“One reasonable way to resolve the tension here is to recognize that the silence that Paul is referring to here is not absolute but is silence with respect to a particular kind of speech, namely the authoritative teaching associated with the teaching office of the church,” said Ortlund, “which in that context may have had something to do with kind of rendering judgment about prophecies being given. If that’s right, that would fit the pattern that we’ve already seen and would explain a lot of these diverse strands of New Testament teaching.”
At the same time, Romans 16 suggests that a woman named Phoebe is a deaconess. In that chapter, Paul describes married couple Priscilla and Aquila as his “co-workers in Christ Jesus.”
Ortlund also addressed a controversial part of Romans 16, where Paul says that a woman named Junia is “outstanding among the apostles.”
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“There’s so much more that would need to be said about this one verse,” said Ortlund, “but just one observation is, even if she is called an ‘apostle’ here, we have to remember that that term can be used in different ways.”
“It can be used more broadly for commissioned missionary messengers in the church, not just for the foundational office of the 12 or eyewitnesses to the resurrection like the Apostle Paul,” he said.
As far as how “the word ‘apostolos’ is used in the New Testament,” Ortlund said that “it’s put into spiritual gifts lists. It’s used for people like Epaphroditis and so on and so forth. So I’m saying there’s ambiguity in that term. And by the way, the same thing is true for the term ‘pastor.’ It can be used in more and less technical ways.”
Ortlund said that he was not trying to get sidetracked by rabbit trails. His point was that “if we step back from terminology, there remains this underlying reality that both men and women are vital to the operation of the ministry of the gospel while there are distinctions of office. And I think that’s the best way to put the data together.”
To the egalitarian argument that Paul’s instructions to women were cultural in nature, Ortlund pointed out that Paul “grounds that in the creation order of Adam and Eve.”
“If the problem is just in Ephesus with women who are…susceptible to false teaching, Paul could have addressed that particular situation,” Ortlund said, “while leaving room for the women who aren’t susceptible to that false teaching.” Instead, Paul bases his teaching in 1 Timothy 2 on the created order. Moreover, in 1 Corinthians 14:33-34, Paul says “this kind of silence he’s calling for from women in the churches is for all the churches of the saints.”
Ortlund’s final point in his argument was based on “the ontology of gender,” that is, the fact that men and women are different and take different roles. “We are equal in our value, in our status, in our access to God,” Ortlund said. Yet “we have different roles in the purpose of God and that is most particularly instituted with respect to the marriage relationship and the church.”
Ortlund pointed to Ephesians 5, “perhaps the most profound passage in the Bible on the meaning of marriage. And we learn here that marriage is ordained by God at creation.”
While the passage is clear that Christians should practice “mutual submission in the sense that all Christians submit to one another, nonetheless, with respect to the more specific husband-wife relationship…the arrows don’t point equally in both directions,” said Ortlund. “And what we want to observe is that Paul ties that into the gospel itself.” Husbands and wives in their marriages are a picture of the relationship between Christ and the church.
“That broader vision can help us understand why the restrictions on church office are not arbitrary,” Ortlund said. “They come in this much larger theological structure and they cohere with God’s intended purposes for creating us specifically as men and women.”
As Ortlund concluded, he said, “If marriage and sexuality and gender tie into deeper theology, which is what we’re suggesting here, that is all the more reason why harsh and domineering expressions of male headship are so deeply wrong and destructive.”
“Let me put it like this,” he said. “Biblical headship is cruciform. It looks like sacrifice. It looks like courage. It looks like service to the other. It looks like protection. It looks like responsibility. It looks like giving up your rights for the sake of the other. It looks like the gospel itself.”
“How we should tremble to serve in pastoral leadership in the church because this is not something that’s going to make us feel exalted and tough. It’s going to be humbling,” Orlund said, exhorting people to have humility as they discuss the topic of gender and church leadership. “And we need leadership in the church today that looks like Jesus, not the macho, fake masculinity that is so common.”
