He must also have a good reputation...

Here's a story that I first learned about on Susan's blog. My wife will just love it: A Baptist 'church' in New York fired a female Sunday School teacher because they feel that the selected parts of the Bible that they like to read support their misogynistic and oppressive ideas.

Or as they put it, "...the church had adopted an interpretation that prohibits women from teaching men."

Same thing.

The Sunday School teacher in question, Mary Lambert, had taught at this Church for 54 years.

54 YEARS! 54 years of unbiblical teaching were going on in this church and no one bothered to notice?

Right.

For their proof-texted justification for such nonsense, they offered up 1 Timothy 2:12: "I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she must be silent."

These folks convientiently forget that Paul wrote to Timothy addressing a specific group of people in a localized area at a very certain point in history. Maybe the early Christians in Ephesus had a problem with this sort of thing - certain individuals overstepping their traditional boundaries, and maybe most of those people in that situation were women.

I can accept that.

That doesn't mean that Watertown, NY, some 2000 years later, has the same problem or needs the same solution.

I wonder if they give the same weight to the prohibition against women wearing "braided hair or gold or pearls or expensive clothes".

Or if they teach that women are "...saved through childbearing"?

Do they urge their members to "drink a little wine"?

Do they teach that: "All who are under the yoke of slavery should consider their masters worthy of full respect"?

All from First Timothy, by the way.

So which is it - literal or situational?

Do they forget that Paul also wrote to the Galatians that: "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus"?

And do they forget that Paul also told Timothy that church leaders must have a good reputation with outsiders?

Apparently so.