IMPOLITE TOPICS

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Claims about authority are always personal, because they either increase or take away take personal power. And so rather than begin with an abstract study of authority, power, and persuasion, I will tell you a personal story.

My story began in the fall of 1973, with three days of orientation at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, which is a large evangelical seminary north of Boston, Massachusetts. I was an incoming student, who knew almost nothing about the Bible and very little about evangelicals.

I had recently experienced what I perceived was a call from God to attend seminary and study for the ministry. I chose to attend Gordon-Conwell rather than one of the other theological seminaries located in the Boston area on the recommendation of the minister of the church I was attending, who told me that he didn’t trust any of the other seminaries to teach the Bible accurately.

With hindsight, I can see many warnings signs of what was to come, and am sure that I would have been much happier if I had chosen to attend one of the other Boston area schools. But I simply didn’t know enough to anticipate what lay before me.

And so on a beautiful September day in New England, when the leaves were already beginning to turn, I joined more than two hundred other incoming students for orientation. I noticed immediately that I was one of only five incoming women enrolled in the Master of Divinity program. I found out that there were three women in the class ahead of me.

So, in a student body with more than seven hundred students, there were eight women enrolled in the degree program leading to ordination, as well as a few women enrolled in the Christian education program. I also happened to be the only student in the entire school who was also a mother. I soon began to feel that I had stumbled uninvited into a stag party.

Since the seminary required us to be present at orientation all day, it provided us with lunch each day. On my first day, I sat down at a table in the dining room across from a young man. He looked me up and down, as if he was inspecting a side of beef, and obviously noticed my wedding ring. He then asked this question: “Is your husband a student at this school?”

I thought the question was odd, considering that all of us in the room were incoming students, and so I said: “I am a student at this school.” And then his eyes narrowed into little slits and he asked: “What is your degree program?”

I said: “M.Div.”

And then his tone, which was cold enough to start with, turned even colder and he said: “Haven’t you heard of 1 Timothy 2:12?  What is your hermeneutical position which allows you to be disobedient to the Word of God?”

The truth was, I hadn’t heard of 1 Timothy 2:12 and I had no idea what the word “hermeneutical” meant. And so I said: “I believe that I have been called by God to be here.”

At that point, the young man started to pound his fist on the table to create a drumbeat to emphasize each word he proclaimed loudly with dramatic pauses between them: “God!    Does!    Not!    Call!   Women!”

I remember thinking at that moment: “This is going to be harder than I thought.” I had never met a women minister, but I thought that was simply a cultural thing. At that point, I hadn’t met a woman doctor, lawyer, or truck driver either. This was the era of Women’s Liberation, with expanded possibilities for women, and I naively assumed that I was simply entering into new territory for women. I didn’t know that I was challenging the authority of the “Word of God.” 

I truly was ignorant about so much of the Bible. I didn’t know that many evangelicals thought (and still think) that women have no authority to be leaders within the church. I didn’t know that 1 Timothy 2:12 is the single verse most often cited to prove that God forbids women to be ordained into the ministry.

I did grasp in a single instant that I was in a battle for which I was not prepared. I had no answer for the question I was asked again and again: “How can you justify your disobedience to God by being here?”

A wiser woman would have said, “I am not going to put up with this,” and transferred immediately to a more welcoming seminary. But I was not wise enough to do that. I really thought I was supposed to be there. And so I endured. And “endured” is the proper word, in a place where most of the male students and many of the faculty (all male) thought that women had no right to be there. They felt that it was their obligation to continually “confront the women with their disobedience.” And the administration that accepted us as students and cashed our tuition checks did absolutely nothing to quell the endless harassment.

What made it tolerable for me was that I didn’t live at the seminary, but commuted back and forth. The women who lived at the seminary and ate their meals in the dining hall were exposed to relentless assault, day and night, by the male posse accusing them of disobedience to the authority of scripture.

Not surprisingly, of the five of us women who started in September, the woman who told us on the first day of orientation that she had dreamed of being a minister since she was a child  and couldn’t believe that she was finally in seminary, dropped out before the end of the first term, with her dreams of ministry shattered.

The second woman transferred to a friendlier seminary at the end of the first term.

The third woman dropped out in the middle of the second term, feeling devastated by the relentless attacks.

The fourth woman had made very clear that she had no intention of seeking ordination to the ministry. She simply thought that the Master of Divinity degree was a better career choice than the degree the seminary offered for Christian education, and so the male posse left her alone.

By the end of the first year, I was the only woman of five who started together in September who still intended to seek ordination.

In my rude awakening among the evangelicals, I learned how the concept of “authority” lies at the root of an evangelical world view. The idea of “authority” shaped almost every topic of study, from biblical studies, to systematic theology, to church history, to pastoral counseling.

And yet despite this relentless assault by the most vocal critics of women in ministry, I was also exposed to teachers who began to teach me how to answer such questions. I began to learn Hebrew and Greek and see beyond the limitations of English translations to grasp a larger vision than exclusion based on gender. I even learned what the word “hermeneutical” means. And I began to understand why those who use Timothy 2:12 as a weapon against women seeking ordination are misusing the verse, to claim that it means something it does not.

At this point, I will not answer the questions that my angry inquisitor demanded that I answer: “Haven’t you heard of 1 Timothy 2:12?  What is your hermeneutical position which allows you to be disobedient to the word of God?”

I promise that I will return to this story, to demonstrate a new perspective on these words, based on what the original Greek actually says. For now, I will leave this story at the point I was when I started my theological education, with no answer to the questions except to know that something was very wrong with the type of  relentlessly cruel authority that created such pain and suffering for women whose only crime was a desire to serve.

Dr. Kalinda Rose Stevenson
     

written by Kalinda \\ tags: 1 Timothy 2:12, authority, hermeneutics, Kalinda Rose Stevenson, ordination of women, theological seminary