Cheryl

Charis,

Glad to see you back! I have been laying low myself while I finished a PowerPoint presentation. I just got it done so it is a load off my mind.

You said:

“The seminary did not allow women to take homiletics/preaching but I took hermeneutics where I learned that “context is king!”

This is exactly right. A sentence or part of a sentence may sound completely different when it is ripped from its context. If our understanding doesn’t fit with the context, then we rework our understanding. Many just ignore the context that doesn’t fit but that isn’t right.

Now as to 1 Timothy 2:12, if we are going to take this passage the complementarian way, I think the restriction would have to be for inside and outside the church not because of the “everywhere” but because of the reason given as something to do with creation. If they interpret this as the order of creation so that the man gets to teach because the first one gets to have special privileges that the second one doesn’t have, then one cannot restrict this to the church because the order of creation has nothing to do with worship but the nature of the creation. Although I believe this interpretation is very wrong for several reasons, if we took it this way as the complementarians do, we could not limit the restrictions to church.

“…which would resemble the lot of women in strict muslim countries: no woman teach any man anything, no woman have any authority over any man in any realm.”

At least the Muslims here are consistent in their belief that women cannot teach men and have no authority with men. It is because they believe women are inferior in everything, not just inferior in the place of worship.