Rare are the instances when a denomination is faced with a watershed moment that will define its entire future for good or for ill. For the Southern Baptist Convention that moment is this week’s annual conference.
What’s at stake is whether or not the SBC will continue to carry the torch of biblical authority and inerrancy, or begin to travel down a path that leads to full-fledged apostasy. It will either stand on the rock of Scripture or it will be swept away by the same current that has carried Presbyterians, Episcopalians, and Methodists over the falls.
The issue is clear and unambiguous, the Scripture at stake is easy to interpret, and the choice is simple. It is a choice between the Bible and the world.
There is a movement in the SBC to select a woman as the next president of the denomination. Dwight McKissic, senior pastor of Cornerstone Baptist Church in Arlington, Texas, is promoting the idea, and specifically advocating the election of well-known Bible teacher and open borders advocate Beth Moore to the post (The Case for Electing Beth Moore as President of the Southern Baptist Convention).
From a biblical standpoint, this is a movement that should be firmly rejected, on the grounds that the plain meaning of 1 Timothy 2:12 forbids it.
Here’s how 1 Timothy 2:12 reads: “I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man; rather she is to remain quiet.”
Only an idiot — seriously, a bona fide idiot — thinks that the Bible is inerrant, but in the case of I Timothy it’s worse than that: A solid majority of scholars doubt it’s Pauline authorship.
The author of First Timothy has been traditionally identified as the Apostle Paul. He is named as the author of the letter in the text (1:1). Nineteenth and twentieth century scholarship questioned the authenticity of the letter, with many scholars suggesting that First Timothy, along with Second Timothy and Titus, are not original to Paul, but rather to an unknown Christian writing some time in the late-first-to-mid-2nd century. Most scholars now affirm this view. As evidence for this perspective, they put forward that the Pastoral Epistles contain 306 words that Paul does not use in his unquestioned letters, that their style of writing is different from that of his unquestioned letters, that they reflect conditions and a church organization not current in Paul’s day, and that they do not appear in early lists of his canonical works.
In other words, some Bronze Age anonymity had a bossy woman in his life — and women writ large have been paying for it ever since.