Prophets, Preachers, Teachers

Recently, I came across an online discussion concerning the relationship between prophets, preachers and teachers, as biblically defined. By some verbal sleight of hand, one of the participants had accepted as valid the proposition that preaching is the functional heir to the prophetic gift.

The question naturally followed: since there were female prophets (prophetesses) in both Old and New Testaments, why can’t women be preachers today?

Untested Propositions

I am always cautious about untested propositions, especially when they arise from historical observations rather than prescriptive teaching. It’s far too easy to allow them to guide our thinking about the specifics of church life, when they may have nothing whatsoever to do with the church. Let’s back up for a moment and try to think about how the Bible uses each of the three terms in our post’s title.

The Bible is not a dictionary, which is to say that it is not full of hard and fast definitions by which we can easily pin down its concepts in a neat sentence or two. Even when it appears to define an idea for us (for example, “Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen”), the reader quickly realizes that sometimes a word that appears to be fully defined in one place is used differently by other authors (for example, Jude uses “faith” to describe the content of revelation). This means that we have to arrive at our own definitions (or accept those of others) by looking carefully at the scripture usage of its various terms.

Distinguishing Between Concepts

Let me take a crack at distinguishing these three ideas, though I will not try to do so exhaustively:

Prophecy may be predictive or prescriptive, but the term always describes the content of a message delivered to the speaker directly by God. The message may be familiar (many OT prophets repeated truths already spoken by previous prophets) or brand new, but its timing and wording were entirely of the Holy Spirit. No prophecy was ever produced by the will of man.

Preaching simply refers to the act of proclaiming. The prophets preached. Not all preachers were prophets (some preachers got their message via the written word rather than directly from the Spirit of God), but all prophets were preachers. Because it overlaps with prophecy, preaching may also be either familiar or brand new, but it always requires some practical response from its audience.

Teaching refers to the act of making a concept understandable to its audience, usually in order to produce a certain type of behavior. Scriptural synonyms are “instruct”, “counsel” and “guide”. A teacher may or may not make demands on his audience like a preacher; he may be content with producing correct thinking about an idea, the practical implications of which may be explored later. The teacher’s subject matter usually comes from the written word, but sometimes from the prophetic word communicated to the teacher orally (“teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you”).

So then, there is overlap between the three concepts in that prophets preached and taught teachers to teach, but these are all distinct ideas and not synonyms. Prophecy refers primarily to the way a message was received by the prophet, preaching and teaching to different methods of delivering truth to the world.

Functionally Heirless

Prophecy, preaching and teaching each occurred throughout the Old Testament, often at the same time to the same people. Enoch was an early prophet, Noah an early preacher and Moses an early teacher. Haggai and Zechariah preached the prophetic word in their day. Ezra and his fellow priests taught the law to some of the same Jews simultaneously.

Thus, it is incorrect to refer to the role of either preacher or teacher as the functional heir of the role of prophet. All three things were usually going on at the same time, sometimes by the same people. The Lord Jesus prophesied, proclaimed and taught, as did many of his disciples later, often within the very same discourses.

So then, if neither preaching nor teaching is the heir to the prophetic gift, then using the existence of the occasional prophetess in Old or New Testament as evidence women should be able to preach or teach during meetings of the local church is obviously faulty reasoning, even if we were unaware such activity was expressly forbidden by an apostle.

And truly, how could that be in our enlightened age?