Paul’s Doctrine of Male Leadership

Let a woman learn quietly with all submissiveness. I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man; rather, she is to remain quiet. For Adam was formed first, then Eve; and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor.

1 Timothy 2:11-14

One of the few primary doctrines of the modern liberal worldview is egalitarianism, especially concerning male and female. In the culture at large it has been taken for granted that anything a man can do, a woman can do just as well. It has been the central theme of just about every Disney movie since the 1990s. Interestingly, it was not at first argued that anything women can do, men can do just as well. After all, no one was interested in making new humans or perpetuating much of a heritage. Yet even that has given way over the past decade or so, as we have a Supreme Court Justice who testified with a straight face that she could not define what a woman was because she was not a biologist. This is made even more curious when, during these same years, even biological differences are made a cultural construct so that gender itself may be malleable.

Evangelical Christians have the opposite problem—at least for now, since they are always a few steps behind the culture whose approval they crave—which is to affirm biological differences, yet hesitant to affirm differences that go all the way down to the soul. Study after study in the field of psychology would like to have a word though. It is a dark day in the intersection of religion and culture when modern psychology gets closer to the biblical view than the “conservative” church.

All of this forms our background when we come to the Bible’s teaching about the relationship between leadership and the design of the sexes. I say “leadership,” purely and simply, and not merely church leadership and home leadership. I say this because of what Paul says. He offers glimpses in a few places of his epistles, yet it is in the words of 1 Timothy 2:11-14 especially where we find the concise outline of his whole doctrine. In other words, here we find his reason for the command. There is nothing arbitrary about it. We observe an order in the passage, moving from the imperative to the argument, the latter of which is twofold.

• The Imperative from God

• The Argument from Essential Nature

• The Argument from Corrupted Nature

The Imperative from God

Before we get into the rationale for Paul’s doctrine, we must notice Paul’s command; and we must notice that Paul’s command is God’s command. Paul is merely the messenger. It is the reality of commands like this about subjects like this that have always caused liberals to show their true colors. I mean that literally in this case, because they begin to show us by color-coding the Bible between black letters and red letters—the red letters being the words of Jesus and therefore on a higher level of authority than the merely black letters. Usually, what that comes to mean is that, “Well, that is just Paul talking. It’s not Jesus!”

The fundamental problem with this is basic to the whole fabric of New Testament theology. If we think about it, it is also a fundamental problem for our knowledge of who Jesus is. This is the sort of thing that Christian apologists have to do in reasoning with both skeptics of the modern sort and with Muslims. We can know who Jesus is, what He did, and what He taught because of the New Testament. All of the words of the New Testament are relayed to us from the Apostles. Yes, even the red letters! They are the words of Jesus, but they are words written by the Apostles. We Christians have good ground to believe that these words were inspired by the Holy Spirit, but at no point in the New Testament do we come across words not written by the Apostolic writers. The implications for the divorce between red letters and black letters are now immediate and obvious. But what relationship did Jesus have to these Apostles, and especially to Paul? I would commend the reader to books such as J. Gresham Machen’s The Origin of Paul’s Religion (1921) and Richard Bauckham’s Jesus and the Eyewitnesses (2008) if they would really like to go deeper. Only a few verses will suffice for our purposes,

Whoever receives you receives me, and whoever receives me receives him who sent me (Mat. 10:40).

Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever receives the one I send receives me, and whoever receives me receives the one who sent me (Jn. 13:20).

But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you (Jn. 14:26)

And you also will bear witness, because you have been with me from the beginning (Jn. 15:27).

When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth, for he will not speak on his own authority, but whatever he hears he will speak, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. He will glorify me, for he will take what is mine and declare it to you. All that the Father has is mine; therefore I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you (Jn. 16:13-15).

I do not ask for these only, but also for those who will believe in me through their word (Jn. 17:20).

Whoever knows God listens to us; whoever is not from God does not listen to us (1 Jn. 4:6).

As in many other conversations, we must often take a step back and ask the person: Do you believe that every word of this book is the Word of God? Very often what we are dealing with is at least a functional unbeliever. Perhaps they are only parroting words about the divorce between Jesus and Paul. All of this to say: Paul’s words here are God’s word. God has given this imperative, which should not surprise us because, as Paul then argues, God has given us this design of male and female.

The Argument from Essential Nature

Paul grounds his imperative in a doctrine. The first part of that doctrine is an argument from essential nature, or, in other words, creation: ‘For Adam was formed first, then Eve’ (v. 13). What exactly does this prove? Elsewhere Paul puts a bit more weight on the point to show that this order was no coincidence. It was not random. “the head of a wife is her husband” (1 Cor. 11:2) Further down he says,

For man was not made from woman, but woman from man. Neither was man created for woman, but woman for man (1 Cor. 11:8-9).

The from and the for are related to each other by Paul. The first cause and the final cause are in perfect harmony. We will see it clearly by following the Genesis account.

From my Genesis 2 sermon about men, I argued that God spiritually wired men to work and keep the secular and the sacred in a distinctly masculine way. When I use the adverb “spiritually” I am deliberately claiming that God did not just wire men with a masculinity that is biological. The biological is the typology of the psychological—i.e., it is the outward sign of an ultimately spiritual nature that is uniquely masculine.

When we look at the text itself, we observe some crucial Hebrew wordplay. Specifically in the words, “the LORD God formed the man of dust from the ground” (Gen. 2:7). The word GROUND is used four times in verses 5, 6, 7, and 9. The Hebrew word Adam means man, and word for ground is adamah (אֲדָמָה). We also saw from a chapter before that the image of God is a glory-reflector. In mankind’s thinking, feeling, and doing, we do all of what we do because of what it says about God. That is what the action “glorify” means; and that is what the image of God does. But in 1:26-31 that was treated as a unity—man and woman together as “mankind.” When we come to Chapter 2, we see the diversification of the sexes, so that the masculine brand of the image of God seeks for glory in the cultivation of the ground—the shaping of things—because that is where he was taken from. That is the stuff that drives him.

So it is with the creation of woman in verse 24, that the poetry describes the action of verse 22, that the ishah (אִשָּׁה) is taken from the ish (אִישׁ). That is the other Hebrew word for “man” when treated in relation to woman. So, in other words, we have the same kind of Hebrew wordplay here with the woman’s origin as we had with the man’s origin. Now we can summarize the two. As the man was taken from the ground, made of its “stuff,” and therefore his nature is to seek for glory by cultivating things and defending that terrain; so the woman was taken from the man’s side, made of its “stuff,” and therefore her nature is to seek for glory by cultivating relationships and nourishing souls. Both are made, as images of God, to seek for God’s glory in either a distinctly masculine way or a distinctly feminine way. One does planet-moving, the other does people-moving; and it is no good to ask: Well, which one is where the glory is? God stakes His glory in both, and made you one or the other.

But this is the key to why men and women process all of reality the way that they do. And as we will see in Chapter 3, their strengths will be their weaknesses, and their blessings will explain their curses.

There are immediate implications of this argument from essential nature.

First, it implies that Scripture’s reasoning cannot be reduced to a concession to the fall. It is not a mere cultural norm, nor a “necessary evil,” much less a description of an abuse or disorder.

Second, it implies that such leadership transcends the church (and the home, which most complementarians would grant) and extends to all social orders which call for distinctly masculine leadership just the same.

This will also be instructive when considering the question of whether the office of deacon ought to be male-only, where some excuse themselves from taking a position on because it is not a teaching role, where Paul here specifies that the woman not ‘teach or … exercise authority over a man’ (v. 12). However, it is that latter half that calls attention to what an office is in this context. All teaching is an exercise of authority; but the converse does not follow: i.e., that All exercises of authority are teaching. It is precisely the exercise of authority as such that is “male-coded” as one might say today. It is not that leadership in this or that area happens to be male. Rather it is that leadership is an object with a nature, and its nature is distinctly masculine. That is what it means for the man to have been created “first.” It is not reducible to chronology, but speaks to ontology.

The Argument from Corrupted Nature

In Paul’s very next words, he turns from essential nature to corrupted nature, yet it should be remembered that both are of the universal human nature. What I mean is that what he says here cannot be reduced to a particular culture or historical period or especially not to church matters alone. As all mankind were in Adam and Eve originally, so all mankind were in Adam and Eve sinfully. So Paul adds, ‘and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor’ (v. 15).

This will explain three things about the fall narrative of Genesis 3: (1) Satan’s line of attack, (2) the man and woman’s particular responses, and (3) the man and woman’s particular cursed consequences. All three are gender-specific.

First, Satan’s line of attack was gender-specific. Eve was the first person to ever be counseled, “Follow your heart.” But it came in the form of deconstruction—first of truth, then of goodness. There was “Did God really say?” (v. 1) then “For God knows …” (v. 5). In other words, you can’t trust what He says and you want more than He gives. But in everything that could be said about the nature of the lie, notice that Satan made a bee-line for the woman and got underneath truth by getting to the heart of fairness.

Second, the first couple’s particular responses were gender-specific. And therefore, so are ours. An obvious question emerges: Where was Adam? The text tells us: “she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate” (v. 6). HER HUSBAND WHO WAS WITH HER. This is supported by the masculine plural participle (יֹדְעֵ֖י) that is used in verse 5, so the Hebrew carries the sense of “like gods [the two of you] knowing.” He became a pathetic, passive audience in the face of the most absurd delusion. You have a man silent by the woman’s side, and the woman taking orders for the man from a talking animal. This is a reversal of the hierarchy of Day 6. When man stands behind woman, mankind bows to the beasts.

Third, the first couple’s cursed consequences were gender-specific. And therefore, so are ours. Taken from the side, the woman is cursed in its fruit (3:16). Taken from the ground, the man is cursed in its fruit (3:17-20). To the woman: “Your desire shall be for [contrary to] your husband, but he shall rule over you.” The ESV’s rendering here is consistent with the two Hebrew words signifying a constant state. Those words are “desire” (teshuqah) and “rule” (mashal). They are used again in Genesis 4:7, when the Lord addresses Cain, it is not simply that the same two words are used. It is that they are used in the same mirroring fashion: “And if you do not do well, sin is crouching at the door. Its desire is for [contrary to] you, but you must rule over it.”1

No matter what one thinks about the ESV’s questionable word-choice from the Hebrew, the otherwise ambiguous “desire” cries out for explanation. This is a curse after all, while a wife’s original desire for her husband was and is a good thing. Perhaps it is up to the preacher (not the translator) to draw the good and necessary consequence of this as an undermining effort by the wife. It may be said that she does not mean to do so. Margret Thatcher did in the UK what no man would step forward to do. Indeed. When a man is at work, the woman must be the disciplinarian. All such points may be granted, and yet we forget about this sin what we are willing to accept about all others. No one, as C. S. Lewis famously pointed out, does a bad thing simply because it is bad. That is because of the more general point which we might tend to dismiss as “too philosophical,” but so it is that bad-ness has no being within itself. Hence there are only good things gone wrong. Consequently, when it comes to the pursuit of bad things,

The badness consists in pursuing them by the wrong method, or in the wrong way, or too much. I do not mean, of course, that the people who do this are not desperately wicked. I do mean that wickedness, when you examine it, turns out to be the pursuit of some good in the wrong way. You can be good for the sake of goodness: you cannot be bad for the mere sake of badness. You can do a kind action when you are not feeling kind and when it gives you no pleasure, simply because kindness is right; but no one ever did a cruel action simply because cruelty is wrong—only because cruelty was pleasant or useful to him. In other words, badness cannot succeed even in being bad in the same way in which goodness is good. Goodness is, so to speak, itself: badness is only spoiled goodness. And there must be something good first before it can be spoiled.2

So it is that Eve desired that which in a man was essentially good, but now, by corruption, was absent. Looking back into his side, she saw “what must be” and yet nothing at all, and so coveted its being. The lesson is not that the woman’s rush to the void is incomprehensible. It is perfectly natural—and yet, like other merely “natural” things in our fallen state, it is not for that reason good in itself. It is spoiled masculinity.

None of this stayed in the Garden. Paul spoke of those servants of the devil, that

among them are those who creep into households and capture weak women, burdened with sins and led astray by various passions (2 Tim. 3:6).

Much of the church and its parachurch institutions are run entirely by such captors of weak women, who are hardly men themselves. This is all relevant to Paul’s words to Timothy. He is giving his two leading reasons why these posts are not for women because women were not designed for these posts, or to even have any interest in them.

When there is “interest,” it is because a degenerate culture has made meaningless such things as commanding soldiers or preaching God’s word. The interest is aroused instead by a play-version of the genuine article.

Here we also distinguish between a general sense of “leading”—such as any person can perform in relation to other souls: giving instruction, caring for, protecting, and encouraging to growth—as opposed to institutional leading, which takes the head position as the master and commander of a vessel at war. Older siblings may and often must do the former; generals of men alone have an inkling of the latter.

I said about the essential nature that leadership is “male-coded.” In other words, leadership, at the institutional head level, is the kind of thing that, rightly viewed, essential woman would have no desire to exercise. The reason that Paul’s doctrine makes no sense to those for whom it makes no sense is because it has never been seen. Our world is broken insofar as men have abdicated and women have filled the void. This was so in Eden, and, since Eden was both the origin and microcosm of the world to flow from it, as a full organism from its embryo, all of the types have come off the same assembly line of that prototype.

It is leadership itself which is foreign because the great war in which leadership would direct participants is foreign to those removed from the field. From the bugle that Paul says gives no certain sound, no warriors can ever come together or really even be awakened from their spiritual pacifism.

Practical Use of the Doctrine

Uses 1-2. Instruction and Exhortation.

First, believe Paul’s doctrine without hesitation or apology. I said, When man stands behind woman, mankind bows to the beasts. You cannot reverse the orders of creation without unleashing hell upon the earth. When the Apostle Peter refers to woman as “the weaker vessel” (1 Pet. 3:7), he is speaking of the whole of the woman—body and soul—as we have seen, and not simply the body. The task here was not deadlifting in the Olympics or even acting as a Secret Service agent. The task here was repelling the lie which is the fountainhead of bodily bloodshed. So when Paul says, “but the woman was deceived” (1 Tim. 2:14) and when the prophet threatens Israel that “women rule over them” (Isa. 3:12), the issue is not IQ or some other absence of honor fitting to her glory-seeking for God.

The issue is what we have been seeing. God made men to stand at the door and at the gates against the serpent and his servants; and accordingly, God designed men’s soul to think about these things all the time.

Second, get back to the front door (the front lines)—stand in between the serpent and the flock.

Not coincidentally, when we abdicate that ground, we spend our time on activities that are like play-versions of this spiritual war, whether it be binge-watching sports, playing video-games, fighting on social media, or embracing a form of politics that is like a distant big-stage version of WWF wrestling. So that even the more serious civic interest remains characterized by passivity and performative gestures by those heroes put forth by democratic means. Therefore, the action item is simple here: Reject the bread and circuses of Babylon’s spiritual gender transitioners. Put the fake war down. Get back to the front door, or the gates of the city—in your home, your local church, and the public square.

Third, do not divorce the front lines of your church from the front lines of your nation.

Distinguish, yes—but don’t divorce them. Who will prepare men to battle out in society in a righteous way? James tells us that “the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God” (Jas. 1:20). There is a time and place for anger, as Paul says to the Ephesians (4:26), but it must be an anger that is characterized by righteousness in several different ways, and that requires theological informing, since righteousness is first and foremost an attribute of God, and, secondarily, communicated to man. It is true that theology is not politics and politics is not theology, but it is equally true that (as we are learning in Junius’s book) that the theologian informs the political realm by general principles. The nature of righteous anger is such a general concept that requires theological definition.

I saw a woman in one of the videos coming from the invasion of Ireland. She was on top of a park bench with a megaphone. She spoke with courage and fierce determination to the effect that she and the crowd of natives there with her would not be surrendering their country to the Muslim armies or to that fake government that is ushering them in, leading them to the kill. I do not fault her so much as the men who created the void on that empty bench. They should have been there before her. I do not fault her for the same reason I do not fault Deborah, who had the good sense in the book of Judges to defer to Barak for the actual command of the armies. Nevertheless, many such benches and many such megaphones are still void of a man. So it was first in our pulpits.

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1. It is important to note the claim here. When I say that the “ESV rendering”—which is contrary to, rather than desire for—is “consistent with 4:7,” I am referring to the idea or meaning of the terms in relationship to each other, given the larger context. I am not arguing that this word is the best representation of the Hebrew. The case against the ESV’s latest word choice may be sound and yet my larger point still stand. That is why sermons are engaged in exegesis after all. We move from words, as signs, to things, to channel Augustine in On Christian Doctrine.

2. C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 50.