Dr. Al Mohler answered an interesting question raised in his weekly podcast:

Is it Biblical for a woman to be a political or military leader?

Despite stereotype, most Christians don’t have this question. The question is most often posed by non-Christians hoping to make hay with Christians who haven’t thought much beyond the text of 1 Timothy.

Dr. Mohler provides a reasoned, though not necessarily short, reply: 

“God has given us a pattern of relationships and responsibilities between men and women especially in two spheres… the church and a home…”

But there are different spheres of human involvement, Mohler said. “There’s an artistic sphere and there’s a cultural sphere; there is, of course, a political sphere, and there’s an economic sphere, and…there’s a military sphere as well…”

He then specifically addressed the military:

“It’s very important that women not be in combat. I think that’s a very clear principle in the Scripture…that men are to be the protectors of women. We’re not to ask women to be the protectors of men in that sense.”

While there is certainly a Biblical model for this question, until the mid-1990s the US military accepted precisely the same paradigm for non-religious reasons. In the 1990s, the US military opened the fighter pilot career field to women. In January 2013, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta unilaterally ended the exclusion of women from ground combat, marking the end to major restrictions on women in combat in the US military.

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