Well, in our local churches, we believe God raises up a few qualified men to lead. Not all men in a church are called to pastor, just a few men, but only males serve as elders, according to the blueprints we find in the pastoral epistles in the New Testament. So then, it leads to a question today about the role of women teaching pastors in seminaries.

Scott, a podcast listener, writes in to ask it, "Dear Pastor John, I am a seminary student at an Orthodox but interdenominational school in the United States. I share your complimentary understanding of God's design for male and female roles and relationships in the home and in the church. On that basis, I have recently doubted whether or not my seminary ought to allow women to teach pastors in training.

What do you think? Should women be hired as seminary professors? What is your best case?" So I am going to answer this question as best I can on the assumption that the Bible teaches that churches should be led by a team of spiritual, humble, biblically qualified men—see, especially 1 Timothy 2.12.

In other words, I'm going to base my argument about the seminary on the assumption of complementarianism, which I think is not merely an assumption but a well-founded, historic understanding of Scripture. Probably the best defense of that position still with regard to women teaching and preaching in the church would be Tom Schreiner and Andreas Kastenberger's Women in the Church.

So just to be clear, the issue is not whether women attend seminary in one of its programs and get the best biblical grounding possible in Scripture. The issue is whether women should be models, mentors, and teachers for those preparing for a role that is biblically designed for spiritual men.

That's the way I'm posing the question. And you can hear in that sentence another assumption about the nature of what I think seminary teaching should be—namely, not just the transfer of information. Machines can do that. But the formation of a man for the pastoral role by those who in their teaching embody that role and model that role and inspire for that role through their active involvement as elder qualified men in the church.

That's my belief about what makes for the best seminary teaching. When a student with a pastoral call arrives at the level of seminary preparation, something is different from what was happening in college education and in high school education, at least usually it is. Not only has he moved beyond the adolescent years of transition from boyhood to manhood, but he's now submitting himself to a community of teachers who, by their precept and example, are called to shape his mind and his heart for vocational pastoral ministry.

One difference between the former influences that shape the youth and the influence of the seminary is that seminary education is woven throughout with the vocational pastoral viewpoint. Everything is studied, or I think should be studied, with a view to how it may edify the church and advance the gospel through the pastoral role in the ministry of the church.

Samuel Miller, one of the founders of Princeton Seminary, said, "A professor's example as a devoted, laborious, faithful minister was above all else a requisite for his successful training of ministers." Now this implies that seminary teachers be more than competent historians, competent linguists, competent exegetes or educators or theologians. The proper demand on the seminary teacher is to be an example, a mentor, a guide, an embodiment of the pastoral office in preparing men to fill the pastoral office.

And therefore, the attempt—this happens, I've documented this, in fact I'm drawing a lot of what I'm saying from a paper that I wrote back in 1995 about women teaching in our own seminary in my denomination—the attempt to distinguish the seminary teaching role from the pastoral teaching role in such a way that biblical restriction to men does not apply to the seminary teaching results in a serious inconsistency.

That's my argument. The inconsistency is this. The more one succeeds in distinguishing the seminary teacher from the pastor teacher, the more one fails to provide the kind of seminary education enriched by the modeling of experienced pastor mentors. In other words, in seeking to justify women teacher mentors for aspiring pastors, one will be hard put to stress that they're not in the same category as pastors and thus, as we believe, out of step with Scriptures.

Or let me put it another way, in the form of a question. If it is unbiblical to have women as pastors, how can it be biblical to have women who function in formal teaching and mentoring capacities to train and fit pastors for the very calling from which the mentors themselves are excluded?

I don't think that works. The issue is always that inconsistency. If you strive to carve up teaching in such a way that it's suitable for women, it ceases to be suitable as seminary teaching. So closing word, the issue as always is not competence of women teachers or intelligence or knowledge or pedagogical skill.

It's never competence. It's not the issue in the home, in leadership. It's not the issue in the church, in leadership. It's not the issue in the seminary, in leadership. The issue here at the seminary level is very largely the nature of the seminary teaching office. What do we aim for it to be?

Is it conceived as example and model and embodiment of pastoral vision or not? That will lead us in how we staff our seminary faculty. This is all very interesting. Thank you for the question, Scott. Thank you for addressing this, Pastor John. And thank you to everyone who's listening. This is not just an issue for leaders.

This is an issue that really gets at the heart of how roles work in the home and in the church and starting to think through some of the real practical implications of what it means to be complimentary. And thank you guys for raising the question. Thank you, Pastor John, again for addressing it here.

Thanks for listening and making the podcast part of your week. You can subscribe to our audio feeds and search our past episodes in our archive. You can reach us by email with a question you may have of your own, even a follow-up question you may have about gender and roles in the home and church, something that you want clarified.

You can do all that through our online home at DesiringGod.org/AskPastorJohn. Well speaking of controversial questions, next time we have another one. We hear from a podcast listener who wants to know if it's fair for God to base a soul's eternal destiny on merely one lifespan, say 70 years of life.

Is it even fair or is it unfair to draw out eternal consequences for such a brief span of time? I'll ask John Piper that on Wednesday when we return. I'm your host Tony Reinke. Thanks for listening and we'll see you then.