Already won the Grimme Prize with YouTube videos
Sommer also makes videos of this type in other contexts. For example, to explain world literature, and he even has one for that Grimme Prize won. So he knows what he’s doing, and he’s doing what he can to use the format to promote women’s ordination in his church as well.
As he has studied the Bible intensively over the past two years, he “received that it is often about gender relations, about questions of violence and the exclusion of women from the pastorate is structural violence,” says Sommer.
Selk bishop justifies rejection of women’s ordination similar to the Catholic Church
The head of the Selk, Bishop Hans Jörg Voigt, is against women’s ordination and justifies this in a similar way to the Catholic and Orthodox Churches, to which he feels closer in some teachings and traditions than to the Evangelical Church in Germany, as he says himself: “The main reason is in the Holy Scriptures. That Jesus Christ himself sent out men as apostles and that the apostle Paul also says in the context of worship that he does not allow a woman to teach.”
This is not an argument for Sophia Schwarz. Like Michael Sommer, the doctor is in the initiative for women’s ordination in Selk: “I think even in the same letter from Paul, which contains this fateful sentence: ‘The woman be silent in the community’, it also says that slaves are subject to their masters and can be beaten. And thank God we have moved away from that.”
Criticism: Bible texts must be read in a historical context
You have to read the texts against the background of the time in which they were written, says Schwarz. In the time Paul lived, women would not have had the same educational opportunities as men.
“The fact that a woman who can’t read and write because she wasn’t allowed to learn it might not be able to speak as a pastor in front of a congregation is a completely different topic than it is today.” Sophia Black
A poll of members asking if they want women ministers was recently rejected by the synod. Bishop Voigt states that the survey would have to be accompanied scientifically. However, he also doubts that it is possible to find “biblical and theological truths through majority queries”.
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