Dear Reader,

One of the clarion calls of the Protestant Reformation was that Scripture alone is the ultimate authority for matters of life and godliness. This doesn’t imply some sort of reductive biblicism that rejects the value of creeds for helping us understand the historical teaching of Scripture. Yet it also doesn’t mean that external sources are necessary for arriving at faithful Christian doctrine.

However, recent evangelical debates over justification and the ordination of women as pastors have increasingly included appeals to extrabiblical sources as necessary tools for interpreting Scripture.

In debates about the ordination of women, increasing weight is being given to the idea that Paul, in his letter to Timothy, is primarily resisting women caught up in the Ephesian cult of Artemis. If his notoriously challenging phrase “Yet she will be saved through childbearing” (1 Tim. 2:15) is a direct reference to a local controversy, then Paul’s prohibition against women teaching might have applied only to certain local women. Thus, when Paul writes, “I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man” (v. 12), some argue that statement doesn’t necessarily apply broadly to contemporary Christians.

The argument that Christians must permit women to teach authoritatively within churches is being advocated on extrabiblical data. And, notably, it’s data that we don’t have evidence for within Scripture. Paul never mentions Artemis (a figure who likely figured prominently within his memory, see Acts 19:23–41) as a basis for doctrine anywhere in his extant letters.

In Preston Sprinkle’s book From Genesis to Junia, he announces his shift from complementarian to egalitarian. He states, “I don’t believe 1 Timothy universally excludes all women from positions of teaching and leadership over men.” Though he speaks extensively about the Artemis cult, he also claims that his “exegesis of 1 Timothy 2:8–15 rests primarily on the text itself, not on the cultural context surrounding Artemis.” That’s an important claim that fits well within an affirmation of sola scriptura.

Nevertheless, it’s worth pondering why such a supposedly natural reading of the text has been largely absent from the historical Christian witness on gender roles. Why has Paul’s alleged focus on the Artemis cult become a prominent theme for interpreting 1 Timothy in the last half-century? It seems likely that it’s part of a larger trend among egalitarians, as Tom Schreiner notes in his review, “to appeal to matters not stated or found in a text to overturn what the text actually says. An extratextual feature, never seen before in history, suddenly becomes the lens by which the text is read.”

Protestants should readily affirm Scripture’s sufficiency and be willing to follow where Scripture leads, even when it raises questions about traditional views. Yet we should be careful not to dilute our emphasis on the role of Scripture alone as the norming norm for all Christian doctrine, even when those doctrines run against cultural currents.

Happy reading!

Andrew Spencer

Associate Editor