Here’s another “short” post (don’t laugh, I thought the last one about systematic theology would be too) for the ongoing testimony. In my time with the Hebraic Roots ministry, things came up; sometimes they were onslaughts from the outside, and sometimes they were internal dissensions of various stripes.
The attacks from outside were usually from other extremists. There were people who thought we didn’t know the Messiah personally because we insisted on calling Him “Yeshua” rather than “Yahushua” or a hundred other variations on Sacred Name nonsense. It’s funny how we thought we were the rational ones, because we knew His name was “Yeshua,” and yet my skin crawled a bit when I heard a newbie repeatedly talk about “Jesus” or “Christ” instead of what we were sure was His Hebrew name. It’s like somebody with OCD telling you that having to knock on a door three times in exactly the same spot, no more and no less, isn’t neurotic at all, because he knows somebody who has to do it six times, three times with each hand. Let’s be honest—both of these are disorders. (And I would point out once again that it is possible that many in the group, including the teacher, didn’t have this same problem, the problem being thinking that it could actually be wrong to call Yeshua “Jesus.” But comments made by various people within the group, as highly placed as I was even, tell me that some took this to its logical conclusion, same as me.)
We defended ourselves against one group in particular that still makes me shake my head. There’s a whole tribe of KJV-only fundies (with mirror sites all over the place) who launched an attack on Hebraic Roots, from the standpoint that it was all Kabbalistic; their “proof” consisted of confusing Jewish commentaries with Kabbalistic works and so forth. They didn’t talk much about the fact that we were promoting works righteousness, because frankly they were blind to that fact; it was just another extremist group. They selectively quoted from published works and email list archives and played the guilt-by-association card pretty heavily when they thought that we were connected to other groups that they didn’t like.
Our official response was a little bit disappointing to me, to be honest. The response was to deny the charges and make jokes about their somewhat unusual names. We had a lot more we could have said, but the fact was, a measured, systematic response to each charge was pretty much out of scope for our ministry. In other words, the charges weren’t true for the most part (what heresy we pressed wasn’t the particular heresy of which they accused us, generally), but we didn’t have the ability, “between the keyboard and the chair,” to respond well. I assumed at the time that this was simply because it wasn’t seen as being that important, but when the schism reached its climax I learned that there was another problem, a problem that was fundamental to many of the doctrinal failures in our ministry. I’ll talk about that when the time comes (if I can).
The internal issues were if anything even more revealing. We had one particular fellow who was very gung-ho about the ministry; he had contributed a fair bit, he spoke at one of our conferences, and he was actively engaging in apologetics for Hebraic Roots (writing letters to the Lockman Foundation and trying to find out why they insisted on certain translations in the NASB that we felt were wrong, or taking on Catholics on Usenet). He was quite serious about finding the truth, and I don’t know what happened to him. It was a painful separation when he went another way. He had started to really dig in to find out if the things we said about Greek were true, and he had started to find that… they weren’t. The place where it came to a head was 1 Timothy 2:12: “But I do not allow a woman to teach or exercise authority over a man, but to remain quiet.” As I mentioned before, the ministry was very open to ordaining women as pastors and teachers, and so, like all ministries that take that stand, we had to deal with passages like this one in some way. (My current opinion: see note in the last post again about claiming that Paul meant the opposite of what he said.) The founding teacher insisted that the words and grammar here indicate that this is a temporary state, that Paul never meant that women could never be authoritative teachers in the church. Our detractor had spoken to several professors who taught Greek (Koine and Attic, if I remember correctly) and found that there wasn’t any certainty about that in this passage; the plain meaning is simply that Paul does not allow that.
This was hard for me. Having learned a little bit of foreign language here and there (not being fluent in anything, however), and having had an excellent grammatical education in English (hat tip to Mrs. Joan Lorenz, my high school English teacher, and A Beka Book grammar curriculum used in my tiny Christian high school), I was able to puzzle out with the aid of computer Bible study programs the meaning of the grammar in this verse. NASB is as good as it gets, really: “I do not permit a woman to teach…” and so on. It isn’t “I have not permitted a woman to teach” or “I did not permit women to teach in the past” or anything else; it’s a simple phrase, well within first year Greek. The tricky thing is to make sure that it says what it says, no more, and no less.
As I mentioned before, hard things in the Bible were often taken on by me in one of two ways: either rabbinic logic and hermeneutics (which didn’t support us, because first of all they have no opinion on Pauline epistles, and second, the orthodox Jews wouldn’t abide women as rabbis or any such thing), or a word study: look up every time this comes up in Scripture and see what the consensus is. In this case, it wasn’t a matter of the meaning of “teach” (at least not at this critical point in the debate; the context was pretty clear on the importance and authority of this role), but a matter of the meaning of the grammatical construction used in “I do not permit” and “to teach.” This is hard but so much easier now than it would have been fifteen years ago or more; my computer program allowed me to tell it the Greek grammar and then do a search for everything that was constructed the same way, even though the nouns and verbs themselves were different.
What I found, by doing this word study, was that in the majority of cases where the present active indicatives and infinitives are used, they are referring to something that is true at this time, but not making a statement as to whether it will be true forever. It was true in the immediate past, and it is true now, and that’s all that we can affirm. As you can see, this does not prove that Paul is giving anybody a way out of his restriction; you would have to argue that in a different way, if you were going to argue it at all. I have told you what I think now about this, but I am not writing this to defend the complementarian position specifically; I am trying to show you that this is not enough proof. The better writers and apologists for women teachers and preachers know this; the hacks don’t. But for me, as I have stated in the distant past as I struggled to leave relativism behind, just a doubt having been cast was enough to convince me. I stopped my study of the problem after realizing that the grammar alone, in this one verse alone, didn’t militate for one position over the other. In my mind, this verse had been defanged, and whatever Paul was saying for his time didn’t have to apply to today (again, ignoring context), and therefore it must not apply.
Of course that last clause is the logical failure. I took the shortcut; I looked for one chink in the armor, not realizing that I had built a strawman, and having successfully set it on fire, I felt like I had really come to grips with this problem. I told people that I had wrestled with the deep things of Scripture, and plumbed the depths of Greek grammar, and found that once again, most of the church was wrong and we were right. And at this point the founding teacher, who had taken a back seat for a while as we had this controversy, stepped in and pointed out in Concordant (whose translations are questionable; remember, they believe that all people will be saved, based on their questionable interpretations of Greek mostly) that they translate the passage hyperliterally as “I do not permit a woman to teach yet.” The “yet” isn’t in the Greek, but in certain contexts one could provide that word to amplify a subtlety in the conjugation of the verb. I would not say that this was one of those times, but suddenly, I felt a surge of confidence which I had never felt before. These Greek experts (they had to be experts, after all, they had published books about Greek in the New Testament, which my teacher the Greek expert had recommended) had corroborated what I had found through independent research. I could understand the original languages, without learning to read them, but relying on the computer programs and my research methods.
The detractor eventually insisted on more Sacred Name nonsense (railed on us for not switching to “Yehoshua”-brand Messiah and leaving behind our old anti-God “Yeshua” claptrap), and told us that the original Jewish calendar was solar, because it said so in Jubilees, and we could never really understand prophecy if we didn’t understand the Jewish calendar (and on that last point he was merely parroting what our teacher had been saying for years). We, in our turn, gave up on him. Some lasted longer than others; I hated the idea that this person, who I had considered a friend, could not be brought back into the fold, but on the other hand reading his emails sometimes made me feel like I was going to pop a blood vessel. (I believe I have that effect on some of you. Sorry.) I started to establish some friendly dialogue, heard from the teacher that our detractor had publicly predicted that Juan Carlos was going to be crowned King of Jerusalem by a certain time (to this day I don’t know if he actually said this or not), and when I asked him about it, he was very angry that I brought up such things. And that’s where it ended, with him.
The detractor’s name was Alan. Alan, if you are reading this… I don’t know how things ended up with you, or where you are. I hope you have broken out of the rut we were in, and found solace in sola scriptura and Jesus Christ. I hope you are getting something out of this testimony. You committed the unforgivable sin, you know: you went outside the circle to independently corroborate the things we were told, when we were warned over and over that there was a vast worldwide conspiracy, combined with monumental stupidity and the sheep mentality, that kept the truth about so many things in Scripture from getting out to the public. You were pointed out as an example of what happens when somebody goes out and believes the lie, but I knew, deep down, that you got into this mess because you wanted to be able to defend your friend, our teacher, when others pointed out his problems.
The last thing Alan said to me stuck with me. He told me that someday I would find out that our teacher didn’t really know Greek as well as he claimed, and that none of his work could be backed up with facts when he strayed from the mainstream. I never thought that would happen. But it did happen, over four years later. And almost no days go by where I don’t think about Alan, and continue to be surprised that, as far as the ministry was concerned, I became him.
