Greg Anderson

Ryan & Don ,

I never remotely meant to imply that I am free of any moral constraints.  Murder, theft, adultery, and other sins, are universals that must not be engaged in under any circumstances, and Paul argues that even the heathen world has a conscience that bears this out (Romans 2).

The main gist of my comment earlier, was primarily a defense of women in ministry based on what I still see as a manifesto of freedom in Acts 15 for all people, whether 1st century Jew or 21st century gentile believer.  I also see this same manifesto, or at least a corollary of it in Galatians 3.

So far as church governance goes, I believe that what’s written in 1 Tim. are nice suggestions, but they are by no means written on stone tablets and absolutely binding.  Some churches follow the autocratic Moses model, while still others opt for a representative checks and balances approach.  E.W. Bullinger (hardly a liberal theologian) had this to say:

3. To Timothy were given the earliest instructions for orderly arrangement in the church, these instructions being of the simplest nature, and as Dean Alford well observes with regard to the Pastoral Epistles as a whole, the directions given “are altogether of an ethical, not of an hierarchical, kind”.  These directions afford no warrant whatever for the widespread organizations of the “churches” as carried on today (Bullinger 1799).

Source: Bullinger’s  Companion Bible , first printing 1922.