Dr. Klouda & Women’s Role in the Church
Categories: Dangerous Ideas, Worldviews, Ministry Watch, Culture Watch, Things of Interest, Religion.
Dallas Morning News gives us some insight on the current gender debate as sparked by Southwestern Baptist Theological’s decision to let Dr. Klouda go because she was a woman.
Baptists at odds over removal of female professor
FW: Seminary case fuels debate on women’s role in theology programs
09:29 PM CST on Friday, January 19, 2007By SAM HODGES / The Dallas Morning News
Conservative Southern Baptists are fighting again, this time over whether women should be able to teach men in seminary theology programs.
They agree that the role of pastor is reserved for men, based on a verse in 1 Timothy in which the Apostle Paul says, "I permit no woman to teach or have authority over a man."
But some conservatives say Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, under president Paige Patterson, wrongly applied the verse to remove from its faculty Sheri Klouda, who until last year had been teaching men Hebrew in the seminary’s school of theology.
Paige Patterson
The controversy is yet another sign that conservatives, who in the late 1970s and ’80s united on a platform of biblical inerrancy while winning control of the Southern Baptist Convention, are seriously at odds.
Wade Burleson, an Oklahoma pastor and leader of dissident conservatives, this week used his blog to describe and decry the treatment of Dr. Klouda, who got her doctorate at Southwestern and was given a tenure-track position at the Fort Worth school in 2002.
"Sheri Klouda is not a pastor, she has not been ordained or licensed, she does not perform ministerial duties. She is a professor, for heaven’s sake," Mr. Burleson said by phone Friday. "The same institution that conferred her degree and hired her has now removed her for gender. To me, that is a very serious, ethical, moral breach."
Dr. Patterson did not respond to requests for comment. Speaking for the seminary instead was Van McClain, chairman of the Southwestern trustees.
He confirmed that Dr. Klouda was told she would not get tenure and was encouraged to find another job. He would not say why.
But Dr. McClain did say that Dr. Klouda’s hiring as a professor in the school of theology, which occurred before Dr. Patterson arrived in 2003, represented a "momentary lax of the parameters."
Southwestern, he said, has gone back to its "traditional, confessional and biblical position" that women should not instruct men in theology or biblical languages.
Dr. Klouda, now teaching at Taylor University in Indiana, did not authorize Mr. Burleson to make her case public. But in a phone interview, she confirmed many details in his blog account.
"I don’t think it was right to hire me to do this job, to put me in the position where I, in good faith, assumed that I was working toward tenure, and then suddenly remove me without any cause other than gender," she said.
Want to know more? You can start at the A-Team’s blog with an intersting discussion and the Equality and Inequality of Genders found here
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