(Tim) In another post, I commended this post on Doug Wilson's blog in which he hammers home the necessity of always keeping front and center God's order of creation as we deal with questions of women in leadership outside the church and home.
Under that post, one reader asked:
Given the Creation Order, (correct my logic if I am wrong) we see that woman is to always be under some male authority, as the man is to always be under Christ's authority.
To which I responded: This is the dividing point between some of us. I do not believe that Scripture teaches that a woman must always be taken under the authority of a man...
Many have accused me of holding this, but I do not. Scripture teaches the order of creation, but not the necessity of every single woman being submissive to every single man, nor of her needing to find a particular man to be submissive to so she isn't left in the submissive-to-every-single-man position.
On the other hand, it is proper, and has always been the case, that the wedding ceremony transfers authority from household to household as the father answers the timeless question concerning his permission, "Who gives this woman to be married to this man?"
In our church, we have many, many single women and we've never suggested any of them have a biblical obligation to find some older man to submit to. They, like the men, are under the authority of the elders, and that's what Scripture commands. Not that in addition to the elders, they find someone else for more temporal matters.
But this is not to say that, if their father is dead and they have no older brother or husband, they need to have elders make the decisions for them their father would have made when they were younger and in his household.
Many of these issues arise because, living in an authority-hating society, we have lost the ability to think in a healthy or organic way about these things. So instead, we tend either to be rebellious or rigidly obtuse.
The normal life state of both men and women who are single is that they are safe living alone, and when they have need of input in regular life situations, they go to friends, older or younger, to get their counsel. Sometimes, when it's a question of whom they should marry, they may make a formal request of an older Titus 2 woman to second-guess their heart's desire; and the Titus 2 woman may call in her husband to examine the man and see what he thinks about him.
You can imagine how this and many other situations may play out. But again, the thing I want to emphasize is that a healthy view of authority errs neither in rigidity nor laxity.
Keep in mind in this connection that one reason I think it unwise to try to replace fathers and husbands in the life of a single woman on any formal basis is the extreme danger male-female relationships always have that emotional intimacy will lead to emotional, and then physical adultery. We must be very careful as to how we handle relationships between men and women who are neither married nor related by blood.
With absolute purity, as the Apostle Paul puts it to Timothy.
I can't engage in a long discussion of this, I'm sorry to say, but your questions are very good ones and I hope others will join in with their thoughts--especially if they disagree with what I've written.
