Albert Mohler - "Male and Female Created He Them"

my message this morning is entitled male and female created he them obviously drawn from Genesis 1 verse 27 I scheduled this message many months ago titled it and and put it on the calendar I I say that because at any given moment with any given developments that can appear that a message has been scheduled in response to this or to that sometimes that's actually called for but it and in this case it's just that in God's providence certain issues and questions and public lined up as I was committed to preach this message and even more committed to preach this message when we think about the world one of the responsibilities we bear and it's inescapable just to being human is trying to figure out the world around us big questions what does the world mean how are we to live how should we see and understand the world how do we understand our place ourselves and where we stand in the world we have to ask questions what is the meaning even of our bodies what is the meaning of our relatedness fundamental questions that will change everything immediately impinge on us is there a creator god who's responsible for all of this and to whose glory all of this was made including ourselves and including our maleness and our femaleness and all that goes with that is there a creator god who thus gives all of this meaning or are we just cosmic accidents left to figure all this out to make some sense of it by ourselves fundamental questions what actually does it mean to be human what does it mean to be made in the image of God what what does it mean to be made male or female eventually other questions impinge what does it mean to be sexual what is marriage how is it to be constituted what is the family how is it to be defined eventually what is a church and how would marriage and family society and church be rightly ordered the questions loom a lot larger now it's it's good for us to just remember the fact that we have to think about things and answer questions that were not open questions for millennia that basically includes in the Christian Church the the questions that loom large now have a specific intellectual and cultural context a great intellectual shift to this taking place in the larger society around us and intellectual changes moral cultural political and other changes that are now coming quite swiftly in their wake the project of the modern age is defined by the modern age as a project of liberation the idea behind this is that all claims about creation or ontological order all claims about natural law all claims about fixed structures and truths are just a disguised form of oppression those who are committed to this liberation project honestly and straightforwardly believe that they are serving the cause of humanity humanity defined in human terms or they are liberating a humanity bound in various forms of oppression from all of this suppression how reason is all of this well when it comes to the project that the modern age defines as the liberation of women you're basically talking about just the course of slightly over a century but you're really talking in the controversies that we have now and the white-hot heat of the contemporary moment you're really talking about developments that date back to the second half of the 20th century in the late 19th century and in the first half of the 20th century we saw the rise of what was called first wave feminism and first wave feminism as Lisbeth Katie Stanton and and others that their main point was often pressed in the terms of the Equality of women in fact calls for an equality act for women go all the way back to the to the 19th century in the period after the Civil War the main demand made at the time was female suffrage the right to women the the fact that women should have the right to vote and of course that was won in the early 20th century but then second wave feminism came especially in the wake of World War two and second wave feminism was was quite different it was it was more powerful in the sense that it called for far deeper changes in society that second wave feminism represented an explicit repudiation of the structures the human beings had known for a very long time take Betty Ford an perhaps the most famous of the second wave feminists who referred to the family and the home with a mother and a father and their children in the home and the the father having a primary responsibility in the vocational world outside the home and a mother having primary responsibilities domestically and maternally inside the home Betty Fernan famously dismissed all of that by calling it a domestic concentration camp that was shocking language in the 1950s and 60s but it obviously had a very deep effect that deep effect was to drive through the society an impulse that liberation must indeed happen if the home is a domestic concentration camp and the logic of second wave feminism became very very popular and the culture it began to the cultural engines Hollywood the academic community and all the rest that's that it basically became the dogma that that second wave feminism basically said that the problem is not the abuse of these historic structures but the structures themselves so it's not it's not corruptions of the family or its it's not it's not distortions of of marriage in the family it is actually the entire structure of the system that ultimately needs to be overcome now of course the second way feminists ran into some obvious headwinds they ran into political cultural headwinds boom is pressing back that second wave feminism was a radical movement that had radically misread reality but there was also a pushback from what you might call nature which is to say that it turns out that there's basically one way to make babies and that requires relatedness between a male and a female and even with the displacement of marriage and the redefinition of family the reality is and here's something about common grace that shows through once you have children they imply a certain responsibility that actually curbs the actual explosion of second wave feminism because in one sense a baby isn't impressed by feminist arguments baby says feed me now change me now love me now even if you call this a concentration camp at the popular level it wasn't that most Americans men or women became convinced of second wave it's the second wave feminism just shifted the entire spectrum of reality it it shifted the perception of the real and the perception of the ideal and the kind of life that that women expected or thought they were supposed to expect and to work for and eventually these these shifts made their way into Christian conversation or into the conversation of Christian churches and denominations the question eventually reached evangelical shores and by the time you get to the 1960s and 70s and the mainline more liberal Protestant denominations there are calls for the ordination of women to the priesthood or to the ministry and eventually there were what we're called irregular ordinations that has ordinations that weren't authorized but nonetheless took place and then eventually you had those churches redefined their standards of ministry all of liberal Protestantism too to encourage women to be pastors and in some denominations priests and in some of those denominations bishops so that logic went forward we need to note that that logic went forward with the same kind of imperative that drove many of those mainline Protestant denominations to make other major theological shifts away from an impulse of biblical authority and towards a responsiveness to culture and by the way as you look to those churches you'll notice that those changes were made largely without much extensive theological or biblical consideration but rather a surrender to the culture these issues came to evangelicalism just a little bit later you could date them perhaps to the late 1970s in greater intensity in the 1980s by the time I arrived as a student at Southern Seminary in 1980 the impulse towards what was called women in ministry was was already very much underway it was completely new to me I'd never heard of it until I arrived here but it was an issue of white-hot intensity right here and to be honest the white-hot intensity that was taking place right here on that issue was not entirely but largely following the same lines of argument and liberal Protestantism the the shift in the more evangelical and that's a broad spectrum but in the more evangelical conversation there still was the need to try to prove the case by Scripture and so even when I was assigned and systematic theology here doctor in vant apologia a textbook it was by Paul Jewett man as male and female and that that was the argument being made by the time you get to the late or even the mid-1980s Southern Baptists are very concerned about this and in 1984 they pass a resolution stating that pastors should be men and then with the Baptist faith a message was revised in the year 2000 and overwhelmingly adopted by the Southern Baptist Convention that confession stated that the office of pastor is to be filled only by men as qualified by scripture behind all of that is a lot of what the Germans call Sturm and Drang an awful lot of controversy and an awful lot of tension and stress that became one of the major divisive issues in the separation of the Southern Baptist Convention from the co-operative Baptist Fellowship and before that from the Alliance of Baptists it was it was a big enough issue that all of those groups had to make a stand one way or the other on whether or not women should serve as pastors most centrally then whether or not there was even a biblical differentiation in the roles between men and women in the first place here we are in the year 2019 an interesting question comes to us and that is why did this issue reach the status of a confessional issue by the year 2000 the history of this institution has a lot to telling that story this is one of those dividing line issues it's a second-order issue as I often try to explain there there are at least three different levels of theological issues first order issues second order issues and third order issues for decades now I've tried to call that theological triage as a part of our theological responsibility first order issues are doctrines if compromised contradict Christianity and there can be no true Christianity so the doctrine and the Trinity the the the full deity and full humanity of the Lord Jesus Christ and and I think a first order issue and this is something that some people who would even speak of 1st and 2nd and 3rd order issues would not say I firmly believe that a first order issue is justification by faith alone those are issues that define the gospel if you contradict these doctrines then you are not teaching saving true Christianity but there are 2nd order issues that we believe are of great importance but they're not of the same status and the classic example of this would be say what the Presbyterians and some others call infant baptism we still recognize gospel loving Presbyterians as Christians but we do not recognize them as Baptists and we have Baptist churches and they have Presbyterian churches because we differ over and I'm talking about gospel Presbyterians our friends and the pca and beyond we're talking about people with whom we share a oneness in the gospel and a commitment to the inerrancy and and fallibilities the Word of God a commitment to justification by faith alone a commitment to the full measure of Christian orthodoxy what we don't share is most in horton lee our understanding of the ordinance of baptism and and so we don't anathematized them and say they're not believers we know they're believers but they're not in our churches because a church is going to have to decide on second order issues do we put water on babies or not and and so that's a constitutive constitutional issue and that's what makes a Baptist Church a Baptist Church we mean that every single member of a Baptist Church shares a common baptism we believe baptism is revealed in Scripture biblical baptism baptism by immersion a little bit won't do it and a part of the strength of our ecclesiology is that every single covenant member of a Baptist Church has obeyed to receive the Covenant sign of that covenant membership which is baptism they're in their third order issues that frankly you can you can have division on in a small group without theological risk matters of some questions about eschatology some questions about the origins of the soul different things like this where you have some great theological discussions but it should not be a rupture in communities you should actually on those third-order issues be able to be in the same church and be happily in communion and in covenant deciding where issues rank is very important I'll state without hesitation that the question of whether or not women should serve as pastors is a second-order issue there are some who believe that women should serve as pastors who otherwise are evangelical Christians who love the Lord and love the Scriptures but disagree with us on this now as we're gonna see the advocacy of women as pastors I used the word pastors here just use the most familiar term amongst us holding the teaching office that that can be accompanied by and especially in liberal Protestantism was indicative of a basic rejection of the scripture and disregard for Biblical Authority but we do need to concede there are some who would claim the same view of Scripture that we hold and the same measure of Christian orthodoxy that we teach you would disagree with us on this issue but our response would be that the issue then is how faithfully to read the scriptures what a faithful reading of Scripture requires of us what a consistent reading of Scripture requires of us feminist liberation theology emerged in such a way as to say the Bible itself is a part of the oppression the Bible itself bears all the marks of the patriarchal and-and-and masculinists prejudice against women so on the theological left the easy thing to do is simply to say look the Bible is basically a testimony to what human beings believed about God the denial there is of the inerrancy and fallibilities verbal inspiration and authority and sufficiency of Scripture so freed from Scripture they are free to say yes we know the Bible teaches that but nobody with any decent intellect would believe that now as a matter of fact what we see they would argue in reading the scripture is the very need for liberation because even continuing vestiges of that kind of understanding of the relatedness of men and women and even then ontological which is to say at a basic level of being distinction between men and women that's what we are overcoming in this liberation project Phyllis Tribble would refer to the text that she saw as particularly against women as texts of terror and you can see the parallels and the argument that sets up what those who are pressing the LGBT agenda now dismiss as the so called clobber Tex in the Bible concerning human sexuality texts of Terror clobber Tex the clear implication is we just need to cut these out of the Bible or the very least recognize them for the horrible text that they are so where do we turn well we turned first to Scripture - and that should be our impulse I chose Genesis chapter 1 just to make the point that you don't have to look far in scripture for the direct divine instruction concerning these things so God created man in his own image in the image of God he created him male and female he created them and God blessed them in verse 28 and God said to them be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth we'll take just a bit of time this morning but I want us to do an experiment and exercise in biblical theology trying to think this through as we ask the questions what does the world mean what is our place in the world what does it mean to be human what does it mean to be male and female is there a divinely revealed order if so it'll be to his glory and for our good what would that order be how is it rightly to be understood we start as biblical theology starts we're gonna look at creation fall Redemption and and new creation will we begin with creation because that's where our theology has to start as we think about ourselves and the world we begin with Genesis 1 and what we find here is the image of God the most profound revelation in Genesis 1 is God's special act of creation creating human beings the only creature in His image that means many things more than even we can fully imagine or understand it means at the very least he made us able to know him able to be conscious of knowing him capable of obeying and disobeying him but by the time you have Genesis 1:27 followed by 1:28 it also is clearly functional there's a response it's vocational there's a responsibility to us it is a responsibility to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over it thus human life and our existence is not an evolutionary accident it's God's perfect purpose revealed and what we notice in the beginning of biblical theology here in the first movement of biblical theology and creation is it is without confusion there's no confusion in this in Genesis 1 27 and 28 it is simply stated as a very clear fact confusion will as we know in fast-forward come as a result of sin the imago Dei is vocational and the imago Dei is also the ontological that is the most basic level of being reality for both men and women both male and female it's not a distinction in that sense we are together as male and female told to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and that takes a male and a female then we are also told together to subdue it to rule and have dominion in Genesis 2 and even more elaborate theological description there's an assignment made to Adam prior to the creation of Eve and that assignment is an assignment of exercising that Dominion even in naming the animals whatever Adam named it whatever name he gave it that was its name but you'll recall that by the time you come to the end of that passage Adam is revealed to have no helper no compliment fitting for him and thus Lord put Adam into a deep sleep and that of Adam's side that of Adam himself he made the woman and he presented her to the man and the man having had the responsibility of exercising the Dominion before Eve of naming the animals now also has the privileged responsibility to name Eve and the scripture makes very clear he named her woman because she was taken out of man again it's clearing fuses unconvicted man and woman the same equally made in the image of God equally assigned the rule but different different in their biological structure different in their biological roles and and different in ways that are made even more clear in God's words after the fall the second great chapter of biblical theology is the fall God's verdict and his words of condemnation are clear and they are bracing and horrifying and they are differently addressed to the man and the woman so the theme we're going to see over and over again is same and different the Bible says over and over again repeatedly in every chapter a biblical revelation in the unfolding story in our chapters of biblical theology the theme of same and different comes up again and again and again we sin thereby by failing to see the same we said also by failing to see the different just looking at Genesis chapter 3 just begin looking at verse 16 and you'll see the different that come under the same condemnation but with different effects to the woman he said I will surely multiply your pain in childbearing in pain you shall bring forth children your desire shall be for your husband and he shall rule over you and to Adam the man he said because you have listened to the voice of your wife and have eaten of the tree of which I commanded you you shall not eat of it cursed it is the ground because of you in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you and you shall eat the plants of the field by the sweat of your face you shall eat bread you shall return to the ground for out of it you were taken for you are dust and to dust you shall return and then in verse 20 Adam names Eve again calling her Eve by name because she is the mother of all the living what do we have here well one of the interesting things we have is an understanding of the fact that even before the fall there was a distinction in the roles between men and women because it's not that there's a new assignment given to men and women in Genesis chapter 3 after the fall it is there there is a condemnation on the assignment the assignment is now going to be accompanied by pain and toil and sweat and we might say tears there's a there's an assignment given to the woman here even in childbearing but that's not an assignment that comes by the fall it was clearly an assignment that was found before the fall in the perfection of the garden that be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth defined at least that part of her role and now we're told that it's going to be excruciatingly ly more difficult the same and the different continue it should be very interesting and encouraging to us to see how much of this is presented without the slightest embarrassment this is just an explanation a revealed explanation in Scripture as to what happened what it means and as we think about in a fallen world how we understand these things well I mean the Bible is clear in ways they go beyond Genesis that we need to think about I mean because after all it actually there are there are haunting passages that come to us and just remind us that what we're looking at here is more complex than we had ever perhaps imagined just consider the fact that when when you are thinking about the oneness and then or the sameness and the difference well it really does bring us to understand that there's difference that is made clear the scripture in the Old Testament and then even repeated in the New Testament just consider first Timothy 2:14 where we are told that Paul's instruction is based at least in part on the fact that the woman was first in the fall the woman was deceived and became a transgressor what exactly to do with that we don't know but it does show sameness same curse same fall same sin but also difference and it's not only in Genesis it shows up in the New Testament after the fall here's something you need to recognize and not just about the relatedness of men and women and and what that means we need to notice that after the fall not only is the creation order continued it is far more essential than we ever would have understood it in other words we only survive after the fall because the creation order continues and it is literally a matter of life or death that creation order of human beings made in His image given this responsibility of Dominion that created order which is sameness and difference when it comes to men and women act that created order creation order even when it comes to human reproduction that creation order when it comes to marriage and the family and you see this in the Old Testament and it's narratives you see it in the commands and the laws and the statutes that are given to Israel that creation order is not only continued that creation order is legislated that creation order is made even more clear and as you look to the Old Testament just considering this you understand that there is same and different and again that the covenant is made with Israel all of Israel but the description is often unembarrassed patriarchal it's described that way and then you have the lines of descent through the patriarchs and and then you have the fact that it was men who served as the priests and the prophets and the kings and then you look at the explicit household codes here things to think keep in mind in the Old Testament women are not hardly invisible they're very present in the Old Testament we have not only heroes but heroines many of them women in the Old Testament are not invisible and they're recognized as having agency and often exercising that agency there are even times when and in rare examples women emerge even in old testament in a role of national leadership and even though they're rare they're there and they're there for our instruction and and yet it continues that the general structure and the specific teachings of the Old Testament make very clear the continuation of that creation order same equally made in the image of God but different different in structure different in biology different in role and different in function you have to ask a basic question the liberation project says wherever you find this difference it's just a disguised form of oppression well if that's so and we can't read the Bible as the verbally inspired inerrant infallible Word of God then then what we have to do is look at the Bible and say okay we have a very problematic text here and our responsibility is to try to make it less problematic so we got to fix it where it's clearly wrong and oppressive and that's again the project undertaken by many but we're not just living in the Old Testament the Old Testament we read with anticipation we're looking for a messiah we're yearning for a new covenant we're looking for a new age and that third great chapter in biblical theology is Redemption the story of the gospel the story of God's saving act in Christ his creation of a new covenant people the declaration of salvation in Christ's name all that is contained within the teaching of the gospel comes in this in this great movement of redemption which is promised in the Old Testament in very specific form and then made manifest and what we call the New Testament or the New Covenant beginning with the Gospels and continuing through the book of Acts the the epistles and even the book of Revelation what is revealed well again there is sameness and there is difference there's their sameness in that men and women just as we are equally in the image of God and we are equally guilty of sinning against totally God we're equally in need of a savior and equal provision is made for us in the perfect redemption accomplished by the Lord Jesus Christ and thus from the very beginning of the Ministry of Christ and certainly in the the ministry of the church you have had the gospel preached to men and women and boys and girls believing the gospel is equally addressed to those who are equally sinners in need of a savior and a savior who saves men and women to the uttermost their sameness and that that sameness is something we have to keep so very much in mind we also recognize that even in the the New Covenant age there are there are continuations of will explicit affirmations of the need to continue that creation order starts in Genesis plan and purpose of God after the fall becomes even more important and the Christian Church is recognized that recognize that because it's affirmed in the New Testament and the household codes of the New Testament it's repeated and the affirmation of marriage because after all when the question of marriage comes up Jesus clarifies it more clearly than anyone else when he says it was God's purpose from the beginning that a man shall leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife and they should become one flesh jesus said that was God's purpose from the beginning but even an institution like marriage we understand as Christians that not only that there's an institution of marriage which was declared in and described in creation before the fall becomes even more necessary for our survival and for the glory of God after the fall we even have larger theological categories for this just think of the language in the marriage ceremony of the Book of Common Prayer in which when marriage is described one of its functions declared and that historic service of Protestant worship is that marriage is a remedy for sin you don't need marriage as a remedy for sin in the garden but you do need marriage as a remedy for sin in a fallen world and marriage takes on in the church and even more explicit again this is biblical Christian language we understand that the relatedness of a man and a woman together which means mayor there's no statement of same and different like marriage itself every time you see a marriage ceremony it's a declaration of same but different which is just a footnote we don't have time to track here is the impossibility of marrying someone of the same sex as it's just it's the impossibility that we understand from a biblical worldview because the same but different that is written into the very structure of creation can't be replaced by same same that's a different message not irrelevant the sameness is made clear in the right interpretation of a passage like Galatians 3:28 there's neither Jew nor Greek there is neither slave nor free there is neither male nor female for you are all one in Christ Jesus that clearly points to the sameness of our need for Christ and the sameness of the provision made for us as men and women in Christ and in Christ in our salvation there's no longer male or female there are two different categories of salvation there is one gospel there's one Lord one faith one baptism but that doesn't mean that with the affirmation of sameness that the affirmation of difference all of a sudden disappears it's they're very much in the New Testament we need to note then in the Ministry of Jesus our Lord honored women elevated women recognized women as his followers we also need to recognize that often amongst his followers the women were shown to be more perceptive than the men they had the honor of being the first witnesses to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ there were women who loved Jesus at the foot of the cross but there was not a woman amongst the twelve they're hardly invisible they were centrally important there were models of devotion but the sameness and the difference are both their church order as it turns out is a continuation and a sanctification of creation order after the fall you still have that order that continues the pattern of same and different continues again clear biblical teachings consider the pastoral epistles and of course this leads to a huge issue of biblical authority how do we read Paul and and if if you want to argue for women to serve as pastors then Paul is your primary obstacle and so you you can claim to be well we're a red-letter Christian we we give priority to the words of Jesus and and again you can you can play that game if you're determined to do it but at least be intellectually honest to say you are now denying the full authority of Scripture the full authority of scripture means every word is inspired every word is fully inspired and that means that every word comes to us by the Holy Ghost and that means that the words of the Apostle Paul have the same canonical authority as a citation of a statement from Jesus and the Gospels now know it's not irrelevant that we know that Jesus said this is not irrelevant that Paul said this but we have a broken understanding that is unfixable if Paul the Apostle is in error and the pastoral epistles are just extremely clear I'm not taking them an order but in an order of argument 1st Corinthians chapter 11 we don't time to look at all these passages but just consider 1st Corinthians 11 verse 3 but I want you to understand that the head of every man is Christ the head of a wife is her husband the head of Christ is God now Paul will repeat the same logic in 1st Timothy but or in Ephesians excuse me but the the point I want to make is if we just have a plain simple straightforward understanding of the Scriptures then just looking at 1st Corinthians 11 verse 3 we see the the difference here we're all in the church the issue here is head coverings an issue that would take a lot of time to unpack but the the order is what's most important I want you to understand that the head of every man is Christ the head of a wife as her husband and the head of Christ is God just a couple of chapters over 1st Corinthians chapter 14 Paul continuing in this in this letter we know his 1st Corinthians 2 the Corinthian Christians but by the Holy Ghost to us as in all the churches verse 33 after Paulus said for God is not a God of confusion but a peace he says as in all the churches of the saints the women should keep silent in the churches for if they're not permitted to speak for they are not permitted to speak but should be in submission as the law also says if there's anything they desire to learn let them ask their husbands at home for it is shameful for a woman to speak in church that's that's the Holy Spirit through the Apostle Paul just reading it like we did there are obviously some questions we want to ask does it mean that women can't open their mouths in church it clearly doesn't mean that we were just blessed by a choir that included so many women to open their mouths and sang does it does it mean that women can't say anything in church it must not mean that just given the wholeness of our interpretation of Scripture and looking to other texts but it clearly does mean that women are not to speak in any way that would be a dispute ation in the church and there's a clear difference here I mean it's just no denial as much as we saw sameness affirmed and sinned and in Salvation and image of God we also see difference here and it's a difference that's deeply rooted in a comprehensive theological argument which is why we went to the 1st Corinthians 11 it's a it's it's a it's an argument that Paul fills out in so many ways look at 1st Timothy chapter 2 look in verse 11 let a woman learn quietly withal submissiveness I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man rather she is to remain quiet for Adam was formed first then Eve and Adam was not deceived but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor yet she will be saved through childbearing if they continue in faith and love and holiness with self-control now I want to be honest if I wrote that you can disregard that if I wrote that you can say well there's a theological crank if ever I saw one but you and I both know I did not write that Paul wrote that and if by the way you don't believe that Paul wrote that then you got another problem the biblical authority because they mean you don't know who wrote that but you're really saying the Holy Spirit didn't write that but if you hold to the wholeness of the doctrine of Scripture the Holy Spirit gives this to us for God's glory and for our good for our binding Authority and as command and that as you take the the scripture authority and full bear and and you you look at this and you come to understand there's a lot of difference here it's unembarrassed it's unapologetic there's a clear distinction and it's it's absolutely played out in first Timothy chapter 3 in the qualifications for overseers where the language is just and we're not surprised now it doesn't doesn't shock us in 1st Timothy 3 because after all we've just read out of 1st Timothy 1 and 2 and you look at this knee legal all of a sudden well now you've got the overseers described just to take one point as the husband of one wife the problem in our interpretation of these issues is not that there is some kind of biblical inconsistency the challenge is the fact that there is such remarkable consistency our responsibility is to seek to be most faithful and comprehensive and consistent and understand how all this is to work in the church first of all but also in the home consider Ephesians chapter 5 and again you see the same kind of language and Paul will even repeat the language that we saw in 1st Corinthians in verse 22 wives submit to your own husband's as to the Lord for the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ as the head of the church his body and is himself its Savior now the church submits to Christ so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands husbands love your wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her that he might sanctify her having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word so that he might present the church to himself in splendor without spot or wrinkle or any such thing that she might be holy and without blemish in the same way husbands should love their wives as their own bodies he who loves his wife loves himself for no one ever hated his own flesh but nourishes and cherishes it just as Christ does the church because we are members of the body and then here comes Genesis again therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife and the two shall become one flesh this mystery is profound and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church we didn't know to see that in Genesis but but we do now and though the great theme of redemption we come to understand that even in Genesis 1 27 and 28 and in Genesis 2 there was a picture of a church we didn't know would even come into existence to the glory of God however let each of you love his wife as himself and let the wife see that she respects her husband so again there is there is sameness and there is difference though the issue here is that when it comes to the church and when it comes to the home there are really clear biblical instructions that make make obvious there is to be difference and is everything taught in Scripture that becomes either a matter of obedience or disobedience or consistency or inconsistency 10 points number one the pattern is clear in the Old Testament and the New Testament same and different physical bodies same in so many ways but different in so many ways not an accident but a part of God's plan same indifferent beyond our bodies is also in the roles and vocations to which men and women are called even as revealed in creation it's a pattern same and different that continues throughout our understanding of the entirety of Scripture and the experience of the church second very important this biblical teaching is not about male superiority and female inferiority to think of the Bible pattern to think of this sameness and difference in terms of male superiority and female inferiority is to is to violate the Bible's teaching of the imago Dei the world wants to make everything a matter of superiority and inferiority but those categories don't fit the biblical revelation the difference does involve Authority it does involve responsibility it does even even revolve within defined relationships patterns of respect and leadership and Submission but it is not about male superiority it is not about female inferiority this shows up in the passage in Ephesians where the responsibility of the husband is not to lord over his wife but to love her as Christ loved the church even the titles that are given in ministry in the New Testament are servant titles not lordship titles we remember we are evangelical Christians we don't believe that the church has a human king or human princes but Shepherds servants overseers both men and women teach in the Bible but they teach in different roles and in different ways may just consider Paul's reminder to Timothy of the fact that his mother and his grandmother had faithfully taught him the scripture women do teach women should be honored for teaching but it's a different sphere of teaching and the Bible is just unambiguous about that one of the points we need to make is third the biblical pattern is not about all men being in authority over all women in the society or in the church that's a misreading of the biblical pad race not that all men are in authority over all women the particular emphases of the New Testament when it comes to the church are those men who are assigned and God called and recognized is called to the teaching office and to the office of overseer so it's not just a principle that all women are to submit to all men there are general patterns of men taking leadership responsibilities and even protection treating women with respect and care but it's a distortion of a complementarian theology to say that it means either male superiority and female inferiority or that it's about all men being an authority over all women in the church in the home its husbands and wife its father and and mother and children it's it's they are defined roles forth this is not about ordination one of the arguments often here is an argument which makes sense in certain circles and I can respect the argument in those circles that a woman ought to be able to do that's the way it's often put or authorized to do everything a non ordained man can do so the problem with that is we're Baptists and we have no theology of ordination whatsoever we don't believe that ordination is necessary to fulfill the teaching office or nation is something that basically came in as a compromise of our theology because insurance companies and retirement plans and and state agents wanted to know who's a preacher and who's not ordination was the mark they chose but we actually don't believe in ordination we believe him that and the the passing of authority by the laying on of hands but we don't believe in any clarity we don't believe there's any particular clerical class we don't believe in a sacrament of ordination and so ordination doesn't work for us it's this is where we have to understand that we believe that function and office are the same thing in other words who's the preacher woods the one who's preaching that's that's that's a very easy thing Baptists ought to be unconfused about this fifth this is an issue of biblical hermeneutics and it can be an issue of biblical authority so that that's an issue that's come up of late it is at the very least if there's a controversy over this it's a matter of hermeneutics of the proper interpretation of scripture and yes those who hold to a complementarian position believe that those who hold to an egalitarian position at the very least have a faulty and inconsistent biblical hermeneutics at the least that is not to say they're not Christians it's not to say they don't affirm even the inerrancy of Scripture it's it's not to say they do not teach or preach the gospel it is to say that this is a legitimate disagreement and we believe that their hermeneutic is not as faithful as it should be not as consistent I said it can be an issue of biblical authority it certainly was when I arrived here as a student it was abundantly clear was an issue of biblical authority because I was told and even given books that were assigned that said that those texts either called it and write it or Paul was simply speaking as Paul or this just reflects the the patriarchal and oppressive you know distortion of the text or Paul is repudiated by Jesus or the creation order as revealed in Scripture is a subsequent reading back to the claims of Genesis and forward a theological meaning that was invented by Israel and later by others it can be and in the mainline Protestant denominations it virtually always was a repudiation of biblical Authority and I think long-term it is very difficult for anyone who holds to an egalitarian position to hold to a consistent affirmation of biblical authority I think over time that becomes more and more difficult v actually six now in the Southern Baptist Convention context Southern Baptists recognized increasingly that this question is a second-order issue that is constitutive of communion what does that mean it means we actually define confessional e this pattern within the home in the Baptist faith a message and within the church in the Baptist faith and message not with extensive detail but with a very clear statement that the office of pastor is limited restricted to men as qualified by Scripture so that's what does that tell us it tells us that Southern Baptists have said that our cooperation in our unity as a denomination is predicated upon that affirmation and that means that our seminaries starting here earlier in 1993 because we added it to our confessional expectations in 1993 but the entire Southern Baptist Convention from 2000 on all of its entities are now accountable to a confession of faith which very clearly makes this distinction and that the the sameness and the difference are both affirmed it's a second-order issue but second-order issues how you have congregations it's a second-order issue but second-order issue or how you have denominations this is there's a reason why they're Presbyterians and they're Baptists it's a it's at the heart amongst gospel living people a second order issue but you're gonna do something with the baby or you're not and your congregation is going to be established in order to consistently work that out the same thing is true this other map dis convention I believe that it is one of the most important clarifications that Southern Baptist made especially over the course of the last last generation seventh the biblical revelation of what it means same and different is clear in the passages concerning the home in the church less clear when it comes to the larger society which is to say that gets back to the fact that the Bible's specific instructions especially given our New Testament understanding the Bible's explicit instructions or how to order the home and how to order the church much less specificity about how to order the culture now I believe is this is my argument and it would be the mainstream argument of Orthodox Christianity throughout the ages that will be that the creation order continues and in the creation order the natural order of things is that those leaders would be men and I still think you see much of that in reflected in even electoral decisions today but I do not want to be a hypocrite and I will tell you that if I hypothetically had a choice between voting for Bernie Sanders or Margaret Thatcher I would vote for Margaret Thatcher and what Adrian Rogers called a skinny New York minute and I would feel no compromise of my theology it is less clear in society could should can women fulfill this role or that role in society we are not operating there from clear biblical texts but from biblical reasoning and we need to confess to one another that we do not believe the world is accountable to the same very clear biblical teachings that are clear in the New Testament concerning the home and the church hey it is their responsibility the church to call it the gifts of all believers in biblical order and and those last words are really important in biblical order which is to say according to a biblical order we need to give attention to calling out the gifts that the Holy Spirit has invested for the church and in the church in both men and women in full measure where you find a healthy church you should find the giftedness of all men and the giftedness of all women called out in biblical order that doesn't mean violating that order but it does mean calling out that giftedness as a display of the glory of God in the church now under this point 8 and this is where this is where things get sometimes a little more sensitive to talk about one of the things heard from some women in wonderful gospel churches is the statement there must be more than this I've heard several women raise this with me saying what does that mean there must be more than this well I'll simply say here's the thing in many churches where the right and proper in biblical order gifts of women are not called out there must be more than this absolutely where women are not fully dignified and there their roles and responsibilities and their spiritual gifts are not fully called out and honored then of course there must be more than this but that cannot mean they're miss must be more than this if this is the biblical order revealed in Scripture that's that's the problem we can't happily receive the question there must be more than this if the this is what's revealed in Scripture look a little sub note on this one of the questions that now comes and I answered this in a video sometime Matt can or ought a woman to preach on Sunday and I think the answer is given the biblical order that is given here no I I don't think that that is consistent I think that that is a confusion because the teaching office is inseparable from the from the the function and again that we believe that the that the the function in the office are one now I'm not saying that if that happens in isolated examples that that church is necessarily intentionally denying Scripture but a part of our responsibility to encourage one or other consistency and so that's what I think we do we encourage one another to consistency we don't have a denominational police force or an FBI to go out finding churches where some woman may have done something or some church may have authorized something that we believe to be not fully consistent but on the other hand we shouldn't be embarrassed to talk about this it's a public issue in the Southern Baptist Convention that we ought to engage with a full measure of both respect and conviction we can do that that's that's what we do but I also want to affirm that I believe there is a vast consensus among the Southern Baptist I'm so confident of that that I'm really confident on any given Sunday you take a snapshot of all the of all the preachers who are preaching and Southern Baptist churches on a Sunday I think it's going to be a revelation overwhelmingly of proper order and I hope a proper preaching ix and I apologize for this length but I advertised in advance it might be necessary 9 women deserve the deepest theological and Biblical education we gladly receive women into our ph.d program I think women fulfilling the teaching responsibilities given to women in the church and honoring that and calling out that I want women to receive the deepest biblical education I think women deserve and need the deepest theological studies so that's why we gladly receive women into the degree programs leading to degrees in biblical studies degrees and theological studies degrees in preparation for many phases of ministry other than the pastoral calling and an even in specialized academic pursuits this is one of the reasons why we as an institution do not have a Women's Studies Program we don't it's because I don't believe in right biblical order we would separate women out to study women I want to encourage women to study God and the Bible and theology and to the glory of God many hundreds of them are right here and that means that every male student in this seminary owes every female student in this seminary the utmost respect and seeing them as those who are also called the glory of God - an important role in the church and an important role in the classroom here as well learning together now Tim and I saved this for the last not because it is the last consideration but because as a matter of emphasis I want to leave it as final words in your ears we have to face the question that is now raised very much in public as to whether or not complementarianism is a cause of the abuse of women girls and here's where you need to hear me say it can be and it sometimes is sinful men will use anything in vanity and an anger in sin of every form sinful men will distort anything and will take advantage of any argument that seems to their advantage even to the abuse of women the responsibility is for us to recognize that complementarianism which we believe to be the glorious revelation of God for our good and for his glory in the church and in the home we need to recognize that if that is distorted into male superiority and if it is then distorted through a corrupted understanding then you will have a situation in which it is not only hypothetically possible but it has been true that some men have cited complementarian doctrine as an excuse for lording over their wives rather than leading and serving and even taking advantage to the point of abuse and denying that abuse is abuse this is where we need to be grown-ups here and recognize we have to take responsibility for our doctrine we have to take responsibility for our doctrine and recognizing that it can be abused in such a way that women are hurt and that they are abused and that they are not advocated for then they are not believed there is a real sex abuse crisis in our myths it is our responsibility to make certain not only that we hold to Bibble doctrine that's non-negotiable but that our doctrine is fully biblical and demonstrates the Spirit of Christ and the fullness of what the Bible calls us to JD Greer is the president of our convention and the Southern Baptist Convention and leadership I think have responded appropriately if yet in completely we're learning as we go to this challenge we need to recognize that we have sinned against women when we have a loud complementarianism to be presented in a way that implies male superiority and often leads and sinfulness to male tyranny and terror and sin we need to take responsibility for the fact that we as as a denomination as churches have often failed to hear the cries of women who have spoken of their abuse and we bear responsibility for a failure to deal adequately Christianly responsively as husbands who love their wives as Christ loves the church should respond to the cries of any woman and thus we have work to do but it's work to do we're not left without divine revelation we understand that rightly understood complementarianism produces husbands who love their wives as Christ loves the church and they love their wives as they love their own bodies we understand that yes complementarianism also is represented in women living out even with the word submission that is used repeatedly in Scripture without any embarrassment and learning learning to do that in joy and and there is such a demonstration of God's love and God's glory and the rightly ordered home in the rightly ordered marriage and the rightly ordered church but we've received a wake-up call that we be very aware that there are those who will use any doctrine to their sinful advantage so it's incumbent upon us to clarify and to testify and advocate so do I believe the complementarianism leads to the abuse of women I will tell you yes I believe that it can and it has but that's not the source of the problem source of the problem is human sinfulness pride and arrogance and yes there are patterns of male pride and male arrogance and male terror that haunt us but I believe the embrace of the fullness of what God has revealed in Scripture is actually the only way to find healing and hope and accountability in gospel churches that are rightly ordered and women are rightly honored and in gospel homes where husbands love their wives as Christ loves the church and gave himself for her I know what some of you were thinking therefore movements to biblical theology in the last is eschatology or new creation I have very little to say because very little is revealed on this question we do know this there will be no preaching there'd be no preaching office in the kingdom of Christ because we are told in Scripture that Christ will be our preacher he's going to be our teacher we don't need a human teacher so the teaching office disappears we're told that there's no marriage or giving in marriage there there's no physical reproduction in heaven and so I don't know exactly what all that means but I do know this it's going to be even better than the garden because it will be perfected in Christ so I'm going to wait for that but right now we've got work to do to the glory of God may we do that work faithfully honorably to God let's pray father we're just so thankful that you have not left us without a witness wondering what it is we are to think and how it is we are to live father I pray that these words this morning will be clarifying to me and to all of us I pray that your words and our reflections on those words will make us more faithful father I pray that this extended time this morning will be strengthening to this school and beyond and in our hearts I thank you for the opportunity and pray to be faithful in the stewardship I pray this in the name of Jesus Christ our Lord amen you

Channel: Southern Seminary

Views: 14,904

Rating: 4.8237886 out of 5

Keywords: SBTS, Southern Seminary, Chapel, Albert Mohler, Genesis 1, Manhood, Womanhood, Sexuality, Marriage, Family, Gender

Id: IcjRTKnDqE8

Length: 71min 51sec (4311 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 15 2019