Biblical Eldership Church Leadership

Notes

bands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself up for her.” The Christian husband’s leadership authority, then, is to be characterized by Christlike love and sacrifice on behalf of his wife’s physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being. Knight III, Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, p. 176. Stephen B. Clark, Man and Woman in Christ (Ann Arbor: Servant, 1980), p. 630. Many sound Bible commentators believe that 1 Timothy 3211 refers to women deacons who serve women: “Women, must likewise be. dignified, not malicious gossips, but temperate, faithful in all things.” This is a highly debatable text. I understand these “women” to be wives who assist their deacon husbands. But even if they are women deacons, they hold an of fice of mercy ministries, not one of governance and teaching. Thus women deacons would not violate Paul’s restriction against women teaching and leading men. George W. Knight III, The Pastoral Epistles, The New International Greek Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1992), p. 141,142. Ibid., p. 139. S. Lewis Johnson, Jr., “Role Distinctions in the Church: Galatians 3:28,” in Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, p. 164. David Gooding, “Symbols of Headship and of Glory,” in Bible Topics, 3 (Belfast: Operation O.F.F.E.R., n.d.), pp. 3,4. For many twentieth-century people, the word subordination (or submis sion) has become a repulsive term that connotes inferiority, weakness, inequality, slavery, and oppression. This is unfortunate because subordi nation is actually a positive term. It primarily describes the way a rela tionship is ordered. Stephen B. Clark clarifies this point: Neither “inferiority” nor “equality” have any conceptually neces sary link to “subordination” unless the terms are defined with such a link. The head and subordinate can both be of equal worth and value. In fact, they can be equal in many other ways, and still be in a relationship involving subordination. The subordinate can even be of greater rank and dignity, as Jesus was in relationship to his parents. To equate subor dination with inferiority or inequality is either a confusion, or an at tempt to win an argument by defining the terms in a way that is advan tageous to one’s own side (Man and Woman in Christ, p. 44).

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Clark expands this definition of subordination in the following ways:

The English word “subordination” means literally “ordered under,” and its Greek counterpart means almost the same. The word does not carry with it a notion of inferior value. A subordinate could be more valuable in many ways than the person over him or her. Nor does the

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