Cheryl

Justa Berean,

This seems to be the mindset of those who say that the Father has authority over the Son. In a hierarchy you appeal to the highest authority and for them this is not Jesus. Yet Paul did not see Jesus as a lesser authority who shouldn’t be prayed to. His letter of 1 Corinthians says this:

1 Corinthians 1:2 To the church of God which is at Corinth, to those who have been sanctified in Christ Jesus, saints by calling, with all who in every place call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, their Lord and ours

So the saints are those who call on the name of Jesus. Stephen was one of these saints who called on the name of the Lord Jesus.

Acts 7:59 They went on stoning Stephen as he called on the Lord and said, “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit!”

Jesus himself berated the Pharisees who would not come to him to receive eternal life.

John 5:39 “You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; it is these that testify about Me;
John 5:40 and you are unwilling to come to Me so that you may have life.

We need to come directly to Jesus to have eternal life and those who teach that we cannot come to Jesus are not being faithful to the scripture in this matter. I believe the reason they are not following scripture is not because it isn’t clear, but because they want to have a higher authority to appeal to to prove that men alone have authority in the church. The problem with this is that they want to prove that women are to be subordinated to men because Jesus was subordinated to the Father. And they want to prove that Jesus was subordinated to the Father by citing that women too are like Jesus in that they are subordinated to men. All this is, is circular reasoning. I told Bruce Ware that whether women are subordinated to men or not has nothing to do with the Trinity. In the Trinity there can be complete equality and in humanity there still could be a subordination of women. The two are not connected in any way. He needs to defend his point of view from scripture alone and not be arguing in circles. The scriptures that he uses to support an eternal subordination of Jesus will be dealt with in a very strong way in our DVD as we cannot dance around the scriptures by ignoring what doesn’t seem to fit the teaching of complete equality in the Trinity. We must see what the difficult verses mean in context in order that the scriptures not contradict themselves. We believe this new teaching DVD will be a very important work in the debate on the Trinity and the subordination of women.