John Mark Hicks

This is one meditation from the published book by John Mark Hicks, Around the Bible in 80 Days: The Story of God from Creation to New Creation (Abilene: Leafwood Press, 2022).

These are brief: one tidbit each from the Hebrew Bible, the writings of the New Testament, and from the history of Churches of Christ.

Hebrew Bible

Psalm 68 celebrates the movement of Israel from Egypt (v. 7) to Sinai (v. 8) and then victory in Canaan (vv. 9-14) whereupon God ascends to the throne on Mount Zion (vv. 15-18).

Paul uses Psalm 68 to describe the ascension and enthronement of Jesus in Ephesians 4:8. Jesus, released from the grave, ascended to the throne and gave gifts to the church through the pouring out of the Holy Spirit.

Psalm 68:11 reads: “The Lord gives the command; great is the company of those who bore the tidings.” In the ancient Greek translation, the word “bore the tidings” is the same word as in the New Testament that describes “preaching the gospel” (euaggelizomenoi). They preached the good news.

In Hebrew, unlike in the Greek translation, that word is feminine. In other words, the Psalm envisions a great company of women who declare the good news! In the light of Paul’s application of Psalm 68 to the ascension of Christ, we may hear an echo of the gifting of women to preach the gospel.

New Testament

Why did Jesus choose only male apostles? This is a good and important question.

It seems rather obvious that twelve is a number that reflects Israel’s twelve patriarchs, the twelve sons of Jacob. Twelve male apostles underscores continuity with Israel and also the renewal of Israel.

The twelve apostles were free Jewish men, and the apostleship before Pentecost was limited to those categories. However, Pentecost changed this. While the twelve retained a unique honor in the Christian community, after Pentecost the gifting of apostles, prophets, and evangelists (preachers of the gospel) also extended to slave as well as free, Gentile as well as Jew, and women as well as men. The pouring of the Spirit in Acts 2, in fulfillment of Joel’s prophecy, enlarged the community of gifted leadership from free Jewish men to even enslaved Gentile women.

The gifts given to the church in Ephesians 4 include apostles (Junia was an apostle, Romans 16:7), prophets (Philip’s daughters were prophets, Acts 21:9), and women preached the gospel (the men and women who were scattered went preaching the word, Acts 8:2-4).

Pentecost shifted the dynamics. Those once excluded were now included, and those once unchosen were now chosen. Slaves, Gentiles, and women were now empowered and gifted to participate in the mission of God.

History

C. R. Nichol, a renowned and beloved conservative among Churches of Christ, published an important book in 1938 entitled God’s Woman.

Nichol advocated for female deacons from 1 Timothy 3, underscored that women prayed and prophesied (taught!) in the public assembly of the church in 1 Corinthians 11, and affirmed that women have the right to teach men in a Bible class when the church gathered. While he also taught a kind of patriarchy, he did not believe this eliminated the female voice from the assembly or excluded them from teaching men.

His book, with a few exceptions, was well-received. But its views did not win out in the end, and most Churches of Christ silenced the female voice in the assembly and in teaching men (including, teaching eleven year old baptized males).

This is one meditation from the published book by John Mark Hicks, Around the Bible in 80 Days: The Story of God from Creation to New Creation (Abilene: Leafwood Press, 2022).

Title: Searching for the Pattern: My Journey in Interpreting the Bible.

It is available on Kindle or in Paperback.

In this book, John Mark Hicks tells the story of his own hermeneutical journey in reading the Bible. Lovingly and graciously, he describes his transition from a “blueprint hermeneutic” to a theological one. Some suggest that moving away from a patternistic command-example-and-necessary-inference approach for understanding what God requires leaves no other alternative, or at least none that both respects biblical authority and seeks to obey the gospel of Jesus the Messiah.

In Searching for the Pattern, John Mark offers just such an alternative. His theological hermeneutic is deeply rooted in the way the Bible presents itself as a dramatic history of God’s plan to redeem the world as well as his own experience of growing up among Churches of Christ. Seeing the gospel of Jesus as the center of the biblical drama reorients us to what provides our Christian identity and unites us as disciples of Jesus.

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I pray this book is received with open hearts and open minds because I believe this work could go a long way in helping to bring unity to our fractured fellowship. 

—Wes McAdams, Preaching Minister for the church of Christ on McDermott Road, Plano, Texas

This excellent book helps us understand the inner workings of Bible interpretation among Churches of Christ and provides a persuasive proposal for Bible interpretation that is built on the story of God we find in Scripture—a story into which God calls us.

—James L. Gorman, Associate Professor of History, Johnson University
Knoxville, Tennessee

Finally, a trellis across the chasm! Throughout this book, Hicks does not compromise his high regard for both the church and the Scriptures; and through the grace found therein, he composes this urgent invitation back to the Table, where obedience cooperates with mystery, and we—estranged or conflicted—can find our place as one within God’s magnificent story.

—Tiffany Mangan Dahlman, Minister at Courtyard Church of Christ,
Fayetteville, North Carolina

John Mark Hicks is Professor of Theology at Lipscomb University in Nashville, Tennessee. He has taught for thirty-eight years in schools associated with the Churches of Christ. He has published fifteen books and lectured in twenty countries and forty states and is married to Jennifer. They share six children and six grandchildren.

These are brief: one tidbit each from the Hebrew Bible, the writings of the New Testament, and from the history of Churches of Christ.

Hebrew Bible

Miriam was both a prophet (Exodus 15:20) and a leader (Micah 6:4). She was one of the three people (along with Moses and Aaron) God sent to lead Israel out of Egypt and through the wilderness (Micah 6:4). In addition, she served another role as well:  worship leader.

Once Israel crossed the sea and the Egyptian army was destroyed, Miriam took her tambourine and, with other women, played and danced before the Lord. And “Miriam,” the Bible says, “sang to them.”

Our English translations do not typically specify to whom the “them” refers. Most English readers, in my experience, presume it refers to the women. But the Hebrew text is clear: “them” is masculine. Miriam sang to the men (probably the whole congregation). In other words, Miriam led Israel’s first communal worship after the Exodus. Israel’s first worship leader was a woman!

New Testament

Eve is only named in two passages in the New Testament: 2 Corinthians 11:3 and 1 Timothy 2:13-14. In both passages Eve is mentioned because she was deceived.

Because Eve was deceived, some have thought women are more easily deceived, perhaps due to their supposed emotional nature, natural instability, or weaker mind. But Paul offers no reason for why Eve was deceived; male interpreters have invented these dubious rationales.  In my experience men are deceived as often as women. In fact, the Bible regularly warns everyone about deception (e.g., Ephesians 5:6). Further, we might even say, Adam was weaker because he ate the fruit even though he was not deceived.

Paul uses Eve as a typology of deceived people. In 2 Corinthians 11:3 whole groups of people (men and women) were deceived like Eve. In 1 Timothy 2:13-14, Eve represents the women in the Ephesian congregation who had been deceived by false teachers. She illustrates the danger present when deceived women lead or teach. That same danger is true for men as well, but the specific situation in Ephesus involved deceived women—some had already been captured by Satan (1 Timothy 5:15). Paul is neither describing every woman nor the nature of women but identifying one woman from the Biblical story who was deceived in order to highlight the local problem in Ephesus. It is not a universal statement about women.

History

Daniel Sommer (1850-1940) was a leader in the conservative wing of the Churches of Christ. In fact, some believe he was the major force in the division of Churches of Christ from the Christian Church through his participation in the Sand Creek Address and Declaration in 1889. Those congregations announced their separation from other congregations who practiced “innovations and corruptions.”

At the same time, Sommer advocated for the “privileges” of women to participate in the public worship assemblies of the church. Though he was not egalitarian (e.g., he did not believe they should preach or rule as elders in the church), he encouraged women to lead prayer and read Scripture in the public assembly. Moreover, he encouraged women to “exhort” the congregation in the public assembly. “If a sister in good standing,” he wrote, “wish to arise in the congregation and offer an exhortation it is her privilege to do” (Octographic Review 44.34 [1901] 1). Apparently, such a practice was not an innovation.

Typically, Churches of Christ do not permit any audible participation of women in the public assembly except singing and their good confession at baptism (or perhaps the occasional “amen”), but it has not always been so among us.

These are brief: one tidbit each from the Hebrew Bible, the writings of the New Testament, and from the history of Churches of Christ.

Hebrew Bible

In Genesis 4:1, Eve explodes on the scene East of Eden as one who is already subverting the “man will rule over the woman” script of Genesis 3:16. She names a man!

Eve produced (qanah) a man (ish) with the help of Yahweh. Cain (qayin) is the noun form of qanah, and he is called an ish rather than a child, or a human, or a boy. Eve gave birth to a man, and named the man. Just as Adam named the woman (ishah) “Eve” after God questioned them in the Garden, now Eve names a man (ish) whom she has brought into the world with the help of Yahweh.

This anticipates Paul’s point in 1 Corinthians 11:11-12 where he recognizes the mutual reciprocity between male and female rather than the domination of male over female: “in the Lord, woman is not independent of man nor man independent of woman for just as woman came from man, so man comes through woman; but all things come from God.”

New Testament

In Christ, Paul writes, there is neither Jew nor Gentile, and there is neither slave nor free. Then he also adds a third pair: there is neither male and female. There is no “nor” as in the first two pairs but the conjunction “and.” Why the difference?

Paul writes “male and female” (arsen kai thēlu), which is the precise language that appears in the ancient Greek translation of Genesis 1:27. This is not typical language for Paul who only uses “female” in Romans 1 and nowhere else. He drew it directly from the Genesis 1 creation account. In other words, Paul recalls the creation of humanity as male and female.

This appeal to creation is important because what Paul describes as “in Christ” is part of the “new creation” (Galatians 6:15). This new world renews the partnership of the original creation when “God blessed them” and told “them” to co-create and co-shepherd God’s good creation. In other words, the equality and partnership envisioned in Genesis 1:26-28 is renewed in the new creation.

History

In the nineteenth century, many leading teachers among the churches of Christ believed that 1 Timothy 2:12 had universal application. It was not limited to the assemblies of the church but applied to the whole of society. Consequently, 1 Timothy 2:12 was used to deny women the vote, oppose public speaking by women in any social situation, and reject any kind of public leadership on the part of women.

If the traditional interpretation is correct, they had a point. If the prohibition of 1 Timothy 2:12 is rooted in some kind of “order of creation” (a kind of primogeniture), then it applies universally—whether in the assemblies of the church or in political assemblies. Whatever is rooted in creation applies to every aspect of human life.

It would seem a consistent application of 1 Timothy 2:12—if one thinks this contains a timeless prohibition—excludes women from any public leadership or authority, whether in the church or in society. That is how our “forefathers” read it until women were given the right to vote, hold political office, sit on juries, and become Presidents of universities. Then, we no longer believed that, adjusted our interpretation, and decided that the text only applied to assemblies of the church while continuing to ground the prohibition in some kind of “creation order.”

This is one meditation from the published book by John Mark Hicks, Around the Bible in 80 Days: The Story of God from Creation to New Creation (Abilene: Leafwood Press, 2022).

This is one meditation from the published book by John Mark Hicks, Around the Bible in 80 Days: The Story of God from Creation to New Creation (Abilene: Leafwood Press, 2022).

This is one meditation from the published book by John Mark Hicks, Around the Bible in 80 Days: The Story of God from Creation to New Creation (Abilene: Leafwood Press, 2022).

This is one meditation from the published book by John Mark Hicks, Around the Bible in 80 Days: The Story of God from Creation to New Creation (Abilene: Leafwood Press, 2022).