John MacArthur lays them out in what I suppose is a recent sermon although of course I can't see anything that would tell me when it was given so I don't know how recent. Anyway he says some fifty percent of Masters of Divilinty students or graduates in the seminaries these days are women. That's pretty staggering. I don't remember the other numbers but in the twenties I think for women actually pastoring churches and so on and so forth. Of course this is a heresy. He says that many evangelicals, eighty something percent I think, are OK with a woman pastor. What sort of evangelicals are these? Do they not know what scripture has to say about it, or do they and deny it?
As always I come back to my theme of the woman's head covering. I really don't know if it can be said to be the starting place of this fall into feminimism, I don't, but I think it must be somewhere back there at the beginning of it. I suppose the Marxist influence might be the general starting place. But abandoning the practice of covering the head in church continues to strike me as a pretty big deal. It was practiced for almost the entire tewo millennia since Christ and abandoned only in the mid twetnties century.
On eaxtremely flimsty grounds. Yet men like MacArthur accept those grounds. Why? Because of the credentials of the man who wrote the essay that has become the foundation for all of this? The idea that Paul wasn't really dtalking aboutg aliteral head covering that all women should adopt, but about cultrual practices that distingtuish women from men, the head covering being one of those in his time. Thomsas Shriner made this his artubument against the head cove3ring in his very influential essay and ever since then that's been the abiding perspective and women gave up covering their heads in church. Except for a very few churches that insist that no, Payl really was talking about a literal head covering. Rare churches indeepd. Marginalized you could say.
I spent quite a bit of time studying the question and came to the conclusion that Paul meant a literal head covering. And myu pastor told me that binds me own consience to wear a head covering, which is fine, but of course I think if it's true then I'm certainly not the only one who should be wearing a head covering in church.
And I think it's pimportant. Maybe very very important. Look, the passage, First Corinthians Eleven, two to sixteen, is about the literal human head, the head that sits on stop of the shoulders. It is treated in that passage as a symbol of authoirty, the person's authority. God is Authority over Christ, Christi is authority over men, Men are authority over womehn. That's the worder of what is known as "headship." There's the literal word "head." This is not about femininity syjmbols, this is about the head and about the hierarchy of headship or suthority granted by God. It is called a Creation Ordinance, like Marriage, something given by God at the very beginning of the creation. We reject Gay Marriage because of the creation ordinance that defines marriage as between a man and a woman, but e ignore the ordinance that gives man the headship position over the womahn.
I always come back to a particular simple point: we require men to remove their headgear when they come into church, on the basis of this very passage of scripture which says mmen's heads should be uncovered, but we no longer require the other part of that passage, that women's heads are to be covered.
I wish men like MacArthur would rethink it instad of falling bak on Shrinkers analysis, which has all sorts of flaws in it part from the central mistake of renying the importnt of the head as such, and I've written about those flaws in my blog on the subject, Hidden Glory.
It is not treated as importnat by some I've talked to, as a trivial thing even if I'm right, but it can't be trivila if it's a creation ordinanyc of God, and isn't it glaringly obvious that it has implications galore for the position of women in the clergy that MacArthur is lamenting? Isn't that just downstream of the abandonment of the head covering?
There are a million things that the church needs to straighten out these days so why focus on this one? The Lord is probably coming back before we could get to any of them with any effet anyway. True, unfortunatley. But shouldn't we be about the business of getting it right no matter what?
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