The Church’s engagement with the many challenges and issues in society is an important part of her Christian witness. For many years, Trinity Theological College has worked together with the National Council of Churches to address a wide range of issues that has surfaced in Singapore society, from the ethical and social implications of biomedicine to interfaith relations. TTC has helped the Council to formulate its statements and prepare position papers for public consultations. As the scope of Christian public . Bishop Terry the need to officially establish a Christian think tank in Singapore to reflect on the profound ethical and social implications of the complex issues that affect everyone in society.
On 14 July 2014, the General Synod of the Church of England voted to allow women to become bishops. This decision, which was made some twenty years after the Anglican Church ordained its first women priests in 1992, has finally and completely overturned centuries of tradition.
The Synod’s decision must of course be approved by Parliament in November before it becomes official. Speaking to the BBC before the historic vote, the Most Rev Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury said that to the public, the exclusion of women is ‘almost incomprehensible’.
Be that as it may, the role of women in the Church has been and still is subjected to much debate in contemporary Christianity. Complementarians (or traditionalists, as they are sometimes called) have long argued that the ordained minister is the representative of Christ. Since Christ was male, so the argument goes, the ordained clergy who represents him must also be male. According to this view, a woman can never be said to be an ‘image’ (Greek: eikon) of Christ.
This is the teaching of both the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic Churches. In a 1994 Apostolic Letter entitled Ordinatio Sacredotalis (Priestly Ordination), Pope John Paul II declared that the ‘Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women and that this judgment is to be definitively held by all the Church’s faithful’.
A year later, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI), then Prefect of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, issued a statement which insisted that this ‘teaching require definitive assent’ because it is ‘founded on the written Word of God, and from the beginning constantly preserved and applied in the Tradition of the Church’.
There is a profound sense in which the ordained minister does represent Christ, especially in the celebration of the Eucharist. The question has to do with how the Church should understand this. In what sense is the clergy the representative of Christ? And does this representation require the ordained minister to bear a bodily or biological resemblance to Jesus?
As we have seen, traditionalists’ answer to this question is unequivocal: the ordained minister must bear a physical resemblance to Jesus (i.e., he must be male because Jesus was male). But is it not perhaps more theologically sound to argue that the minister represents Christ orally and not physically? Thus, in the celebration of the Eucharist, the celebrant represents Christ by repeating his words of invitation, that is, by serving as the mouthpiece for the risen and ascended Lord.
The ordained minister can represent Christ because he or she is created in the image and likeness of God, of which Christ is of course the perfect exemplar. This fundamentally means that ordained ministers represent Christ in their humanness, not in their gender.
This view is further supported by the orthodox understanding of the Incarnation, according to which the eternal Word took upon himself fallen human flesh in order to bring salvation to all humans, male as well as female. If this argument is basically sound, it follows that the Church should never exclude women from the ordained ministry!
The question of the role of women in the ministry is also debated among evangelicals, some of whom argue that women should be excluded from ministry – especially leadership roles in the Church – on biblical grounds. Complementarians have customarily appealed to 1 Timothy 2:12 as the biblical basis for excluding women in the teaching ministry and in leadership.
While Paul this passage does prohibit women from teaching and exercising authority, many scholars are of the view that his instruction is directed only at the church at Ephesus where the young Timothy served as pastor. In giving this instruction, Paul uses the indicative instead of the imperative verb. This suggests that the instruction was purposed to address a specific problem that had arisen in the Ephesian church. As Stanley Grenz and Denise Kjesbo have rightly argued, the present indicative indicates that ‘Paul is not voicing a timeless command, but a temporary directive applicable to a specific situation: “I am presently not allowing”’.
Furthermore, while Paul speaks of ‘a woman’ in the passage, many scholars think that he is in fact referring to a group of women. These women were probably influenced by false teaching and were eager to promote it in the Ephesian congregation. This is probably why Paul alluded to Eve, who was deceived by the serpent in the Garden (1 Tim 2:14).
It is also in this context that Paul’s instruction that women should not have authority over men should be understood. This is not a universal injunction that categorically prohibits women from assuming leadership roles. Paul gave this instruction because he specifically wanted to stop the group of gullible women, who, having been corrupted by false teaching, wanted to usurp the authority of the rightful leaders of the Ephesian church.
The NT clearly teaches that every member of the Body of Christ is given spiritual gifts and therefore has a role to play in the Church. This suggests that women must also be allowed to exercise their Spirit-endowed gifts, including the gifts of teaching and leadership. It is only when believers use their gifts to serve one another that the Church, as the community of the Holy Spirit, is able to fully carry out the mandate Christ has entrusted to her.
A TRIPARTITE COLLABORATION ESTABLISHES AN INSTITUTE FOR PUBLIC CHRISTIANITY (Singapore, 22 August 2014) – ETHOS Institute for Public Christianity (ETHOS), possibly Singapore’s first Christian think tank, was launched on 15 August 2014. The launch event, a Breakfast Lecture held at the St Andrew’s Cathedral was attended by about 100 distinguished guests from the public, private, academic and religious spheres. The inauguration of ETHOS marks a milestone in the history of the local Christian community. ETHOS was formed by National Council of Churches in Singapore, Trinity Theological College and The Bible Society of Singapore. ETHOS seeks to serve church and society by engaging contemporary issues and trends from the Christian perspective. To achieve this, ETHOS will: • conduct studies on important topics and issues from the Christian perspective organise regular lectures, seminars, conferences and symposiums for the Christian public provide resources to Churches and Christians in different professions and vocations • contribute resources to the National Council of Churches in Singapore
When Private Curtis Welsby’s friend Jamie died in Afghanistan just weeks before their battalion was to return to the UK, the 20-year-old from Manchester turned to the Bible.
Pte Welsby, from the 1st Battalion the Mercian Regiment, carried an Armed Services Testament from 1916 in his body armour. After his friend’s death he found himself reading Revelation 21:4.
It reads, “And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.”
“I was upset, I was angry and every emotion I could go through,” Pte Welsby recalls of the tragedy which happened in March 2013.
“We all had our body armour on. I noticed the Bible popping out a little bit from my pocket. I went to put it back and then I thought, ‘No, I’m going to read it. I need something to make me feel good right now’.”
Randomly, he found himself at Revelation. “I read it over and over again,” he recalls. “And I thought, there’s nothing for Jamie to worry about now.”
“It was exactly what I needed to read, because what happened was so totally devastating and unexpected.”
Pte Welsby’s little New Testament has seen five conflicts. It first belonged to his great-great grandfather, Jay Greenwood, a teenager who fought in WW1 having lied about his age to get in.
It was passed on to Pte Welsby’s great grandfather who took it with him to the battlefields of WW2.
It then travelled to Korea with Pte Welsby’s grandfather and spent time in Northern Ireland with his Uncle.
Its thin pages are worn with use and it readily falls open both at Acts and John. But it’s Revelation that spoke to Pte Welsby on his tour of Afghanistan in 2012-13.
Temperatures have fallen well below zero in London this week. But a blue sleeping bag is all that keeps the cold out for 40-year-old Mark Alder.
His home, during daylight hours, is the pavement of Victoria Street. People stream past him as if he’s invisible.
“People think that if you’re homeless it’s your fault,” he says. “And it’s true that there are some people who get into drink and drugs and all that and end up making themselves homeless.”
“But it’s not true. It just happens to some people.”
And Mark is one of those people. Until April [2012] Mark was living with his girlfriend Janet and her children Chris and Emma in Newcastle.
Then the relationship ‘turned sour’ and Mark found himself packing a bag and leaving.
“I wanted to get away and start afresh,” he says. Instead, he found himself in London’s busy Victoria station at 6pm with nowhere to go.
He’s slept rough ever since, most recently in the doorway of the electrical equipment store Argos. The people there are very kind, he says. They always say ‘good morning’ and sometimes bring him a cup of coffee.
But the night before we meet he’s had his trainers stolen. “Who does that?” he says. “A sick person. I pity them though, they were awful, they’d got wet and dry so many times.”
Mark carries two large bags that are mostly full of bedding. But deep in one bag is his Bible. He was given it a few months ago by Chas Bayfield, a Christian, who works in one of London’s top marketing agencies.
He reads it eight hours a day and is now on his fourteenth read through.
“The thing that sticks out to us is how much of a nice bloke Jesus was. That’s the only way I can put it, nothing was a bother to him. I would like to be like that.”
Reading the Bible, he says, “gives us peace, it gives us solace, it gives us something to believe in. What else have I got?”
“I went to a Roman Catholic school,” he says. “But the way the Bible was explained went straight over your head. But now I’m understanding it. I like what I’m reading.”
Slowly, Mark is rebuilding his life. He’s found a place in a hostel, which keeps him out of the cold winter nights. It also gives him a much-needed address with which to apply for jobs.
He says he’d like to find work on a building site, or labouring.
“The dream,” he says, “is an address and a job, my own place where I can close the door and shut the world out. I don’t want a job that pays loads of money, just so long as I could feed myself, that would do me.”
Until then, Mark will carry on sitting on Victoria Street reading his Bible and hoping that his situation will change.
