Cheryl Schatz

Ryan writes:

Greg Anderson writes:

For me it is pretty simple actually, from the book of Acts Chap. 15. The text makes it pretty clear to me that God was long finished with writing in stone out of the thick darkness atop Mt. Horeb.

In verse 20, and then repeated in verses 28 & 29, I am assured that there are only 4 things that I am to refrain from in my Christian walk, and that sitting under a gifted woman teacher of the Bible is not among them.

Greg, I don’t think it is quite that simple. When the apostles concluded “You are to abstain from food sacrificed to idols, from blood, from the meat of strangled animals and from sexual immorality,” surely they didn’t mean to say that they were free from the moral commandments such as those requiring them not to murder, steal, covet, lie, etc. Indeed, after listing these few restrictions which they were to communicate, the apostles make it clear why they don’t have to repeat all of the moral requirements: “For Moses has been preached in every city from the earliest times and is read in the synagogues on every Sabbath” (Acts 15:21).

The apostles were only addressing the issue of those ceremonial and judicial laws which were stipulated to separate the Jewish people from other non-Jewish people. In other words, all that was being said here was that Gentiles were not required to follow Jewish customs, aside from a few of the food laws and an emphasis on avoiding all sexual immorality, not that they were freed in any way from the transcendent moral requirements given by Moses.

On the issue of women in ministry, while there are clear verses which seem to be very clear on the treatment of men and women in the Kingdom of God, it is these difficult passages listed before which people use to oppose it and restrict women. Therefore, the best way to prove a view to be correct is to show how it fits with both the verses which seem to agree as well as those which seem to disagree.

Hope that helps…

Ryan