Wright and women’s ordination into the ministry

Here’s an appraisal I received from a correspondent, which I thought was worth passing on:

I just read through N.T. Wright’s paper on women in ministry here:

http://www.fulcrum-anglican.org.uk/docs/2004/20040904wright.cfm

Very disappointing (although I expected to disagree with it knowing Wright’s position).

Wright does preface his remarks with some qualifications about his own lack of thorough study in this area. He also related his ignorance of the debate within American evangelicalism where the debate has been primarily about biblical hermeneutics, contrasting that with the debate he knows better in the Church of England, where the opponents of women’s ordination have been primarily Anglo-Catholics employing arguments mostly from church history/tradition and ecclesiology. Indeed, he betrays little or no knowledge of the detailed exegetical work done by American scholars represented in the works promoted by the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood.

Wright also offers a very good corrective to the feminist (mis)use of Gal. 3:28 to abolish sex-based role distinctions in the church.

But his biblical arguments are lacking. I found his arguments about the texts in 1 Cor. 14 and 1 Tim. 2 to rely mostly on speculative reconstructions of the cultural context of the letters and not nearly enough on the actual flow of argument in the text itself. This is not typical Wrightian exegesis. He usually insists on testing any proposed exegesis by the way that it accounts for the specific details of the text in a comprehensive way. (Although this was a short paper, and it unfortunately lacked footnotes where he could have revealed his sources and tackled some more technical questions.)

He commits several significant errors in dealing with 1 Tim. 2:11-15. All are extensively refuted in the book Women in the Church: A Fresh Analysis of 1 Timothy 2:9-15, eds. Kostenberger, Schreiner, and Baldwin (Baker, 1995). The references to authors in the points below refer to essays in this book:

  1. He bases his exegesis on the speculation that the cult of Diana/Artemis in Ephesus was dominated by female priests. Allegedly, then, Paul’s comments about women are intended to deny that women are to dominate the leadership of the church in this way. Stephen Baugh at Westminster West has shown from the primary sources in Ephesus that this characterization of religion in Ephesus in the first century has no basis in fact.
  2. He takes the verb usually translated “to have/exercise authority over” (a hapax and admittedly difficult word to translate) in a negative fashion: “to dominate or dictate to in a bossy way”. H. Scott Baldwin has shown in an exhaustive analysis of this word in extant Greek literature that this meaning is possible. However, the more neutral sense of “to exercise authority over” (without a negative or positive moral connotation) is equally well attested in the literature. Thus, context, and not lexicography, must determine which sense fits in 1 Tim. 2. If Wright wants to adopt the negative sense, then he must argue for this and not simply assume it.
  3. The possibility that this verb has a negative connotation is all but ruled out by an analysis of the syntax of the construction in which it occurs in 1 Tim. 2:12, specifically, the construction (1) negated finite verb + (2) infinitive + (3) oude + infinitive + (4) alla + infinitive. The specific question here is whether connecting two infinitives with oude makes the expression one connected idea rather than two separate ideas simply strung together. Andreas Kostenberger has shown via an extensive analysis of syntactical parallels in both the NT and other Greek literature that a consistent pattern emerges: in such a construction, the infinitives are either both negative or both positive but not mixed. Therefore, since the verb “to teach” in 1 Tim. 2:12 is positive (no one interprets this as teaching in a morally defective manner; instead, the verb is used consistently in the NT to refer to the authoritative teaching of Christian doctrine), therefore, the verb “to have authority over” must also be positive, and not negative as Wright has suggested.
  4. His proposed reading fails to make any sense of v. 13 at all. This is the verse that feminists usually ignore.

I would love to see Wright’s response to the Kostenberger & Schreiner book I’ve mentioned above. A second edition is coming out this year, which should update its interaction with the last ten years of secondary literature.

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