The Castle Church Door

Chuck Colson has some interesting and eye-opening figures on the holocaust of Christians in the twentieth century. The article itself is dated 2002. The estimate is that 45,000,000 Christians have been martyred in the twentieth century. According to the same estimate, the total number of Christians martyred since the time of Christ is around 70,000,000. I want to point out a couple of things. Firstly, such numbers, as Colson points out, ...

Posted by Bob Mattes In the battleground over women deacons, Romans 16:1 seems to be the hill on which partial and full egalitarians primarily wish to battle. In this verse and the following, Paul writes (all citations from the ESV): I commend to you our sister Phoebe, a servant of the church at Cenchreae, 2 that you may welcome her in the Lord in a way worthy of the saints, ...

Posted by Bob Mattes I posted on the 36th General Assembly proceedings on deaconesses here without duplicating Lanes or TE Aquila’s posts on the subject. My initial thoughts on the issue of female deacons/deaconesses can be found here on GreenBaggins. I wanted to comment in this post on an item in both Overture 9 and the Overtures Committee minority report. The operant phrase in Philadelphia Presbytery’s Overture 9 reads: Scriptural teaching ...

First, I thank Lee for addressing the issues exegetically and irenically. Hopefully my response will be in the same spirit. Part 1 of his response is here, and part 2 is here. I will deal with the arguments seriatim. In part 1, Lee addresses my response to Strimple’s 3 exegetical arguments. My response to the first reply is relatively simple: Strimple does not argue that the feminine participle coupled only with διάκονος means an ...

Lee Irons has already responded to my post (how did he do that so quickly?). He argues that Paul describes Phoebe as a woman holding the office of deaconess. He was convinced by Bob Strinple’s arguments, which are threefold. The first argument is that the grammatical construction of the participial phrase (involving the participle of the verb “to be”) points towards an official position. This argument is shot ...

It seems to me that Romans 16:1 is one of a very few texts that are key in the issue of women deacons. The discussion over at the Puritan Board has gotten a bit heated. What I wish to do is to prove that the case for women deacons regarding this passage has not been proven. Here is the passage in Greek: Συνίστημι δὲ ὑμῖν Φοίβην τὴν ἀδελφὴν ἡμῶν, ...