Frank

Cheryl, your third installment of the Doug/Paul interview is as good as the first two, and certainly brought up a number of key interpretive issues that complementarians, in my experience, are either ignorant of or deliberately ignore. And as someone who has researched and written on the subject of prophecy and prophetic ministry (e.g., “Prophecy, Past and Present, And Its Significance for Women in Ministry,” Journal for Biblical Equality, Vol 4, 1992), I would like to make a couple of observations on this fallacious distinction complementarians, following the example of Wayne Grudem, make between “prophecy,” or the proclamation of God’s revealed word, and “teaching,” or instruction from God’s revealed word.

First of all, neither in the OT or in the NT, is there a clear distinction made between prophecy or teaching in terms of “forthtelling” or “proclaiming” God’s revealed word. When I wrote my original paper, one of the questions I had to answere was, “What were the prophets in the OT and NT doing, when they were not predicting future events?” And what I discovered, and revealed in that article was that they were expounding and applying the Word of God that had been given through their predecessors, the Law of Moses or the Gospel of Christ. For example, Deborah and Samuel in the OT calling erring Israelites to the Mosaic Law, and Judas and Silas, NT prophets, who instructed, exhorted and encouraged the Antiochian church on the basis of the Edict of Jerusalem (cf. Acts 15:22-35). Furthermore, while Jesus is called a prophet, it is his teaching that is most recorded. So this is not a biblical distinction.

Secondly, as we all now know, 1 Cor. 14:33-34, is not the actual teaching of Paul himself, but of a Judaizing group in Corinth that he repudiates in 14:36, as Cheryl Schatz, Gilbert Bilizekian, and other scholars have demonstrated over the last 15 years or so.