Collection › LCMS Convention Workbook (St. Louis, Missouri) › 1969 · 48th Convention › Sheet 551
LCMS Convention Workbook St. Louis, Missouri — 1969, Sheet 551

Scan: The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod
Transcription machine transcription, uncorrected

520 WOMAN SUFFRAGE IN THE CHURCH

The apostle was interested in more than offering
sound advice. He was determined to keep his Corinthian
Christians from causing wholesale disorder and disrup-
tion by a practice which could only have been misun-
derstood and in fact represented a false application of
Christian freedom. He had spelled out this basic posi-
tion previously when he wrote: “Everyone should re-
main in the state in which he was called” (7:20). That
is to say, it was the apostle’s conviction that the church
in her life ought not to undermine but to sanctify the
orders of creation.

Paul in fact insists on this point. He calls it a com-
mand of the Lord (v.37) and describes anyone who does
not recognize this fact as being the kind of person who
is not acknowledged by God.

We must be clear on a number of points in this
connection. First, we must note that the apostle is de-
scribing a public service and not a voters’ assembly.
Whatever is said here, therefore, can be applied only
indirectly, if at all, to the question of woman suffrage.
Second, Paul addresses himself to a specific situation.
In the third instance he is committed to upholding the
institution of matrimony as belonging to the orders of
creation, where renewal is not properly accomplished
by disorder and disruption but by observing and sancti-
fying the practice of authority on the part of the hus-
band and subordination on the part of his spouse.

The Christians at Corinth, as so many others have
done since, acted as though they believed that the gifts
of the Spirit must of necessity disturb the existing
order and that, the greater the disturbance, the greater
the proof that He is at work. Paul counters this notion
by maintaining that God is not the God of confusion and
commotion but of order. His action is often quiet and
peaceful; and worship ought to correspond to such a
manifestation of God's Spirit.

The teaching given in 1 Tim. 2:11-15, the third major
passage bearing on our subject matter, is very similar
to what we have gleaned from 1Cor.14. It reads as
follows:

Let a woman learn in silence with all submissiveness.

I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over

men; she is to keep silent. For Adam was formed first,

then Eve; and Adam was not deceived, but the woman
was deceived and became a transgressor. Yet woman will

be saved through bearing children if she continues in faith
and love and holiness, with modesty. (RSV)

A brief note on translation may be helpful at this
juncture. The Revised Standard Version renders the
Greek word authentein, in verse 12, as “having au-
thority.” It would seem that such a translation does not
fully reflect the significance of this particular term. The
report submitted to the St. Paul convention of our Synod
points out that this term really means “usurping au-
thority, domineering, lording it over” someone. It is
here understood in that sense. Verse 12, then prohibits
women from engaging in activities that result in usurp-
ing authority over men. That is to say, they are not to
undertake such things as give evidence of their ex-

ercising authority over men in their own right, as per-
sons created to be subject to men.

Some of the Hellenistic mystery ceremonies in the
apostolic age encouraged women to engage in such ac-
tions of domineering by inviting them to play a leading
and directing essential part in their ecstatic and often
immoral rites. The sobriety and silence of Jewish
women in their synagogs stood out in stark contrast.
The apostolic author is at pains to exhort Christian
women to reject the vaunted liberty of pagan rites and
follow the descendants of Sarah in their imitation of a
great heroine of the faith (cf. 1 Peter 3:6).

The burden of the text falls on the thought of a
woman destroying the created order by getting involved
in the kind of activity which would suggest a desire to
lord it over men. In those days teaching was considered
to be one such activity, as witness the fact that in the
synagog a teacher was called “rabbi,” “my great one.”

As a matter of fact, in the Judaism of the first cen-
tury even learning, going to school, was a right denied
to women. To have insisted on the kind of opportunity
for learning which was available to Jewish boys and
men would have been considered an act of impudence.
Woman’s lot was to pursue her task in quietness and
subordination. This is the principle set forth in verses
11 and 12. It is supported by an argument from the
sacred account of man’s creation.

The verse dealing with Adam and Eve does not in-
tend to discourse on some presumed difference in the
nature of male and female. Nor does it propose to
exculpate Adam on the order of the apocryphal passage
in Ecclesiasticus (25:24): “From a woman sin had its
beginning, and because of her we all die.” The in-
tent of the words to Timothy is to insist that God’s
order of creation was not invalidated by mankind’s fall
into sin.

In the statement that follows, the sacred author ex-
alts wedlock and motherhood as being the proper role
of women. He does so perhaps with a view to counter-
ing some celibate tendencies developing in certain parts
of the church. While Ignatius, Justin, Tertullian, and
Irenaeus of old held that the childbearing referred to
here was an allusion to the birth of Jesus Christ as the
Savior also of women, the whole context argues against
such an interpretation. “Salvation” is to be understood
here in the sense in which the term occurs in some
other New Testament passages, namely, as being healed
or finding wholeness (e. g.. Matt. 9:21: Mark 5:23: 6: 56).
Accordingly, bearing children is here conjoined to faith,
love, and sanctification as a way to fullness in life.

We must now ask whether the texts that have been
discussed deal directly with the issue of voting at all.
The President’s committee of 1956 already pointed out
that none of them dealt expressly with voters’ assem-
blies as they are structured today. In other words, none
of the passages under study gives a clear answer to the
questions of woman suffrage and of occupying church
offices. Any application of them must be made on the
basis of inference.