In the autumn of 1987, Prescott Memorial Baptist Church in Memphis, Tennessee, a 235 member congregation of the Southern Baptist Convention, called a new pastor. The minister accepted, coming to town with the words, “I believe the pastor is a servant in the midst of people, not a ruler or a dictator.”
Also that fall, a hundred miles south of Memphis, the minister of Morning Star Missionary Baptist Church confronted a faction of disgruntled parishioners on the church steps one Sunday morning. The pastor pulled out a pistol, fired shots into the air, then proceeded into the sanctuary to preach a sermon entitled, “This Church Belongs to God.” A police cruiser was waiting to take the pastor to jail when the service was over.
Within a few weeks, the local Baptist association of one of those churches had voted to oust the congregation from its midst. If you're wondering which congregation was disfellowshipped, the answer is Prescott Memorial Baptist Church in Memphis. And if you're wondering why, the answer is that Prescott was foolish enough to call a woman as its pastor. Regardless of what Missionary Baptists might think about pastors who shoot pistols into the air, there is no question that Southern Baptists as a group oppose pastors who are women.
Now undoubtedly there are many reasons -- some traditional, some cultural, some organizational -- for Southern Baptists to oppose women pastors. But the primary reason that the SBC advances is a theological one. Conservatives within the SBC -- who currently control the denomination -- are convinced that the creation is at heart hierarchical. Every creature, from the simplest protozoa to the most exalted angel, exists solely to obey its superiors. Women were created to obey men, and the creation can be at peace only when women voluntarily subordinate themselves to men. Because conservative Southern Baptists define a pastor as a person who rules within the church, they cannot admit women as pastors. Indeed, when women seek to be pastors, they are guilty of the original, primordial sin: the sin of being out of one's place. The purpose of the gospel, in this theology, is to call people to stay in their divinely appointed places.
When Prescott Memorial called Nancy Hastings Sehested to be its pastor, it consciously embraced an alternative vision of the gospel. According to this model, the “new creation” in Christ brings into being a church that is a community of equals, not a hierarchy of officers and subordinates. The authority to minister comes from the Holy Spirit, which blows where it will, empowering Christians to follow Jesus. Following Jesus means imitating Jesus' servant ministry; it means joining a priesthood of believers committed to serving, not dominating, the suffering world for which Christ died. In this model, pastors are servants in the midst of a community of equals, not autocrats directing their subordinates.
In the rest of my paper today, I'd like to share Nancy Hastings Sehested's disfellowshipping in more detail with you. Then, I want to make some theological reflections about the significance of her case. As Kris Kvam’s and Linda Schearing’s papers indicate, American Christians have been debating the significance of Genesis 1-3 for gender roles and social ordering for years. It is my thesis this afternoon that the SBC, in appealing to Genesis 1-3 to legitimate gender hierarchies, is creating a church in which not only women, but lay men as well, will be increasingly marginalized as second class citizens. In the end, all that will matter theologically is whether people are obeying orders and staying in their places.
Finally, I will argue that the case of Nancy Hastings Sehested is theologically important beyond the boundaries of the Southern Baptist Convention. Much of the conservative SBC theology you will hear today is also found in conservative Reformed and Presbyterian literature. And, in a wonderful irony of history, I have also discovered the SBC conservatives quoting with great relish Roman Catholic authors opposed to women's ordination. Proponents of a hierarchical reading of Genesis 1-3 are battling those who espouse an egalitarian reading on any number of denominational fronts. At the conclusion of my paper, I will make the normative claim that the hierarchical model is theologically unsound. Its Christology is Arian; its ecclesiology promotes male clerical triumphalism, and its social ethic advocates order at the expense of justice.
THE BATTLE FOR MEMPHIS: NANCY COMES TO TOWN
Nancy Hastings Sehested graduated from Union Theological Seminary in New York, and served as an associate pastor at Oakhurst Baptist Church in Decatur, Georgia, from 1981 to the fall of 1987. The daughter and granddaughter of SBC ministers, Nancy was known throughout the denomination for her writing and for her activities in support of women in ministry and other social justice issues. In 1987, the Georgia Baptist Women in Ministry named her “Churchwoman of the Year.”
So no one in the 120-church Shelby County Baptist Association of Memphis complained about Nancy's professional qualifications when Prescott called her as pastor. But many Memphis Baptists were offended. Adrian Rogers, the ultraconservative president of the SBC, was a local pastor in Memphis. Baptists in Memphis tend to be highly conservative, and they had been angry with Prescott Memorial since the 1960's, when the congregation broke ranks and was the first Southern Baptist church in the city to admit blacks as members.
Memphis SBC clergy were quick to act once they heard the news about Nancy. Rev. Vaughan Denton of Kirby Parkway Baptist Church immediately called for an investigation, saying, “Prescott ... has been leaning further away from what grass-roots Southern Baptists have believed for years. This latest call to this lady pastor seems to be the strongest move they've made,” he added, lamenting that the Shelby County Baptist Association was being stuck with “an untidy job we don't like.”
Memphis women clergy from several denominations issued a statement welcoming Hastings Sehested to the city, as did the University Cluster of Churches located near Memphis State University. But the Shelby County Baptist Association was not swayed. Sensing disaster approaching at the Association's October 19th annual meeting, Prescott brought Hastings Sehested to Memphis several weeks ahead of schedule, installing her as a member and as pastor on Sunday, October 18.
The Association meeting on the 19th was all that people had anticipated. Clearing the media from the room, the delegates considered a report from its credentials committee recommending that the Association take no action against Prescott until it could define the nature of the exegetical “irregularities” Prescott had committed. Prescott's opponents rejected that report, arguing that Scripture clearly stated that women must not have authority over men. In reply, Hastings Sehested gave a stirring speech describing authority in the church as the power of the Holy Spirit that enabled all believers to become servants of God. But the delegates were unconvinced, voting by a 3-1 margin to disfellowship Prescott from the Shelby County Baptist Association.
Prescott was undeterred. It invited clergy from every denomination to participate in a service welcoming Hastings Sehested to its pulpit. Hundreds of people attended the November 2 celebration. Yet, when all the singing was over, the conservatives had succceeding in banishing Prescott and silencing most critics. A few “more liberal” Baptists had supported Prescott, but the local “moderates” were conspicuously silent. Conservatives, however, had not been silent. Instead, they vociferously insisted that only an authoritarian, hierarchical male ministry stood between the SBC and the fires of hell. And they were deadly serious when they said it.
WHAT DOES IT MEAN?
But why? Most people outside the SBC are bewildered that the conservatives persist in contending that the subordination of women to men is one of the most important messages the church is called to proclaim to the world.
Unquestionably political concerns were an important factor. But I'd like to bracket those for today and look at the theological implications of this debate. Southern Baptists have been moving toward a hierarchical theology that exalts the male clergy for some years. In 1984, the denomination passed a nonbinding resolution claiming that Paul “excludes women from pastoral leadership to preserve a submission God requires because man was first in creation and the woman was first in the Edenic fall.” In 1988, the year after the dispute with Prescott Memorial Church, the SBC passed a nonbinding convention designed to protect pastoral authority in the local church against possible erosion from the traditional Baptist doctrine of the priesthood of the believer. The Convention cited Hebrews 13:17 -- “Obey your leaders and submit to them; for they keep watch over your souls, as those who will give an account” -- as the normative text to define the authority of the clergy.
The concerns of SBC conservatives to subordinate women to men and laypersons to pastors reflect a hierarchical reading of Genesis 1-3 that is widespread among many conservative Christians, particularly among evangelical ones. According to the hierarchical model, God formed the world as a marvelous chain of being. Every living thing, from the simplest amoeba to the most exalted angel, exists to obey its superiors. As Elisabeth Elliot puts it, “every creature of God has his appointed place, from cherubim, seraphim, archangels, and angels down to the lowliest beast.” Within this chain of command, God intends women to obey men. Such submission indicates no ontological inferiority, but it is a sign of a necessary functional distinction between men and women. “A woman,” Michael F. Stitzinger explains, “may be superior to a man in ability, personality and even spirituality, but because of the divine order of creation, she recognizes the superior rank of the man and 'ranks herself under man.'“ Indeed, if women fail to submit to men -- or if men fail to command them -- the divine order of creation is ruined. The most fundamental task that God has given us is to find our place in the creation's hierarchy. As A. Duane Litfin notes in an article on evangelical feminism:
That the universe should be ordered around a series of over/under hierarchical relationships is His [God's] idea, a part of His original design. Far from being extraneous to the Word of God, a kind of excess baggage that can be jettisoned while retaining the essential truth of the Scriptures, these ideas are the essential truths of the Scriptures. To reject them is to reject the Bible.
Moderates in the SBC, as well as among a wide range of evangelical Christians, answer that God created men and women as social equals. The subordination of women to men, they insist, is a regrettable consequence of the fall, not a part of God's original plan for the creation. “We reject,” says Paul Jewett, “the traditional view of sexual hierarchy, according to which the man, as such, is the head of the woman, and the woman, as such, is subordinate to man. We subscribe rather to the view that under God men and women, as partners in life, share its privileges and responsibilities together.” Though the subordination of women to men has been the norm throughout much of church history, the egalitarians note that Christians have not universally advocated male dominance as God's original intention for human society. Luther, for example, argued that “if Eve had persisted in the truth, she would not only not have been subjected to the rule of her husband, but she herself would also have been a partner in the rule which is now entirely the concern of males.”
Proponents of the hierarchical model simply do not share the egalitarians' zeal for partnership. They approve of stratification in human society, for they are convinced that a similar chain of command exists within the Godhead. God the Son, though sharing divinity with God the Father, acknowledges the functional distinction between them by eternally subordinating himself to the Father. The two persons share a divine nature, but the Father by necessity has authority over the Son; and the submissive Son expresses his divinity by serving the authoritative Father. “The analogous ontological relationship to masculinity and femininity, man and woman, cited by Paul is that of God and Christ,” George Knight writes. “In both cases, one, because of the 'ontological' and ordained role in relation to the other, acknowledges headship and submits.” Egalitarians believe that God created us for mutuality and equality; the hierarchical model, on the other hand, describes the authority structure within the trinity as normative for human relationships as well.
LIFE IN CHRIST: THE SHAPE OF REDEEMED HUMANITY
Since the two models disagree on the shape of the created order, it is not surprising that their descriptions of redeemed humanity are equally at odds. Predictably, the hierarchalists depict life in the church in terms of authority and submission, while the egalitarians envision Christianity as a discipleship of equals.
For the egalitarians, Galatians 3:28 is the focal text. “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” In Christ, they claim, we are new creations, and the social hierarchy typical of fallen human relationships is ended. God has poured out God's Holy Spirit on all flesh, empowering everyone who receives it to minister in Christ's name. Ministry, in this model, does not mean ruling other believers, but serving with them, as all strive to imitate the ministry of the one “who did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant.” (Philippians 2:6-7) As Nancy Hastings Sehested explains,
We seek to understand and embody a completely new paradigm for leadership -- a new vision, rooted in our biblical identity, for what it means to exercise power and authority....What it needed is not to remove the terms power and authority from our vocabulary but to redefine them in a more biblical fashion....Jesus did not come to rule but to serve, not to be a master but a servant....Women (and men) who would embody a definition of power must continually refuse the temptation to allow someone other than God to be Lord. Jesus' way of servanthood is the kind of power and authority which church leaders are to model.
The hierarchalists reject that interpretation of Galatians. In the first place, they deny that the text has a social application. Instead, they argue, the passage describes the theological freedom that each believer enjoys to approach God directly for salvation. Secondly, they insist that the egalitarians have misread Paul's intention in the text. To say that Christians are one in Christ does does imply that they are equal. Unity does not entail social equality. Thus, even if the text had a social application, it would be as misguided to use this passage to oppose sexism as it was inappropriate, over a century ago, for the Grimke sisters to cite Galatians either to argue for women’s equality or to demonstrate that slavery was inconsistent with Christianity. The spiritual freedom of the gospel never violates the order of rank basic to the hierarchical creation; and anyone who reads social equality into the gospel is seriously mistaken. As Elisabeth Eliot concludes, “The natural order established at creation has not been abrogated either by the Fall or by redemption.”
Rather than a society of equals, the church is, in this model, a hierarchy. At the top is the pastor. Two characteristics are central to the hierarchical model's understanding of the pastor. In the first place, the pastor must be a male. Here, the hierarchalists cite Timothy 2:12 for support: “I permit no woman to teach or have authority over men; she is to keep silent.” Secondly, the pastor must be defined as one who imitates God by ruling with authority over his subordinates. Here, Hebrews 13:17 provides the normative model: “Obey your leaders, and submit to them; for they keep watch over your souls, as those who will give an account.” In thus defining the pastor as one who rules with authority and the average Christian as one who obeys in submission, the hierarchalists have applied the same grid to the relationship of clergy and laypeople that they earlier used to explain the relationship of men to women and the relationship of the Father to the Son. In each instance, the “head” of the hierarchy commands, while the “subordinate” exists to serve its head. Laypeople and Christ are servants; pastors and God the Father are their masters.
IMPLICATIONS FOR THEOLOGY AND ETHICS
All of which is to say that these two models present two irreconcilable interpretations of what it means to be a Christian. In the hierarchical model, believers experience God as an authoritarian architect who crafts an infinitely stratified universe. Following God entails finding our place in the cosmic hierarchy and staying there. To know ourselves as God knows us is to define ourselves by our gender and social standing. In the egalitarian model, however, believers experience God as the one who destroys all social rankings. Following God means joining Jesus' discipleship of equals. To know ourselves as God knows us is to define ourselves as servants for Christ's sake.
It's easy to see, then, why Nancy Hastings Sehested raised such a stir when she came to Memphis saying, “I believe the pastor is a servant in the midst of people, not a ruler or a dictator.” Those words are not innocuous in Southern Baptist circles. Rather, they imply a rejection of conservative hierarchical theology. Hastings Sehested and other SBC moderates believe it is every Christian's calling -- women as well as men, pastors as well as laypeople -- to imitate Christ. If Christ is the one who did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, than all Christians are called to follow Christ in this servant ministry. The church -- Christ's very body -- is a community of equals committed to a vocation of service.
I want to close by offering a brief critique of the hierarchical model. Admittedly this position can claim biblical support -- and certainly it has centuries of tradition behind it -- but I wish to argue that it is fundamentally flawed. In the first place, its Christology revives the Arian heresy. Trinitarian thinking has always insisted that the persons of the Godhead are equal, but the hierarchical model eternally subordinates the second person of the trinity to the first. If we are to use trinitarian language, we must avoid subordinationism -- which reduces God the Word to the status of creature (as in the case of Arius), or suggests, alternatively, that Christians worship a pantheon of gods. I suspect that subordinationism is appealing to the hierarchical model because its primary theological goal is to subordinate some social classes to others.
That leads me to my second objection. The hierarchical model presents a view of the world which exalts an authoritarian male clergy as the pinnacle of creation. I find that hard to swallow. Where did we ever get the idea that the church's primary purpose on earth is to divinize social hierarchy and privilege? Or that discipleship is primarily a matter of bowing down to male clergy? Whose interests, moreover, are served by this theology? Not those of women; or lay people; or the poor; or those in bondage. This model of spirituality serves males, especially pastors. It uses the same argumentation for the subordination of women that slaveholders used in the nineteenth century to justify black slavery and to deny the rights of citizenship to women. Political developments in the Southern Baptist Convention over the last decade indicate, in addition, that this theology is still being put to oppressive use that eaders will be responsible to those whom they govern. Instead of a divine kingship, this model creates a sacral clergy whose principal goal is to perpetuate itself by preserving a highly static caste system. The only sin, in this model, is the sin of being out of one's place. Quite simply, I am not convinced. I do not believe that God's amazing grace has so transformed the clergy that the laity can trust them to rule on God's behalf rather than their own. And in a world where so many people are poor and powerless, oppressed by political systems that deny them power, I cannot imagine advocating a theology that values order and not justice.
In Christ, the gospel of Luke tells us, God has scattered the proud, put down the mighty from their thrones, and exalted those of low degree. Jesus himself has said, “Whoever would begreat among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be slave of all.”
It is time, I would argue, to hear the good news of the gospel.
NOTES
1. Annual of the Southern Baptist Convention, 1984, p. 65.
2. Elisabeth Eliot, “Why I Oppose the Ordination of Women,” 13.
3. Michael F. Stitzinger, “Genesis 1-3 and the Male/Female Role Relationship,” p. 34.
4. A. Duane Litfin, “Evangelical Feminism: Why Traditionalists Reject It,” 267. There is no lack of other literature to examine. Some of the important works are:
Stephen B. Clark, Man and Woman in Christ (Ann Arbor: Servant Books, 1980); W.A. Criswell, editor, The Criswell Study Bible (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, Publishers, 1979); John Jefferson Davis, “Some Reflections on Galatians 3:28, Sexual Roles, and Biblical Hermeneutics,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 19, 3 (Summer, 1976): 201-08; Elisabeth Elliot, “Why I Oppose the Ordination of Women,” Christianity Today XIX, 18 (June 6, 1975), 12-15; Susan T. Foh, Women and the Word of God: A Response to Biblical Feminism (Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Co., 1979); Patricia Gundry, Women Be Free! (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan Press, 1977); H. Wayne House, “Paul, Women, and Contemporary Evangelical Feminism,” Bibliotheca Sacra 136 (Jan.-March, 1979): 40-53; Paul King Jewett, The Ordination of Women (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1980); Paul King Jewett, “Why I Favor the Ordination of Women,” Christianity Today XIX, 18 (June 6, 1975), 7-12; George W. Knight, III, “Male and Female Related He Them,” Christianity Today XX, 14 ((April 19, 1976): 13-16; A. Duane Litfin, “Evangelical Feminism: Why Traditionalists Reject It,”Bibliotheca Sacra 136 (July-Sept., 1979): 258-71; Alvera Mickelsen, ed., Women, Authority and the Bible (Downer's Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 1986); Roger Singleton Oldham, The Ordination of Women: An Appraisal of Current Thought, unpublished Th.D. dissertation, Mid-America Baptist Theological Seminary, 1985; Roger Singleton Oldham, “Positional and Functional Equality: An Appraisal of the Major Arguments for the Ordination of Women,” Mid-America Theological Journal 9,2 (Fall, 1985): 1-21; Review and Expositor LXXXIII,1 (Winter, 1986); John R. Robbins, Scripture Twisting in the Seminaries, Part I: Feminism (Jefferson, Missouri: The Trinity Foundation, 1985); Michael F. Stitzinger, “Genesis 1-3 and the Male/Female Role Relationship,” Grace Theological Journal 2, 1 (Spring, 1981): 23-44; Bruce K. Waltke, “I Corinthians 11:2-16: An Interpretation,” Bibliotheca Sacra 135, (Jan.-March, 1978): 46-57.
As Andrew D. Lester notes in “Some Observations on the Psychological Effects of Women in the Ministry,” Review and Expositor LXXXIII, 1 (Winter, 1986): 64, discussions of women's submission are also essential to “God's Divine Order” theology as popularized by Larry Christenson and Bill Gothard. Any number of Southern Baptists works on the family also employ hierarchical theology. See, among many, Ed Wheat and Gaye Wheat, Intended For Pleasure (Old Tappan., N.J.: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1977); Charles Stanley, How To Keep Your Kids on Your Team (Nashville: Oliver-Nelson Books, 1986); and Jack R. Taylor, One Home Under God (Nashville: Broadman Press, 1974).
5. Paul K. Jewett, The Ordination of Women, p. 2. In presenting the theory that social hierarchy is a result of the fall, proponents of both the egalitarian and the hierarchical model often Phyllis Trible's analysis of Genesis 1-3.
6. Martin Luther, Lectures on Genesis, quoted in Marianne Meye Thompson, “Response,” in Mickelsen, Women, Authority and the Bible, pp. 94-5.
7. George W. Knight III, ““Male and Female Related He Them,” 16. Susan Foh expresses the hierarchical position even more pointedly. There is an “authority structure” within the trinity, she claims, that is eternal. Christ is always subordinated to the Father -- before, during, and after the incarnation. (Women and the Word of God, 41)
8. Nancy Hastings Sehested, “Women and Ministry in the Local Congregation,” 73-4. Hastings Sehested's professional career is a fascinating example of the practical implications of this theological debate. When Prescott Memorial Baptist Church in Memphis called Hastings Sehested to be its pastor in 1987, a furor developed. Eventually the local Shelby County Baptist Association disfellowshipped Prescott on the grounds that Scripture forbids women to have authority over men. Prescott hired Hastings Sehested any way, on the grounds that the Holy Spirit had called and empowered her to lead the congregation in servant ministry.
9. Susan Foh, Women and the Word of God, p. 42. See also House, 50; George W. Knight III, “Male and Female Related He Them”; and John Jefferson Davis, “Some Reflections on Galatians 3:28.”
10. Ibid.
11. Eliot, 14.
12. This was the text cited by the Southern Baptist Convention in the summer of 1988, when the Convention passed a nonbinding resolution designed to protect pastoral authority in the local church against possible erosion from the traditional Baptist doctrine of the priesthood of the believer. This resolution followed a 1984 ruling, in which the Convention had declared that Paul “excludes women from pastoral leadership to preserve a submission God requires because man was first in creation and the woman was first in the Edenic fall.” (Annual of the Southern Baptist Convention, 1984, p.65.)
13. See, for example, James Henley Thornwell, “The Rights and Duties of Masters,” in Robert L. Ferm, Issues in American Protestantism (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1983), pp. 189-195; and George Fitzhugh, Sociology for the South, or the Failure of Free Society (Richmond, Va.: A. Morris, 1854). Klyne R. Snodgrass, in “Galatians 3:28: Conundrum or Solution?” (pp. 160-181 in Mickelsen, Women, Authority, and the Bible) has written an analysis similar to mine. For a discussion of slavery from advocates of the hierarchical model, see Foh, Knight, Stitzinger, Litfin, House, and Stephen B. Clark (Man and Woman in Christ).
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Eve and Adam
Genesis and Gender Roles: The Southern Baptist Debate over Women’s Ordination
Valarie H. Ziegler, DePauw University
Southeastern Conference on Religion, Atlanta, Georgia, March 19, 1994
© Valarie H. Ziegler, 2000
