On November 2, Geoff Patterson, pastor of the Forest Lake SDA Church in Florida delivered a sermon titled God’s Call.
In this sermon he discusses racism, chauvinism and women’s ordination, culminating with the fantastic claim that people who oppose female headship will eventually become anti-trinitarian. There will be a more in depth response to his anti-trinitarian accusations in a later article. Look for it!
The rest of his message is analyzed below,
17:30 - starts talking about race. Brings up an issue from 1981.
23:40 - says the church is subtly discriminatory
24 - His church is tolerant of musical forms. Tolerance is not good enough (Riddle Scale). Integration and acceptance are our goal.
Leadership in the church has shifted. Baby boomers have been replaced by the genXers. Millennials do not see reality like you do.
28:36 - WO "Our current debate reveals within us a chauvinism, that I never realized we had." Because Ellen White was a woman, we never had gender-exclusive theology." Never gender exclusive in our past theology. We had gender-exclusive traditions/proclivity, but never in our theology. These traditions came from the culture at the time.
As culture began to change, we looked at the issue of female elders, there was nothing in our theology against it.
30:35 - We went the next step--we decided women could be pastors. There was nothing in our theology against it. So it happened.
31 - Then the Holy Spirit began to bless the women equally in those roles. Just like He fell upon the gentiles in Acts 11. Asks audience if they can tell a difference between the spirit he has and the spirit of a woman pastor? Says women tend to be more spiritual. Says the Church subverted ourselves at the point of recognition, not at the point of participation.
32:17 - The reason we don't recognize women as ordained pastors because traditions die hard. Then those who opposed WO began to seek a theology that justified exclusion. (No, we sought to stop taking the Biblical distinctions between male and female for granted.)
32:50 - some went looking for a theology to match their predilection--they found it in male headship theology. (We didn't have to go looking for it, male leadership is in everyone's Bible already.) Just because we acted that way doesn’t mean it was part of our theology. We functioned that way, but not because of our theology--our culture taught us that.
33:18 - The male headship theology that SOME sought to embrace, they stole it lock stock and barrel from the fundamentalists. We are not fundamentalists--we interpret lots of things in Scripture through the whole of Scripture. But because we wanted to protect tradition, we took a theology that was foreign to us and tried to put it in our history. And its not there. And when we did this we adopted the eternal subjugation of Jesus to the Father, which almost always leads to anti-trinitarianism. (He has a difficult time explaining why some of the pioneers were ant-trinitarian--if this is a retrospective belief acquired from fundamentalism.
34:30 - if you’ve been around Conservative Adventism in the last ten years, you will have seen a rise of antitrinitarianism among them because of the inclusion of these doctrines which were never ours. You wont find the pioneers writing these things.
35:00 - to people of a certain age, male headship has the appearance of truth because it seems to mirror how we used to do things. Yet the fruit of this doctrine within us is not consistent with the notion of Jesus as mediator to us all, because it leads to this notion of males pushing women out, and they end up coming to the Father through their husbands. (this is a bold faced untruth)
36:16 - We have traditions in history that seemingly support the view that men are pastors and women are not but we never had a theology that taught that. In fact it was our theology that called into question our traditional behaviors regarding race. Our theology taught us that we shouldn't be segregating ourselves by race. It's the same thing regarding women. We cannot ever possibly justify a literal reading of Paul's words regarding women not teaching men, or speaking in church, and seek to justify the life of one of our founders--EGW.
38:00 - We don't believe that the literal counsel of Paul applies in our context. So let's stop pretending that it does. The challenge of having a high view of Scripture is the temptation to think that the points of specific clarity are the things that we should put as first importance. But the truth is the big picture principles are what is first importance, and it is through them that we interpret the specifics (Principle based hermeneutic).
When Peter reported what had happened with the gentiles in Acts 11, all they had was the Old Testament. What part of the Old Testament would suggest that it's ok for uncircumcised people to be a part of God's people. .?
Here's a warning to people 55 and older. The next 20 years will rock most of my traditions and forms. But I don't anticipate that these changes will have any impact on our theology. Is it possible that we can completely change the way we do things and not change our theology? Probably, yes.
To the people 55 and older, I say "We had a good run. But who knows what these crazy kids behind us are thinking. But if we don't throw them the keys, it will die with us.
Are we going to preserve our traditions or are we going to let God have his own way? What a tragedy if we lag behind where the Spirit has already gone.
My Response
Patterson introduces racial ethnicity into his sermon in order to try and manufacture a civil rights narrative for his Pro-WO argument. In my opinion this is a faulty association. One’s ethnicity is sacred, bestowed upon them by God. One’s gender is sacred for the same reason. If the assumption is “Ethnic and gender present no barriers to the economy of salvation, if one comes to Christ”, we agree.
However, God’s role distinctions in the Bible are also sacred, rooted in Creation and maintained throughout Scripture. A King wanting to become a priest or prophet does not qualify him for the office (1 Samuel 13), a woman wanting to become a preacher or pastor does not qualify her for the position (1 Timothy 2:12; Titus 1:5-9; 1 Corinthians 14:34-38).
Attempting to frame WO in a civil rights context, is a social justice/cultural argument not found in Scripture. Reality is, WO is not biblical — by authority of the aforementioned scriptures. Because of that fact, many modern AdFeminists turn to social justice/culture to try and make a case for WO. But God’s biblical role distinctions are sacred and cannot be wished away by human reasoning, or mingled with pagan cosmology.
Tolerance of all music. If you eliminate God’s distinctions between male & female, you are free to eliminate distinctions between sacred and profane music. Not only that, you will be required to integrate (promote) all music forms, not just tolerate them. This argument is also being used successfully in the pro-LGBTQ agenda (see Dorothy Riddle and the Riddle Scale). Surprisingly, tolerance becomes a bad thing in the new distinction-free pagan paradigm. You must accept and promote cultural sin, not merely tolerate it.
According to the new pagan cultural paradigm, if you tolerate homosexuals, you are homophobic. If you uphold God’s gender distinctions you are a chauvinist. Patterson’s charge that the SDA church is chauvinistic arises from his new distinction-free cultural worldview.
The claim that the existence of the prophetic ministry of Ellen White caused a void in the Adventist understanding of male leadership, is only partly true. Faced with the occasional accusation of fellow Christians that EGW was speaking in the role of a man, and was therefore unbiblical, the Church responded that while biblical prophets were predominantly male, they could be either gender in the Bible, and that we were within the bounds of divine instruction to recognize the messages that God gave her.
(Indeed, it would have been wrong to not accept God’s messages through her, just as it was wrong for Hazen Foss and William Foy to reject the calling. It is this author’s opinion that modern male proponents of WO have more in common with Foss and Foy than they do with Elijah, Moses, Paul, and Barnabas.)
This worked well, during a time when the culture was patriarchal in its impulses and macro directions. However, when the culture shifted dramatically under the onslaught of second-wave feminism in the 1970’s, the Church was caught without formal recognition of biblical male leadership because we had generally taken that for granted. The Bible didn’t change, but the culture did, and with those changes a vulnerability was exposed in the SDA Church. That vulnerability was twofold, a missing codification of the biblical principle of male leadership and various church members in leadership positions who were more attuned to our culture than they were to the Word of God. These were dumb dogs who failed to bark in 1975 (Isaiah 56:10).
When the annual council approved female elders in 1975, it passed for three reasons.
1. The Church was in the interstitial space between the former patriarchal culture and the full-blown swell of second-wave feminism. The brethren didn’t know what was coming.
2. The brethren failed to allow the Bible to guide their decision in this pivotal moment of inquiry. Some of them subconsciously assumed that since Ellen White was given messages for the Church, it must be ok. They forgot that the One who gave Ellen the messages also gave us the Bible and calls us to live by it (Matthew 4:4). They took the lazy way out—a lesson for us today.
3. It was introduced as a measure that would be used only in abstract examples, where no qualified men were available. What our leaders failed to make clear, is that the Bible withholds the office of elder from all women and most men.
Where were the visionary leaders crying out about the dangers of the door that the General Conference Executive Committee had just opened. They were mostly blind.
This led to the adoption of female pastors. Patterson is correct in his chronology, albeit incorrect in his interpretation of forces that motivated these unbiblical events. He sees them as a positive progressive move, the basis for a new hermeneutic. I see them as a negative progressive move, one that seriously undercuts Adventist faith in Scriptures.
Using Ellen White as a reason to ordain any and all women who ‘feel’ called is a very poor argument. It is akin to saying “Since Apollos was an eloquent and effective speaker, that means all men can be preachers, as long as they ‘feel’ called.” Indeed not. The position of pastor or elder is prohibited from all women and most men (Titus 1:5-9). Unless a woman demonstrates the same prophetic gift that Ellen White was given, it is futile reasoning to claim that because of Ellen White, modern woman’s ‘felt’ calling authorizes her to grasp a position that she is biblically restricted from. Unless you have the same calling that Ellen White had, this is incorrect association. If you do have the same calling that Ellen had, please make it known. Otherwise you are destroying that which is unique/special by making it the type of a plebian antitype.
Patterson makes the subjective claim that women are more spiritual. How does he know this? Does he sit in the place where he is all-knowing, “discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart”? Of course not, it is the divinely sharpened Word of God that discerns the thoughts and intents of the heart, and the Word of God has already given us the Father’s will for leadership roles in the Church, the family, and the home. Our challenge is to accept that instruction and humbly live by it.
Patterson claims that the biblical teaching of male leadership means that women are pushed out. This is simply untrue. It is the errant camel of female elders that must be pushed out of the Remnant tent; male and female have equal access to salvation through Jesus Christ. Striving for position and power that the Bible restricts will disqualify a person from heaven.
Patterson also says that the doctrine of male leadership means that women must come to the Father through their husbands. This is an untrue caricature of the biblical doctrine of male & female roles. I know of absolutely no one who is making this straw-man claim (except Patterson).
Women, like men, are saved by submission to the Lord, His Word, and His Spirit, — humbly accepting the Gift of Jesus through repentance. That saving relationship leads us to accept God’s ways in His Word, whether it aligns with culture or not.
Summary
Complementarian male leadership is not derived from tradition, as Patterson asserts, but rather from God’s biblical role distinctions in His Word.
Adventists did not borrow biblical male leadership from fundamentalism, we got it from the same place everyone else does—the Bible.
The notion that complementarian biblical role distinctions automatically lead to anti-trinitarianism is patently false. This argument comes—in part—from certain pro-WO enthusiasts at the Andrews Seminary, and is supported more by desperation than it is by sound biblical exegesis. Look for a thorough biblical treatment of this false notion in the near future on Fulcrum7.
Look around you, friend. Major changes are taking place that will render the Church and the world unrecognizable. On the one hand, there are tremendous destructive forces massed against the Judeo–Christian identity of the SDA Church, determined to bring it down. On the other, a revolutionary anti–Christian ideology which believes it can make all things new. An air of social revolution is blowing across the bridge to the twenty–first century.
As with all revolutions, the old (conservative) order of the Adventist Church has to be brought to its knees before the new order can take control. That is why WO is such coveted turf in the Church, it symbolizes the conquest of this new order over the old order. The spoils of this conquest are the rich Adventist storehouses of our heritage, health message, and mission. The new order gets to write their own ‘future’ upon a carved image standing on the Plains of Dura.
Each of us are saved by submission to the Lord, His Word, and His Spirit — humbly accepting the Gift of Jesus through repentance. That saving relationship leads us to accept God’s ways in His Word, whether it aligns with culture or not.
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