My guest this week is my former Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary professor, Dr. Roy Ciampa, whose transformative class, Ephesians in Depth, has stayed with me over the years as my faith has grown and changed. In this conversation, we discuss the theological implications of Paul’s writings, the cultural context of the Greco-Roman world, and the significance of mutual submission in relationships. Dr. Ciampa shares insights from his academic background and teaching experiences, emphasizing the importance of understanding scripture in its historical context. The dialogue highlights the beauty of God’s love and grace, encouraging listeners to reflect on their own faith journeys and the role of women in ministry.
I think my favorite thing Dr. Ciampa said to me, was that Ephesians was “written in the key of worship.”
Dr. Ciampa mentions a document he compiled to help students understand first century Greco-Roman views of women and marriage, beginning with Old Testament and Classical Greek texts up through the time of the New Testament, so that NT texts might be better understood in light of the developing contexts. You can read that insightful document here. And find more of Dr. Ciampa’s scholarly writings on his website, viceregency.com.
You can watch our conversation on YouTube, or stream it on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, and more–find all those links on Podlink! Please like, subscribe, rate and share with a friend if you found this interview helpful!
Transcript:
Ruth Perry (00:16)
This is a new thing for me and I appreciate you being one of my very first guests, Dr. Ciampa.
Roy Ciampa (00:22)
Well, I’m honored to be invited and hope this will be helpful to people.
Ruth Perry (00:26)
What I’m hoping to share on my podcast for my first season is I’m going to go back and have conversations with people who helped me as my faith has shifted and changed over the last 20 years. Because my background is very conservative, complementarian, traditional, But it’s changed a lot over the years through crises of faith and through cognitive dissonance that’s happened and different things that have gone on. And I’m just really grateful that my faith has remained strong because I’ve encountered people like you who’ve helped me to reimagine my faith and think about things differently.
Roy Ciampa (01:04)
That’s nice to hear.
Ruth Perry (01:04)
And so at the time that I had you as a professor, I was a complementarian student, pretty committed to that perspective. And I was an educational ministries student at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. And I think that I took Ephesians as one of my core theology classes. And it’s the only class that I encountered you as a professor. But looking back on my seminary experience, I really loved that class so much and the book of Ephesians has just remained my favorite book of the Bible.
And I’m really grateful that I had that experience because I didn’t have to learn Greek or Hebrew in seminary as an education student. And this was the only class where we really went through word by word and you taught how to parse Paul’s Greek into English and how to make sense of his run on sentences and you taught the importance of understanding the context of the passage. And I just learned so much from you. And so I’m really excited to talk about that with you today. But I thought before we get into that, I would like to know more about you. I don’t really know what your faith formation was like, your background, where you’re coming from. If you’d like to just go back and tell us a little bit about your own spiritual journey.
Roy Ciampa (02:15)
Sure, I’d be happy to. I grew up in an nominal Christian family. We went to church about once a year because my grandmother wanted us to. I was confirmed in a Congregational church when I was, I suppose, a young teenager. But it didn’t really mean much. I never really understood anything about the Bible.
I came to faith when I was in my first year of college, I owe it, a large part of it, I owe, I think, to next door neighbors who moved in when I was in middle school. Wonderful, dedicated Christians, the Monk family, and they had two sons, one a year older than me and one a year younger, Robert and Stuart. And the whole family just modeled for me, a wonderful Christian faith and love. And so they took me to evangelistic events.
But I didn’t think that I thought I was a Christian. I remember sitting during one, in a roller skating rink while somebody was speaking and we had our heads down and I’m saying that this isn’t for me. I’m already Christian. They’re not talking about me. I’m a Christian. Anyway, it was my first year of college. Some guys shared the gospel with me and I realized that this was the message that had transformed their lives and their family and I realized it was true and I was in need of it and so I trusted in the Lord and I was baptized, came to faith, I was discipled.
But I was in a very conservative context. I was listening to the guys that discipled me had me listening to some fundamentalist preachers. John R. Rice wrote a book I Am a Fundamentalist and after a year I felt like God was calling me into ministry and I went to Jerry Falwell’s school at the time was called Liberty Baptist College for a year. And then after a year there I transferred to Gordon College where I did my undergraduate degree.
By the time I graduated from Gordon College, well certainly I was no longer a fundamentalist, was I would say mainstream evangelical and probably still conservative on women’s issues but very open to other ways of understanding that issue.
I don’t really remember at what point, if it was near the end of my college experience or beginning of my seminary experience, I went to Denver Seminary, had some great mentors there. And I know while I was at Denver Seminary, I became a convinced egalitarian.
And that came out of various kinds of experiences. Part of it was coming to have a much better understanding of the world in which the New Testament was written, and especially Paul, in the context of his letters and the things that he says about women, among other things. And part of it was just understanding more broadly what theology would say about how I should relate to my own wife and other women as well.
But maybe we’ll get around to that later. After seminary, my wife and I were appointed to go overseas and we had two kids by then and we took our kids and we went to Portugal where I trained pastors. And overall, our time in Portugal span about 12 years, and in the middle of that, I spent a couple of years in Scotland doing my PhD.
I had wonderful time training pastors and Christian leaders in Portugal, worked with the Bible Society there to help with their contemporary Portuguese translation of the Bible. And then I was invited to go teach at Gordon-Conwell in 2001. So I taught the New Testament studies at Gordon-Conwell from 2001 to 2014. At a certain point became the Chair of the Division of Biblical Studies there.
And then after or 13 years there, I went and worked for four years for American Bible Society, training Bible translators and Bible translation consultants around the world. I still taught for Gordon Conwell on weekends while I was doing that, but my main gig was training Bible translators and Bible translation consultants. So that was a great experience, but I missed the full-time academic community.
So in 2018 I accepted the invitation to take on the role of Chair of the Religion Department which soon became the Department of Biblical and Religious Studies at Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama. But.
In 2024, I retired and moved back to New Hampshire, which is where my wife and I had had a place for a while, and it’s our happy place. And so I’m now a professor emeritus at Stanford University, and I teach a course a semester for Gordon Conwell. I’m teaching Interpreting the New Testament for Gordon Conwell on Thursdays right now. So I mean, that’s that’s more than you wanted, probably, but that’s kind of the overview.
Ruth Perry (06:38)
No, that’s great. Congratulations on retiring and then continuing your work.
Roy Ciampa (06:44)
Thank you. Well, there’s lots of what I’ve done that I love. I’m still writing books and articles and teaching one day a week scratches that itch. so it’s fun.
Ruth Perry (06:53)
I’m a Gordon College graduate myself. I was a music major there and the reason why I decided to study music was because I loved the church and I wanted to be in ministry and that’s where I saw women serving in the church. So I studied music and then I decided to go to Gordon Conwell in 2003 when I graduated from Gordon College because I still loved learning so much and I wanted to continue learning and in my conception of my ministry life, I always conceived myself as just being in volunteer ministry in the church. And that I would be a pastor’s wife, likely, or a missionary’s wife. I really wanted to live overseas. I went backpacking through Europe while I was in college, and Portugal was my favorite. I loved Portugal.
Roy Ciampa (07:41)
It’s a great country.
Ruth Perry (07:41)
And so I would have liked to have been a missionary or a musician, but those were really the only two ideas that I had in my brain that a woman could do in the church. I knew that I loved the church more than anything and I really wanted to serve the church. So that’s what brought me to Gordon-Conwell and brought me to your classroom. And it sounds like it was early on in your teaching there.
Roy Ciampa (08:00)
Yeah, it was early on at Gordon-Conwell. I taught for a number of years in Portugal, but that was in my early years at Gordon-Conwell, yes. And I remember that course called Ephesians in Depth, as I recall.
Ruth Perry (08:09)
It was in depth for sure. Yes. I remember we went word by word and we would, I can’t even remember how to explain what you did with us in the class. I was trying to find my class notes because I know that they’re in my basement somewhere. But I remember we parsed every sentence and figured out what the structure was. And you really brought it.
Roy Ciampa (08:29)
Ha
Ruth Perry (08:37)
It was hard work and it brought the book to life for me.
Roy Ciampa (08:41)
That’s so kind of you to say. I’m grateful to hear that.
Ruth Perry (08:43)
And it’s such a beautiful book. Ephesians, it just, the words that come to mind when I think about Ephesians is, Paul keeps talking about peace and love and unity and the power of the Holy Spirit and all the blessings that we’ve received from God. And it’s just such a beautiful theological grounding of then why we should follow Christ and live in a way worthy of the calling we’ve received.
And so I don’t know how much you want to talk about Ephesians itself before we get to the household codes in Ephesians 5. But what I really want to talk with you too for my Beautiful Kingdom Builders audience is the context of the book of Ephesians and what was going on in the cultural world at that time that would have helped the people who are hearing Paul’s message in that day understand it maybe differently than we understand it today.
Roy Ciampa (09:35)
Well, yeah, there’s a lot to talk about. So many different aspects of it. And I think one of the things, actually in our church, we’re in a small group right now that’s going through Ephesians. And so it’s been kind of fun to do that in a church Bible study again. But one of the things I think that’s key to Ephesians, you just have this joyful, kind of, I would say worshipful kind of tone to the whole thing.
Many people have pointed out that the letter has a different style than most of Paul’s letters. It has these kind of run-on sentences and these kind of complicated sentences. There’s lots of what we call pleonasms where you could say something simply, but in a pleonasm you could put up two or three different ways of saying it within the same sentence. So over and over again Paul will say we have kind of this blessing of redemption, the forgiveness of our sins. And it’s like, well, those are two different ways of talking about the same thing, or he’ll talk about within one line, he does this a couple of times in the opening part of Ephesians, that everything’s happened according to God’s purpose and his will and his choice. It’s like, well, those are just three different ways of saying God did what he wanted to do.
And I’m reminded that, We find examples of this in various contexts. We find it in poetry and we find it in worship music. An example I typically use is the song Majesty, Worship His Majesty. And if you go through that song over and over again, it finds different ways to say the same thing in new words. Kingdom authority, majesty, kingdom authority, so exalt, lift up on high. Those are two different things, they’re not. Exalt, lift up on high, the name of Jesus. Magnify, come glorify. What’s the difference between magnifying, it’s all the same thing.
Singing this is just a worshipful, excited, rich, different way of expressing yourself. And Paul begins the letter with what’s called a Jewish Baruchah, which in Hebrew would be blessed, be like Baruch HaTah, Adonai Eloheinu, blessed as the Lord our God. he starts out, blessed is the…
God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every blessing in Christ. And so I think the style is different and I think it’s different for a purpose because Paul’s wanting to express his theology in a very worshipful almost liturgical kind of way.
And it’s remarkable that he’s doing that while he’s under arrest. He says he’s in chains, which reminds us of Acts of course, when they’re imprisoned in Philippi and they end up singing songs and praising God in prison. And here Paul is, he’s in prison and he writes a letter and he writes it in the key of worship. And partly that’s because just who Paul is and partly because he’s writing to readers who are Gentiles, who are so far away from where Christianity began in Jerusalem and Judea. And they’ve got to be thinking as Gentiles, like their spiritual leader is now in prison and could lose his life.
What does this mean? Have they gotten themselves messed up with something they shouldn’t have? Has a train gone off the rails and they’ve got to be concerned about Paul. They’ve got to be concerned about what all this means. And here’s Paul, he writes from prison, he’s like, God’s plan is working itself out in this wonderful way and it’s such a blessing to me to be a part of this. let’s praise God for all the blessings that we have. And let me just list off some of these blessings for you.
And it really is, I think, meant to reassure the readers that… the train hasn’t gone off the rails, that God is in charge, that everything that they’ve experienced is part of God’s plan of redemption and of reconciling Jews and Gentiles together and to God, and that Paul is not at all, know, fretting or depressed or himself concerned that something’s gone wrong because he’s in prison, but he sees God’s hand in all of this. So I think that’s a, for me, that’s a very important part of the background.
And then you have to be careful because I’m tempted to try and lecture my way through a whole semester’s worth of stuff on Ephesians in one little conversation. But I do think, you know, that most people recognize that two halves of the letter have different tones and sometimes they describe the first half as doctrine and the second as practical teaching.
But an important key is that it’s not just that Paul decided to talk and discuss theology for a while and then look at his watch and said, well, that’s maybe enough theology for them. Maybe I should give them some practical stuff. And so let me talk practical stuff for a while. But the theology underwrites the practical part. That is, the theology, the first part is there to support everything he’s going to tell the church that they ought to be doing.
And the second part, they are organized organically related to each other. And the whole first part is about God’s grace, his mercy, his love, how he hasn’t treated us the way we deserve when we were, you know, children of wrath by nature. He hasn’t treated us that way, but he’s shown us love and mercy and grace and blessing upon blessing upon blessing. And then we get in the second half of the letter. And in my understanding, the second half of letter is primarily all about imitating God.
And so we get that theme early on how we should be imitators of God. We shouldn’t live like the Gentiles live. That’s one of the themes. But we should be imitators of God. And then he talks about how God has shown his love to us in Jesus Christ who gave himself for us and his love for us. And so we have sections that talk about how we should be one, united together as one body.
And then we have material talking about how we should and love and we should walk in the light and then later how we should walk in wisdom and then finally the last part is where we should put on the full armor of God and we look at those things they come what do these things have in common being one walking in love and light and wisdom well love and light are two main attributes of God God is love God is light
And then wisdom is another very well-known attribute of God, the all-wise one. And there’s large sections of scripture dedicated to wisdom and Proverbs 8 and elsewhere. And that’s understood to be an attribute of God. And then you think,
When we walk in love, we’re imitating God. When we walk in light, we’re imitating God. When we walk in wisdom, we’re imitating God and His wisdom. And then you realize that the full armor of God we’re supposed to put on is not just armor that God gives us, but the Old Testament background tells us this is the armor that God puts on. He puts on a helmet of salvation. He puts on a breastplate of righteousness. When he goes and he fights spiritual battles for his people. So even when we put on our spiritual armor, we’re still imitating God.
That earlier part about being one, it’s like, that’s right, God is one. So when we’re one, you there’s one God, one Lord, one baptism, and when we act as one, we’re also imitating God. So one of the greatest ways we imitate God then, when you understand the relationship between the first half of the letter and the second half, is by treating other people the way he’s treated us.
He hasn’t treated us as he could have, but he treated us with love, with mercy, with grace, over and over again. And this ends up becoming very important for, as you referred to, the household codes, because they’re a main theme is about how people in charge with authority treat people that in that culture were under them, wives were under their husbands and children under the parents and slaves under their masters. And so one of the main themes that comes out there is, again, the emphasis tends to be on the person with power, treating the one with less power with grace and mercy and not being harsh with them. But I mean, that raises all kinds of other questions about why do we have household codes and what’s this about?
We’re talking about household codes, we’re talking about slaves and masters. And we don’t have slaves and masters in our household. We think of those as something outside the family. You get your family, and then you get your employees or other people. But of course, that was part of the family. But hey, I’ve been going on for a while now, Ruth, so maybe feel free.
Ruth Perry (18:02)
No, you’re cooking. I’m enjoying it immensely. I was thinking about back to your class, I remember that before we got into the household codes, you started that passage in Ephesians 5.18, be filled with the Holy Spirit, singing songs and hymns and spiritual songs to each other, making music in your heart to the Lord and always giving thanks to God the Father for everything in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ and submitting to each other out of reverence for Christ. That all of those things were under that same heading of be filled with the Holy Spirit.
Roy Ciampa (18:42)
Yes, it is. And being filled with the Holy Spirit is under the heading of walking in wisdom. So, because it’s one of the things is if you look for the term walking, which is often translated as live, like live in love or live according to light. The metaphor is walking in the light and walking in love and walking in children of light or walk wisely. And then the wisdom part underneath that is all the stuff about being filled with the spirit and submitting to one another.
And then so all that stuff about husbands and wives and parents and children and masters and slaves comes under the submitting to one another part, which comes under the being filled with the Holy Spirit part, which comes under the walking in wisdom part.
And it’s Paul providing his readers with wisdom about how to live in family in the first century Ephesian or, you know, Greco-Roman context. And of course, it’s important that context is radically different from ours.
Ruth Perry (19:44)
Can you describe that context for us.
Roy Ciampa (19:47)
Sure. Well, in a few different ways. Maybe one way to start is by, just as we were already kind of hinting at…
that when we talk about a household code, we do talk about husbands and wives and parents and children and masters and slaves because the household was very differently structured than we think of it today. That many households, they had slaves within the household and they’d have also freed men and free women in some cases in the household as well. And so we think of a household typically as, you know, parents and their children and nuclear family.
And sometimes we think of the extended family as well. Maybe there are grandparents around or something. But we don’t think of parents and children and slaves and freed men and women as part of a household. But that is a part of what a fairly well-to-do or a somewhat well-to-do household would have all those components. And then, you know, we realize
When people preach through Ephesians, when they get to the stuff about slaves and masters, they realize what we don’t approve of masters and slaves today. And so if they’re to preach on that, they kind of adapt it and say, well, this might apply to like employees and employers and that sort of thing. And so here we can get some wisdom for how we can relate to each other as employees and employers. And maybe there’s it’s OK. But it’s really important to point out that employees are not slaves and employers are not masters. And so you have to make adaptations.
You can’t just say all the employers shouldn’t treat the employees the way Paul thought, you know, masters should treat slaves. And we have to be reminded that Paul’s not endorsing slavery, but early Christians were living in a world where this is just part of the social fabric. They weren’t put in charge. They weren’t asked to take over the social fabric and restructure it. They had to learn how can they live as Christians within that social fabric and within these institutions. And so Paul provides wisdom for those who are in these situations.
But as I was saying, when we get to that stuff about masters and slaves, people say, we have to make adjustments. We can’t just apply that to employees and employers because that’s not the same thing. But when we preach about husbands and wives, people look around and say, I know husbands and wives, and many of us will say, well, I’m a husband or I’m a wife and I have a wife or a husband. And so they’re all around us. So when he starts talking about husbands and wives, we’re like, okay, we know what he’s talking about.
This is something very familiar to all of us, except that it isn’t because marriage has evolved in many ways. And so to go back and realize that in the Greco-Roman world, Men didn’t typically marry until they were 28 to 30 years old. And partly because there was no expectation with the double standard that’s typical in all of history, the double standard with regard to sex is that men weren’t expected to remain pure or virgins until marriage. They had access to prostitutes and household slaves and other sexual outlets and that wasn’t considered a problem by most people in the Greco-Roman world. Whereas women were expected to be married shortly after going through puberty.
When I was in class, I have like a 40 page document, you may or may not recall of this kind of material from the Old Testament and quotes from the Greco-Roman world and different sources where people are talking about husbands and wives and it talks about age at marriage and it talks about, you know, the understanding that it’s good if a woman or girl can know how to carry on a conversation and maybe do a little bit of sewing, a little bit of cooking, but that’s about it because she’s supposed to learn everything she learns from her husband that she’s supposed to be like a tabla rasa, she’s supposed to be like a blank slate on whom the husband can leave his impressions.
I was just reading, reviewing again because something came up on social media. I don’t remember what it was anymore, but it was about, that’s what it was, this woman’s book recently. A woman wrote a book on misogyny in America and the publisher accidentally put out an ad or an email inviting people to submit for exam copies. whoever prepared the text for that forgot to replace the name of the author from a previous book they must have worked on. And so they had the title of the book in the book cover, but the author’s name was a man who hadn’t written anything like this, who writes in very different subjects.
So here’s a book on misogyny in the church, and the publisher puts out something that attributes it to a man instead of the woman who wrote it, and reminded me of this ancient… thing about somebody who’s talking about some man’s wife who’s a man who’s great at poetry and he’s presented some poetry from his wife and he claims that his wife wrote this wonderful poetry and this person’s saying it’s great poetry but you know I’m not sure if his wife really wrote it but either way the husband deserves the credit because either he’s the one who really wrote it or He’s the one that taught her.
So whatever the woman produces, it’s always back to the man. Because again, she’s expected to have learned whatever she knows through her husband, a woman getting married right after puberty and a man not marrying until he’s 28 or 30 years old. There’s a huge difference, not only in age, but maturity, knowledge of the world and in the Greco-Roman world, the extent to which women were expected to be more or less confined to the home, whereas men could go anywhere and could have a greater education so their knowledge of the world is different. Their human development at marriage and then throughout marriage. You might say, 10 years later it’ll be different. Well, 10 years later they still, they would have already formed a kind of relationship where he’s practically like a parent.
The husband’s practically a parent or Ben Witherington describes it as almost an uncle-niece relationship between a husband and wife at that time. And that changes a lot. I mean, that helps you understand all kinds of things in the New Testament when people are talking about how husbands and wives should relate to each other. It’s a significant thing in terms of submission if the wife has always only been kind of tutored by her husband and taught by him and mentored by him.
You know, three stages of human development behind him, then it’s natural that the man’s going to be treated as though he’s more knowledgeable, wiser, more experienced, better able to provide any kind of leadership needed, and that that’s the role that he should have. Which brings us back to that whole thing about love and mercy.
One of things that I realized when I started looking through these texts and thinking about it more was if one of the main themes of the letter is that we should treat each other as Christ and God has treated us, if my wife is my peer, which is something that just was not normally ever the case in the Greco-Roman world, right? We were just talking about that. But my wife is more or less my age. She has the same experience of the world. She hasn’t been cooped up at home. She’s got college education. She has, a master’s degree. She’s wiser than I am on many things and just as intelligent as I am. If she’s my peer in every way, does Jesus, does God really want us to pretend as though I’m much wiser and more knowledgeable than she is and better able to lead in every situation than she is?
Because that was the traditional slot of a wife in first century Ephesus and the slot of a husband in first century Ephesus or should I actually treat her for who she really is? And to recognize her strengths and her knowledge and her wisdom and her abilities. And this relates to something I’ve sometimes referred to as the mapping of identities. That is, we look at women today and we map onto them the identity we find of a wife in the first century Ephesus. We look at a husband today and we map onto them the identity of a husband in first century Ephesus. And we do that in other ways as well. I have an whole article about ways in which this mapping of identities can create real problems.
But I don’t think I should ask my wife to try and fill a slot from a different culture and time, asks her to treat me and asks me to treat her as though we are so different, as though we are as different as the first century Greco-Roman husband and wife, when in fact we’re actually peers. And then I’d go back and realize that if this whole second part is about learning how to treat other people…as God has treated us, and I realize, well, even if you look at the household code, the instructions to husbands and wives aren’t exactly the same as the husbands to parents and children, and neither of those are the same as the instructions to slaves and masters. So Paul recognized that although we’re all supposed to be Christ-like and treat others in Christ-like ways, the nature of the relationship is going to impact what that looks like.
And so the first century Greco-Roman husband-wife relationship is different from the parent-child relationship is different from the slave-master relationship. So Paul provides different instructions. So then I begin to think and realize, well, then we can treat this as a case study.
We have at least three case studies and what it means to apply Christ-like, God-like love and mercy and grace to other people. And it’s one thing in the marriage, one thing with the children, another thing with masters and slaves. Maybe it would be something else if it was with a spouse who is my peer and who is as intelligent and wise and able to lead and do other things as I am, as my same age, same experience of the world, what would it then mean for me to treat her in a Christ-like way and for her to treat me in a Christ-like way and not try to fit them into some…
You know, I’m reminded we have a two and a half year old granddaughter, you know, those cubes you get that have the different shapes, there’s the triangle and there’s the square and the rectangle and the star and you have the blocks, you’re trying to fit them through the right shapes, you know, and I feel like lots of times they’re taking, you know, modern men and women who are very different shapes and we’re trying to fit them into the shapes of the first century husband and wife, male and female.
And those pieces just don’t fit. And the key question still comes back to, if I’m looking at the second half of Ephesians, I’m learning how to walk wisely in acting in Christ-like ways towards people around me.
And so there lots of different relationships. There’s the student athlete relationship. There’s the police officer citizen relationship. There’s the teacher student relationship. There’s the husband wife relationship. There’s the employee employee employee relationship. And all of these we learn how to treat each other in loving ways. But we don’t have to find some first century Greco-Roman slot to fit people into to make that relationship match the one we have.
Ruth Perry (31:02)
I feel like the way my brain works is that I have a sieve inside my brain and when I go to class I learn the information and it all goes away. But for some reason I really latched on to all of that that you taught 20 years ago and then I went off and I got married the next year and it just fell completely into traditional rules because that’s what I grown up with and that’s what had been modeled to me and same for my husband. And so it was just natural to not even think about how we’re going to relate to each other. We just fell into the traditional rules that we had been taught through example and direct teaching. And almost immediately for me as the woman, I could recognize that my voice was diminished, my importance was diminished, and it created some cognitive dissonance for me. But I didn’t, I just tolerated it. I didn’t really rock the boat any.
And then we had another experience early on in our marriage. I’m thinking maybe three or four years after we got married, our church had a really terrible conflict and split. My dad was a pastor and so it was deeply personal. And you’re teaching again on the book of Ephesians. I looked at that experience and it was a traditional church structure with men in leadership. And it was clear as day to me that if the women had a voice and a place at the table in that conflict, things wouldn’t have been as ugly as they were and as destructive and terrible. And so those two things, like my early marriage years and walking through that church conflict,
The importance of your teaching on the book of Ephesians really snapped into place for me crystal clear that if we are walking in a manner worthy of the calling we’ve received, we’re going to submit to one another, male, female, slave, free, Gentile. Like there’s no distinctions that if we’re truly living in the way that God has called us to live, that we’re going to love each other. And that means we’re going to listen to each other’s voices, that every voice has a place and has value.
And we’re going to submit the mutual submission piece that we often gloss straight over and go into, OK, but wives, you’re submitting, and then the husband is the head.
Roy Ciampa (33:12)
Mm-hmm. Right, yes. No, it really, it ends up being, and I hate to say it, but in many cases, not a loving sort of thing, but a very obedience, command-centered sort of thing, which kind of is pushing them back against the grain of the letter as a whole, and the way I understand the theology of the letter as a whole.
By the way, one of the key texts that I think is helpful for thinking about this is in 1 Corinthians chapter 14, where Paul has that part that says, and some people think that this doesn’t belong in the Bible, and I don’t know what you think, but I think verses 34 and 35 are supposed to be there. But it’s the part that says women should remain silent in the churches, they’re not allowed to speak, but must be in submission, as the law says.
They want to inquire about something, they should ask their own husbands at home, for it is disgraceful for a woman to speak in the church. Now Paul had already taught that both men and women could pray and prophesy, right, back in chapter 11. And that’s remarkable in itself because a lot of people look at 1 Corinthians 11, they think, because it starts off about who’s the head of who, who’s the head you know, God is the head of Christ, who’s the head of the man, who’s head of the woman. it sounds like, okay, yeah, very much what sort of subordination here and all this sort of thing.
But when he actually gets into it, he talks about ministry in just two terms, prayer and prophecy. Gordon Fee has suggested, and I think he’s probably right, that those are like big terms for discourse directed to God. That’s prayer and discourse directed at the congregation, which is prophecy. But in any case, those are the only two things he talks about. And he says both men and women can do it. They just have to dress appropriately when they’re doing it. So there’s nothing in there about any kinds of ministries that men can do that women can’t.
But anyway, so he’s already said that they can pray and prophesy. So what’s this all about? They should remain silent. And so obviously he’s not speaking about speaking in general. He has certain kinds of speaking. And in that very passage, he says, if they want to inquire about something, they should ask their own husbands at home. Well, that may be the hint that what he’s talking about is women who don’t understand something that’s going on.
Again, remember the women would have less education, less experience of the world, less knowledge of what’s going on around them. And if they don’t know what’s going on and they’re asking questions that are interrupting them in the church, and in that culture, for a woman to ask another man, somebody else’s husband their question, would be really offensive and would raise all kinds of concerns. Anyway, so.
If that’s what’s going on, Paul says if they have things they should inquire of their own husbands at home. Now, you know, I may have said this when I taught you in class, but I mean, I’ve been teaching since, you know, a full-time teacher since I suppose I started in 1991. And I don’t know how many times I could have said, having both a husband and a wife in my class, I could have said to the husband, if you’re not getting all this, you might ask your wife to explain it to you when you get home.
I’ve very often had husbands and wives in the class and it’s not unusual for the wife to understand things better than to be more academically strong than the husband is. I could never say, you know, if any of the women here don’t understand what I’m talking about, why don’t you ask your own husband at home? not that I couldn’t just say it because it wouldn’t be politically correct, but it would just be stupid.
And I’m not saying Paul’s stupid, The expression assumes a culture and a context where the husband can be virtually guaranteed to know more and understand things better than their wife, which is perfectly reasonable for the Greco-Roman context of Corinth that Paul’s speaking to, not Corinth and Ephesus and the whole world in which Paul’s speaking because of this age and education and experience gap that we talked about at the beginning of our conversation. So a verse like that makes perfectly good sense in that context, but would make absolutely no sense in a world where men and women can both be educated and experienced And so again, I think it really is a problem of, I think, very harmful biblical interpretation when
We end up trying to act as though we are living in roles that were filled by first century people. And we’re gonna figure out how to treat each other in those roles as opposed to treating people for who they actually are. And that’s at the core of love, isn’t it? To know someone, to respect them for who they are, for what they bring to the table, and to learn from each other and to submit to each other.
And that’s really a large part of what effusions is about.
Ruth Perry (38:10)
I think from my background being very conservative, there was a lot of warning against listening to people who didn’t share traditional values because they were being influenced by the culture around them or they were playing fast and loose with scripture and they weren’t taking the word of God seriously or this or that. Like there were so many warnings against listening to someone who might suggest mutual submission or sharing authority between men and women in ministry and in the home.
And in my experience, just with my encounter of you, Dr. Ciampa and since you, many other egalitarian scholars and pastors, they’ve all taken the word of God seriously, and their life has shown the fruit of the Spirit in ways that isn’t always readily witnessed in other people’s lives who are really clinging to the authority structures and having power over others. And so I’m really grateful that I took this Ephesians class with you 20 something years ago and that I remembered all the information even though I compartmentalized it at the time and filed it away and went on with my traditional ways. I’m grateful that it was accessible when I needed it and when things started falling apart. And so then I didn’t just say Well, if this is what Christianity is, I don’t want it. But I could imagine a more beautiful Christianity because of what you had taught me.
Roy Ciampa (39:42)
That’s very kind, but I think that it is very sad to see people turning away from Christianity because the presentation they’ve received is not wholesome, it’s not healthy, it’s not edifying. And too often it is, as you said, very much about power and who can have power. And so it’s very sad to see large parts of a whole generation are more that are turning away from the church because of the way the church in Christianity has been presented, which is sad. And we do think it’s such a beautiful thing. The truth of God’s grace and the grace that he teaches us to live by ought to be something that ought to attract people from all over the globe to this great God of love and grace and mercy who’s worthy of all our praise.
Ruth Perry (40:30)
the message of Ephesians is speaking to us today. And I pray we all have ears to hear.
Where can we find your papers and your writing? Dr. Ciampa, do you have a website or do you have the online presence?
Roy Ciampa (40:43)
I have a website. Yeah, actually, but it’s not it’s just a purely pedagogical sort of thing. And I, and I’ve spent hundreds of hours, if not thousands, thousands in the heyday of my career. So I have a I have a website called viceregency.com And the.com is a joke, because I’ve never done any commercial stuff with it. should be a.org. But I have vice regency.com. And then it’s it’s all links to different things you can learn from and
Maybe I’ll go there and add a link to this paper. I’ll tell you what, I’ll send it to you in case there’s some place you want to post it on, on anything you’re doing.
Ruth Perry (41:20)
I have a Facebook page called the Beautiful Kingdom Builders. I will put it there and I want to give you the last word before we sign off.
Roy Ciampa (41:31)
Well, thank you for having me. It’s been a blessing to be with you and it is anything I can do to help people see how great and marvelous, as Paul was trying to say in Ephesians, how beyond anything we can imagine is the love of God, how deep and high and wide, and in every dimension you can imagine this love of God that we find in Jesus Christ and the mercy and love that it teaches us to express towards others.
May God advance that through the knowledge of Jesus Christ. So thanks for having me.
Ruth Perry (42:02)
Thank you so much. Amen. Have a great time in your retirement and as you continue to teach. Thank you so much. Bye.
Roy Ciampa (42:08)
Thank you very much. Bye bye.
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Ruth Perry
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The Beautiful Kingdom Builders 