NOTES for Ti1 2:11-12

¹¹Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection.

¹²But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence.

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.

Other notes

For Ti1 2:8-15

⁸I will therefore that men pray every where, lifting up holy hands, without wrath and doubting.

⁹In like manner also, that women adorn themselves in modest apparel, with shamefacedness and sobriety; not with broided hair, or gold, or pearls, or costly array;

¹⁰But (which becometh women professing godliness) with good works.

¹¹Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection.

¹²But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence.

¹³For Adam was first formed, then Eve.

¹⁴And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was in the transgression.

¹⁵Notwithstanding she shall be saved in childbearing, if they continue in faith and charity and holiness with sobriety.

The apostle Paul is one of those specific people against whom feminists raise objections. “How can this be? What he says is simply demeaning”... Read more

The apostle Paul is one of those specific people against whom feminists raise objections. “How can this be? What he says is simply demeaning.” The problem is that, in his own language, the apostle explains a simple fact: men and women differ greatly in their constitution and divine calling. One can react to this in different ways. One can be indignant and outraged. One can refuse to believe in God because of it. Yet the differences between men and women are a fact that must be taken into account, if only because the paths by which we go to God and the callings He lays upon us depend on who we are.

For Ti1 2:8-15

⁸I will therefore that men pray every where, lifting up holy hands, without wrath and doubting.

⁹In like manner also, that women adorn themselves in modest apparel, with shamefacedness and sobriety; not with broided hair, or gold, or pearls, or costly array;

¹⁰But (which becometh women professing godliness) with good works.

¹¹Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection.

¹²But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence.

¹³For Adam was first formed, then Eve.

¹⁴And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was in the transgression.

¹⁵Notwithstanding she shall be saved in childbearing, if they continue in faith and charity and holiness with sobriety.

Continuing the theme of a "quiet and peaceable life," Paul speaks about what it should be filled with... Read more

Continuing the theme of a "quiet and peaceable life," Paul speaks about what it should be filled with: prayer and good works (vv. 8-10). Such a way of life would be quite acceptable for any religious person, regardless of the religion he professes. The only exception might be those bearers of the spirit of militant religiosity who accept no one but themselves and consider it their duty to wage holy war against the whole world until the complete triumph of their religion. But the point is not only that the spirit of peaceful religiosity was personally closer to Paul than the spirit of militant religiosity. In any case, the image of Paul when he was not yet either Paul or an apostle testifies rather to the opposite: he did not adopt either the spiritual calm or the religious breadth of his teacher Gamaliel, the Gamaliel of the Book of Acts. But when, after the meeting on the Damascus road, Paul understood what the Kingdom was, he also understood something else: religion is not the main thing in a person's life; it is not religion that makes him righteous, and it is not religion that saves.

The Christian's main task, as the apostle sees it, is not the spread of a new, final, and absolutely true religion, but witness to the Kingdom. But one cannot bear witness to it by words alone: one must show seekers that the Kingdom is not a beautiful dream, but a reality already accessible now to those who want to be joined to it. How could the Kingdom be demonstrated to those who do not yet know anything about it? Answering this question, Paul points to the Church's prayer gatherings as the place where the Kingdom can be seen with one's own eyes. But if those who presented themselves in the prayer gathering as examples of an inhabitant of the Kingdom were no different from pagans the rest of the time, the witness could hardly be considered complete. And the good works the apostle mentions became a manifestation of the same life of the Kingdom in everyday life. Hence also the requirement of hierarchy and order in church gatherings about which Paul speaks, forbidding women to be church preachers, "to teach," vv. 11-15. This is connected, of course, not with any inferiority or second-class status of women, as some readers of the Bible think today, but with the calling given to woman by God and, accordingly, with the ministries entrusted to her by God, among which church preaching is not included.

And the point here is not church discipline as such, but what stands behind it, provided that the Church is living a normal spiritual life, one that is not distorted or perverted: the order proper to the life of the Kingdom, determined not by external laws, but only by God's providence for each of its inhabitants and, accordingly, by each person's calling. In that case even outward order becomes not something self-important and often self-sufficient, but a witness, a witness to the Kingdom that determines this order.

Notes

NOTES for Ti1 2:11-12

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