A Response to “Thoughts on the ARP Special Committee on Women Deacons Study”
Logically and rationally with so much history supporting female deacons or deaconesses, it is difficult to understand such conflict. The office of deacon does not biblically lead to the office of elder. Their gifts and callings are different. One governs and the other serves. Remember, originally, they served tables.
The current battle over women as deacons or deaconesses is disturbing—disturbing, as there are so many evidences for women participating in the works of mercy (responding to “Thoughts on the ARP Special Committee on Women Deacons Study”)
First, perhaps a thought is worth noting. We hear and believe as some claim that the feminization of the church has/is taking place. I would also offer that there is a history of the masculinization of the church. Let’s be reminded that in the Church, we are “. . . neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” Throughout history, this has been forgotten.
I am not a member of the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church (ARP) but rather a member of the Evangelical Presbyterian Church (EPC). But I am also a student of the Word with a degree in Biblical Education, which means I’ve academically studied Bible, theology, church history, Greek, and hermeneutics. This background plus more than 60 years of Bible study leads me to my conclusion. Now to some personal thoughts.
I agree with the ARP form of Government wherein is stated, “The office of deacon is not one of authority and does not require the obedience of church members.” The author responds, While an argument might be made that the New Testament church had female deacons, there is no evidence to suggest that some congregations had deaconesses and others explicitly denied them.” Actually, the New Testament doesn’t compare any congregations. So that point appears moot. The author continues as to teaching reaffirming women being ordained to the office of deacon stating, “. . . I don’t believe any of us believe is the one taught in Scripture.” Actually, Scripture, it appears, does give evidence in 1 Timothy 3: “In the same way, the women are to be worthy of respect, not malicious talkers but temperate and trustworthy in everything.” (1 Timothy 3: 11) This follows the qualifications of the male deacons. The word διακονοι covers both men and women. Some versions translate women as “wives” of deacons. However, as qualifications for elders precede deacons, their wives—who would be more important than deacon’s wives—are not mentioned. Other translations of “women” allow for considering in context that these are the qualifications of female deacons. To me, this is the more hermeneutically logical and rational understanding. Then there’s Phoebe who is titled in the Greek “deacon.” But since the same word can be either translated deacon or servant, some versions translate “servant” for her as a woman. One has to wonder if it’s an effort to avoid affirming her role as deacon/deaconess.
Next worth considering is that neither the fruit of the Spirit nor the gifts of the Spirit are separately listed by gender. Therefore, the gift of mercy is not a gift given only to men—remember, “neither male nor female.” There is a practice in many Reformed faith churches that also is not taught in Scripture. It is customary in many churches for a man to be an usher, be promoted to deacon, and then promoted to elder. That’s not biblical. Where in Scripture is evidence that a deacon becomes an elder? Those gifts and offices are separate.
We must go to church history to see what transpired in churches closest to the times of the Apostles. For the first 400 years of the church, female deacons or deaconesses were prolific. “Their ministry is mentioned by early Christian writers such as Clement of Alexandria and Origin. . . In a letter, Pliny the Younger attests to the role of the women deaconesses. . . (He actually tortured two) 4th century Fathers of the Church, such as Epiphanius of Salamis, Basil of Caesarea, John Chrysostom, and Gregory of Nyssa accept the ministry of deaconesses as a fact.” (Wikipedia) There is much more out there in Church history.
In Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion, he lauds deaconesses compared to nuns. Perhaps he later differentiated between ordained and nonordained, but he recognized the ministry.
Logically and rationally with so much history supporting female deacons or deaconesses, it is difficult to understand such conflict. The office of deacon does not biblically lead to the office of elder. Their gifts and callings are different. One governs and the other serves. Remember, originally, they served tables. When there are potluck or other meals in the church, who mostly serves tables? Aren’t they the women?
This is written, and hopefully lovingly, in response to the conflict and cancellation of women as deaconesses or deacons in the ARP, but it stretches to many Presbyterian and Reformed Faith churches including my own.
The opinion I offer here today isn’t based on gender; it’s based on Scripture, ancient history, and Church history. It’s so confusing—if not disappointing—to see such a strong push against the ministry (works of mercy) and service denied those gifted by the Holy Spirit for such a ministry. Imagine the wealth of service a church lacks due to denying gifted women authority, recognition, and a God-given role in Christ’s body to practice and use the gifts the Holy Spirit has sovereignly given to both men and women to honor and glorify Jesus Christ and benefit His body, as well as many others. I’m compelled to say, “Lord, have mercy. Christ, have mercy on us.”
Helen Louise Herndon is a member of Central Presbyterian Church (EPC) in St. Louis, Missouri. She is freelance writer and served as a missionary to the Arab/Muslim world in France and North Africa.
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Are You A Child of Abraham?
The point of Abraham as a father figure in Scripture is that he is a father of the faith and an example to us all of believing in the Lord Jesus Christ. So then we who believe in Christ are following in the path of that father in the faith and the very fulfillment of the promise to Abraham more than 4,000 years ago that in him all nations of the earth would be blessed. We who believe in Christ are the promised children of Abraham who are like the stars of the sky in number. But notice, Abraham is an example of faith, but Abraham is not the author or the object of faith.
And if you are Christ’s, then you are Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise.
Galatians 3:29 *
Premise
All those Jews and Gentiles who put their trust in Jesus Christ alone for salvation are the children of Abraham, the Israel of God, and members of the body of Christ.
Background
Since college one of the most common questions I have experienced Christians wrestling with is the relationship between blood relatives of Abraham (Jews) and Christians. Is God saving the Jews differently than non-Jews? Should Christians think of Jews as closer to God than anyone else? What is the relationship between the people of God in the Old Testament and the people of God in the New Testament? Do Jews go to Heaven by nature of their being Jews? Are any of the promises to Abraham helpful for us today?
The goal of this short article is not to critique my brothers and sisters in Christ who hold to a dispensationalist view. The goal rather is to demonstrate to Christians that the answer is not as complicated or mysterious as it may sometimes appear to be. That which God would have us to know about ourselves and our brothers and sisters in Christ through history is set down very clearly in Scripture so that we can rejoice in the Lord who brings all His elect to salvation by faith.
Abraham
A discussion of the children of Abraham naturally begins with Abraham. Abraham’s name was not always Abraham as history generally remembers him but for the first ninety-nine years of his life he was named “Abram “(Genesis 11:26). Then in Genesis 17, God changed Abraham’s name from Abram to Abraham for a specific purpose:
No longer shall your name be called Abram, but your name shall be Abraham; for I have made you a father of many nations.
Genesis 17:5
From the introduction of Abraham’s name to history, God tells us that his name is significant because it reminds us that Abraham was never to be the father of just one nation but many nations. The children who would have the Lord as their God (Genesis 17:7-8) would be children not limited to one nation but a multitude of nations united by one faith in one Lord Jesus Christ.
From the beginning of Scripture, the Lord helps us to discern the children of Abraham with the very name of Abraham. Whenever we hear the name Abraham we should think “Father of many nations.”
Abraham’s Faith in Christ
Abraham believed God and His promises. Hebrews 11 ties together the Old Testament church and the New Testament church by the Hall of Faith telling us that as of old so now we live by Faith. Even Abraham obeyed God not by his own will but “By faith” (Hebrews 11:1). Abraham didn’t look for God to fulfill His promises in an earthly kingdom in the Middle East but “waited for the city which has foundations, whose builder and maker is God” (11:10).
Sometimes we are tempted like the Jews in John 8 to think that Abraham didn’t know anything about Jesus 2,000 years before Jesus was born. But we find in Scripture something very different. Abraham had faith in the promised Messiah to come. Jesus tells us in John 8:56, “Your father Abraham rejoiced to see My day, and he saw it and was glad.” Two thousand years before Christ, Abraham believed in and was looking for the coming of the Messiah, the Christ! Jesus who was before Abraham tells us, and Abraham saw Christ’s coming by faith! Abraham is remembered above all as a man who had faith in Christ alone for salvation – a faith that God calls all men, Jews and Gentiles, to share.
And he [Philippian jailor] brought them out and said, “Sirs, what must I do to be saved?” So they said, “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and you will be saved, you and your household.”
Acts 16:30-31
The Promise of God to Abraham
God’s promise to Abraham to be his God and the God of his seed after him, to justify him, to give him eternal life, was not through the law or by blood but by faith. From the beginning, the promise was through the righteousness of faith.
Does this blessedness then come upon the circumcised only, or upon the uncircumcised also? For we say that faith was accounted to Abraham for righteousness. How then was it accounted? While he was circumcised, or uncircumcised?
Romans 4:9-10,13
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“You’ve Got Self:” How the Internet Cultivates Expressive Individualism in All of Us
Written by Samuel D. James |
Sunday, April 10, 2022
As Christians remind each other of the gospel, we will build in one another the capacity for richer joys, deeper identity, and lasting meaning that digital technology promises but never delivers. The permanence of the gospel, revealed in a book, proclaimed by a community, and demonstrated through love, is more than enough ballast for screen-weary souls.Christopher Nolan’s 2010 film Inception tells a story about a technology called “dream-sharing,” invented at some indeterminate point in the future, that allows participants to enter into one another’s dreams via their subconscious. The main character, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, assembles a team of dream “hackers” to invade the mind of a billionaire business heir and convince his subconscious to break up his father’s commercial empire. In one of the film’s mostly subtly metaphorical scenes, the team visits a chemist who can make an especially potent sedative to allow for vivid and prolonged dream-sharing. The chemist takes the team downstairs, where they’re led to a dimly lit room where dozens of people are sleeping, connecting to dream sharing devices. The chemist explains that these people come to spend hours every day dreaming together, as their subconscious selves construct an alternative life in their dreams. Stunned, the team asks, “They come here to fall asleep?” “No,” the chemist replies. “They come here to wake up.” The dream has become their reality.
There are no real-world dream sharing devices, but there is one real-world technology that connects billions of people in a dream-reality: the Internet.
As Carl Trueman brilliantly lays out in The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, expressive individualism has its origins in a complex collision of history, philosophy, and politics. Today, however, the most powerful vehicle for shaping people in its image is not the classroom or Supreme Court, but the Internet. To see this more clearly, we need to think of the Internet less as a singular tool or hobby, and more like what it is now: an immersive epistemological habitat in which hundreds of millions of people have regular, active membership. The Internet has transformed the way humans read, learn, communicate, labor, shop, recreate, and even “worship.” No other technology is as disruptive to traditional forms of human activity.
Membership in the online commons has formative effects on us, just like membership in a local church. The liturgies of assembled, embodied, gospel worship point us toward one set of beliefs and values, while the liturgies of Internet membership point us toward a different set.
While secular technology critics have been talking this way about digital life for a while, Christians largely have not. Instead, we’ve focused not on the form of the Internet, but on its content, encouraging one another to avoid pornography, slander, and envy on the various website and social media platforms we navigate daily. This encouragement is good and necessary, but much more is needed. Pastors and church leaders in particular need to see online technologies as powerful instruments of personal formation that push us in a certain spiritual and epistemological direction.
Before going further, we should take careful note of something important. The Bible’s vision of human flourishing as divine image-bearers and Christ-followers is a deeply analog vision. By this I mean that Scripture both assumes and prescribes doctrines, attitudes, and practices that are tied to our embodied, physical existence. For one thing, Christians believe that divine revelation is expressed in a physical book, the Bible, and that this book features language with objective meaning.[1] Further, the very first thing we learn from the Bible about ourselves is that we are created in the image of God, male and female. This means that our fundamental identity as people is tied to our bodies. God creates physical image-bearers who have embodied sexual identities, and in submission to God these image-bearers come together to marry, make love, and bear children that fill the earth (with their physical selves) and subdue it. Family is not an abstract concept, but a flesh-and-blood institution that is ordered according to real, embodied persons.
The Internet, by contrast, is radically disembodied. To be online is, in a very real sense, to escape the givenness of created existence. The social critic Laurence Scott writes:
If our bodies have traditionally provided the basic outline of our presence in the world, then we can’t enter a networked environment, in which we present ourselves in multiple places at once, without rethinking the scope and limits of embodiment. While we sit next to one person, smiling through a screen at someone else, our thoughts, our visions, our offhand and heartfelt declarations materialise in the fragments in one another’s pockets. It’s astonishing to think how in the last twenty years the limits and coherence of our bodies have been so radically redefined.[2]
The Internet’s disembodied, “fragmented” character is not merely interesting trivia. It is a massively important part of the way being online shapes our beliefs, intuitions, and habits.
Consider now three distinct “digital liturgies” that shape all of us in the image of the disembodied Internet.[3]“My Story, My Truth”
Online technology’s flattening, democratizing character means that the most valuable social currency is not expertise, wisdom, or character, but story. When a truth claim goes up against a narrative, the narrative wins every time. Personal experience is the authoritative norm in digital discourse, and in many cases no amount of evidence or argument can trump it. To suggest that someone’s story may be relevant but not necessarily authoritative is often seen as a grossly unacceptable attack on their personhood.
The power of individual story to provide justification for desires and thwart any criticism is powerfully evident to Gen-Z. In her book Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, journalist Abigail Shrier describes how large and growing numbers of teen and preteen Americans are learning to question their given gender through transgendered influencers, particularly on YouTube, Reddit, and Tumblr.
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Arranged in the Body with Purpose
Do not despise your gifting, but trust that God really has designed you for the good of the church, precisely as He has willed. Celebrate the variety of people God has placed within your local body and remember that He has done it all for the common good and the building up of the body. May God be honored in His church.
Jesus promised His disciples that He would build His church, “and the gates of Hell” would not prevail against it (Matt 16:18). And for the last 2,000 years, He has been faithful to do just that. He has saved men and women and brought them together for the praise of His glory and the good of the saints. And not only has He saved, but He has uniquely gifted each one, arranging His church, His body, in a very specific way. And this is the encouragement: That the church of God is arranged with purpose.
It’s one thing to understand that we are the body of Christ, and that we are each like different parts of that body. Some are like mouths and some are like ears. Some are like eyes and some are like hands. These are body parts with noticeable purpose. Still others can feel like pinky toes or the appendix. Not really sure why they’re there, but technically a part of the body. But it’s another thing to know that, not only am I a part of the body of Christ, but I am a purposeful part of the body of Christ.
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