Biblical Eldership Church Leadership

Male Leadership

and will. Those who try to justify women elders find little help from the examples and teachings of Jesus and the Twelve.

THE MODEL OF MALE LEADERSHIP IN THE NEW TESTAMENT CHURCHES

The biblical tradition of male leadership continued throughout the New Testament era. Even a cursory examination of Scripture reveals this to be true. Nearly 70 percent of the New Testament was written by Paul, the great apostle to the Gentiles and the most dominant New Testament figure outside of Christ, or one of his intimate associates. In fact, all the Old and New Testament writers were males, as were the predominate characters in the Bible. For this reason, secular feminists find the Bible to be hopelessly patriarchal. Describing the patriarchal character of the Bible and the liberal religious feminists’ frustration with it, Cullen Murphy, a writer for The Atlantic Monthly, writes: With respect to issues of gender the Bible is also, of course, highly problematic, to use a word that no feminist scholar I’ve spoken with can help uttering in a tone of ironic politeness. . .. It is an androcentric [man-centered] document in the extreme. It was written mostly if not entirely by men. . .. In the Hebrew Bible as a whole, only 111 of the 1,426 people who are given names are women. The proportion of women in the New Testament is about twice as great, which still leaves them a small minority. ...There is no getting around the disturbing character, for women, of much of the Bible, short of an interpretive reading...that may represent, something of a stretch—short of what one biblical scholar has called an act of “hermeneutical ventriloquism.”2 So it comes as a mind-jolting shock, after nearly two thousand years of agreeing that Paul (and Jesus) restricted women from elder ship, that many Bible-believing Christians and scholars today claim the New Testament and Paul to be egalitarian. This viewpoint is often called Biblical Feminism or Egalitarianism, meaning that men and women are fully equal and that the New Testament does not teach

55