Such “theology” is responsible for much “free thought” among justice loving persons

363.      Expositors of the Bible will never be able to understand, or to set forth a clear, consistent, correct interpretation of the Word of God as regards women until they abandon, once for all, the attempt to found the social, ecclesiastical and spiritual (as far as this life is concerned) status of Christian woman on the Fall, and found it, as they do man’s social, ecclesiastical and spiritual status, in the atonement of Jesus Christ. They cannot, for women, put the “new wine” of the Gospel into the old wine-skins of “condemnation” before God’s law. The skins burst, the wine is spilled; and such “theology” is responsible for much “free-thought”: among justice-loving persons, who confuse the teaching of the expositors with the teaching of the Bible, and denounce the latter instead of the former.

364.     The Lord says, through the mouth of Moses, “Thou shalt not have in thy bag divers weights, a great and a small,” Deut. 15:13; and Proverbs 20:10 teaches us: “Divers weights and divers measures, both of them are alike abomination to the Lord.” It seems to us that divers weights and measures have been employed, occasionally, when translating the utterances of the Bible. For instance, the word for “minister, deacon,” diakonos, is used, properly, of a helper of any sort who is not a slave. It occurs 30 times in the N. T., and is almost always rendered “minister.”  It is translated “servant” only 7 times and “deacon” 3 times, and “minister” 20 times. We will notice only those instances in which it may, or certainly does, refer to an ecclesiastical office,¾Romans 15:8; 1 Cornthians 3:5; 2 Corinthians 3:6; 6:4; 11:23; Ephesians 3:7; 6:21; Colossians 1:7, 23, 25; 4:7; 1 Thessalonians 3:2; 1 Timothy 4:6 (rendered “minister”). And Philippians 1:1; 1 Timothy 3:8, 12 (“deacon”). But in Romans 16:1, where the Apostle Paul says: “I commend unto you Phoebe our sister, who is diakonos of the church which is at Cenchrea,” referring, beyond all possibility of a doubt, to her status in the church, the A. V. translates “servant” (the R.V.margin translates “deaconess”). Bishop Lightfoot speaks of the mistranslation, “servant” in this place. He also gives strong reasons for believing that 1 Timothy 3:11 refers also to women deacons, and adds: “If the testimony borne in these two passages to a ministry of women in the Apostolic times had not been thus blotted out of our English Bibles, attention would probably have been directed to the subject at an earlier date, and our English church would not have remained so long maimed of one of her hands.” We suppose the Bishop’s thoughts went no further than to the thought of a needed order of “deaconesses,” when he penned these words. But they apply with greater force all the way along to woman’s full equality with man in the ministry of the Gospel,¾for until that point is reached, the Church will ever be maimed of one of her hands in her struggle with the world, the flesh and the devil.