How Are We to Interpret 1 Timothy 2:12?

Gideon YutzyLeave a comment

When I read the Epistle of 1 Timothy, there is one verse that stops me up short like a towering and immovable stone bulwark:

“I do not allow a woman to teach or exercise authority over a man. She must remain quiet” (1 Timothy 2:12, NET).

For most 21st-century Westerners like me, a face-value reading of this Scriptural injunction could yield only one message: half of the church is to stay silent, full stop. And as brutal as the implications of such an interpretation may be, it is the most straightforward and uncomplicated, the one that most people throughout 2,000 years of church history have held to.

Indeed, Paul (or another early Christian leader if the passage is pseudepigraphal) could have intended just that: women are to keep silent and refrain from teaching and exercising authority over men; women, as in all women, in all congregations as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be world without end, amen.

But there are other reasons why that may not be the only reading or even the best reading. As succinctly as possible, let me give three.

First, other New Testament passages assume the exact opposite. Take Junia, a woman “of note among the apostles” (Romans 16:7, KJV). She does not sound like someone who stays silent and never teaches. Additionally, even the churches committed to the most steadfastly literal interpretation of 1 Timothy 2:12 admit that the first Christians appointed deaconesses; Anabaptists as early as 1632, no slouches in their regard for scripture, anticipated deaconesses when they wrote their creeds. Admittedly, the role of deaconess could include many various responsibilities, but it is difficult to see how it would not include some measure of speaking and teaching and even exercising authority over men.

Elsewhere in his epistles Paul wrote that there is no male or female but that we are all one in Christ Jesus. It hardly seems insignificant that he reiterates this point three times to various major churches (Colossians 3:11; Ephesians 3:6; Galatians 3:28). Granted, this Pauline motif of oneness can still be reconciled with women keeping silent and never teaching men, but in my view it is an unnatural and forced reading at best.

Second, it is nearly impossible to hold to a face-value interpretation in all areas of church life. How are women to remain quiet while singing, for instance, or communicating about logistics for church events? (Poignantly, even when women are expected to do only acts of service behind the scenes, it is still nearly impossible for them to avoid speaking during church services.) What about women who have specific expertise that none of the men in the congregation have? Are they also to be relegated to the sidelines, to refrain at all times from teaching and exercising authority? Rising to the challenges of a scriptural command is noble, but in this case I fear our zeal often works against New Testament ecclesiology. In extreme cases, it leads to a boys club in the church.

Third, any simplistic interpretation is seldom the best interpretation. Even Peter, who was Paul’s contemporary, wrote that Paul’s letters “contain some things that are hard to understand” (2 Peter 3:16, NIV). Culturally, Peter was similar to Paul; if it was difficult for him to understand Paul’s writings, why should we expect it to be easier for us today?

In raising this point, I genuinely do not wish to evade the demands of Scripture. Rather, I am highlighting the profound limitations of human language in any context. In The Lost World of the Flood, the evangelical biblical scholar John Walton writes that all communication happens on a continuum from high context to low context. For instance, a text message from your spouse about picking up groceries provides high context because you and your spouse share a vernacular, not to mention your religious, cultural and scientific assumptions. (Sadly, despite our shared reality, my wife and I still manage to miscommunicate woefully at times.) In contrast, if you alter even one factor in the communicative setting, you end up with a lower-context exchange.

Take amount of time elapsed as an example. We have to pay moderate attention to this morning’s news story with all its facts and figures, but when we read an article from 200 years ago we often have to scrutinize it phrase by phrase to parse out its meaning. Now imagine reading something written 2000 years ago in an ancient language, from a setting that is also culturally and geographically different. The reality is that 1 Timothy 2:12 comes to us from that world – an extremely low-context world that requires years of immersive study for scholars to penetrate, and even then those scholars are forced to reinterpret it through the lens of their time. As Walton puts it, the New Testament was written for us, but not to us. Nietzsche may be a dubious source of wisdom, but I believe he was right when he said that all interpretation is reinterpretation.

To summarise, a face-value interpretation of 1 Timothy 2:12 is unhelpful because it ignores other passages of Scripture, is almost impossible to live out, and fails to reckon with the complex layers of the original context.

Yet simply saying that it only applies for the church in Ephesus, or that it is too opaque for Westerners today, is also reductionist. What, then, is a better approach to the passage? I propose that if we are to have a proper regard for 1 Timothy 2:12, we must wrestle with it. We must interrogate it as we interrogate all passages: What do you want us to take away from you? How can you disturb and unsettle us? Where can you help us flourish in our faith and practice?

Consider one alternative interpretation. N.T. Wright has explained that Ephesus was the home of the cult of Artemis, a female-only cult with a female goddess and female priestesses. In other words, the major local civic religion in Ephesus was one in which women were the key leaders. As always when a little group discovers Jesus, it upsets the status quo. The status quo in Ephesus, unlike many contexts then and now, meant it was the women and not the men who were expected take over the leadership. This is counterintuitive but historically verifiable.

Additionally, the key word that gets translated in 1 Timothy 2:12 as ‘assume authority’ is a difficult word with 12 significantly different meanings in the lexicon. Wright thinks the most likely meaning is that Ephesian women are free to live differently from mainstream society, that they do not have an obligation to take over the leadership like the women in the Artemis cult. Furthermore, continues Wright, “The point about quietness and submission doesn’t refer to women being quiet and submissive in relation to men in the congregation [but] the word for leisure, which comes through as somebody who has time to study.”

At first Wright’s explanation may seem unduly complex and no doubt many Christians will remain unconvinced by it. But at the very least it seems we should respect Wright’s larger point: the world of first-century Ephesus was a low-context world, one very different from ours. We should not hasten to simplistic interpretations of a letter from that world. In the words of L.P. Hartley, “The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there.”

Another implication of Wright’s explanation, one that is timeless and readily applicable for all believers, is that the church is called to be countercultural. On this point, I pose only one question: in today’s society where women are often objectified and manipulated, is silencing women truly countercultural? Restricting women to servile roles is all the more tragic when we consider the inherently female characteristics of Jesus’ movement. Ours is a faith that births, that gives new life, a faith whose adherents are midwives of a new creation. In the first few centuries women flocked to Christianity, so much so that Christian women sometimes had to marry non-Christian men because of the lopsided numbers (1 Corinthians 7).

In the coming years, I hope to take the challenge personally, to sit with 1 Timothy 2:12 and avoid rushing to simplistic conclusions. Meanwhile, I am also committed to practicing other New Testament verses, such as this one:

“What then shall we say, brothers and sisters? When you come together, each of you has a hymn, or a word of instruction, a revelation, a tongue or an interpretation. Everything must be done so that the church may be built up” (1 Cor. 14: 26, NET).

Note the inclusion brothers and sisters. The English phrase ‘brothers and sisters’ comes from a word (adelphoi) which is, again, not easily translated. Yet a number of major translations render it in exactly this way: brothers and sisters. Of course other translations use ‘brothers’ or ‘brethren,’ and furthermore I acknowledge the vast differences in how we view gender today versus how it was viewed in the Greco-Roman world.

But what if Paul really did mean both halves of the church? What if he envisioned the whole gamut of church activity—instruction, interpreting, inspiring—be done not only by men but also by women? A place where there is no male or female, but all really are one in Christ.

Now as ever, we must prove all things and hold fast to that which is good.

Recognizing the Resurrected Jesus

Gideon Yutzy1 Comment

From out of nowhere, spring is emerging. This time around it comes lockstep with an unveiling that I feel taking place in the musty recesses of my own wintry heart. To mix two curious metaphors from the Gospel of Luke, although I often kick against the pricks, God is removing scales from my eyes. Some of the most mundane things are now appearing in a new light. I give thanks because I know vernal breakthroughs, both in the heart and in the soil, come through unalloyed grace.

In a few days our pastor boards an early morning flight from Dublin, bound for his native Sierra Leone. It is reported that he won’t return until August. In his absence I have been asked to preach several of the Sunday morning sermons. Checking the lectionary, I take down my first text: Luke 24: 36-48. This will be two weeks after Easter Sunday so Jesus has already well and truly risen. “Peace be with you,” says Jesus, it is the broiled fish passage. Feverishly, I take down several notes. I hope that’ll preach, I mutter and add several more.

In further reading, I learn that the resurrected Jesus is mistaken for three different people. Mary Magdalene, the first ever witness to the resurrection (but certainly not the last), thought him a gardener. Later, the disciples took Jesus for a fellow fisherman hollering advice at them for how to remedy a fruitless night of fishing. And finally, two unnamed disciples thought he was just another random bloke traveling to Emmaus.

This insight captures my imagination and I decide to craft my sermon around it. When the resurrected Jesus appears he is devastatingly intimate and as local as a lemonade stand; a gardener, a fisherman, a dusty traveler. Yet he is also mysterious, unrecognizable at first, even among his closest associates.

Imagine the most universal and all-encompassing being you can think of and Jesus is more universal. Now imagine a person who spends their entire life in the same tiny neighbourhood and Jesus is more local, more embodied, more rooted in the particular.

Stepping into the shower to kick off my weekend, I remember lines from a popular Mennonite hymn: I thank thee too that thou hast made our joys abound/that in the darkest spot of earth some love is found. It occurs to me that the resurrected Jesus, hard as it is to recognize him and pin him down, is that joy in the darkest spot of earth. He descended into hell, he ascended into heaven…

Today, post-resurrection, Jesus is manifested not only in the gardener, the fisherman and the traveler, but also in the butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker. If I make my bed in hell, behold thou art there. Nothing remains untouched by the cosmic Easter event. The divine has been irrevocably mixed with the human and now there is no turning back. The ship has sailed, the genie has been let out of the bottle, the cat let out of the bag, our messiah out of his tomb.

The Christ who transcends time and space comes to each of us differently, yet there is one commonality in each resurrection appearance: he knows us, changes us, heals us, and makes us whole people.

To me that is the meaning of Easter. I think it just might preach.

The Wisdom of Self-Care

Gideon YutzyLeave a comment

Every month or two a group of us meet for a conversation club. When the group is in sync an hour seems to go by in seconds, and the event becomes a high point of my earthly existence. People from a variety of backgrounds have attended and we try to choose a topic of general interest. In our most recent meeting we discussed self-care.

Before extolling the benefits of self-care, we listed ways we have seen it abused. Arpad, a Hindu from Kashmir, mentioned people applying skin products in the name of self-care only to find that in the long term these products cause damage to their skin.

Next a Baháʼí named Kent, from Michigan but living in Waterford, pointed out another dangerous parody of self-care: the trend for college students to protest views in any way different from theirs. Students will even call these different views “toxic” and ask that the staff or classmates who hold them be removed from campus so that nobody feels “threatened” or “harmed.” It seems clear that the interaction patterns on social media fuel this overreaction. Our consensus was that too much fragility kills public discourse and could obviously not be true self-care.

Self-care, we agreed, must make us more resilient in the long term. I brought up the neuroscientist Rachel Yehuda who has studied epigenetics–traits you inherit because of your parents’ environment and behaviour. In studying the children of Holocaust survivors, Yehuda found that some were disempowered through their knowledge of their parents’ trauma, but others became more resilient. The latter is obviously preferable. The best self-care results in more resources, not fewer.

Nobody in our group had experienced trauma at the level of Holocaust survivors, yet all of us have either gone for therapy or know someone who has. The question is, does therapy actually make us more resilient? A recent article in the Atlantic entitled “Plenty of People Could Quit Therapy Right Now” concludes that therapy has become a luxury for privileged Westerners. Someone in our group wondered if there are no better ways to spend 100 dollars than on hour-long navel-gazing sessions, especially when we have neighbours who don’t have enough money for food and shelter.

Yet the comment from Shika, another (barefoot) Hindu in the group, was also true: we cannot heal others until we find healing. Hurt people hurt people, goes the old adage. We will fail to bring true and lasting help to others if we ourselves carry open wounds. How can we show forgiveness and compassion to others if we cannot extend it to ourselves? In airline safety parlance, passengers should fasten their own oxygen masks before assisting others.

An itinerant German who had joined us for the day observed that Jesus said to love our neighbour as ourselves, and it follows that we cannot love others if we don’t know how to love ourselves. St. Paul seems to consider some measure of self-care inevitable: “No one ever yet hated their own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it.”

“Acquire inner peace,” said the Russian mystic, ” and thousands around you will find their salvation.” How best to find that inner peace can be discussed at length, but what is not up for debate is the necessity of doing so. As Christians we sing about being poured out like wine/upon the altar of God, but how can we be poured out if we are never filled? We heard from different members about how they recharge their batteries, everything from crafting, jogging, and watching Netflix by the fireside to–among the more devout–leading youth camps, 5-minute meditations, and daily prayer.

Additionally, several people testified to the usefulness of therapy (despite the negative assessment of it a few minutes earlier). A Catholic named Dela said that in her home country of Cameroon a kind of therapy happens naturally because neighbours have an open, honest way of communicating. Keeping your front door closed during the day, a practice we take for granted, would raise suspicion in Cameroon. In contrast, we in the West often put on our best face when we have problems, and we tiptoe around others when we sense problems in their lives. Dela reckons this way of relating is one reason we need therapy in the first place. Still she does not dismiss therapy. After all this is our sociological ferment, and therapy just might offer a solution to the mess we got ourselves into.

Mentally, I also noted the importance of not romanticising the past. History is replete with people who were psychologically unstable in ways that their embodied community, however much of a boon it was, could not support them.

Triggers, trauma, toxic people–all buzzwords in today’s context, but are they helpful? Do we need to dwell on our problems or can we just “get over it, snowflakes,” as one preacher once admonished his congregation. Well-intentioned advice perhaps, but it is no secret that unaddressed pain can only come back to bite us, rearing its head among the third and fourth generations. The father will eat sour grapes and their children’s teeth will be set on edge, quoth Jeremiah of Anathoth.

In the end, I boil the conversation around self-care down to one word: wisdom. My hunch is that to be human is to experience trauma. However, that trauma exists on a continuum from extreme to mild, and this calls for discernment to know which situations require deep healing work and which ones do not. Therapy is hardly warranted, for instance, when a colleague did not greet me warmly enough when I arrived at work, or when someone else’s post gets more likes than mine. But what if someone was neglected or harmed by their parents and now begins to act out the same relational patterns with their children?

Turning self-care into a god is narcissistic and cripples us into a life of tragic inaction but we do ourselves an equally great disservice when we ignore our past wounds, or worse still inflict them on the people closest to us.

The Book of Proverbs makes strong claims about the role of wisdom: God “has founded the earth by wisdom” (3:19), and “getting wisdom is the wisest thing you can do” (4:7, NLT). As another passage in the wisdom literature puts it, “There is a time for everything” (Ecclesiastes 3:3). Wise people know there is a time to care for others and a time to care for ourselves, realising also that somehow, mysteriously, the two are inseparable. Likewise, there is a time to do the deep work of introspection and personal healing–even when it includes the brutal act of naming ways people have wronged us–but there is also a time to let it go and move on.

Wisdom, according to Proverbs, “crieth aloud and uttereth her voice in the street.” In an increasingly complex world, embracing that wisdom is the ultimate act of self-care.

How American English and Hiberno-English Influence Each Other

Gideon YutzyLeave a comment

I remember being at a church-related event here in Ireland where the American emcee “dismissed” the people at the end of the service. He grew a little flustered when the congregation, primarily Irish, burst into shrieks of laughter instead of departing in a reverent hush as one might expect.

Alas, it was but another breakdown in communication between English speakers from the US and English speakers from Ireland. At times we assume too great a similarity between our respective iterations of that vast and storied language. In Ireland, to dismiss someone means to fire them, as in to let them go, to sack them, to terminate, to send packing, to axe. Our American friend had just buoyantly informed everyone at church that they had lost their jobs.

In my six years as an American expatriate to Ireland, I have encountered a common trope among Irish people: they believe Americanisms are ruining their beloved Hiberno-English. Hiberno-English, for the uninitiated, is the English spoken in Hibernia, which is the moniker the Roman general Tacitus gave to Ireland. (Hibernia means ‘wintry land’ and it’s related to hibernate*.)

For instance, a classmate named Caoimhe** complained that her young son pronounces ORANGE the way it’s pronounced on American TV: AWR-inj. And someone else once opined that MOVIE sounds out of place in Hiberno-English, the purists preferring FILM, which for some inexplicable reason the Irish pronounce FIL-uhm.

All of this I acknowledge and I hang my American-born head in shame. But in all fairness (to use a common Waterford expression), it works both ways; the Irish also influence American English. Just in the past month, I heard expressions like GOBSMACKED and LEAVE IT WITH ME in American podcast episodes.

I have two theories for why Americans would borrow from Hiberno-English: First, in the last few centuries many Irish emigrated across the pond (an expression that always makes me feel like a doofus for the first split second after using it). These Irish played no small part in shaping American English, and thus when modern Americans encounter their linguistic palimpsest*** they incorporate the words quite naturally. And second, all the Americans I know are infatuated with Ireland, or at least what they think is Ireland, and they find it exotic to use Irish-isms.

Taken together, then, it only follows that they would be quick to adapt Irish staples like GOBSHITE****, ARSED, BANJAXED, and GURRIER.

Anyway, thanks for listening, you are all dismissed.

*So now we know.

**Almost certainly, that wasn’t her name, I just wanted to use a hyper-stereotypical Irish name. It’s pronounced KWEE-va, by the way, and it means beautiful.

***Definitely felt like a doofus

****Funny how I knew immediately what the word meant when I first heard it upon arriving in Ireland.