Ordaining Women: New Edition with an Introduction and Notes

Table of Contents

Title Page

Foreword

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Note to the Reader

Preface

1. Prejudice

2. Woman’s Legal Condition

3. Words

4. Ordination

5. Objections: Old Testament

6. Objections: New Testament

7. Objections: Natural

8. Women Apostles

9. Women Prophets

10. Deacons

11. Deaconesses

12. Evangelizing the World

13. Required

14. Fitness

15. Governing

16. Heathen Testimony

17. Conclusion

Bibliography (Introduction)

Bibliography (Ordaining Women)

Ordaining Women

New Edition with an Introduction and Notes

B. T. Roberts

new edition by Benjamin D. Wayman

ORDAINING WOMEN

New Edition with an Introduction and Notes

Copyright © 2015 Benjamin D. Wayman. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

Wipf & Stock

An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers

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ISBN 13: 978-1-4982-0861-1

EISBN 13: 978-1-4982-0862-8

Manufactured in the USA.

For Cheryl Lynne

Table of Contents

Foreword by Christy Mesaros-Winckles and Howard A. Snyder ix

Acknowledgments xiii

Introduction xv

Note to the Reader xxv

Ordaining Women 1

Bibliography (Introduction) 121

Bibliography (Ordaining Women) 123

Index of Texts 129

Index of Names 132

Foreword

Take a quick look around any Christian bookstore today and you will find entire sections devoted to the division of labor by sex. Men are to be the leaders of the home. Wives are to be the caretakers. Many church events are planned by gender, such as retreats and Bible study groups. Men’s and women’s retreats center around themes that highlight differences, not partnerships. We plan our men’s and women’s Bible studies on topics such as a garden getaway, God’s princess, manly man’s retreat, man camp—steaks, bacon, and fire, etc. Such superficial differences have been sold to the public and divide people more than unite them.

In 1891, when Benjamin Titus Roberts published Ordaining Women, these were the kinds of issues he was addressing: not only the fact that women should be allowed to preach, but also that men and women are created equal in the eyes of God. As Wayman explains, Roberts’s perspective is informed by a Galatians hermeneutic based on Galatians 3:28, There is neither male nor female for ye are all one in Christ. Christ has set everyone free. All are equal. All are free to serve.

Yet, too often Christian believers and denominations revert to a misreading of Genesis as the basis for denying biblical gender equality. Roberts addresses this himself, and Wayman does an excellent job making the translation even clearer in Chapter 5: Old Testament Objections. Eve was not made second because she was the lesser of the two creations. As Roberts explains, "God created woman a female man—nothing more—nothing less. She had all the rights and prerogatives of the man. The dominion given to him was equally given to her" (43). God did not just create a companion for Adam, but also created both Adam and Eve as joint partners to care for and manage the garden together (Gen 1:26–27). Throughout Ordaining Women Roberts sets forth a compelling argument for biblical equality that is timeless. While we might like to think the issues of women’s ordination and equality between the sexes have been resolved in the twenty-first century, in many Christian circles there has been little change.

Ordaining Women was and still is situated in the midst of cultural debates on gender. In 1891 women’s suffrage was gaining steam, and women were entering the public sphere and leaving the home. Women were pursuing professional occupations such as medicine, law, and ministry.¹ The Seneca Falls Convention’s Rights and Sentiments, which first appeared in 1848, included a section demanding equal rights for women in the church and in ministry. The question of women’s ordination and biblical gender equality was not only a theological question, but a societal question many other denominations of the time were also facing. The decision to enfranchise or disfranchise women had broad social and organizational implications. If women could not find a home for their calling to preach within the Free Methodist Church and support for their right to be treated equally, they would leave and find a denomination that would.

Roberts was a prophetic revolutionary who wanted to address these questions. Without the funding of the Free Methodist Church he published Ordaining Women through his own publishing house, The Earnest Christian Publishing House, in Rochester, New York. Like any prophetic work, the book was controversial within his own denomination. G. W. Coleman, one of the denomination’s superintendents, wrote a long editorial to The Free Methodist, the denomination’s weekly magazine, denouncing the book’s theology point by point.² Roberts responded in kind with his own editorial.³ Other Free Methodists later accused one of the top denominational leaders of refusing to allow the book to be sold at Free Methodist annual conferences in his district.⁴ On this issue, Roberts was a prophet without honor in his own denomination (cf. Mark 6:4). Over 125 years later, Ordaining Women lives on with a prophetic message as relevant today as it was in 1891.

The republication of Ordaining Women is a service not just to history, but also to all churches and Christians who would be faithful to the Good News of Jesus Christ and embody it in their lives and witness in our day.

Christy Mesaros-Winckles and Howard A. Snyder

Christy Mesaros-Winckles is Assistant Professor in Communication Arts and Sciences at Adrian College (Adrian, Michigan)

Howard A. Snyder is Visiting Director at the Manchester Wesley Research Centre (Manchester, United Kingdom)

1. Elizabeth E. Grammer, Some Wild Visions: Autobiographies by Female Itinerant Evangelists in 19th-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003) esp. pp. 27–41.

2. G. W. Coleman, Ordination of Women, The Free Methodist (June 17, 1891) 1–2.

3. Benjamin Titus Roberts, Ordination of Women, The Free Methodist (August 12, 1891) 1–2.

4. Norrington of Canada, General Conference Dailies (October 23, 1894) 68.

Acknowledgments

I am fortunate to work with friends in the church and the academy who share the conviction that this book has something important to say to Christians today. From the earliest stages of this new edition, the Board of Bishops of the Free Methodist Church, USA, my superintendent Lucia Delamarter, the Committee on Free Methodist History and Archives, and Jason Morriss, the Director of Ministerial Development and Credentialing for the Free Methodist Church, USA, have been enthusiastic supporters of the project.

At Greenville College, my provost Edwin Estévez passionately promoted this project and with Kristin Koehnemann and my department chair Christina Smerick, adjusted my teaching load to make room for work on the book. A generous and timely fellowship as a Glenn L. and Ruth A. Archer Distinguished Faculty Scholar provided the funding to bring the new edition to completion. I appreciate as well Greenville College librarians Jane Hopkins, Gail Heideman, and Georgann Kurtz-Shaw, who graciously employed their time and expertise in locating Roberts’s panoply of sources.

Christy Mesaros-Winckles and Howard Snyder are well deserving of my thanks, whose eloquent foreword displays the scholarship and perspective only they could offer. I am also grateful to Howard for his critical review of the final manuscript and to Kent Dunnington, for his friendship and feedback throughout the production process.

This new edition provided me the joy of working with Tyler Merrill, who was a diligent and disciplined research partner. His insight and attention to detail made this book better than it would have otherwise been. My deepest appreciation goes to my wife Michelle, whose selflessness and companionship grants space for creativity and meaningful work. This new edition is dedicated to my mother, whose life makes it easier to imagine the full range of the gospel.

Introduction

B. T. Roberts saw the barring of women from ordination as akin to racism. Racism and the prohibition of women’s ordination were for Roberts two glaring contradictions of the gospel. He reasons, All restrictions to positions in the church based on race have been abolished; it is time then that those based on sex were also abolished (112). For him, the issue was clear: the integrity of the gospel in its fullness hinged on the question of the ordination of women. It is indeed the case that one can only act in a world one can see, and one can only see a world one can say, and one must be taught to say.⁵ For nearly two thousand years, the majority of Christians throughout the world have been taught to speak against the ordination of women and so have been unable to see the world made possible by Christ.

Church tradition presents the most formidable obstacle to the ordination of women today.⁶ With over one billion members worldwide, the Roman Catholic Church is the most prominent representative of the tradition opposing women’s ordination.⁷ It is not insignificant then that B. T. Roberts confronts church tradition with the longstanding Christian practice of slavery. Writing in 1891, having ministered in ante- and postbellum America, Roberts pinpoints a damning example of Christian unfaithfulness in the church’s widespread endorsement of owning slaves. The props for this insidious institution were many, but most fundamentally, the support purportedly rested on reason, Scripture, and church tradition. Roberts states,

If those who stood high as interpreters of Reason and Revelation, and who expressed the prevailing sentiment of their day, were so greatly mistaken on a subject which we now think so plain that it does not admit of dispute: that every man has a right to freedom; is it not possible that the current sentiment as to the position which woman should be permitted to occupy in the Church of Christ may also be wrong?

Reader, will you admit this possibility? Will you sit as an impartial juror in the case, and carefully weigh the evidence we may present? (15–16)

Roberts here beckons his nineteenth-century reader and now he beckons you and me to a careful, unprejudiced consideration of women’s ordination. In this book, Roberts exposes the failures of traditional biblical interpretation and historical Christianity’s distorted view of women, inviting us to reconsider the participation of women in the ordained ministry of the church. If we had once been so wrong about race, might we today be wrong about gender?

A Minority Voice

Benjamin Titus Roberts (1823–1893) helped found the Free Methodist Church in 1860. Roberts was a pastor and general superintendent, a reformer, an abolitionist, and an advocate for women. From the inception of the Free Methodist Church, Roberts called for women’s equality in the church, but was opposed by many in his fledgling denomination.

Despite Roberts’s objections, in 1861 the Genesee Conference took action forbidding ‘female preaching,’ claiming that public preaching ‘clashes with the ordinary duties and relations of the female sex.’⁸ The Conference soon amended its position, licensing women to preach locally, but it did not afford them the opportunity for elder’s ordination.

So Roberts continued to champion women in ministry, lauding their accomplishments as preachers. As the editor of the Earnest Christian, a monthly publication that continued for fifty years, Roberts celebrated the lives of women preachers and ministers he saw as models.⁹ In 1872, he published a twenty-four-page pamphlet entitled, The Right of Women to Preach the Gospel. Women’s right to preach was Roberts’s point of entry for his advocacy of women’s total equality in the church. Howard Snyder comments, however, that in both the Methodist Episcopal and Free Methodist denominations, Roberts was a minority voice advocating the full equality of women in ministry.¹⁰

At the 1890 General Conference the debate concerning women’s ordination reached its tipping point and became the focus of the gathering. One could say that Roberts had been preparing for this meeting his entire ministry, and so he offered the following resolution: Resolved, That the Gospel of Jesus Christ, in the provisions which it makes, and in the agencies which it employs for the salvation of mankind, knows no distinction of nationality, condition or sex; therefore, no person who is called of God, and who is duly qualified, should be refused ordination on account of sex, or race or condition.¹¹ This statement, with slight adjustment, would also feature as the