Main news for 18 October 2021

Paul's words about the prohibition on women "teaching" have raised questions in every age. Indeed, God can give a special gift to a man or a woman, and the experience of communion with God lived by women is often brighter and deeper than the experience lived by men.

Meanwhile, the apostle is not saying at all that a woman should be silent about her experience of communion with God or about the experiences connected with it. He says that it is not good for women to become teachers in the sense in which this word was understood in the first Christian Church. Teaching in those days was above all a ministry connected with the experience of awareness and understanding of the inner Torah and with instructing others in the path of the inner Torah. Essentially, teacher-rabbis played the same role in traditional synagogues.

In Christian synagogues, and in those days the Church existed precisely in the form of a Christian synagogue, the issue was no longer simply the experience of the inner Torah, but also the experience of a person's becoming in Christ a living Torah, and in this sense the experience of a person's likeness to Christ as disciple to Teacher. This presupposed very intense spiritual life and very tense ascetic work, not in the sense of mortification of the flesh, as asceticism is often understood today, but in the sense of spiritually ordering one's life, inner and outer, and growing within oneself that spiritual core without which one cannot speak of the inner Torah or of a person's becoming in Christ a living Torah.

Such a path is very difficult in general; it requires serious, often extreme tension of physical and especially psychological forces even by itself. And if one also teaches and instructs others, doing so as one ought, each time maintaining in every communication, whether with one person or many, the state that will keep the words from being spiritually empty, the tension can sometimes become simply beyond measure.

Women are more enduring than men in situations of prolonged and unchanging loads, but in a short stressful situation women, as a rule, still yield to men. Meanwhile, in the ministry of a teacher there are many such situations; in a certain sense his whole life consists mainly of stressful situations, though outwardly it may sometimes seem more or less measured. For a woman such a regime can prove unbearable sooner than for a man, which means that from a woman one can sooner expect a more or less serious psychological breakdown if she wants to be a real teacher and not only one by title.

The alternative, since no one has abolished the instinct of self-preservation, can easily become the profanation of the ministry, when a person remains a teacher outwardly while inwardly ceasing to be one, which is no better, and in many ways worse, than a breakdown. Of course, a man who bears the ministry of teacher is not guaranteed against either one or the other, but he still has more chances for a favorable outcome; this is apparently what the apostle proceeds from when he forbids women to bear the ministry of teachers in the Church.