The Mohaven Council—Where It All Began

A General Conference Commission on the Ordination of Women in the Seventh-day Adventist Church has met twice in the past two years. At the urging of friends who were participating, I shared my current views on the subject with the Commission, both for the first meeting in Washington, D.C. and for the more recent one convened at the Cohutta Springs Camp in Georgia. In fact, I addressed an open letter to the Commission in time for its latter meeting, which I understand was read to the participants by the chairman. I think any point I make in this article was essentially covered in that letter to the Commission.

My involvement with this issue goes back nearly two decades. As director of the Biblical Research Institute of the General Conference in the seventies, I was asked to activate study of the question of the ordination of women. I therefore had some part in convening the Camp Mohaven (Ohio) Council on this issue in September of 1973, and with some of the subsequent committees that looked at this item during the remaining seven years of my stay in Washington. Since my current views may surprise those who knew my position in the seventies, I will give some indication of why my viewpoint has been modified since that time.

Advocacy

Mohaven was a banner General-Conference-authorized meeting, if only because approximately fifty percent of the participants were women. The decade of the seventies was a time of considerable activity in many churches on the question of the role of women and possible ordination. It was also a time of some concern within the Seventh-day Adventist Church in North America over claimed discrimination between the salaries of men and women doing the same jobs. Over a period of years in my responsibilities in the organized work of the church, I had come to feel that this was not the only form of discrimination against female workers in the church. My role at Mohaven became more than that of a neutral secretary of the meeting—I was an advocate of new opportunities and wider authority for women in the church. When the theologians present at Mohaven gave their understanding that the Bible neither advocates nor prohibits the ordination of women to the ministry, and that the issue was therefore one of church polity and administration, I felt confirmed in my advocacy position. However, several of those present at Mohaven, both women and men, did not share such a perspective. To the extent that their viewpoint was not included in the reports and papers passed on for further study, I feel and have expressed a sense of regret and some responsibility. Minority reports have sometimes come from such meetings, and doubtless some such should have been included from Mohaven. We felt pleased, however, that in the Annual Council of that October in 1973, and in several subsequent councils, the role-of-women item was on the agenda. The outcomes are well known and have been the occasion for some of the concerns expressed in earlier issues of this journal.

Reconsideration

Since that Council I have had occasion to reconsider my earlier positions.

E. G. White

First, I already knew that even our pressing of the E. G. White materials did not provide evidence of her advocating ordination of women to the ministry as such, though she certainly claimed for them a ministry, calling especially for the employment of the gifts and attributes of women as distinct from those of men. She did call for the remuneration of wives who doubled the time and energy investments of their minister husbands, and for women to reach high achievements in fields of motherhood, family development, health and nutrition, teaching, nursing, Bible-instructing, and the medical profession. (We still have not implemented these as Ellen White intended.) But in spite of our efforts to put some pieces together that could imply a call for the ordination of women to the ministry, we had to acknowledge that such a call is not explicitly present in the E. G. White writings. And as most people also know by now, Ellen White never received ordination herself.

Bible Interpretation

Second, I learned that several papers subsequently came in, from individuals whom I highly respect for their scholarship and their Christian leadership, challenging the assumption by Mohaven that the Scriptures themselves were neutral on the ordination-of-women question. Those favoring women's ordination claim that Paul would not have urged the restrictions and limitations that he did had it not been for the expectations and demands of the surrounding cultures. (I have never been comfortable with that position, if only because it is the seed or root which has produced the higher-critical or historical-critical method of approach to the Scriptures. By such, the entire Scriptures are considered fair game for reinterpretation on the assumption that they are all culturally conditioned.) Now here came papers which specifically challenged neutralizing, on the grounds of cultural adaptation, the Apostle Paul's limitation upon spiritual leadership roles of women in the early Christian church. These writers called particular attention to the fact that Paul did not base his restraints on women believers on the culture of his day, but on the original relationship between the man and the woman enunciated in Genesis. That is a serious and strong basis of appeal. I believe that one, at least, of our Mohaven theologians has also modified his view since those days and agrees with these more recent papers that support Paul's limitations on the leadership role of women in the church.

Unity

Third, there is the matter of unity. From the day that the General Conference president laid the burden of this ordination of women question upon the Biblical Research Institute, I have felt and expressed repeatedly that if this issue should ever be seen to threaten the unity of the church for which Christ prayed, this threat alone would be reason enough to leave matters as they were. Though the membership of the Seventh-day Adventist Church at large has not yet been fully confronted by this ordination of women advocacy, we do know from the experience of other mainline Protestant churches that some who have travelled down this road are even now faced with the serious possibility of schism. For me, that in itself would be enough to call for our church to rescind even the intermediate actions already taken.