Developing a Hermeneutical Lens to Consider the Place of Women in Ministry

My experience as a Bible translator living cross-culturally, along with completing a missiology DTh in intercultural studies, has given me an understanding of how language and culture affect communication. I have come to believe that the dynamics of human interpretation—both its power and its limitations—point us toward a hermeneutical lens that can guide our faithful interpretation of God’s communication in Scripture.

Some material in these articles has been taken from my Intercultural Theology course given as an instructional lecture series with Northwest Baptist Seminary. That course provides a more extensive examination of some concepts introduced here.

I know I have blindspots; the trouble is I can’t see where they are. My desire is not to be right, but to pursue truth and so I am open to correction. All readers are invited to respond and challenge what I have written. I will be grateful for your insights and for continuing the conversation.

The occasion for this reflection is the dispute over women in church leadership—a disagreement that may lead to division within our Canadian Fellowship of churches. My aim is to propose a biblically faithful way of reading Scripture that allows for the affirmation of women in leadership. I hope to show that this position does not arise from cultural compromise, disobedience, or a rejection of Scripture. While it may not change convictions about male-only leadership, I pray that it will encourage a gracious recognition that this view is rooted in a high regard for Scripture, a desire to glorify Jesus, and a passion for God’s kingdom. Therefore, rather than separation, I pray for a response marked by grace and continued mutually beneficial partnership.

Recognizing the many influences that shape how we read and obey the Bible can make us more aware of our limitations, lead us to interpret with greater care and skill, foster a humble posture of ongoing dialogue, and help preserve our unity.

The articles develop the hermeneutic as follows:

1. An introduction to the hermeneutic of reading the Bible as revelation
   • Rather than reading the Bible as a manual of commands to obey, the Bible is a revelation of God’s will, character and mission to which we conform
2. Obedience as conformity to the heart of God
   • Obedience is about children striving to be like their father rather than servants following rules
3. Linguistic and cultural limitations that require a hermeneutical solution
   • Recognizing the limitation of our cultural location gives us pause so that we do not take illegitimate shortcuts in our understanding.
4. A Framework to guide the Process of Interpretation
   • Useful responses to help navigate cultural limitations and lead us to a more robust interpretation of Scripture.
5. An understanding of theology based on the proposed hermeneutic
   • Since we generate our interpretation through a theological grid, the development of theology needs to be done with care.
6. Biblical support for the proposed hermeneutic
   • Discovering Jesus’ and the apostles’ hermeneutic of reading the Bible as revelation.
7. Addressing disputed verses on women in leadership through the hermeneutical lens
   • Examining verses that are used to forbid women from ecclesial leadership through the hermeneutic of reading the Bible as revelation.

Part 1: Reading the Bible as Revelation

Hermeneutics “is the science and art of interpreting the Bible.”^[1] It involves discerning how we move from the biblical text to theological understanding taking into account the complexity of that process. Hermeneutics can be described as reading Scripture in community for the purpose of bringing our beliefs, commitments and behaviors into alignment with God’s revealed purposes. This work is complex because of the historical, geographical, linguistic, and cultural distance between the world of the biblical authors and audiences and the contexts of modern readers.

The hermeneutic proposed in this series of articles arises from the process of theological development that naturally takes place among believers in their contexts: Readers engage with the text through the assumptions, questions, and priorities they bring to it, and they shape their theological understanding according to the perceived relevance of the message within their setting. When they are committed to being faithful to the intention of the divine Author, the Holy Spirit guides them to understand and embody the will, character, and mission of Jesus.

The hermeneutic I will propose is grounded in the understanding that we are not called to obey and follow the Bible; instead, the Bible calls us to obey and follow Jesus. For those who struggle with discerning the difference, consider the Pharisees who diligently studied the OT scriptures. They had obedience to God—known as the tradition of the ancestors (Mt 15)—down to a science, but in their attempts to obey God’s commands, they missed (and dismissed) the incarnate Word.

Jesus claimed he brought “new wine” that disrupted those traditions (Mt 9:17; Mk 2:22; Lu 5:37-39). He challenged the religious teachers to re-evaluate their understanding through the lens of who he was, the nature of his kingdom, and what it would mean to follow and obey him. Jesus declared to the Pharisees in Matthew 12 that “something greater” than the temple, the law and the insight of Solomon was present, something that not only overthrew nationalistic visions, legal foundations and established wisdom, but also established a kingdom-centered way to engage life beyond conformity to commands—a kingdom with a person, Jesus, on the throne, who rules by his Spirit.

The implications of these passages for this hermeneutic will be explored in a later article, but these comments establish at least one reason to clarify how we are to discern God’s will from our reading of Scripture: we are not responsible to maintain the theology of godly leaders of the past, no matter how much we respect them. Instead, we are called to test the spirits, the theologies, and the narratives that surround us according to Jesus’ “new wine.” A hermeneutic that does justice to Jesus’ new wine should help us address conflicting theologies of gender, theologies of hierarchy, and theologies of human authority in the kingdom God.

Summary Description of the Hermeneutic

The following is a summary of the “hermeneutic of reading the Bible as revelation,” or the “contextually sensitive hermeneutic,”^[2] which will be referred to throughout the articles:

We are called to read Scripture as God’s self-revelation, given through prophets and apostles within their historical and cultural settings. By discerning God’s will, character, and mission in each passage, we focus on the divine Author, engage a broad theological framework and acknowledge the differences between the biblical context and our own. This keeps us from assuming that culturally shaped instructions or practices in Scripture must be reproduced today. Instead, we pursue obedience by conforming our lives to God’s revealed character and purposes. God’s people express obedience in ways that (1) navigate cultural differences, (2) remain consistent with what we have discerned about God from Scripture, and (3) embody God’s mission within the local body of Christ through contextually meaningful behaviors.

This hermeneutic addresses the following challenges to interpretation that will be explored in these articles:

1. We always interpret from a theological perspective—a human construct developed over time through exposure to God’s revelation and other influences.
2. We always interpret from an enculturated position, using the language and concepts granted to us from our context.
3. Communication is complex and requires dialogue within community in order to move to appropriate action and application.
4. As fallen humans, we are limited and susceptible to misunderstanding and inconsistency. Humility before God and openness to correction is required.
5. A biblical understanding of concepts such as authority and the implications of gender should not be assumed when reading a verse. Instead, we need to recognize the influences and assumptions that shape our theology (faith) and then test them.
6. We cannot assume that even a “clear” verse is properly understood. Because of the historical and conceptual distance between us and the original author/audience, there are contextual dilemmas and tensions that are not immediately obvious.
7. Obedience is not about following rules and emulating biblical patterns, but conforming to God’s revealed will, character and mission.
8. Conforming to God’s revealed will, character and mission requires expressions that are contextually meaningful.
9. We are constantly engaging in a dialogical process between theology (faith), text (Scripture) and context (the influences that shape our thinking and understanding of reality). This liminal reality is our human condition and it encourages us not to establish practices based on a few verses but on a robust theology that reveals God’s deeper purposes. Only then can we confidently apply our conclusions to ecclesial contexts today.

This hermeneutic welcomes dialogue with others—across history, within our own culture, and interculturally—to confirm that our interpretation aligns with Scripture and that our application genuinely reflects the message we aim to live out.

It also implies that it is not appropriate to take any narrative, command or promise in the Bible and apply it directly to our situation today. Nor is it possible to extract a “kernel” of truth or a timeless principle that can be understood apart from a cultural context or that can be applied universally. All communication is culturally embedded.

The following Contextually Sensitive Hermeneutic diagram illustrates the process:

The bottom (information) arrow with the “X” shows that we should not read the Bible as if its teachings move directly from the text to our situation without interpretation. We cannot simply take biblical instructions and apply them straight to our context because we are dealing with two different cultural contexts—the biblical culture and our own. A direct, culture-to-culture transfer is impossible because of assumptions, priorities, and questions that shape our beliefs.

Instead, we approach Scripture as God’s self-revelation—his nature, will, and mission—communicated in a time, place, and cultural setting different from our own (left arrow—revelation). From that revelation, we develop a theological understanding of who God is and what he desires (top arrow—integration). Only then can we express our obedience in culturally appropriate actions today (right arrow—application).

In summary: The meaning of any passage reveals God’s intention within a particular context distinct from our own. Discerning God’s will, character, and mission from that intention calls us to trust in him and to shape our lives in conformity with his purposes—grounded in our relationship with God in Christ, rather than by mere adherence to instructions or commands found in the passage^[3].

^[1] Donald K. Campbell, “Foreword,” in Basic Bible Interpretation: A Practical Guide to Discovering Biblical Truth, ed. Craig Bubeck Sr. (Colorado Springs, CO: David C. Cook, 1991), 19.

^[2] Both of these descriptions are used in these articles. “Hermeneutic of reading the Bible as revelation” focuses on how the Bible is to be read, while “Contextually Sensitive Hermeneutic” emphasizes the intimate connection between meaning and context.

^[3] Scholars will recognize this approach as a version of theological hermeneutics. “When we speak of theological exegesis, particularly when we acknowledge the Spirit’s role… we are speaking … of the way that God, working through the text, is reshaping us.” from Richard B. Hays, “Reading the Bible with Eyes of Faith: The Practice of Theological Exegesis,” ed. Joel B. Green, Journal of Theological Interpretation, Volume 1, no. 1–2 (2007): 15.