Just My Thoughts

Tonight brought up a whole lot of thoughts, some of which are connected and some of which are not. First of all, we've been talking about what the role of women in the church should be for the past seven weeks and for the most part, one point of view has been discussed. And the more we talk about the egalitarian view, the more it makes sense to me in the scholarly sense. But the more it makes sense the more I dig in my heels because the fact of the matter is that I'm not really comfortable on a practical level with women preaching. But even that practical discomfort brings up questions because I'm comfortable with Sarah and other women speakers in chapel...but chapel doesn't feel like church to me...but where you preach doesn't really matter....does it?

That's the kind of confusing thought process that I'm trying to straighten out in my head right now. And then there's the question that was brought up tonight about whether or not the role of women is essential doctrine. I'm going to say "no" on that one - that trying to call it essential doctrine speaks too much to an agenda, that if we try to call this essential doctrine we could, hypothetically, call almost anything essential doctrine. And finally there's my thoughts about the class as a whole. When I signed up for "women in the bible" I was thinking we would study the stories of biblical women and then draw interpretations from them, asking that essential question, "What is the Main Thing the passage is teaching?" Instead, we started with a very clear agenda and then looked at scripture with the lenses of that egalitarian agenda.