Should Women be able to Teach at Southern Baptist Seminaries?

 

I am constantly reminded by people that I am getting old. Almost every day someone reminds me that I am not a young kid anymore. I am not sure why people on the east coast constantly remind me of this, but it is what it is.

It is true that I graduated from a Roman Catholic parochial in the 1980’s and spent many years of my life in the hippie orientated Calvary Chapel movement and as an evangelist, conservative activist and apologist on the beaches and college campuses of Southern California.

During my tenure as an activist, I have had the privilege to be a part of the founding of three significant parachurch organizations, The Evangelical Debate Society, Conservatives for California and the Southwestern Apologetics Group. I am proud of my involvement with these groups and it was blessing getting these and other activities off the ground.

I am not ashamed of my counter cultural heritage and the fact that it took me a while to realize that I had a future in the academy. Having said this, although I am still a few years away from the half-century mark, people constantly remind me how old I am.

One of the advantages of having some years behind me is that I have a tremendous amount of experience in this world in a practical sense. Much of my ministerial and theological views come from a few decades of experience in the real world. It is not strictly text-book and hypothetical knowledge that I draw upon when I write and comment about issues.

I became a Christian in 1986, long before many of my blog readers were born. From that point of my conversion to now, I have been dedicated to Christian theology, evangelism and apologetics. I spent many years in the proverbial trenches of real life ministry. I have researched, debated and reviewed issues for many years. One of the issues I have studied pertains to women teaching in theological seminaries and the alleged Pauline prohibition against this found in 1 Timothy 2:11-15.

My question for my conservative Evangelical friends is this; does this text refer to teaching in the church or teaching in general?

A few years ago, Paige Patterson, President of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary (SWBTS), terminated Dr. Sherrie Klouda from her position as a professor of Biblical Hebrew on the grounds that she was a woman and that she was exercising role of teaching and authority over male students.

You can read about the matter about SWBTS and the firing of Dr. Klouda here:

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/judge-okays-school-ban-on-female-teachers/

This matter and others did not sit well with me during my time as a student at SWBTS. I have decided to use this blog to voice my opinion on matters in the Southern Baptist Convention, American Evangelicalism, Republican and Libertarian politics and elsewhere.

As a recent graduate of SWBTS, I have come to believe that it is simply not a very good argument to use 1 Timothy 2:11-15 to ban a woman from teaching a Biblical language at a Southern Baptist seminary. SWBTS is not a church, it is an academic institution.

Another issue in this whole mess at SWBTS that has greatly bothered me is that while they terminated Dr. Klouda because she was teaching Hebrew at SWBTS, but they allowed another woman to teach Arabic in the Islamic Studies program. To me, this is a massive contradiction.