Your Daughters Shall Prophesy is less a book defending the ordination of women in the church and more a guide on how to fully implement women’s ordination and enable women to actually share true equality in leadership. Dr. Todd Korpi is currently serving as the Church Planting Commission Coordinator for OneHope and Lead Researcher of the Digital Mission Consortia at the Wheaton College Billy Graham Center. He is Assistant Professor of Christian Leadership at Fuller Theological Seminary and Adjunct Professor in theology and mission at Ascent College. Both Todd Korpi and his wife Tara have been pastors in Pentecostal churches that were considered to be egalitarian. Despite this, in practice they discovered that women still faced clear barriers to full participation in ministry. After a particularly difficult experience pastoring together in the same church, where Tara experienced gender discrimination from a co-pastor, Todd discovered that many women in egalitarian settings experienced similar things. Much of the material in this book is the result of years of investigation and conversations with women in ministry.
i think objections to the issue of male headship in the home has the potential to torpedo egalitarianism in the Adventist Church, even though, strictly speaking, egalitarianism in the Church is the Bible’s fundamental message…this is because male headship in the home is clearly taught in the Bible in both testaments, and even more clearly in egw…
this is not to say there is never crossover between male headship in the Church and home, as the Bible amply demonstrates there needs to be when male headship dominates society…but stripping a clear biblical teaching in order to facilitate a teaching that is less than clear to many isn’t a winning strategy, if the object is greater acceptance of ordained female ministry in our Church…
of course if the goal is the full suspension of gender in order to facilitate objectives that are widely believed to be unbiblical, all bets are off…there comes a point where there may no longer be value in appealing to the Bible for permission to implement anything in the Church…
The point where one realizes that the Bible can, and has, been used to “prove” all sorts of irrational and immoral things and therefore proves nothing.
This has got to be one of your most cogent points EVER…
When some use the Bible to “prove” their points it inevitably comes from a place of “interpretation” which, of course, they believe as universally correct and true. However, as you pointed out the Bible has been used to “prove” and justify all sorts of immoral and unethical things such as slavery.
The concept of spiritual progression/growth is usually lost on those raised in Fundamentalistic belief systems. “God said it and I believe it…and that’s good enough for me.” You must remember this musical phrase.
well, where the Bible has been abused, it certainly does invite the criticism that there is no value in the Bible, and that it should be abolished…but another solution is to implement a correct use of the Bible, one that is correct because the entire testimony of the bible is painstakingly taken into account…this is what this book isn’t doing…it’s deliberately dismissing husband headship, a clear biblical teaching, because it thinks it interferes with its egalitarian vision for Church life…
given San Antonio, and the vast amount of studying done on the subject of WO in its wake, the distinction between husband and male headship is now too widely understood for this book to be persuasive in many, if not most, Adventist circles…this is unfortunate…it’s valid egalitarian vision is going to be trashed because it’s going to be perceived as requiring the dismissal of clear biblical texts…this kind of error wasn’t necessary…the book could have established egalitarianism in Church life without diminishing husband headship, even where husband headship has been incorrectly realized and applied…
Just as anything can be said to be biblical, logic can be used to make the case for anything.
Thus human reason never proves anything and we are apparently left in a world of utter subjectivity and self-sufficiency, i.e., that learning to know one’s self is to know enough, no matter how incomplete that knowledge will always be.
I’m okay with that.
Many people aren’t.
Hence, the song we used to sing.
“Give me that old time religion.”
There is no evidence of any such thing, as noted above.
there actually are many clear biblical teachings…but if you don’t want to see them, because they don’t fit your narrative, you won’t see them…and you’ll see good reasons not to see them…
this isn’t true…an objective look at the Bible shows that definite teachings exist…the only people who won’t see this is the people who don’t want to…this is the case with other phenomena, like climate change and Trump crime…as Paul says, “Shall their unbelief make the faith of God without effect?”… wanting to see something doesn’t produce a reality as surely as not wanting to…these states of mind and the apparent realities they create aren’t interchangeable…
and why would i want something to be in the Bible that isn’t there…i don’t need everything to be in the Bible…in fact i don’t need anything to be there…i think people wanting to discredit the Bible have a much stronger reason to not see what is there, but also to see what isn’t there…essentially everything about the Bible militates against unbelief…a person who doesn’t have this unbelief has no incentive to adopt a mindset that distorts the Bible…but a person mired in unbelief has every incentive to latch onto anything that distorts or neuters the Bible, and ditto with egw…
There’s no such thing as an objective look at the Bible…or pretty much anything else for that matter.
While I have issues with Kant’s defense of religion, I don’t see that short of omnipotence there is any getting around his assertion that all human observations and conclusions involve an essential element of subjectivity and faith.
Why would you look for something that isn’t there?
I suspect this has something to do with a person’s desire to impose his judgments of others on someone other than himself.
For example, there is no mention of original sin, the Trinity, Jesus use of the word “Christianity”, nor any specific reference to EGW in the bible and yet you’ve argued that these are objectively biblical for motivations which are clearly your own.
prove it…this is your assertion, and it’s a bit self-serving in my view…obviously if you don’t want to believe the Bible, you will want to believe it can’t be examined objectively…
I don’t think that this is entirely true but it is completely necessary to know what you believe and how and why you do. This can shift and change as we mature and grow but this is part of being a human being.
i don’t agree that the burden of proof - for what, that the Bible can be objectively understood - is on me…i’m agreeing with the widely believed assumption that the Bible can be objectively understood (you may know that thousands of individuals complete PhD’s in biblical studies)…you’re disagreeing with this widely believed assumption, and introducing something foreign, and novel…therefore the onus is on you to prove your point that society’s collective understanding is wrong…
Beliefs and assumptions are the opposite of logical deductions.
Further, this holds true no matter how many people hold those beliefs and regardless of the education level of those who make the same assumptions that you do.
(Nice try, in attempting to cast me as the foreigner and novel outsider, though, as if I didn’t get enough of that growing up SDA.)
So again, I can’t prove you wrong because again that’s trying to prove a negative.
Whether you agree, disagree or just don’t like being required to think about it, the fact remains that when you make an assertion, the ball is in your court. So it’s still up to describe the process you’ve devised to rise above the well known limitations of human intellect and subjective bias in order to arrive at a truly objective perspective on anything, much less a tome as contradictory and confounding as the Bible.
it’s not a subjective observation that the default understanding with respect to the Bible is that it can be objectively understood…and it’s hardly only committed Adventists who believe this…you’re the one that’s saying this assumption is false…the onus is on you to prove it, which you’re showing you can’t, which in turn only strengthens the view that the bible can be objectively understood…
I’m convinced you have an evil, invisible, ignorant twin who posts comments under your Forum ID.
When you can prove this assertion false or wrong, I’ll get to work on proving that you-and whom ever agrees with you-are wrong about human objectivity.
