Journal: Journal for Baptist Theology & Ministry
Volume: JBTM 17:1 (Spring 2020)
Article: On The Universal And Particular Offices Of Proclamation In Relation To Women As Teachers In Church And Seminary
Author: Malcolm B. Yarnell III

JBTM 17:1 (Spring 2020) p. 41

On The Universal And Particular Offices
Of Proclamation In Relation To Women
As Teachers In Church And Seminary

Malcolm B. Yarnell III

&

Karen Yarnell

Malcolm Yarnell is Research Professor of Theology at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas.

Karen Yarnell is adjunct professor in Women’s Studies at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas.

We have been asked to address the question of whether women may fulfill the office of teaching theology within the setting of a Southern Baptist Convention seminary, but the answer one adopts is bound together with how women are received as teachers in the local churches. The question of how women may function as public teachers may not be answered through a simplistic, non-canonical, and non-contextual appeal to a particular prooftext, nor is the issue explicitly addressed within the official confessional documents of the various Southern Baptist seminaries.

The Baptist Faith and Message limits the office of church pastor “to men as qualified by Scripture” (Art. VI), but certain aspects of Southern Baptist ecclesiology discourage a relaxed equation between church and seminary. Formal extra-ecclesial institutions like denominational seminaries are not manifestly addressed in the Bible. This requires caution against hasty applications. Stating it bluntly, we assert a seminary does not qualify theologically as a church; therefore, a seminary employee may not, by virtue of her seminary employment, be considered a pastor.1 Yet many pastors

JBTM 17:1 (Spring 2020) p. 42

also serve as seminary professors—one of the authors serves as both a seminary professor and a church pastor. For the sake of best practices within theological education, seminary constituents properly perceive correlations between church and seminary, and between pastors and professors. Numerous beneficial synergies result from such correlations.

However, to borrow from Aristotelian logic, any correlation may be accidental or substantial. The seminary professor’s relation to the church’s pastorate is accidental rather than essential. Indicating the lack of an essential relation is the fact that many seminary professors are currently not pastors, and vice versa. Due to the accidental nature of a seminary’s relation to the church, and of a seminary professor’s relation to the pastorate, we must be careful not to identify substantially these distinct institutions or their respective offices with one another. Any Baptist seminarian who deigns to equate his institution ...