User20004000
Puritan Board Sophomore
I don't at all believe that the divine order for the church is opposed to nature; a convenient relationship to things that are seen, is fitting for things that are unseen.
On the other hand, I think that if God had ordained something quite extraordinary--such as, in fact he has done: bringing life out of death, for example, which is highly unnatural--for orderliness in his church, it would be our duty to "roll with it." Our attitude should then have been: "Whate'er My God Ordains Is Right." He has his reasons, even if they prove to be beyond our reckoning.
We attend Paul's reasoning respecting men (exclusively) leading in the church because he reasons there from Scripture, and not because nature is that which determines the case. Sometimes, commentators are guilty of conflating Paul's appeal to "nature" in the passage on head-covering (1Cor.11:14) with his normative statements about male leadership of the church. The two should not be merged, as if the one was informative of the other.
I’m eager to agree but I’d like to press just a tiny bit more.
You wrote and I agree, “I don't at all believe that the divine order for the church is opposed to nature...”
But my question is not merely whether the two are compatible (ie not in opposition to each other), but rather whether the created order as it relates to the sexes happily complies with God’s ordering of church and family government. In other words, I’m not asking whether church government as revealed in Scripture denies the created order, which we agree it doesn’t. Rather, I’m asking whether it is fitting that God calls men to be ordained as opposed to women. I think it is.