It is obvious to us now—or so the argument goes—that it was a thorough-going patriarchy that supported the practice, while Scripture, of course, embraced no such arrangement.
To her credit, Keyes has rightly recognized that each generation of Christians will most likely consider only those interpretations that are culturally plausible and that unbelievers will only consider those religious options that are culturally plausible. Hence, Christians need to be aware of cultural factors. Unfortunately for Keyes, however, by allowing her historical consciousness to accomplish the separation of generations of believers from the true meaning of the biblical text, she has at once undermined her own cultural right to the meaning of biblical texts. What I mean is that Keyes’ clear texts may very well have been our predecessors’ obscure texts and their plain ones, Keyes’ obscure ones.11 These conjectures can only be offered as hypotheses here, but still, this is no small dilemma to ponder, for it seems to imply that the Bible will mean different things to different people at different times. In other words, Keyes’ argument would be helped along if she proposed that at present it seems that the Bible supports such and such a stance and not that it has always taught such and such a teaching (or that it always will).
It is no secret that today’s cultural ethos is such that it cannot provisionally entertain Paul’s prohibition, much less seriously accept it as presently binding. In fact, with so many scholars and clergy obsessed with the correction of male oppression (especially white male oppression), 1 Tim 2 as a durable injunction is utterly unthinkable, indeed, a major embarrassment or even deeply offensive.12 This contemporary disposition rings so truly that many evangelical thinkers are seeking to ground the disposition itself in Scripture. Thus, it behooves faithful Christians (so the argument goes) who are committed to Scripture’s authority to account for Paul’s teaching in some way that does not offend and yet at the same time does not detract from Scripture’s divine authority. The former is understood to be the crucial lifting of an unnecessary obstacle; the latter is taken to be a rudiment of orthodoxy. The perplexing dilemma that many evangelicals precariously bear follows naturally: how can one steal the sanction of Scripture from Paul’s prohibition against women without robbing the sacred writings of their divine punch? Resolution can take interesting turns when the invalidity of Paul’s prohibition is pre-understood as an unnecessary obstacle. The most consistent way to achieve these desired results is to revisit what is meant by the authority of Scripture. Countless Christians have been more than willing to do this, some with more caution than others.
The sundry arguments that posit 1 Tim 2.12 was situational and limited in scope converge, for the most part, on one consideration: Paul was as successful as he was in missionary endeavors because he did not allow any other obstacle to belief other than the cross. Richard Hays, for example, in The Moral Vision of the New Testament, is so disturbed by 1 Tim 2.12 that he disallows Pauline authorship for that particular verse.13 He is critical of Paul for those portions that he has written when he writes:
Paul wrestles constantly with the hermeneutical task of relating the gospel freshly to the situation in his target churches; 1 Timothy assumes that the norms must be merely guarded and passed along. Indeed, there is a positive impatience with theological argumentation: Those who disagree with the officially sanctioned “sound teaching” are said to manifest “a morbid craving for controversy and for disputes about words” (1 Tim. 6:4). It is difficult to imagine Paul dismissively avoiding theological controversy in this manner. Do we see here the evidence of a bad case of apostolic burnout?14
In other words, Paul does not seem to be as nuanced here as he should have been. His game was clearly off.15 An otherwise admirable saint should not be emulated for his work here. An instinctive evangelical rejoinder might very well carry the following sentiment: “Well, drastic situations call for drastic measures—if a Pauline text offends you, cut it off; perhaps, it is better to enter the twenty-first century without 1 Timothy then to be politically cast away with an intact Bible!” We should note again, though, that it is contemporary extrabiblical knowledge and sensibilities that are prompting changes in interpretation. This is only natural; perhaps, conservative evangelicals should be more sympathetic.16
Hays is, after all, wrestling with the same dissonance that (egalitarian) evangelicals are. He expresses particular concern with 1 Tim 2.11–15 because “the peculiarity of the passage has given rise to various imaginative exegetical attempts at damage control, but the overall sense of the text is finally inescapable: women (or perhaps wives) are to be silent and submissive and to bear children.”17 If Hays is right here, his conclusion is unavoidable for those who reject the possible contemporary applicability of 1 Tim 2.12 in one way or another: 1 Tim 2.12 is not a legitimate part of the canon.18 Though the majority of evangelicals would never openly stand for so flagrant a dismissal, they are actually in the same boat as Hays. In fact, his conclusion seems to follow necessarily for evangelicals because, on account of the evangelical methodological insistence, existing tensions are magnified between what the text actually says, the authority with which it says it, and the reader’s expectation of what the text should say and how it should say it. This is an especially grave predicament to a constituency that is committed to scientific hermeneutics. In other words, egalitarian evangelicals must secretly cast their ballots with Hays (with whose conclusion they do not agree) precisely because they agree that the text is not authoritative here even though it is an otherwise authoritative text. The paradoxical situation is such that these evangelicals must both aver their allegiance to the text and surreptitiously endeavor to undermine it for the sake of their commitments to an authoritative Bible and an egalitarian interpretation. They have somehow retreated from the text in such a way that they are evangelical and non-evangelical at the same time. Surely, this poses a serious problem with regard to an allegedly authoritative Bible.
II. Complementarian Evangelicals and the Authority of Scripture
Complementarian evangelicals are those who agree that the 1 Tim prohibition somehow binds the church today. We shall now explore Paul’s exegetical arguments for his prohibition. The plan is to point out how Paul’s argument depends on non-scientific exegesis and then ask how scientific evangelicals who would not otherwise accept his line of argumentation can nevertheless profess the validity of his conclusion.
By coupling the beginning of 1 Tim 2.11 with the end of v 12, the verses evince the following structure: “Let a woman learn in silence . . . she is to keep silent” (gunh en hsuxia . . . einai en hsuxia). A sequence of contrasts is presented: silence/teaching; submission/authority; women/men and the prohibition begins and ends with “in silence.”19 The former in each of the three pairs correspond as do the latter in each pair. The structure of the text reinforces the surface meaning: men can teach and have authority; women should be silent and submit.
What the text says is more than evident to complementarians; however, these evangelicals are encouraged to take Paul’s exegesis of the Eden narrative more seriously and less naively. In fact, given Paul’s record with controversy, it would appear that that is precisely what he anticipated that his hearers/readers would do.20 The two arguments that he employs are based upon his own reading of the Genesis creation narrative according to complementarians. They are (1) “Adam was formed first, then Eve” and (2) “Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became the transgressor.”
The first argument is a good example of the “prominence” value of New Testament times. Chris Seeman writes, “Prominence implies an ordering of priority on the basis of time, space, or rank . . . This sequencing of priority-evaluation is often indicated in the Bible by the categories ‘first’ and ‘last’.”21 It is important to note that a very high degree of authority inheres in this appeal to the order of creation, for it is an order that no human can or could have altered. 22 The fact that Adam was created first was beyond anyone’s control, and in light of the Scriptural story, it was not merely a matter of contingency. It has traditionally been inferred that since God had created man first that man has been given the priority or prominence. The question that complementarians must answer is, In what way or capacity has man been given priority? Most complementarians do not see women as irrelevant or inferior. They typically
