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Here stands a dynamic faith community whose founding prophet and major source of authority outside the Bible is a woman. Thirteen decades after a resolution to ordain women, it continues to search the Bible for reasons to ordain or not to ordain them. And yet, throughout its history, women have always functioned as ministers of the gospel. There must be some supra-biblical force driving the resistance. Olive Hemmings has gone behind the scenes of the age-long biblical debate. She has searched the archives, closely scrutinized the arguments, laid bare the politics, and even sought entry into the heart of the prophetess herself. This is a surgical work of removing a tight, well fitted mask to reveal the real social fears and inhibitions driving the hermeneutics. This study is helpful for students of sacred texts wishing to observe the social dynamics driving interpretation, and even formation of sacred texts. This is a work of interest for social scientist wishing to exhaust the religious motivations for social grouping and action. Mostly, it is a peep into one scene of an age-long drama, namely the human struggle to find our best self.

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Olive Hemmings, Ph.D is Professor of Religion at Washington Adventist University. She has been teaching in Seventh-day Adventist higher education since 1983. In the teaching of New Testament Bible, Ethics, and World Religions, she tends to call attention to the essential co-relation between religious ideologies/convictions and human civilization.

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