Short Take #3: Why Female Pastors Are the Beginning of Larger Compromises

Here is another short take from The Christian Worldview with David Wheaton. Travis, why does ordaining female pastors, we've seen it in the mainline denominations, always seem to lead to compromise on other issues like sexual issues, homosexuality, transgenderism, the mainline denominations are fully in favor of that now integrating into churches. It ultimately leads away from a focus on the saving gospel of Christ, salvation issues to more social justice.

Why does it always seem to be that same progression? It's connected to the question you just asked about first and second order issues. If you equivocate on obedience to what the Bible clearly says in one issue, where do you draw the line and start obeying and other issues? When you give ground and compromise, then the culture continues to pressure you toward a complete compromise and a complete abandonment and ultimately an apostasy from Scripture. This has come out in a hermeneutical debate. It was in 1991, Piper and Grudem, general editors for Recovering Biblical Manhood and they were responding then to evangelical feminism in 2004. A response was published to that called Discovering Biblical Equality, and the subtitle was Complementarity Without Hierarchy.

So the editors and all the authors of the articles in that book, they're responding and pushing back against Piper and Grudem. They're still calling themselves complementarians, and yet they were not complementarians. They were going into the banner of complementarianism, just like Rick Warren said, we're not going to be pushed by the culture.

We're not going to follow tradition. We're totally biblical. We have a biblical basis for everything we do. That's what these authors are saying as well, and yet they're compromising on the issue of women in ministry. William Webb wrote a couple of articles in that volume, introducing something called the Redemptive Movement Hermeneutic. He's since published a book in 2009 called Slaves, Women and Homosexuals, exploring the hermeneutics of cultural analysis. Without getting into the weeds of that, he's describing that we need to see the Bible more as a dynamic movement kind of a text rather than static, and to read the Bible that way and to develop our ethics that way so that it's kind of on a sliding scale as the culture moves. That's exactly what you hear in the constitutional debates of the US Constitution. Is it a static text that we are textualists and we read that text as the authors intended, or do we continue to let it develop and let it be dynamic and read it with a view to the changes in the culture? So that same thing happening in constitutional law and interpretation happens also first probably in Scripture as well. This has been a short take from The Christian Worldview with David Wheaton. To find out more about The Christian Worldview, order resources, make a donation, become a monthly partner or contact us, visit thechristianworldview.org. You can also call us at toll-free 1-888-646-2233 or write to us at Box 401, Excelsior, Minnesota 55331. That's Box 401, Excelsior, Minnesota 55331.