Women and the Church — Part 1

False Teachers, Error, and Heresy

The Body of Christ is hurting. Accusations of sexual misconduct and abuse have been leveled at Pastors within and outside of the SBC. Of course, the Body of Christ in the West found a way to make it even worse; the leadership knowingly covered the abuses, ignored the victims, and, in cases of outright evil (there is no other way to describe it), attacked the victims. Over many, many years. Protestants are rueing the day they pointed fingers at the Catholic Church.

The SBC did not handle it well. They circled the wagons, held a ‘conference’ about the issue, and gave the appearance, whether correct or not, of trying to make money. The victims were angered. In fairness of the SBC, they did allow a few victims to speak and brought in a speaker with scathing criticism of their practice of not allowing women to preach or teach in the Body. Others have covered this well, such as Julie Roys (twitter: @reachjulieroys). Since this meeting, this subject has not achieved a state of equilibrium; it is still flaring periodically.

The controversy that has arisen, even among the Baptists themselves, is whether the Baptist doctrinal interpretation of Ephesians 5 and 1 Timothy 2 is correct. To address this, I want to discuss what the Bible says about women as a whole. Not just selective parts of Scripture. And before we do this, and since I am fully aware I may have accusations of all three, we must address terms I see batted around with too much flippancy and misunderstanding; False Teachers, Errors, and Heresy.

Of the three, heresy is probably the simplest and yet most abused. Heresy is, first and foremost, the denial that Jesus was God in the Flesh and that he died and rose again on the third day and the only way to the Father in Heaven. There may be other heresies, but all their roads eventually lead to the denial of Jesus. The Gnostics were the first heretical group as they rejected the idea of God becoming a man and Jesus rising from the dead.

The next on the list is False Teachers. The Bible defines them for us. Peter explains them in detail in 2 Peter 2, and their traits include:

1. They make up destructive heresies.
2. Deny Jesus
3. Greedy and makeup ways to get your money.
4. They openly, publicly perform sins of immorality.

False teachers are not teachers who interpret Scripture differently than you do. Teachers of the Word of God all error. The authority of Scripture is Scripture itself, not our interpretation of it.

And that brings us to error. All of us make errors in our interpretation of Scripture. Paul, the father of Christian theology, makes this statement:

Now we see things imperfectly, like puzzling reflections in a mirror, but then we will see everything with perfect clarity. All that I know now is partial and incomplete, but then I will know everything completely, just as God now knows me completely. 1 Corinthians 13:12

This side of Heaven, we will never see all of God’s truths. When someone is presenting an interpretation of Scripture that we disagree with, we need to stop reaching for the heresy bag. We need to stop accusing those Teachers of the Word heresy unless they fit the Biblical definition. If we don’t personally know them, it is probably not in our wheelhouse of authority to call them out. Avoiding their teaching is.

Now we’ve established this framework on how you may call me out, let’s discuss Genesis 2 and Genesis 3. Without a proper contextual understanding of these two critical chapters, one will have difficulty understanding what Paul was saying about women in the Body of Christ. We will discuss this in Part II.