The Weeks in Review (June 30, 2024)

1. The most significant event in my life these last two weeks was the tweet that went viral. Thus far, 153,000 views on Twitter and 826 shares on Facebook. I had been working on a Kingswood Learn course on women in ministry and leadership and jotted down my notes in that post. You just never know what's going to go viral.

Here's the post:
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I affirm women in all roles of ministry leadership on the following basis:

1. Women arguably play every such role in Scripture except one. That's the OT priestly role that Hebrews 7 says is definitively fulfilled in Christ (so doesn't apply to this conversation).

They are apostles (Junia), deacons (Phoebe), teachers (Priscilla), and arguably overseers and elders (Lydia, Priscilla, Nympha). They are supreme political and military leaders (Deborah) and the highest spiritual authority in the land (Huldah).

2. Theologically, women in ministry leadership reflects redemption from the Fall (a clear Christian and kingdom value) and is a natural consequence of the resurrection and Pentecost (Acts 2:17; Gal. 3:28). It also reflects the kingdom trajectory, where women are not "given" in marriage (Mark 12:25).

3. Counterarguments are either unbiblical or single-text prooftexts taken out of context. For example, the Bible never connects the question of husband headship to this question (thus those arguments are not biblical). 1 Corinthians 14 cannot be about ministry because it assumes 1 Corinthians 11 where women speak in prayer and prophetically speak in worship.

1 Timothy 2:12 is the only verse that even sounds like it would prohibit female leadership and 1) it is about the husband-wife relationship, 2) the verb authentein is strong and shouldn't apply to men or women in a marital relationship, 3) parts of the verse are unclear (women saved through childbearing), arguably cultural (birth order), and possibly situational (Artemis cult, false-teaching at Ephesus). In short, this verse is unclear and exceptional. You never base a theology on a single verse, especially when your interpretation would conflict with the whole tenor of biblical theology and practice.

1 Timothy 3 assumes that most overseers and deacons will be male (and they have been) but says nothing about precluding women as overseers or deacons.

4. Women have played leadership and ministry roles in the early centuries of the church (e.g., bishop as late as the 800s). The Wesleyan Methodist Church supported women's ordination as early as the 1850s.

5. It is the experience of thousands of women that they are called to ministry (which makes perfect sense). Be careful not to oppose God. Attributing to the devil what is the work of the Spirit is blaspheming the Holy Spirit.
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2. Because the tweet/post went viral, I quickly wrote up the innards of the argument, one of course that I have been refining for the last twenty years. Here is the book that resulted (picture above).

3. I did finish the microcourse on women in ministry leadership. It should be public on Kingswood Learn tomorrow or Tuesday (I'll try to come back and insert link). I'm the tour guide, but it features JoAnne Lyon, Christy Lipscomb, Carla Working, Miranda Cruz, and Katie Lance.

4. I finished a course for Kingswood Learn and Campus toward ordination, Wesleyan Church History and Discipline, featuring Bud Bence and Mark Gorveatte. It should be up this week as well, I think. You will be able to take it for free. It will be a modest sum if you want it for ordination ($350 Canadian, I think). Then an upcharge of $550 from there to get academic credit. This is the kind of thing I think colleges/seminaries should be doing to influence, get name recognition, and attract students.

5. I had a chapter in an Oxford book come out this week, "Hebrews -- Contested Issues." This article was finished about a year ago and commissioned about five years ago. It's my latest scholarly work. It represents the state of Hebrews research circa 2023.

6. Finally, yesterday was the Crossroads District Conference. Mark Gorveatte ran an extremely tight ship. A model for District Conference. 3 hours with a break.

7. This week I hope to finish a Theology of Holiness course with Chris Bounds. Would love to publish my own version, previously started and mentioned here as well.

The Week in Review (June 14, 2024)

1. It's been a tiring week. On Monday, a colleague and I traveled to Nashville and back to talk with a great church about some possible ventures. I met some people with some real spiritual charisma. They live on a whole different plane than I do. I often wonder what it is that sets them apart. Sharpness. Confidence. Obviously people gain insight and benefit from them and keep coming back for more. 

At the same time, they're really just ordinary people. They can feel intimidated too. Fascinating.

2. On Wednesday I flew to Florida to visit and help with my mother. 98 years old. But after Monday and getting up really early on Wednesday, I was obliterated. I return to Indiana this weekend.

3. I worked some this week on the side toward my publishing ventures. It's so difficult. Very discouraged again. I write and I write and it's usually pretty good stuff. But I just can't quite get over the marketing hurdle. What's more, I seem to get a lot of jeers from Facebook when I market broadly. A lot of negativity toward Christianity out there it would seem.

4. Meanwhile, I haven't crossed the finish line on Wesleyan Church History, Theology of Holiness, or the Women in Ministry Leadership microcourse. There aren't enough hours in the weekend to finish more than one if even that. I'll probably aim for the women in leadership one.

Good night folks. 

The Weeks in Review (June 8, 2024)

1. Two weeks have passed. All projects continue. Biblical Hebrew for the Novice is almost done. Finished editing the "Rural Church Ministry" microcourse for Kingswood. Almost done with Wesleyan Church History and Discipline and Theology of Holiness for ordination with Campus and Kingswood.

My cousin Carl Shepherd got married yesterday. Angie and I went to his reception. Saw old family acquaintances there, including two of my Shepherd cousins. Headed to Florida to be with my mother this week. May work a little on family history with her. Blogged through it once upon a time. She just turned 98 last month.

2. A couple deaths of significance this past couple weeks. Alan Miller, who used to do a lot of PR for IWU, suddenly passed. Good guy. Very loyal. Wrote a history of the Barnes presidency that was kept from publication because some thought it was too explicit about some people. I think it's sitting in the IWU archives. I hope it is eventually published.

This is a dynamic that is a little unfortunate. The real opinions and history of things sometimes dies with people because of the desire not to offend some of the living participants in such events. For example, I have strong opinions about the last ten years at IWU and Houghton that may not ever see the light of day because of politeness. I suspect I have been annoying with some of the material I've blogged about people like David Riggs, Kerry Kind, or Keith Drury but I have wanted to preserve my memories of them and events involving them.

Back when I blogged through the history of Houghton University, I stopped at President Dan Chamberlain. His was the second death of great significance these last two weeks. I believe his presidency overall was the high mark of Houghton's history.  As I posted on Facebook, I never met him, but I admire the accomplishments of his time there. Here are some of his accomplishments:

• Under his presidency, I believe Houghton solidified its identity as the Wesleyan Wheaton. It remains a quality academic institution today, although it has faced invasive cuts in programs and faculty these last 15 years. 
• He gave the campus its current look, building the Paine Science building, the Chamberlain classroom building, and famously moving Fancher Hall in 1987 to its current location after tearing down Gao girls dorm.
• London Honors and the Tanzania programs started under his presidency. The Tanzania program was ended my last year in town. London Honors thankfully remains.
• He significantly expanded the Buffalo program, which went strong under him. It moved under Dr. Mullin, and I believe has closed under Dr. Lewis.
• He brought Houghton to its now mythical 1200 enrollment. It hasn't come anywhere close for years. When I left, I believe it had experienced something like 12 years of consistent enrollment decline. I believe last year it managed to creep a smidge back above 800, which is where it was when I arrived before COVID.
• The death of six students in a car accident in 1981 left a lasting impact on the campus. A monument in front of the Campus Center remains to this day in their honor. 

I wonder if lessons for Houghton could be learned by examining his presidency. It's of course easy to Monday quarterback. It just seems like Houghton had a certain magic during his time. Those were the days of Tim Fuller, for example. He would have made a nice college president somewhere, I suspect.

3. It is interesting to watch the Global Methodist Church wrestle with the question of whether to put "inerrancy" into its Articles of Religion. The online journal Firebrand has had several position pieces. Almost 20 years ago, I blogged on the Wesleyan sense of inerrancy. The word entered the Wesleyan Methodist Articles in the early 1950s under the urging of Stephen Paine (former president of Houghton). That was the era when evangelicalism was strongly pushing the idea. It was not in the more revivalist Manual of the Pilgrims.

My own sense is that the term has a lot of epistemological baggage from the twentieth century. I prefer the Asbury/Lausanne wording that the Bible is "without error in all that it affirms." In my blog pieces, I argued that this is in effect what Wesleyans mean by the term. We've never defined it narrowly. In fact, it is very difficult to define narrowly because, once you get into the details, it gets rather complicated in its clarification.

The late Bob Lyon was asked to affirm inerrancy to work at Asbury. He initially resisted the term given the culture wars over such things that were going on in the 1970s. He was asked, "If it means this and this and this and this, can you affirm it." He said yes, but is that really what people are meaning by the term? That was enough -- they just needed him to say Shibboleth -- and they hired him.

I thought Collins had an interesting point about the Evangelical Theological Society in the piece I linked above. ETS is overwhelmingly Reformed and Calvinist. Many broader Wesleyan scholars who are orthodox believers and affirm the truthfulness and authority of Scripture are excluded because they do not feel comfortable with the term as ETS defines it. I myself have never joined because the feel of it has always seemed off to me as a Wesleyan. For example, it is a sea of complementarian men, with a fairly small number of women. It also has seemed for many years as if the main preoccupation of ETS is who to kick out next. 

In any case, I have had no trouble affirming inerrancy as a Wesleyan. We have never really fought over the term. The only ruckus over it that I know about is when a faculty member at Houghton was let go on the pretext of it in the 90s. That was one moment of Chamberlain's presidency of some interest. He was apparently a gentle soul, and he assigned a friend of mine to take care of the situation while he himself went off to China for a few months. The person he assigned to take care of it was eventually ousted by the faculty, perhaps in large part in revenge for doing the dirty work of getting rid of the faculty member.

4. In related matters, it would be nice to write a little book on epistemology before I die.

P.S. As a footnote, Jurgen Moltmann also died this week. He was all the rage among some of my friends at Asbury. He never gelled with me probably for several reasons. 1) I didn't speak his language and no one really translated him for me. If ChatGPT had been around, maybe I would have taken more interest. 2) he emphasized social action now in anticipation of the coming kingdom. That wasn't a page I was on in the 80s, I don't think. 3) He depicted the cross as the suffering of God. While I think the cross does show God's identification with human pain and suffering, I don't think God "feels" anything. Patripassianism remains a heresy for me. I remain a scholastic when it comes to God.