Why Review a 1998 Book?

The 2023 Synod of the RPCNA received a lengthy paper from two men entitled “Women and the Diaconate.” The Synod committee appointed to review and evaluate the paper recommended that the 2025 Synod remove the words “Women as well as men may hold the office of deacon” from the Reformed Presbyterian Testimony (25.8, p 87). The moderator ruled that proposed major changes require a year’s notice, so this recommendation will likely be considered by the 2026 Synod.

The paper “Women and the Diaconate” quotes many writers, but Brian Schwertley’s 1998 book Women Deacons is quoted in nine different places. Since the 2022 paper makes considerable use of Schwertley’s book, A Little Strength plans to review several aspects of Schwertley’s book in this and coming issues.

Note: Who is Brian Schwertley? He came into the RP Church through the Broomall congregation, where he and his family were members for some years. The Atlantic Presbytery licensed him to receive a call, and the Southfield, Michigan RPC called him as its associate pastor for church planting in Lansing, Michigan. When Southfield’s senior pastor died, there was a quarrel over whether Brian would succeed him. The Great Lakes Gulf Presbytery tried to resolve the quarrel, but Brian and part of the congregation withdrew. Since then, Brian has lived in several states with a variety of ecclesiastical connections. He now resides in Texas.

Book Review:

A Historical and Biblical Examination of Women Deacons

by Brian M. Schwertley, 1998

The Bible tells the Church how to govern itself. Teaching and ruling elders, also called overseers (bishops in KJV) or pastors, have collective authority over the church under Christ. The elders as a group form the Session. Under the Session, deacons handle church finances and care for the needy. I Timothy 3 lists the qualifications for a deacon. It also lists the qualifications for an overseer, while Titus 1 lists the qualifications for an elder. However, as Acts 20:17, 28 and Titus 1:5, 7 make clear, elders and overseers are the same men. Overseers do not rule elders. And Philippians 1:1, “Paul and Timothy, servants of Christ Jesus, to all the saints in Christ Jesus who are at Philippi, with the overseers and deacons” makes it clear that there are only two continuing church officers, overseers (elders, pastors) and deacons.

After the Apostolic Age, the Church unfortunately slid quickly into Roman hierarchical rule. Ignatius of Antioch, on his way to Rome to be executed (c. 115 A.D.), wrote to a church: “Let the laity be subject to the deacons: the deacons to the presbyters: the presbyters to the bishop; the bishop to Christ, even as He is to the Father” (quoted Schwertley, p 9). In time, the Church added further layers of hierarchy: metropolitans and patriarchs in the East, with archbishops, cardinals, and the pope in the West. To deacons were added sub-deacons. It was not until the Reformation in the 1500s that Reformed churches returned to rule by elders meeting as local Sessions, regional Presbyteries composed of many Sessions, and national Synods made up of many Presbyteries.

The office of deaconess appears clearly in Canon 19 of the 321 A.D. Council of Nicaea: regarding [heretical] Paulinists who want to join the Catholic Church, the Council decreed, “Likewise in the case of their deaconesses, and generally in the case of those who have been enrolled among their clergy, let the same form be observed. And we mean by deaconesses such as have assumed the habit, but who, since they have no imposition of hands, are to be numbered only among the laity.” Elsewhere we find that the special job of the deaconess was to minister to women. By about the year 700 A.D., with the rise of nunneries ruled by a Mother Superior, the office of deaconess died out. Where did the office of deaconess come from in the first place?

To answer that question, Schwertley begins his book with history, as his book title, A Historical and Biblical Examination of Women Deacons indicates. Readers should immediately be alert: it looks like Schwertley will be reading Scripture through the eyes of later church sources, that is, through the eyes of what is usually called Tradition. What if one went about a study of church offices in Schwertley’s quasi-Roman Catholic way? Like Catholics and the Episcopal Church, you would put bishops atop elders, where Ignatius put them in 115 A.D., and explain away references in Acts and Titus that show elders and bishops being the same men.

The earliest source Schwertley references does not reveal anything at all about where the later deaconesses came from. The Didache 1 instructs, “Appoint, therefore, for yourselves, bishops and deacons, men meek…” The Greek word translated “men” is the word for male, in agreement with I Timothy 3:8-10, 12. Schwertley’s off-target further comment is, “The placing of deacon alongside of bishop…indicates that very early in the church deacons had authority.” What? Paired titles do not imply authority. If they mean anything about authority, the commonly paired titles “parents and children,” “husbands and wives,” or “masters and slaves,” suggests that the first one named has authority and the second one named does not.

The matter of authority, who has it and who does not, is very important to Schwertley. If women deacons have authority in the church, then they will have authority over men. He refers often to Paul’s rule, “But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor usurp authority over a man” (KJV, I Timothy 2:12). However, the verb translated “usurp authority” appears only once in the NT and its meaning is uncertain, with translations varying. Therefore, one should hesitate to make that verse a broad statement of women never allowed to have authority over any man in any circumstance. The verse might mean that Paul will not permit a wife to bully her husband, especially not in public, in which case the translation of the KJV, with its verb “usurp” is probably close to its meaning.

Schwertley’s view of female authority reveals a major reason he disagrees with the RPCNA on women deacons. Like Ignatius, he thinks that deacons have authority over the laity. However, the Greek word diakonos itself points to deacons not having authority. The word originally meant “waiter,” or more generally servant.2 Waiters and servants do not have authority! The 1806 RP Declaration and Testimony, as amended in its 1911 printing, explicitly denied that deacons have authority as elders do: “The deacon has no power except about the temporalities of the church” (XXIII:3). The 1980 Testimony of the RPCNA states the same. “The diaconate is a spiritual office subordinate to the session and is not a teaching or ruling office. The deacons have responsibility for the ministry of mercy, the finances and property of the congregation, and such other tasks as are assigned to them by the session” (Testimony 25:11).

After the Didache, Schwertly next cites Pliny the Younger’s charming letter to Emperor Trajan, written in 113 A.D. Pliny reports how he dealt with people accused of being Christians, executing some for being stubborn. He asks Trajan for advice on what more to do. To learn what Christians teach, Pliny reported, he interrogated by torture two women slaves called ministrae, Latin with the same range of meaning as the Greek diakonos. Being slaves, these two women were suitable for torture, and having an office, they presumably knew what Christians teach. Pliny concluded Christians do not believe anything alarming. Concerning this letter, Schwertley concludes, “This instance sheds no light on whether deaconesses are patterned after Paul’s order of widows in I Timothy 5:9-12 or held the same office with male deacons” (p 8). Yes, it does! Pliny’s letter shows that the church did have women called ministrae, that is, diakonoi. He does not identify them further as widows but as slaves, and Governor Pliny knows that they are central enough to church life to be worth torturing for information.

By the time Schwertly gets to Cyprian (250 A.D.), he observes that deacons had evolved into assistants to bishops. At this point in history, deacons ruled alongside presbyters under a bishop. Long before 250, of course, the Church had left behind simple rule by elders. Leaving aside other early century writings that Schwertley discusses briefly, we move to his treatment of Romans 16:1-2 and I Timothy 3:11.

From Corinth in 57-58 A.D., Paul wrote to the church in Rome: “I commend to you our sister Phoebe, a servant (Greek, diakonos) of the church at Cenchreae, that you may welcome her in the Lord in a way worthy of the saints, and help her in whatever she may need from you, for she has been a patron of many and of myself as well” (Romans 16:1-2, ESV). Schwertley comments: “There is no question that her activities sound similar to the activities of deacons” (p 98). Yes, they do. Furthermore, he admits that Paul gave her “an official sounding introduction.” Yes, he did, especially by identifying her as a diakonos of the church at Cenchrae,3 not the more general “diakonos of the Lord.” And, finally, it seems unlikely that Phoebe on her way to Rome on business is an aged widow whom the church needed to support financially (I Timothy 5:9). On the contrary, Paul writes, "she has been a patron of many and of myself as well." Paul's description of Phoebe as a "patron" puts her in the same category of woman as those noted in Luke 8:3, who provided for Jesus out of their means. Phoebe is not just unlikely to have been poor; Paul says flatly that she is a woman of means. But, Schwertley continues, Phoebe had to be a widow deaconess over 60 years old, not a deacon. Why? Because later church history does not write specifically about women deacons, only about deaconesses several centuries after Paul introduced Phoebe to the church in Rome! As Schwertley comments, when responding to B.B. Warfield and other 1800s scholars who believed that Phoebe held the office of deacon, it is “very unlikely” that women deacons vanished not to be “properly restored until the nineteenth century” (p 31). Of course, any believer in rule by bishops could write the same thing about elders ruling as equals vanishing, not to be restored until the sixteenth century. However, our authority is the Bible, not later church history.

Paul’s introduction of Phoebe to the church in Rome supports understanding I Timothy 3:11 as referring to woman [deacons] rather than to old widows with no children to support them. What about I Timothy 3:11 being “wives,” as the KJV translates? Schwertley rightly rejects this translation because the “women” are introduced with the same word, “likewise,” that introduced deacon qualifications. The word “women” should be translated “women.”

Writing about 390 A.D., the universally respected John Chrysostom, ignored by Schwertley, commented briefly on I Timothy 3:11: “‘Even so must the women be grave, not slanderers, sober, faithful in all things.’ Some have thought that this is said of women generally, but it is not so, for why should he introduce anything about women to interfere with his subject? He is speaking of those who hold the rank of Deaconesses.”4 That’s it. I Timothy 3:11 deals with women deacons, later called deaconesses. Chrysostom does not think it necessary to discuss the idea that the “women” were wives of deacons, as per the KJV.

In his subsequent sermons on I Timothy 5, Chrysostom does not mention what work aged widows did for the church. Why? Paul’s topic in that chapter is financial support: first, family should support poor widows; second, young widows should remarry; third, worthy older widows who had done past service should be enrolled for church support; fourth, elders who labor in word and doctrine are worthy of “double honor,” that is, financial support.

If the women of I Timothy 3:11 are not the wives of deacons, who are they? They are women deacons. The qualifications for the women [deacons] are the same as for deacons, except for one thing, the necessity of the deacons being husbands of one wife and ruling their children and households well, required in the next verse, I Timothy 3:12. To require women [deacons] to rule their own households well would indeed contradict the Bible’s teaching on the relationship of husbands and wives, with a husband being the head of his wife (I Corinthians 11:3, Ephesians 5:23). Therefore, Paul gives qualifications for deacons, then similar qualifications for women [deacons], and concludes with one final qualification for deacons: they must rule their own houses well.

The strongest case Schwertley makes for his view that the later deaconesses stem from the indigent aged widows of I Timothy 5 is contained in a chart (pp 116-117), where he compares the qualifications for elders and deacons from I Timothy 3 with those for widows over sixty from I Timothy 5. He nicely shows the similarity for all three. However, these qualifications are ones all Christians should aim for, so not much can be concluded from their similarity.

In this discussion we are asserting that 1 Timothy 3:11 refers to women deacons. As can be seen above, the later Council of Nicaea speaks of something closely related but still slightly different: the unordained deaconess. In the second half of the 19th Century, the RPCNA, along with scholars like B.B. Warfield, a famous defender of orthodoxy, concluded that Phoebe was a deacon, not a deaconess. The later feminine “deaconess,” a new word, was needed when deacons began to preach in the quickly developing church hierarchy. Then, still later, some in the Church looked to the widows of I Timothy 5 to account for the existence of deaconesses.

Schwertley discusses what deaconesses did in the Eastern Church until they faded away. One might conclude from his discussion that every church should aim to have a women deacon or two. Why? There are some things that women need other women to help them with, so a church with all men elders and all men deacons can be lacking in available care for women.

In a later article, this writer intends to give some attention to the reasoning given in the decidedly conservative Presbyterian and Covenanter and the avowedly more progressive Our Banner in support of Synod’s 1888 ruling that women could be deacons, thus responding to Schwertley’s second main thesis, that the RPCNA acted in 1888 from illegitimate Christian feminist motives. A still further article may deal with the issue of ordination, which Schwertley also takes up, denying that it is ever proper to ordain a woman.

I do not recommend that you try to find a copy of Brian Schwertley’s book, A Historical and Biblical Examination of Women Deacons. It can be hard to find. If you do find one, read cautiously. Schwertley cherry picks his sources, omitting the careful and respected preacher John Chrysostom, for example. Buttressed by his quasi-Catholic approach of starting with post-apostolic documents and then looking at the Bible, his dogmatic certainty can carry along the unwary to his preordained conclusion.

– Bill Edgar

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Footnotes:

1 Didache is the usual shorthand reference to The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles, a book lost until it was rediscovered in Constantinople in 1873. It is a compendium of rules and procedures, early but not apostolic.

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2 Generally, the Christian Church did not use pagan or Jewish religious terminology. Instead, it adapted ordinary Greek words for its needs. It used “ekklesia,” an assembly of people, for “church,” and “apostolos,” meaning messenger, for the Apostles. The Greek “diakonos,” a server, named an office so unique to Christianity that translators of the Bible into English do not translate it. When it refers to a church officer, they just use the word “deacon.” Attempts to find qualifications and duties of deacons from the Temple Levites or synagogue officers are therefore misguided. Thinking that deacons are just New Testament “Levites” commits the frequent error that the ancient Church called “judaizing.”

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3 Cenchrae was the eastern port of the city of Corinth. Goods would land at Corinth from the Gulf of Corinth, be transported a short distance over land to Cenchrae, and then loaded onto ships there for further destinations.

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4 “Deacon” in NT times was like the English word “servant,” used equally of men and women, or like the word “server” in a restaurant. Sometime before the year 390 when Chrysostom preached, the Church re-framed the common gender noun “deacon” as a masculine noun, and it called a female deacon a “deaconess,” a word appearing nowhere in the New Testament or contemporary Greek sources.