84 FEMINIST VIEWS THAT UNDERMINE SCRIPTURE
ministries of women and their equality in value and dignity, but they do
not tell us that women could govern or teach a New Testament church.
But it is difficult to imagine that an egalitarian advocate could do
the same with passages such as 1 Corinthians 14:33-36, 1 Timothy 2:11-
15, the passages about male elders in 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1, and the
passages about the twelve male apostles. It would be difficult to believe
that an egalitarian could begin with those texts and reach the conclu-
sion that all roles in the church are open to women as well as men,
because these texts set a pattern that so clearly affirms the opposite.
I am not saying that we all should emphasize every verse of the Bible
equally. There will always be passages that a pastor will emphasize more
than others in his preaching and teaching. He will probably spend more
time teaching from Romans or 1 Corinthians than from Leviticus, for
example. But that is not because this pastor thinks that Romans is part
of a “canon within the canon” or that it has more authority than
Leviticus. It is rather because Leviticus was written to a situation we no
longer find ourselves in—the situation of God’s old covenant people,
who had to follow ceremonial rules and regulations. But the New
Testament epistles are written to people in the same situation we are in
today—members of the New Testament church who live after Jesus’ res-
urrection and before his second coming. Preaching from Leviticus is
worthwhile and is “profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction,
and for training in righteousness” (2 Tim. 3:16), but its application to
our situation is less direct and more difficult to understand, and it is not
wrong to give it less emphasis in preaching than many of the New
Testament books. This question of emphasis, however, is different from
an evangelical feminist claim that implies we can decide to be subject to
some parts of Scripture and not to others.
I am troubled by the evangelical feminist claim that it all depends
on what texts we choose as basic, because that suggests there are other
texts we can decide do not apply to us today and do not have authority
over us today. Once again, that position weakens the authority of
Scripture in our lives.
The egalitarian and the complementarian positions are not the same
in how they treat the texts they emphasize. Egalitarians wrongly limit
the application of male leadership texts by saying they don’t apply today
to the very same kinds of situations they applied to when originally writ-