Ordaining Women

New Edition with an Introduction and Notes

Roberts, Wayman

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781498208628
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

B. T. Roberts saw the exclusion of women from ordination as analogous to racism. His ability to see the new community made possible by Christ offers Christians today a prophetic vision of the difference Christ makes. Roberts's 1891 Ordaining Women takes seriously the scriptural promise that Christ has unmasked the false distinctions and repaired the damaged social arrangements of this world. Like the abolition of slavery, the ordination of women becomes yet another obvious sign of the world made new in Christ. With careful attention to biblical interpretation, church tradition, and empirical evidence, Roberts exposes the biases that have long held captive the Christian imagination. In this new edition, Benjamin Wayman offers an updated and fully annotated version of Roberts's original work and demonstrates the breadth and depth of his analysis. Roberts's vision of the gospel challenges the traditional and still-dominant view of the global church, and invites Christians to reimagine the inclusion of women in ordained ministry. If Christians had for so long been wrong about race, might we today be wrong about gender?

1

Prejudice

“Errors, like straws, upon the surface flow;

He who would search for pearls must dive below.”

—Dryden2

“He that would seriously set upon the search of truth, ought in the first place to prepare his mind with a love of it, for he that loves it not will not take much pains to get it, nor be much concerned when he misses it.”

—Locke3

Christ lays great stress upon the truth. It has in it a saving quality. “Sanctify them through thy truth” (John 17:17). It is not possible for us to be sanctified only as far as we open our hearts to receive the truth, and inwardly resolve to obey it. The Holy Spirit is the spirit of truth (John 14:17). “Let us,” says the Duke of Argyll, “educate ourselves up to that high standard in the love of truth, under which we hate and disdain an intellectual fallacy as much as we hate and disdain a common lie.”4

Then, to the rights of women under the Gospel, as an important question, we should give our candid attention. If prejudiced, we should, as Daniel Webster said, “Conquer our prejudices.”5 The feeling against woman’s being accorded equal rights with man is old and deeply rooted. Generally, among mankind, the law of force has been the prevailing law. The stronger have tyrannized over the weaker.

Aristotle was one of the greatest of the old Greek philosophers. In his book on politics and economics he wrote: “By nature some beings command, and others obey, for the sake of mutual safety; for a being endowed with discernment and forethought is, by nature, the superior and governor; whereas he who is merely able to execute by bodily labor is the inferior and a natural slave; and hence the interest of master and slave is identical.”6

[Aristotle concludes:] “It is clear then, that some men are free by nature, and others are slaves, and that in the case of the latter, the lot of slavery is both advantageous and just.”7 Again, Aristotle wrote: “The art of war is, in some sense, a part of the art of acquisition; for hunting is a part of it, which it is necessary for us to employ against wild beasts, and against those of mankind who, being intended by nature for slavery, are unwilling to submit to it, and on this occasion, such a war is by nature just.”8

Until recently, as long as there was any slavery to tolerate, human slavery was tolerated by the leading churches of this country. Reason and revelation were appealed to in defense of the practice of human slavery. No longer ago than 1836 the General Conference of the M. E. Church took the following action, as recorded on its journal:

Resolved by the delegates of the Annual Conferences in General Conference assembled:

1. That they disapprove, in the most unqualified sense, the conduct of two members of the General Conference who are reported to have lectured in this city recently upon, and in favor of, modern Abolitionism.

2. That they are decidedly opposed to modern Abolitionism, and wholly disclaim any right, wish, or intention to interfere in the civil and political relation between master and slave as it exists in the slave holding States of this Union.9

Some time after slavery was abolished by war, the above resolutions were repealed, and another General Conference of the same Church passed a resolution to the effect that it was a matter of congratulation that the Methodist Episcopal Church had always taken the lead of the sister churches in the anti-slavery movement.

About thirty years ago the Right Rev. John Henry Hopkins, D.D., LL.D., one of the learned men of his day, and the Protestant Episcopal Bishop of the diocese of Vermont, wrote and published a book in which he endeavored to prove that human slavery, as it then existed in these United States, was supported by “the authority of the Bible, the writings of the Fathers, the decrees of Councils, the concurrent judgment of Protestant divines, and the Constitution.”10 The efforts to overthrow it he characterized as the “assaults of mistaken philanthropy, in union with infidelity, fanaticism, and political expediency.”11

If those who stood high as interpreters of Reason and Revelation, and who expressed the prevailing sentiment of their day, were so greatly mistaken on a subject which we now think so plain that it does not admit of dispute: that every man has a right to freedom; is it not possible that the current sentiment as to the position which woman should be permitted to occupy in the Church of Christ may also be wrong?

Reader, will you admit this possibility? Will you sit as an impartial juror in the case, and carefully weigh the evidence we may present?

It has taken the world a long while to understand the Gospe...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Note to the Reader
• Preface
• 1. Prejudice
• 2. Woman’s Legal Condition
• 3. Words
• 4. Ordination
• 5. Objections: Old Testament
• 6. Objections: New Testament
• 7. Objections: Natural
• 8. Women Apostles
• 9. Women Prophets
• 10. Deacons
• 11. Deaconesses
• 12. Evangelizing the World
• 13. Required
• 14. Fitness
• 15. Governing
• 16. Heathen Testimony
• 17. Conclusion
• Bibliography (Introduction)
• Bibliography (Ordaining Women)