Questions You Must Answer if You Don't Let Women Teach Men

May 12, 2025

IN THIS ARTICLE: If we insist that Paul’s argument and application in 1 Timothy 2:11-15 are to all women everywhere because it is a “transcultural, timeless truth,” the argument opens a Pandora’s Box of problems for churches that wish to maintain this position.

For the last six weeks, we have reassessed 1 Timothy 2 and Genesis 2-3, finding no permanent restriction on women teaching the gospel to men or exercising leadership based on any transcultural principle from Eden.

If we insist that Paul’s argument and application are to all women everywhere because it is a “transcultural, timeless truth,” the argument opens a Pandora’s Box of problems for churches that wish to maintain this position:

First, if this is the case, why would God allow women to teach anyone, anywhere? Women teaching women would be the blind leading the blind, so you should interpret verses about older women teaching younger women in light of 1 Timothy 2. You should ensure that a male is present when the teaching is taking place so that Satan doesn’t easily deceive your older women into leading your younger sisters astray.

And your children are defenseless against the onslaught of potentially deceived women – why should they teach children’s classes? It would make more sense to let them teach men, who “are not deceived” and could quickly correct them as soon as they wander off course. Letting them teach women and children, unless perhaps male elders are always present to watch over things, is a recipe for disaster.1

But second, why would God let men teach? It is hardly better that Adam wasn’t deceived, but he sinned anyway. “Don’t let the easily deceived sex teach. Let the ones who sin deliberately teach.”

Third, why would God want women to teach from any source of knowledge? Contemporary evangelical church leaders often say, “Women can teach secular subjects; they just can’t teach men from the Bible.” The more hardcore, strident patriarchists are right to criticize this inconsistency.

Why could Satan only deceive women from the Bible? Can’t he deceive them even more thoroughly when they use psychiatry manuals or medical treatises? Science textbooks or accounting software? Why would you do what “soft complementarian” churches often do, restricting them from preaching sermons and Bible classes but letting them teach parenting techniques, how to manage your budget, how to overcome anxiety, and other subjects that fall under the rubric “How to live”? And why would we say our Christian sisters can teach these things as long as they don’t use the Bible to do it?

Finally, this reading of 1 Tim 2:13-14, which grounds the subordination of women to an ontological reality from the dawn of time, which they can never overcome, is nothing like “functional subordination” even though “functional subordination but ontological equality” is listed as a guiding principle of complementarianism.2

Some have tried to explain the functional subordination of women like this:

An attorney who is hired as an associate at a law firm has equal worth and dignity before God as a partner at the firm, but the associate is subordinate in role. Likewise, a woman has equal worth and dignity before God as a man, but the woman is subordinate in role.

But here is the rub: if associates want to be partners and are willing to work hard, they may become partners someday. People of all kinds can have many different “roles” throughout life. A subordination based on the way you are born, which can never change, is not a role. It is an inequality of being. It’s like George Orwell’s Animal Farm:

All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.

Which of these two examples is an appropriate correlation to the denial that any woman could ever teach a Bible subject to men?

A woman who tries to join the fire department but cannot pass the required standards, OR
A Black person who is refused admittance to a “Whites Only” restaurant?

A woman who wants to be a firefighter can train hard. It is less likely that a woman becomes a firefighter than a man because women tend to be less able to meet the physical demands of the job, but it can and has been done. A “Whites Only” restaurant will only ever admit people with white skin – there is nothing a nonwhite person can do about it.

If you can’t help being what you are (a woman, a person of color) and if inferiority of function flows from what you are, then make no mistake: you are inferior in your being. If you believe in the subordination of women to men, just substitute the word “woman” for “Black person” in any sentence you’d use to describe her subordination. How does that sound?

In some ways, indeed, men and women are not equal:

Only women can get pregnant.
Only women can nurse babies from their breasts.
Only men can get women pregnant.
Most of the time, but not always, men are taller, bigger, and faster.

These scientific facts have many implications for who spends more time at home, who spends more time with small children, who spends more time hunting, farming, defending the village, etc. But they have nothing to do with who can teach, administer, hear from God, and proclaim the gospel.

If all women were created with an inability to lead or teach, in the same way that all men are created with an inability to birth babies, then science would bear it out.

Yet in 2019, Harvard Business Review found:

women in leadership positions are perceived as being every bit as effective as men. In an analysis of thousands of 360-degree assessments, women were rated as excelling in taking initiative, acting with resilience, practicing self-development, driving for results, and displaying high integrity and honesty. In fact, they were thought to be more effective in 84% of the competencies that we most frequently measure ...3

To say that the subordination of our sisters is simply what God wants but isn’t grounded by what they are or what God made them to be (human beings, equal to their brothers before God) separates God’s will for them from his design of them. If what our sisters must not do is ontologically detached from what they have the gifting to do, this runs counter to the Bible’s teaching that what we have been given must be invested for kingdom purposes. (Matt 25:14-30; Rom 12:6-9; 1 Cor 12:7-11; 1 Peter 4:10-11).

More Questions We Must Answer

Should women on the church music team only sing backup vocals? Or not at all? Song lyrics have incredible power to shape us.4 Further, when someone leads others in song, powerful physiological, mental, and emotional changes occur within the group, enhancing psychological well-being and binding people together.5 This is the essence of leadership. And female worship leaders sing doctrinal truth over people, putting theology on their lips – theology that we recall much more readily than what we’ve heard from sermons.

Should you pull books by female authors from your church bookstore? Regardless of anyone’s theory on the authority of preaching, most people practically forget what you preach within 48 hours. They read their favorite devotional books repeatedly, dog-earing and highlighting them. Many Christians might say preaching is more authoritative than books; they’ve been conditioned to say this. But for those who like to read, printed words on pages are what they return to, time and again.

Or should you announce that only women are permitted to buy these books?

Or should you explain that it’s okay for men to buy these books, although you would never let women authors teach in person because of John Piper’s explanation:

Here is a truth. A woman saw it. She shared it in a book, and I now quote it, because I am not having a direct, authoritative confrontation. She is not looking at me and confronting me and authoritatively directing me as a woman. There is this interposition of the phenomenon called book and writing that puts the woman as author out of the reader’s sight and, in a sense, takes away the dimension of her female personhood.6

Are you okay with that statement? If not, do you care (and are you curious) if your pastor is okay with that statement?

Finally, should you pull all the songs women wrote from your catalog? As I said above, most people learn their theology primarily through music. Their favorite song lyrics shape and form them each day of their life. Their favorite songs are the words that drift through their minds as they approach death.

“Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine / Oh, what a foretaste of glory divine.”

A woman wrote that.

“Just as I am, without one plea / But that Thy blood was shed for me.”

A woman wrote that.

“Filled with wonder, awestruck wonder at the mention of your name. Jesus, your name is power, breath, and living water, such a marvelous mystery.”

A woman.

“I sing for joy at the work of your hands; forever I’ll love you, forever I’ll stand. Nothing compares to the promise I have in You.”

Still a woman.

These songs shape us. They teach us things about God and our relation to God. Should we pull all these songs from the church repertoire? Should we only allow them to be sung at women’s events?

These questions may seem absurd but if you’ve been tracking with the last several weeks worth of arguments you know that 1 Timothy 2:12 can’t be restricted to a woman standing in front of a group of men and women on Sunday in a church house, doing what we could consider to be “preaching a sermon.” I’ve submitted evidence that the prohibition is local and time-bound, and that the “created order” argument doesn’t make sense of Genesis. If it does, and if the prohibition is permanent and transcultural, then all the questions in this article are legitimate. And as I’ve said before, this is an area where the hardcore patriarchalists, as bad as their position is, are more intellectually coherent than the so-called “soft” or “thin” complementarians who restrict this passage to the Sunday sermon and perhaps Sunday School/Bible study groups made up of men and women.

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