On Woman

Men and Women Were Never Equal

On its present course, the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod will certainly end up ordaining women. When I was confirmation age, my pastor used to talk about how bad the ELCA was, but a lot of LCMS folks thought it was overblown. The ELCA ordained women and took a loose view of the Scripture, but it wasn’t that bad, many people thought. I was confirmed in 1991. Eighteen years later, the ELCA voted to accept practicing homosexuals as pastors. It didn’t take very long.

It won’t take very long for the LCMS on its present course to start ordaining women, although maybe it will take longer than eighteen years. But we will start talking about it sooner than that. As we get used to allowing women to teach, distribute holy communion, and exercise authority over men, it will only be a matter of time before people start saying, “Look, we already have women faithfully serving Christ in teaching the Word. Why do we prevent them from serving Him in the holy ministry?”

Women already do all those things in the LCMS. We give women theological training at the seminaries. As deaconesses, women are treated as theological authorities. Although in some places they are not permitted to teach men, in many places they are. Women teach theology by writing essays for Synod theological publications, like Luther’s Large Catechism with Annotations and Contemporary Applications. They write devotions read by a huge number of men in Portals of Prayer, the Synod’s devotional magazine. Apparently, at at least one congregation in Michigan, they are permitted to preach. I’m not sure what that congregation calls it, but they post videos of their services with women standing at a podium expounding on Holy Scripture. Finally, women assist the pastor in distributing Holy Communion and reading the Scripture lessons in the liturgy. This is very common pretty much everywhere in the Synod outside of the Midwest, Wyoming, and Montana. At our recent All Workers’ Conference in the Northwest District, women were reading the lessons and distributing the Holy Supper. And of course, women vote in synodical and district conventions and in congregational meetings; they hold positions of authority at district, synod, and congregational levels.

In another decade or two, people will start asking, “We already have women doing all the things a pastor does. Why are they not allowed to be pastors?” But at that point, it won’t matter much. It will matter the way that it mattered when Cain finally murdered his brother, as the final domino. But the sin had all but been committed long before, when Cain had refused to accept God’s chastisement for his unbelief, when God accepted Abel’s offering and not Cain’s. The Missouri Synod has already decided in its heart that it will not listen to God when He says that men and women are not equal, and that Equality is a false god.

Men and women are not equal. This is the sort of thing you don’t say, when you’re a pastor in the Missouri Synod. But you could say it in the American Lutheran Church one hundred years ago:

It is unfair to charge Paul with an inferior view regarding women because he himself was unmarried and to assert that he voices only his own personal opinion when he gives such direction to the Corinthians. Back of Paul is the divine nomos or Word. And that binds him as well as us. Nor can one say that what Paul wrote was well enough for his time and age which assigned a different position to woman than does ours. If woman is now assigned a different position, this is done, not by God, but by man, and by man in contradiction to God. The claim that the sexes are equal collides with the simple fact that God did not make them equal, and no amount of human claiming can remove or alter the divine fact. R. C. H. Lenski, “Interpretation of I and II Corinthians”, Wartburg Press (1957), p. 616-617.

Lenski’s commentaries on the New Testament were originally published in the 1930’s. He was a professor first in the old Ohio Synod, which in his lifetime merged with the Iowa and Buffalo Synods in 1930 to form the first American Lutheran Church. It was still possible for a professor in a synod somewhat less rigorous than the Missouri and Wisconsin synods to forthrightly say, “God did not create the sexes equal” in the 1930s. One cannot speak so forthrightly now in the Missouri Synod without creating an uproar among the women in one’s congregation and certainly in the Synod as a whole.

But we need to take the risk of saying it just this directly. It is simply a fact taught by God in His Word, whether or not the world will ridicule us for believing it. If we dance around the issue, we are not speaking the truth plainly and are laming ourselves in the work Christ has given us to do, which is first of all to preach the Law of God to call sinners to repentance. If we fail to speak plainly, we will not be able to hold our position on women’s ordination, and we will be forced to retreat constantly before a culture that makes war on the Church specifically on this front, with the charge that Christianity is misogynistic and patriarchal. The correct response to this is to affirm that Christianity is patriarchal and meet the attack directly instead of constantly retreating.

God Says

In the ancient world, first Israel, and then the Christian Church met rampant polytheism with the blunt affirmation that there are no other gods besides the Holy Trinity, that all the gods of the nations are worthless idols, but the Lord made the heavens (Ps. 96:5).

In our day the denunciation of idols in part requires the confession that men and women are not equal. Maybe that is because since the Enlightenment we have deified human beings, and so the insistence that all human beings are equal, regardless of sex, age, nationality, sexual proclivities is the perverted way the American religion mimics the Christian doctrine of God’s unity in essence.

The reason we are required to confess that men and women are not equal is simple: God says so. But who are you, O man, to answer back to God? Will what is molded say to its molder, “Why have you made me like this?” Has the potter no right over the clay, to make out of the same lump one vessel for honorable use and another for dishonorable use? (Rom. 9:20-21)

I will prove from Scripture that God has not made men and women equal under three subheadings. First, men and women were created unequal before the fall. Second, woman was subjected to man’s lordship as a consequence of her part in the fall. Third, woman is not equal to man because she has a different calling from God which, satanically, most of the western Church is counselling her to disobey.

In this post I will deal with the first subheading. The next two posts will deal with the inequality of woman as a consequence of the fall and as a consequence of her special calling.

Men and Women Were Never Equal

The problem with words like “equal” is that they are equivocal; they mean different things to different people. There is a sense in which men and women are equal. They were created in the image of God, so they are both equally human, and they are both, as Peter says, “heirs of the grace of life.” (1 Peter 3:7)

But that is not nearly sufficient for feminists and for most of the American church. When they say “equal”, they mean men and women are like the persons of the Holy Trinity—coequal in majesty, neither is before or after another. And they should be able to do exactly the same things. They should have the same career options, the same legal rights, the same freedom to fornicate without having to carry a baby. This definition of “equal” attacks God the Creator and goes against nature itself. No one who believes that men and women are or should be equal in these ways should ever complain when a man dresses as a woman and appears in a woman’s bathroom or on a women’s sports team, because they have already prepared the ground for it when insisting that “a woman should be able to do anything a man can do.”

What is funny about this is that these things were obvious to nearly everyone forty or fifty years ago. Awhile back there was a video floating around on Twitter of people being interviewed on the streets of London in the seventies about whether it was appropriate for women to work outside the home. “No,” was the universal response. “A woman’s place is in the home, to care for her husband and her children.” Children are the key in this discussion. If it is expected that women are going to bear children, it quickly becomes obvious that her primary place is not out in the world providing resources for the family, but bringing children into the world and nurturing them. To get to where we are, we have had to train our minds not to recognize the obvious—that God has given to women, and women only, the ability to bear children and nurse them.

That is why legal contraception and abortion emerged historically at the same time as the liberation of women from male authority. Nature does not make it optional for women to bear children, unless they are nuns. In order to liberate women from male authority, we had to liberate them from bearing children. But I will return to this later.

Scripture plainly teaches that women and men were not equal even before sin entered the world in terms of authority, nor in terms of their gifts.

“Let a woman learn in quietness, in all subjection. But I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man, but to be in silence. For Adam was formed first, then, after that, Eve. And Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor. But she will be saved through childbearing, if they remain in faith and love and holiness with self-control.” (1 Tim. 2:11-15)

Paul says women are to learn in the Church in quietness, in all subjection or subordination. Further, he does not permit them to teach or to exercise authority over a man. Teaching in the Church is presuming to stand in Christ’s stead and His authority. People are to listen to their pastors and obey them only because and only when in doing so they are listening to and obeying Christ. But Paul doesn’t limit a Christian woman’s subjection only to refraining from teaching. Much less does he suggest that women are permitted to teach men as long as they aren’t standing in a pulpit wearing a stole during the Divine Service, but anywhere and everywhere else it’s permissible, as so many in the Missouri Synod foolishly claim. He says a woman is not to exercise authority over a man at all, whether by preaching God’s Word or sitting on the city council. While Paul, as a pastor, does not allow a woman to have authority over a man in the Church, his rationale for denying her ecclesiastical authority also prohibits a woman from exercising temporal or political authority over a man.

And what is Paul’s rationale for this refusal to permit a woman to have authority over a man? Because Adam was formed first, then Eve. In other words, by virtue of being first, God bestowed honor and authority on men that He did not bestow on women. This may be difficult for some people at first, until you consider that the firstborn son in the Old Testament has the birthright unless God overturns the usual order. The firstborn son in Israel also belonged to the Lord to serve Him as a priest, but the Lord allowed Israel to redeem their sons and took the Levites in their place. Also, God requires children to honor their parents for no other reason than that our parents come before us. God brings us into being through our parents, so we owe them honor. Simply by virtue of creating the man first, God made men and women unequal and gave greater honor to the man. As Paul points out in 1 Corinthians 11:8-9: “For man was not made from woman, but woman from man. Neither was man created for woman, but woman for man.”

Secondly, even at creation, man and woman were unequal in their gifts. The second reason Paul does not allow a woman to teach or have authority over a man is because she was weaker even in the state of innocence, and remains weaker now. And Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor. Why was Eve deceived and Adam not? There is no other explanation for it than that the woman was weaker even before the fall—not in this case physically, but in that she was easier to deceive. And in fact, Scripture expressly teaches that women are the weaker vessel of the two. “Husbands, live with your wives in an understanding way, showing honor to the woman as the weaker vessel, since they are heirs with you of the grace of life, so that your prayers may not be hindered” (1 Peter 3:7). It is precisely because a man’s wife is the weaker vessel that he is required to lay down his life for her to protect her from the serpent. Failure to teach this makes it impossible for men and women to live as God has called them to do in marriage. It is not a minor error that the American church has neglected to teach on these matters, and that when it has taught, it has usually contradicted God’s Word. Peter tells husbands to be understanding with their wives because they are the weaker vessel, and not only are they not able to keep up with their husbands physically, they are more easily deceived by the serpent. When husbands don’t understand this, they not only become impatient with their wives. They also repeat Adam’s error of giving way to their wives when they are deceived by the serpent due to their weakness.

But since God made women unequal even before the fall, giving the man pre-eminence and making the woman weaker, it is obviously the case that when women are given to rule in the Church, the home, or the state, it is an inversion of God’s order that does great harm in those three estates.