the NT church. The only such “auth. teaching” I can find is where Acts says the people “devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching”, aka our NT epistles.