Women Teaching Men: Seminaries vs the Church

Conservative seminaries are training the next generation of pastors, and in some of those classrooms, the professor standing at the front is a woman. The same denominations that hire her to teach Old Testament exposition, systematic theology, or homiletics to men will tell their own congregations, a few years later, that a woman can’t serve as a teaching elder in those men’s churches. That’s not a small inconsistency to wave off.

If Paul’s words in 1 Timothy 2:12 mean what complementarian churches say they mean, why does the restriction disappear the moment you walk into a seminary building? This isn’t a question with an easy, tidy answer – even conservative theologians disagree on the matter. But Scripture does give us real categories to work with: what Paul actually restricts, what an elder is, what a deacon is, and where Phoebe fits into all of it.

What 1 Timothy 2 Actually Restricts

Paul restricts women from teaching or exercising authority over men inside the gathered life of the church, and he roots that restriction in creation rather than in a passing cultural problem at Ephesus.

Let a woman learn quietly with all submissiveness. I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man; rather, she is to remain quiet. (1 Timothy 2:11-12)

Notice what Paul does next. He doesn’t say this rule applies only during the Sunday service, and he doesn’t frame it as advice for a particular troublemaker in Timothy’s congregation. In verses 13 and 14 he reaches back to Adam and Eve – to the created order and to the way the fall unfolded – which is a strange place to go if the point were merely local and cultural. A few verses later, Paul describes the qualifications for overseers, and one of them is the ability to teach (1 Timothy 3:2). Put those two passages together, and a traditional complementarian reading comes into focus: authoritative doctrinal teaching and governance in the church belong to qualified men serving as elders.

Elders Govern and Teach; Deacons Serve

Elders and deacons are two distinct offices in the New Testament, and only one of them carries responsibility for teaching and governing the whole congregation. Paul lists elder qualifications in 1 Timothy 3:1-7 and deacon qualifications in 1 Timothy 3:8-13, and the difference between the two lists is telling. An elder must be “able to teach” (1 Timothy 3:2) – that phrase doesn’t appear anywhere in the deacon qualifications. A deacon must be tested, dignified, not greedy for money and must manage his household well … but Paul never asks whether a deacon can teach sound doctrine to the gathered church.

That distinction lines up with how deacons first show up in the New Testament. In Acts 6, the apostles appoint seven men to oversee the daily distribution of food to widows so that the apostles themselves could stay devoted to prayer and the ministry of the word (Acts 6:1-4). Most conservative scholars see this as the pattern behind the deacon ministry – practical service that frees elders to focus on teaching and prayer. Deacon work is real ministry, and Scripture takes it seriously. It’s also, by design, not a teaching office over the whole church.

Phoebe: Servant or Deacon?

Phoebe is called a diakonos of the church at Cenchreae in Romans 16:1, and whichever word your translation chooses – “servant” or “deacon” – nothing in the passage puts her in a teaching or governing role over men.

I commend to you our sister Phoebe, a servant of the church at Cenchreae, that you may welcome her in the Lord in a way worthy of the saints, and help her in whatever she may need from you, for she has been a patron of many and of myself as well. (Romans 16:1-2)

The Greek word diakonos is flexible. It’s the same root word used for deacons in 1 Timothy 3, but it’s also the ordinary New Testament word for a servant or minister, used of both men and women in plenty of places where no church office is in view. The ESV renders it “servant” here; other translations render it “deacon.” Regardless, the calling of deacons is to serve rather than teach.

No one translates diakonos in Romans 16:1 as “elder,” “overseer,” or “pastor.” Paul’s list of deacon qualifications a few chapters earlier also mentions “the women” in 1 Timothy 3:11 – a phrase scholars read either as the wives of deacons or as women serving in the deacon ministry themselves. Either reading asks the same thing of these women: dignity, self-control, faithfulness in all things. Neither reading asks whether they can teach the congregation. Whatever Phoebe’s exact title was, she carried Paul’s letter and served the church at Cenchreae. She wasn’t functioning as an elder.

Why the Seminary Classroom Deserves the Same Question

Several conservative, complementarian seminaries already employ women to teach men, and that fact alone should raise a question, if not a concern. Dallas Theological Seminary explicitly permits women to teach Biblical and theological subjects to men – Linda Liu serves as an assistant professor of Old Testament studies, and Kymberli Cook teaches in theological studies and counseling ministries. Southern Baptist Theological Seminary draws a tighter line: president Albert Mohler has said that professorships in Southern’s School of Theology are reserved for men who qualify for pastoral office, while women teach in the seminary’s other schools and programs (ie. music, children’s ministry, women’s studies, etc.). Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, led by Daniel Akin, falls somewhere between the two – its own faculty directory lists women such as Anna Daub, who teaches missions and supervises doctoral students in missiology, along with Kristin Kellen in Christian counseling, Kelly King in Christian ministry, and Amanda Aucoin in Christian history.

Three justifications show up again and again. Some argue that Paul restricts the authoritative teaching office of elder to men, but not all areas of instruction, so a professor without that office hasn’t crossed a line. Others point out that a seminary is a school, not a local church, so its classroom isn’t the “household of God” Paul has in view in 1 Timothy 3:14-15. Still others think the restriction is broader than either of those answers allows, and that authoritative theological instruction of men preparing for pastoral ministry resembles exactly the function Paul restricts, regardless of the building it happens in. Even Southwestern Seminary president David Dockery has acknowledged real disagreement among complementarians on this exact point, even where everyone agrees that the senior pastoral office itself belongs to men.

Here’s where I land, recognizing I could be wrong. A woman teaching Greek grammar, church history, or counseling technique to men isn’t exercising the kind of authoritative doctrinal teaching Paul has in view – that’s an academic subject, not pastoral instruction. And it is not overseeing a flock of lay believers or seekers as is often the case in a church setting. But a woman serving as the primary professor of Biblical exposition or systematic theology to men who are being formed for the pastorate is doing something that looks a lot like the thing 1 Timothy 2:12 restricts, even though she holds no church office. Changing the room doesn’t settle the question. If thirty men can rightly learn under a woman’s authoritative doctrinal instruction on Monday in a seminary classroom, a consistent complementarian needs a real answer for why those same thirty men couldn’t learn under the same instruction, on the same material, in a Sunday class at their own church. “It’s a different building” or “a different audience” isn’t an answer. “It’s a different kind of authority” might be true – but then the institution needs to explain what that difference actually is, and typically that is rarely addressed.

An Opinion on Teaching Mixed Small Groups

My view, from a traditional complementarian reading, is that a woman can facilitate discussion in a mixed small group without violating 1 Timothy 2:12, but she shouldn’t function as the group’s ongoing authoritative Bible teacher if men are present and elder oversight hasn’t clearly placed her in that role.

There’s a real difference between leading a discussion and functioning as the teacher of record. A woman who facilitates a mixed small group using curriculum an elder has written or approved, who asks questions, shares her own insight, and leads the group in prayer, is doing something closer to what Priscilla did when she and Aquila explained the way of God more accurately to Apollos (Acts 18:26) – a far cry from occupying the authoritative teaching office Paul reserves for qualified men. But if a mixed small group’s ongoing teacher – the person responsible for the doctrinal content and direction of the study week after week – is a woman, that arrangement is functioning as exactly the kind of authoritative teaching over men Paul restricts, whatever label the church puts on it.

Churches that want to be consistent should ask the same question of their small-group structure that they ask of their pulpit: who is exercising ongoing doctrinal authority over this group of men and women together, and is that person a qualified elder or operating under one’s direct, active oversight? Get that question right, and a lot of the confusion – in small groups and in seminary classrooms alike – starts to clear up.

Editor Comment: This matters because a church that wants to be faithful to Scripture needs the same consistency in its classrooms that it expects in its pulpit.