# Dan McClellan — "Women Pastors Always Preach Heresy?" **Summary.** A stitch-reply video (published 2026-07-12) in which [[Dan McClellan]] answers a creator arguing that women pastors necessarily preach heresy because being a woman pastor requires ignoring scripture. McClellan's counter runs in two moves: everyone ignores scripture, because scripture contradicts itself; and the specific passages cited against women were not written by Paul, while the passage naming a woman as an apostle was. The complementarian is therefore prioritizing forged texts over authentic ones — and calling the result fidelity. (Source: [[3. Resources/Readwise/Articles/Women Pastors Always Preach Heresy|Women Pastors Always Preach Heresy]]) --- ## Key Claims 1. **Scripture is not univocal, so all preaching ignores some of it.** The foundational move, and the one that dissolves the charge rather than answering it. Scripture is "inherently inconsistent and self-contradictory," so any message preached is preached over against some conflicting portion. Everyone has rationalizations for which parts get set aside. "It's inherent to the whole project. You can't do it without ignoring scripture." (Source: [[3. Resources/Readwise/Full Document Contents/Articles/Women pastors always preach heresy|Women pastors always preach heresy]]) 2. **No passage says women cannot be pastors.** The office of pastor appears exactly once in the New Testament, in passing, in Ephesians 4 — with no qualifications attached to it, and in a letter McClellan notes "probably wasn't written by Paul" either. The prohibition texts do not mention pastors at all. 3. **Paul names a woman as an apostle.** Romans 16 — a genuine Pauline letter — acknowledges and praises a woman apostle. The inference is compact: "If a woman can be an apostle, a woman can be a pastor." 4. **The prohibition texts are pseudepigraphic or interpolated.** Two specific claims. The silence command in 1 Corinthians 14 is an **interpolation** that directly contradicts 1 Corinthians 11, where women pray and prophesy in the assembly. The authority prohibition (1 Timothy 2:12) comes from the **Pastoral Epistles**, which Paul did not write — "someone who was lying about being Paul decades after Paul's death." 5. **The charge reverses.** If the complementarian sets aside Romans 16 to keep 1 Timothy 2, they are doing precisely what they accuse women pastors of doing — with the added problem that they are keeping the forgery and discarding the authentic letter. A woman pastor "might be ignoring the parts of scripture that are lies… but at least they're actually listening to what the authentic Paul has to say." 6. **"Heresy just means an idea I don't like."** The definitional deflation. Having established that everyone ignores scripture selectively, McClellan presses the unanswered question: which heresy, specifically? The video ends with none identified. 7. **Misogyny as a credibility enhancing display.** The closing power analysis. The objection is not exegetical but positional — "you're trying to structure power and values and boundaries and identities and ways to take access to power and resources away from women." Performing the objection publicly signals in-group reliability: "Oh, look at that one. They're willing to tow the line. They must be one of the good ones." > [!quote] > "To be any kind of pastor, you must ignore scripture because scripture is not univocal, but is inherently inconsistent and self-contradictory… It's inherent to the whole project. You can't do it without ignoring scripture." — Dan McClellan > [!quote] > "You ignore scripture that actually came from Paul and asserts scripture that came from someone who was lying about being Paul decades after Paul's death. I wonder what kind of heresy comes from misogyny and from prioritizing pseudepigrapha over and against authentic Pauline writings." — Dan McClellan --- ## Analysis for this wiki The eleventh [[Dan McClellan]] source, and the one with the most direct bearing on Courtney's own church context. [[St. John's UCC Chambersburg]] sits in a denomination that has ordained women since 1853 (Antoinette Brown, Congregationalist) — so this source does not settle a live question locally. Its value is different: it supplies the *scholarly* case for a position [[United Church of Christ]] practice already assumes, which is exactly the sort of grounding useful when the practice gets challenged from outside. **The pseudepigraphy thread is now the wiki's most repeated McClellan move.** It has appeared as the historical-Paul-versus-pseudo-Paul split on celibacy and childbearing ([[Dan McClellan]] entity), as authentic-Paul-over-Ephesians-5 on wifely submission ([[2026-07-05-data-over-dogma-monte-mader-purity-culture|Inside Purity Culture and Christian Nationalism with Monte Mader (Data Over Dogma)]]), and now as the load-bearing argument for women's ordination. Across at least four sources the same structure recurs: the harshest gender texts are the ones Paul did not write. That is well past the point where it deserves its own node rather than a bullet on an entity page. **The "everyone ignores scripture" move is the transferable one.** It reframes the debate from *who is faithful to the text* to *who admits what they are doing*. That is the same underlying insight the wiki tracks in [[2026-07-14-mcclellan-jesus-in-the-old-testament|Dan McClellan — \"Jesus in the Old Testament Is Beyond Dispute\]] — where presupposition does the work while claiming the text does — and it is a tool with wide application in [[Deconstruction]] conversations. **Feminist-hermeneutics candidate advanced.** The 2026-07-12 cycle opened this thread with Sarah's erased agency and Rebekah's silence. This source adds the strongest available data point — a named woman apostle in an authentic letter, overruled by a forgery — and pairs with [[2026-06-10-mcclellan-feminism-satanic-roots|Dan McClellan — Responding to 'Feminism Has Satanic Roots]] on the weaponized history used against women in the church. The thread now has three independent sources and a clear spine. **DEIB lens.** The closing analysis is the notable part: the objection is read as a mechanism for allocating power and resources, and its public performance as an in-group signal. That names a cost borne by women in complementarian systems that a purely exegetical rebuttal leaves untouched. > [!note] Tradition / source-caution > Academic critical scholarship in polemical stitch-reply form; the register is contemptuous throughout ("deeply misogynistic and stupid," "grow the hell up"), which is worth registering even where the claims hold. The scholarly positions are mainstream but compressed and asserted rather than argued: Pauline authorship of the Pastorals is doubted by most critical scholars though not all; the 1 Corinthians 14:34–35 interpolation is a strong and widely held text-critical argument but not unanimous; Ephesians is genuinely disputed rather than settled. The Romans 16 apostle is **Junia**, whom McClellan does not name here — a reader would need outside knowledge to follow up, and the name itself carries a long history of being masculinized to *Junias* in translation, which the video omits. No citations. Treat as a competent popular summary of the critical case, not as a survey of the debate. > [!question] Concept-page candidates surfaced > **Pseudepigraphy / authentic-versus-attributed Pauline letters** — now at threshold on the wiki's usual standard: four-plus sources, a stable structure, and load-bearing use in multiple arguments. Nothing currently covers it, and both [[Purity Culture]] and this source lean on it. **Feminist hermeneutics / erased women** — advanced from one data point to three (Sarah, Rebekah, Junia); the Junia case is strong enough that this may now be the better-supported of the two. Both held for a directed pass per the standing convention; folded into [[Dan McClellan]] for now.