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Foreign.
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To the CBMW podcast. My name is Colin Smothers. I'm the executive director of CBMW and I am joined by Denny Burke, the president of cbmw. And today I'm filling in for John Swan, who decided he needed a vacation. So he's not joining us this week, but will most likely be back with us next week. How are you doing, Denny?
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How dare he.
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I cannot believe the audacity in the middle of summer to take a family
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vacation should be here at our every beck and call.
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We wish you the best, John, and looking forward to having you back on the podcast. But today the nature of our topic and conversation is actually centered around an article that you published, Denny, recently@cbmw.org and you provocatively titled it the Phoebe Hoax. So Denny, what led to you writing this particular article and why'd you call it the Phoebe Hoax?
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The title is intentionally provocative. The reason I did this was because a lot of it is related to developments within my own denomination. We talked about this in a previous episode, but recently the Southern Baptist Convention passed an amendment to the first vote to pass an amendment at our recent annual meeting. And it's to clarify that only women are supposed to be pastors. That's actually not what it says. Only men are supposed to qualified men are supposed to be pastors and that only qualified men should be preaching. And so we just passed that and there was so much controversy in the media about it, so much controversy on conversations online. And I began seeing that there was A clip from N.T. wright being passed around about Phoebe from Romans 16, chapter one through verse two. And this clip was being used by Southern Baptists to argue for the legitimacy of female preachers. And so again, this is not like famous well known Southern Baptist necessarily. I just saw this keep popping up in conversations though about this, as if you could justify having women preachers by appealing to Phoebe. And so I've got a little clip here, I can read it to you. But N.T. wright says this. He says everywhere I go in America, people ask me this question, honestly, it's getting worse right now. And he says, I'm sorry about that. We in the UK tend to say we had this argument about 35 years ago. We more or less sorted it. Well, not quite, but more or less sorted it. He says. But anyway, whenever I have to make the case in the uk, as I've always done many, many times in the General Senate and diocese and events and parishes and so on, I start with two women who are prominent in the New Testament. One is Phoebe. Now, here's what he's saying. He's saying, I get asked about women in ministry, and the first person I go to is Phoebe. She's one of the two women that he goes to first in Scripture to talk about women in ministry. And he says this. When Paul writes Romans, he gives the letter to an independent businesswoman who lives just east of Corinth because she's going on a business trip to Rome, and she's going to take the letter. That in itself is a bit shocking to some people. Romans is one of the greatest pieces of writing ever, of letters or anything. It's an extraordinary document. Who you going to give it to? Well, some senior apostle. Well, no, actually, it's Phoebe. She's on this trip. She'll do it. When in the ancient world, somebody took a letter to somebody else, especially a group of people, almost certainly nothing in Ancient history is 100% certain, but this is probably 90%. They would be the ones who would read it out. And when the people said, excuse me, what did that mean? They would also be the ones who would explain it. So the high probability is that the first person to do public exposition of Paul's letter to the Romans was a businesswoman from east of Corinth. Okay, so end quote. Oh, that whole mouthful There was from N.T. wright. And so this was going around, and people were using it as, oh, look, here's this great New Testament scholar, and he's making the case that Phoebe was the first preacher of Romans. She was the one who exposited the text to the church in Rome, perhaps the house churches in Rome. And so therefore, because Phoebe did that, shouldn't it be the case that women should be preaching in churches today? And so that was the logic. And I wanted to answer that because this is actually not a new argument. This is a very old argument that egalitarians have been making for years and years. I've heard NT Wright making this argument for many years. But here it came up again in the context of our conversation within the sbc, which is a complementarian denomination. And so what the new thing was that I noticed was instead of this being a major egalitarian argument, it seemed like certain complementarians were starting to use this egalitarian argument about Phoebe to justify women preaching to the gathered assembly. And so I've been watching this thing, this argument for years, but I decided, you know what? It's time to write something about it, speak some clarity to this. I've always thought of it as a very unpersuasive Not a very good argument. Sort of a sidebar to the conversation. NT Rights been leading with it and now it's being picked up popularly. And so I wanted to address it.
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So it seems like Southern Baptists who maybe are against the amendment that was passed that want to still make room for women preachers in the sbc, perhaps even women pastors in the sbc, they're making this appeal to authority and they're appealing to the authority of N.T. wright on this sort of tendentious or specious claim from two verses in Romans about the nature of Phoebe's ministry. And, you know, the complementarians, people like Al Mohler and cbmw who are trying to make the case against the egalitarian exegesis there. We're appealing to the Apostle Paul who plainly and simply says, I do not permit a woman to teach or exercise authority over man. And N.T. wright seems to be saying, oh, but I do permit a woman to teach or exercise authority over a man. So it's kind of like, choose your fight or the APostle Paul or N.T. wright. But Denny, you did call it a hoax, and I wonder if you would just unpack that. What is it about N.T. wright's argument? He's looking at these two verses in Romans that is so specious. Or, you know, in your article you talked about more eisegesis than exegesis. What about this argument just kind of falls flat here.
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Yeah. So the basic claims that they're making are that number one, that. Because let me just read to you what Romans 1 through 2 says. Okay, let me just read that first and then you'll. This will make sense. This is all that it says. And by the way, what I'm about to read to you is the only thing that the Bible says about Phoebe. Okay. This is it. It's not like there's other verses elsewhere. It's not like there's some background information where we think we have some other information about.
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According to NT Wright, this is the primary expositor of the book of Romans, the initial, the fundamental exposure of Romans.
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This is what Romans 16:1 2 says. It says, I commend to you our sister Phoebe, who is a servant of the church which is at king crew, that you receive her in the Lord in a manner worthy of the saints, and that you help her in whatever matter she may have need of you. For she herself has been a helper of many and of myself as well. Now I just encourage readers to listen to that. Go read this in a lot of different English translations and see the claims that Paul makes there. He says she's a servant of the church in Cancri, and then he says that she's a helper. Okay, well, from this passage, you have all these people making extraordinary claims. They'll say, well, based on her name, she was probably a former slave, and she's a freed slave because she was traveling, it looks like. Looks like she was traveling without a husband. Of course, it doesn't say anything like that in here, but looks like she was traveling without a husband. Therefore, she was an independent businesswoman. She had. She was in slavery, and she had drawn herself up to be this independent businesswoman who was now so wealthy that she could be, you know, giving a lot of money away to Paul and a lot of money away to other people. And so also because she's called a deacon or she's called a diakonos, therefore she must have held an office in the church, the office of deacon. And that was a preaching office. That was an office of leadership within the church. And then also, Paul calls her. This word that's translated as helper really means leader. She was actually a leader in the church at Rome. And so we also know from New Testament backgrounds that whenever letter carriers arrived with a letter, that they were the ones responsible for reading it out loud to the people that they're sending the letter to, and they were the ones who would interpret and explain the letter. And so you have these points that egalitarians have been making based on some contested meanings of a couple of terms, and then based on this background about letter carriers. And so, voila. Now Phoebe is the first preacher of the Book of Romans. That's what they're arguing. Now, keep in mind, here's what Paul says. I commend to you our sister Phoebe, who's a servant of the church, which is at concrete that you receive her in the Lord in a manner worthy of the saints, and that you help her in whatever matter she may have need of you. For she herself has also been a helper of many and of myself as well. Now, I'm just trying to point out to people that is a crazy mythology to weave around, Phoebe, based on what Paul actually wrote there. There's a lot of reading into the text, things that are not there. It's this background about letter carriers, which is a specious background. It's the meanings of these terms, which are very implausible meanings they're suggesting for these terms. It just doesn't make any sense at all. And so that's why I was putting
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this forward Yeah, I mean, it seems like the argument that has to be built from Romans 1, 1, 2. I mean, you cite Denny in your article, several commenters, where one of them is saying that the apostle Paul himself submits to Phoebe somehow through this commissioning or whatever they're saying. Philip Payne says that. And then another one says that Phoebe was actually a de facto apostle because of what Paul does here or what Paul commends. So,
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like an ad hoc apostle.
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Yeah, ad hoc apostle. So what is going on? There is. There is a reading between the lines, like they're not even reading what Paul is saying because they have to make servant mean preacher, they have to make helper mean leader or even something like de facto apostle or something, ad hoc apostle. And then they have to basically make this argument that Paul is somehow commending her not just as a servant and a helper, but as a preacher, apostolic delegate, you know, fiery preacher of the, you know, the letter, Paul's most important letter, you know, in the New Testament perhaps. And it just seems like such a far afield claim. Why is it that egalitarians are so attracted to this? Here's my theory. Because in the very plain text of scripture, places like 1 Timothy 2, places like 1 Corinthians 11, places like Jesus choosing of his own 12 disciples to be apostles, to be his, you know, apostolic delegation to the ends of the earth. Everywhere else in the plain black and white letters of Scripture, it's clear God's design for leadership in the church, leadership in the home, etc. So you can't appeal to the plain text. You have to go to Romans 16, 1, 2. And Paul's not even main point in the letter. He's just sort of doing his, you know, final greetings, as he does in every one of his letters that he writes. And we're going to make an entire case for female leadership and preachers and pastors, et cetera, from this one character that we don't know anything else about.
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Yeah, well, I mean, that's the whole issue though, Colin, is that the egalitarians are trying to say all those texts that you think are clear, they've been spending decades saying, oh, those actually aren't clear. So when Paul says, I don't allow a woman to teach or excess authority over a man, it just seems like it says that really he just meant that for those believers in Ephesus, he didn't mean that for every church. It was just addressing a local problem there. So, in effect, I don't allow a woman to teach or Exercise authority over a man means I do allow for you all reading this now to have women teaching and exercising authority over men. And so they turn the text completely upside down. And so they've. There's been so much ink spilled over these texts that I think are clear, but there's been so much ink spilled over the years, they've made them contested, unclear texts. Now, here's the thing. Before the middle of the 20th century, these texts weren't unclear to anybody for almost the entire 2000 year of the history Church. Everybody understood that Paul was making a prohibition that applied across the ages in first century.
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But, Denny, we're so much smarter than them now here in the 21st century.
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Yeah, a little chronological snobbery is going on here, really. This has not been the way that Christians have interpreted these texts throughout the history of the church. It's been a very recent thing since about the middle of the last century and in these Western countries. Right.
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And how convenient that the new reading happens to line up with the spirit of the age so concretely. Yeah.
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In other words, feminism, really, the second wave feminism, really comes into its own beginning in the 60s and 70s, and that's when these readings begin to take off. So those are new readings. So now what's going on, though, is now everybody's trying to say, well, at best, these are contested readings. These texts aren't clear. But I'm just saying you have turned everything upside down at this point. You've turned upside down the clear texts and said that they're problem texts and that we can't really know what they mean. And now you're taking a text that is talking about a sweet woman who seems to have been a faithful Christian there in Rome, so much so that it looks like she's probably the letter carrier. I do think that that's a legitimate thing because Paul uses the language of commendation. You would usually want to commend somebody who's carrying a letter. So maybe she's the letter carrier. But all this other stuff that they're attaching to the letter carrier, that the letter carriers are basically the preachers of the letters they carry. They're explaining obscure points in the letters. They're reading out those letters. The evidence for that is just paltry and unconvincing. And to try to build a theology of female pastors or female preachers on this is to go against other texts which are so very clear. I think of 1 Corinthians 3, where Paul talks about headship within the church, and the women were participating in the worship services, they were. They were praying, they were prophesying. It says there in 1 Corinthians 11. But Paul says that when they do so, they have to do so with authority on their head. In other words, whatever ministry, whatever legitimate ministries there are for women in the church, they do it with deference to male headship, which would mean, I think, the headship of their husbands, but then also the male leaders, designated leaders of the church. And so Paul says at the end of 1 Corinthians 11, after he's done all this teaching on male headship, he says, I'm going to read this to you so I don't butcher it. He says, if one is inclined to be contentious, we have no other practice, nor have the churches of God, which means all this stuff I'm telling you about headship, that you have to observe a headship principle. We have no other practice, meaning we apostles. And then, nor do the churches of God, all the other churches. So basically, this is what we teach in all the churches. And all the churches are doing headship. That's Paul's teaching there. And he says something similar in 1 Corinthians 14. Let the women keep silent in the churches, for they're not permitted to speak, but let them subject themselves, just as the law also says. Now, I think in context, he's talking about not speaking per se, but he's talking about the judgment of prophecies. So that's my view on this text. So they're not, which is a teaching function within the church. And then he says, if they desire to learn anything, let them ask their own husbands at home, for it's improper for a woman to speak at church. Was it from you that the word of God first went forth, or has it come to you only now? What is he saying there? He's saying, is it to you that the word of God has come only, or is it just coming to you? No, the word of God's come to all the churches. There's a lot of different people who've received this and who are doing what we apostles have said that they're supposed to do. And so this was, you know, Paul says these things without much defense because they weren't as much contested in that day. But he's saying that this is the practice of the apostles, the teaching of the apostles, and it's what's practiced in all the churches. Is it really plausible to think that Paul's going to expect Phoebe to do what he's prohibiting women to do and all the other churches that's not plausible. That's not logical. It's an absurdity. But that is sort of where egalitarian exegesis has led to. And I'm concerned that there are certain complementarians, people who want to hold us, quote, unquote, soft complementarian position, which means they hold a headship in some sense. But basically, women are authorized to do in church ministry whatever a man can. What other. Whatever an unordained man can do. I'm concerned a lot of soft complementarians are now adopting this egalitarian view and saying, yeah, women should be preaching in their churches.
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Yeah, it seems like what egalitarians are doing with those, what we think are very clear texts, you know, 1 Corinthians 11, 14, 1 Timothy 2. One tactic is to say, well, the text is unclear. It's not saying at face value what you think it's saying. The other thing they do is they actually limit its application. They say, well, that's what's going on in Ephesus, or that's what's going on in Corinth. Isn't it amazing, though, when you get to Romans 16, that all of a sudden we have a universal.
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Yeah, it's a universal principle.
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Everything is, you know, according to what Paul says about Phoebe here, even though he doesn't actually say it. We're just kind of triangulating from the text. But you have Universal in Romans 16, but no, not in 1 Corinthians 11 or 1 Timothy 2. Even though, you know, Paul in 1 Timothy 2 is grounding his reasoning in the creation order. So clearly he does the same thing in 1 Corinthians 11. So, you know, what we have here in the Phoebe hoax is yet another attempt by egalitarians to get faithful Christians to not pay attention to the plain text of Scripture, which we believe God's word is clear. We believe it's inerrant and accurate and good for human flourishing, including and especially in the church. So, you know, cbmw, we're going to continue to advocate for the complementarian position. I would commend this article to you. I'm commending you, Denny, as the writer of this article and to our listeners. Go read it. Denny has other exegetical connections and engagements there that will help you the next time that you have somebody else make this argument. Yeah, Denny.
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Colin, I would just mention that you asked earlier on about why call it a hoax.
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Yeah.
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I'm not saying that people aren't in earnest. Okay. People can be in earnest to be taken in by a hoax.
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Oh, absolutely.
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You know what I'm, you see what I'm saying? Like, people can actually believe what they're saying but still be, you don't have
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to be the perpetrator of a hoax to be taken in by a hoax.
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Exactly. And so I just think that this, wherever this started, it was falsely done and it's being propagated in a way that's destructive because it's just an error.
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Well, listeners, thank you for listening today. For more information about CBMW, go to cbmw.org and we'll see you next time.