ORDINATION OF WOMEN

Ordination of Women

Ordination of Women

Ordination of Women

The hottest debate among the Christian church in recent times is regarding the issue of the women's ordination (WO) as elders/pastors. The debate has been going on and it has brought a theological crisis that has long been ignored, if not denied. We will try to give here the pros and cons of the case from a neutral perspective.

Pros and Cons of Women Ordination

The conservative theological view against the concept of women ordination takes support from the absence of any biblical precedent for ordaining women, not only as priests in the Old Testament but also as apostles and elders/pastors in the New Testament.

The New Testament preaches that that the offices of both apostle and elder/pastor must be occupied by not just human beings of either gender but by males. While elaborating the qualifications of apostles and elders/pastors, the New Testament writers made it very lucid that such an office holder should be a man, not a woman. Had that been the case of equal opportunity for either of the genders, they would have used the generic term anthropos, a word that means human beings, either male or female, without any regard to gender. Instead of that, they used the specific term aner / andros, that means a male person in distinction from a woman, a person capable of being called a husband.

The book of Acts tells that shortly before the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, the 120 male and female disciples who were gathered in the upper room looked for guidance to find a replacement for Judas. Most importantly, they initially sought biblical guidance on whether to fill the vacancy (Acts 1:14-20). Both the 120 and Luke, the writer of Acts, realized the apostleship as an oversight office. the Greek term used in Acts 1:20, translated "bishoprick", "office" and "leader" (NIV), is episkopos, the word Paul used to describe the office of elder/pastor (1 Tim 3:1, 2; Acts 20:28; cf. Acts 20:17; Titus 1:5-7; 1 Pet 5:1-3 for the corresponding term presbuteros). The qualifications of choosing Matthias as an apostle in place of Judas can be noted:

"Therefore it is necessary to choose one of the men who have been with us the whole time the Lord Jesus went in and out among us, beginning from John's baptism to the time when Jesus was taken up from us. For one of these must become a witness with us of his resurrection.

It can be seen that why did the 120 men and women in the upper room appoint two men, and no women, as candidates from which to select an apostle to be added to the eleven? Whether there were no qualified women "who have been with us the whole time the Lord Jesus went in and out among us, beginning from John's baptism to the time when Jesus was taken up from us"? This obviously cannot be the case. There must be capable women among the 120 disciples, since all of them--male and female--were ...