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Source: (consider it)
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Thread: Dead Horses: Headship
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Levor
Shipmate
# 5711
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Lyda*Rose:
Interesting that you brought up that peculiarly Sydney-ite comparison of the subordination of the Son (eternally?) to the Father which the Jensons and the Sydney Diocese have used for all sorts of ways to suppress women both in their personal relationships and the church. And some have said that that particular twist on trinitarianism smells strongly of Arius. If I hadn't even known to what sexist purposes that spin on the Trinity was being put to use, I'd had argued that Christ was necessarily subordinated to the Father in becoming human, but in his eternal divinity there is no subordination.
I know Gordon has already dealt with this, but can I add my two cents as well. Sorry if I go over the top - but I've gotten caught up in the public face of this debate and it's consumed a lot of my time over the last two years. It'll probably end up influencing my choice of PhD area.
The issue of the Son being 'subordinate' to the Father or 'obeys' the Father in eternity and not just in the incarnation is difficult for a number of fairly complex reasons to do with the concepts behind the Father's begetting of the Son (you can have one orthodox theologian like Greagory reject the word obedience, another theologian reject the word subordination, and yet Hilary of Potiers use both 'obedience' and 'subordination' to discuss the relationship). Historically the church spoke more of an 'order' in the relationships that reflected the fact that the Father is the source and cause of the Son and the Spirit - the operations of God are from the Father, through the Son and by the Spirit. Athanasius and the Cappadocians speak freely of the Son doing the will of the Father.
The accusation that Sydney Anglicanism (and conservative evangelicalism in general) have adopted Arianism comes from Protestant theologians committed to a principle of egalitarianism who seem to think that the church's confession of the equality of the Son with the Father must then mean that there can be no hierarchy at all, in any sense. They are often quite explicit in rejecting the idea that the Son is begotten by the Father too. For them,
submission = inferiority
and so must only be true of the human nature of Jesus Christ, and
being caused = being inferior to the cause
and so the Son cannot be eternally begotten of the Father.
In my reading, I have found no Orthodox or Catholic theologian on the Trinity who denies the sort of position that Sydney has been accused of Arianism for. Whatever other sins Sydney may be guilty of, at this point it is only saying things similar to what one can find in Barth and Pannenberg among Protestants, Walter Kasper among Catholics, and expressed in the St Vladimir Journal among Orthodoxy.
It is Protestant egalitarians that are out of step, as far as I can work out.
I wonder if part of the reason why the link between the relationship of the Father and the Son and the question of headship (and women's public ministry) has only occured in conservative evangelical circles is because it hasn't been fought as strongly on egalitarian grounds in Catholic and Orthodox circles? In evangelical circles the analogy has only been brought in to refute the argument that
submission = inferiority
quote:
Originally posted by Mousethief:
The Father is the eternal cause of the Son and the Spirit in a way that neither the Son or the Spirit is the cause of the Father. The Son is eternally begotten, and the Spirit eternally proceeds. Thus the Son and Spirit are subordinate ontologically, albeit not in glory or majesty etc.
Mousethief, I'm sure you know Orthodoxy much better than I do, but are you sure that Orthodoxy believes that the Son is subordinate ontologically? Every Orthodox theologian I've read on the topic has strongly rejected any such suggestion as something synonomous with Arianism. Isn't the homoousious intended to affirm that the Son has the same ontology (being) as the Father?
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in Christ,
Levor
Posts: 276 | From: Sydney | Registered: Apr 2004
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mousethief
Ship's Thieving Rodent
# 953
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Levor:
Every Orthodox theologian I've read on the topic has strongly rejected any such suggestion as something synonomous with Arianism. Isn't the homoousious intended to affirm that the Son has the same ontology (being) as the Father?
Well I may be using the word incorrectly. I meant it to mean that the Son's existence is caused (eternally) by the Father (as is, of course, the Spirit's). I don't mean to say they are not homoousious -- if that's how the Orthodox theologians use the term "ontologically subordinate" then I mistakenly picked the wrong phrase to say what I meant.
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This is the last sig I'll ever write for you...
Posts: 63536 | From: Washington | Registered: Jul 2001
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Levor
Shipmate
# 5711
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Posted
Cool. I was a bit worried that either I'd really misunderstood Orthodoxy over the last couple of years, or that it would give ammunition to Western accusations that Orthodoxy has an Arian (that I think are quite unfounded and based on some of the more unhelpful bits of Augustine's legacy).
Thanks for the clarification.
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in Christ,
Levor
Posts: 276 | From: Sydney | Registered: Apr 2004
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mousethief
Ship's Thieving Rodent
# 953
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Posted
Arian, we're not. Semi-pelagian, well.....
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This is the last sig I'll ever write for you...
Posts: 63536 | From: Washington | Registered: Jul 2001
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Weed
Shipmate
# 4402
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Posted
I can't resist adding my twopennorth after Levor's interesting contribution. It's a case of fool's rushing in because I have nowhere near the theological background to justify arguing with those who've studied this more than me. My ignorance does have relevance I hope because my non-conformist, evangelical in the pre-1970s sense, upbringing wasn't very hot on developed trinitarian thinking. My ignorance also allows me to say such possibly outrageous things as that I don't think St Paul was either, at least in epistles such as the first letter to the Corinthians.
What comes across to me from that letter (and some of the others) is a Jew's understanding of monotheism coupled with a ratification of the teaching and ultimate sacrifice of Jesus by that single deity raising him from the dead. In that letter I see Paul trying to deal with some of the problems that had broken out in the Church at Corinth and bring a bit of order back and it's a much a Hosts and Admin job as anything else. Wouldn't you love to have seen the letters that the churches wrote to Paul or the reports that came back to him? Uppity women claiming their freedom in Christ means that they can freely challenge the men, including their husbands. A loss of decorum with some of the women breaking all the rules of polite society by wearing their hair loose. Men getting hot under the collar about both.
St Paul wasn't challenging the norms of what was considered ideal in 1st century Greek and Roman thought, he was appealing to the church to comply with the best of them. He did that because, as a Jew first and foremost, he had grown up with women being inferior as the natural way of things. He had seen Jesus being totally submissive to the will of God so what more obvious way to curb the riff-raff tendency in Corinth but to appeal to them to mimic what he saw as Jesus's own behaviour in relation to God.
The trouble comes, IMVHO, when, later in that 1st century with John's Gospel and beyond with the Councils, we get a quite different approach which inform the trinitarian view held over the last 1500 years or so. Please excuse my argument's lack of subtlety but I think that once people decided Jesus was divine they had a problem with how to reconcile that with a monotheistic faith and especially with a God that was unchanging. The only way to do that was to hold that Jesus was the eternal Son of God, begotten before time. Two isn't a nice number so we have to have three, so we bring in the Holy Spirit who therefore also has to have existed before time despite the fact that Jesus tells us that the Godhead is spirit anyway.
You've then got huge problems of whether the Son is subordinate or not and if so in what sense. What I see happening in the current discussions about headship is that evangelical thought has disconnected what St Paul said from his 1st century understanding of God and society. Because of our trinitarian understanding of submission of the Son to the Father which, crucially, doesn't involve inferiority, the evangelical argument is that what St Paul must have been laying down when he appealed to the people of Corinth to look to the analogy of the Son and the Father was also some kind of mutual submission between husband and wife.
What I maintain (in a more evangelical than thou tone of voice) is that the text just doesn't support this. It simply doesn't. Couple what is said in 1 Corinthians with what is said in Timothy, Ephesians and Peter and it is absolutely stark-staringly clear that all the writers thought women were inferior to men and that it was right that each of them should be under the authority of a male. (And we have far, far clearer texts on this matter, and a lot more of then, than we have on what was and was not considered a sexually immoral act amongst those with a homesexual orientation at the same period.)
What I say modern evangelicals of the Sydney approach are doing is exactly what they accuse liberals of doing, of twisting the text so that they make it support a highly developed form of trinitarianism and a modern attitude towards the relationship between husband and wife. How you find that in the plain text I don't know. You end up, as has been argued earlier in this thread, with saying that "submission" doesn't mean what everyone thought it meant until about 1970 and that Paul was telling parents to be submissive to their children and husbands to submit to their wives. To argue that robs the word of all meaning and ironically removes the whole justification for the doctrine of headship in the first place.
And that's why I'm saying that what we've seen on this thread is a wishy-washy, pale shadow of the sort of headship St Paul was talking about and that evangelicals are fooling themselves if they think it isn't. A partnership of equals in which one has the final say in cases of conflict may be more acceptable than the husband making all the decisions about the extent to which his wife could be educated or get a job or mix freely in society but it's not what St Paul was talking about. It's just not biblical!
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Weed
Posts: 519 | From: UK | Registered: Apr 2003
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Gordon Cheng
a child on sydney harbour
# 8895
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Posted
Ooh, ooh, a Trinity discussion! Now this is much better and far more interesting than boring old Headship. This being Dead Horses and all, perhaps if we keep the conversation to a whisper we’ll be able to keep going for a while before anyone notices. I might call up a few friends and get them in here too.
Having said that I want to talk not about the Trinity but to go back to this question of how we use culture to read and interpret the Bible. My view is that cultural insights are not of any use at all in determining the meaning of Scripture: the only way to interpret the meaning of the Bible is by the Bible itself.
Weed, let me take your example of the shepherd. Let’s suppose that I’m only marginally more dim than I actually am, and that all my understanding of what shepherding is like derives from Australian farming practises of the late 20th and early 21st century, mediated through my time at an agricultural high school and watching snippets of docos on TV.
I am therefore convinced in my own mind that shepherding require a chief shepherd who flies a helicopter, and some helper-shepherds who ride around on motorbikes whistling and shouting to the sheepdogs such wise aphorisms as “Carn doggie” and “git over here” as they round up several thousand sheep at a time and herd 'em off to the abbatoir and thence to the refrigerated trucks; from there on to the supermarkets.
I now pick up my Bible with this picture firmly in mind, open randomly and read that “The Lord is my shepherd”. I picture God in a helmet driving his motorbike around the paddock in large circles, or possibly hovering around the place in a helicopter with all the gear. I picture him fattening me up and lining me up for the kill.
Now, under the sustained impact of regular Bible reading, how long do you think my mental image of biblical shepherding will last?
I keep reading, and I learn that he leads me by quiet waters and makes me lie down in green pastures. I flip across to Isaiah 40 and learn that he gathers the lambs in his arms, carries them in his bosom and gently leads those with young. “What”, I’m thinking, “several thousand sheep and he carries them around personally? Or just the ones that need mulesing and dipping on account of the flystrike?” I turn randomly over to Ezekiel 34 and discover that this shepherd who is God won’t even kill the fat lambs, and that he refuses to use force or harshness to keep the beasties in line.
I conclude that the Old Testament is probably dodgy anyway when it comes to advanced sheperding practices and move to the New Testament. In the New Testament I am astonished to find that shepherds actually sleep in the fields by night to watch over their sheep. “Can’t these guys build electric fences?” I think. Then I nearly fall off my chair when I reach John 10 and realise that shepherds who own their sheep seem to know them by name! Perhaps they’re microchipped!
The point being that it doesn’t take a lot of reading to work out that my mental image of a shepherd only corresponds very vaguely to what is there in the Bible, and in the end I am far better off just looking up the words “sheep” and “shepherd” in a concordance, chasing up the references, and working out what I can from there.
Now undoubtedly someone who’s done archaeology and dug up a lot of first century sheep bones will be able to tell me a bit about first century sheep and how they were microchipped, but really how will that help? The only thing that will do for me will be to throw up plausible possibilities about what the Bible verses about shepherding mean. And if there is some unknown local Galilean variant of shepherding where shepherding is done in a very different way from the rest of the Ancient Near East, then even what I do know about the first century in general terms will be of little use.
Sorry to rabbit on about sheep but the point I hope is clear. Cultural reconstructions are at best tentative and can only be used to suggest new possibilities for textual interpretation of the Bible. The Bible must ultimately be self-interpreting.
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But a question for you Weed: I am now a bit confused as to what you mean by inferiority. You seem to believe that if Jesus is portrayed as submitting to his Father, he is necessarily not God and not ontologically of one substance with his Father. Is this so, in your opinion?
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Latest on blog: those were the days...; throwing up; clerical abuse; biddulph on child care
Posts: 4392 | From: Sydney, Australia | Registered: Dec 2004
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ken
Ship's Roundhead
# 2460
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Posted
Good sheep analogy. Strongly tempted to repeat it as if it was mine...
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Ken
L’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle.
Posts: 39579 | From: London | Registered: Mar 2002
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Weed
Shipmate
# 4402
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Gordon Cheng:
Ooh, ooh, a Trinity discussion! Now this is much better and far more interesting than boring old Headship. This being Dead Horses and all, perhaps if we keep the conversation to a whisper we’ll be able to keep going for a while before anyone notices. I might call up a few friends and get them in here too.
Bring 'em on! I think we can easily defend the trinitarian aspect on the grounds that it's completely tangled up with the current arguments on headship. I'm more worried about being told off for talking about things that would be better done on one of the biblical interpretation threads but it's difficult to ignore those aspects.
quote:
Cultural reconstructions are at best tentative and can only be used to suggest new possibilities for textual interpretation of the Bible. The Bible must ultimately be self-interpreting.
Then I'll accuse you of anti-incarnationalism. Jesus is the Word of God. It's an incarnationational faith. God becoming a human being and treading in the sheepshit of everyday life in a real place at a real time. The bible doesn't stand alone. To hear conservative evangelicals talk I would honestly think that the words that were written about Jesus Christ were more important than Jesus Christ himself. Was St Paul nothing until he wrote his letters and they were accepted as scripture?
The bible doesn't interpret itself. Do you think St Paul didn't use his intellect and his reason when he compose the first letter to the Corinthians? You can't even understand the words he uses unless you use your God-given brain. Can you read the NT in a foreign language you've never come across before and understand it? Of course you can't. The words aren't magical, somehow conveying meaning without any use of the brain. Why shouldn't we use our intellect and our reason and our study of the ancient history of the Middle East to try to get at what St Paul was saying? The easiest way to to that is to try as far as possible to put ourselves in his position or the position of someone listening to him in Corinth.
Under your method you are using cultural information but only that cultural information that you manage to glean from the bible. But it doesn't tell you everything about the culture because when the words were written the author could assume the common knowledge of the time. The stories Jesus told were about ordinary everyday things that his audience knew about. All the evangelical preachers I've ever known have explained the cultural significance of the various elements of the stories. If we don't understand those things we miss out on half the points Jesus was making.
Take the constant references to the bridegroom. If you've got the idea that mummy and daddy fell in love and got married and mummy was called a bride and daddy a bridegroom you don't see the significance of the use of the term in the bible. Jesus didn't fall in love with the church and go around saying, "I can't live without you, let's get married." The analogy only makes proper sense, the sense that was originally meant, in the terms of that particular society's understanding of marriage and we have to do everything we can to understand it too. Why on earth should we limit ourselves to facts that appear in the books that the church approved for use within liturgy?
OK, you disagree with that. I know you do but frankly I think the conservative evangelical method you describe is very dangerous and it's a method I had never come across before until I joined the Ship. The trouble is I am old and I didn't realise how old. As I've read this thread I've had the distinct impression that a lot of the posters have no idea what it was like to be female before feminism. When I was young (I swore I would never say that) if a husband didn't permit his wife to go out to work, she didn't. It was not uncommon for a prospective employer to ask the husband whether it was OK for his wife to be given the job. Single working women couldn't get a mortgage or a bank loan without having their father stand guarantor for them even though they earned the same as their male counterparts. The main argument against paying women the same as men was that men had families to support so it was part of the natural order of things that they should be paid more.
It wasn't nice. People didn't turn a hair if a man physically disciplined his wife because that was "a domestic matter". It's only within the last twenty years that a husband has been able to be charged with rape of his wife. Before that, the marriage vows were taken as perpetual consent to sexual intercourse whether she wanted it or not. We're not talking about some romantic fiction like the last scene of "An Officer and a Gentleman", we are talking about oppressive behaviour sanctioned by both the church and state. I am greatly disturbed by any hint that we return to those days and some of the posters here seem to have no idea of the dangers. The idea that an educated, independent modern woman in a good job is a sign of the falleness of humanity I find laughable. What was Eve before she met the snake? An empty-headed bimbo?
quote:
But a question for you Weed: I am now a bit confused as to what you mean by inferiority. You seem to believe that if Jesus is portrayed as submitting to his Father, he is necessarily not God and not ontologically of one substance with his Father. Is this so, in your opinion?
Oh I'm hopeless when it comes to the trinity. God is three and God is one and the rest is mystery is as far as I get on a good day. But my own current understanding and uncertainties are completely irrelevant to my argument. I'm trying to be biblical and true to my own evangelical roots you see.
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Weed
Posts: 519 | From: UK | Registered: Apr 2003
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Laura
General nuisance
# 10
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Posted
Weed:
I think you've really hit the nail on the head with the observation that a lot of folks don't seem to realize what it was like before the feminist movement (in terms of headship).
I think if you read the first couple of pages of the thread, you apprehend fairly quickly that the only reason headship is an issue is that women may now choose to allow the man to be the head of the family. It would have been a silly discussion even a few decades ago, because the headship of the man was simply a matter of course. In that sense, today in 1st world countries the submission is much more meaningful (to give credit to those who feel prayerfully that this is how they wish to organize their family lives) than any submission years ago. But those who do so choose should not be under the impression that what they do is what women in St. Paul's time did. Women in St. Paul's time submitted because they belonged to their husbands and lived and died at their husbands' will. The current model of headship that allegedly does not presume inequality would not be recognizable to men and women living hundreds of years ago or even forty years ago in many cases.
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Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence. - Erich Fromm
Posts: 16883 | From: East Coast, USA | Registered: Apr 2001
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mousethief
Ship's Thieving Rodent
# 953
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Weed:
The trouble comes, IMVHO, when, later in that 1st century with John's Gospel and beyond with the Councils, we get a quite different approach which inform the trinitarian view held over the last 1500 years or so. Please excuse my argument's lack of subtlety but I think that once people decided Jesus was divine they had a problem with how to reconcile that with a monotheistic faith and especially with a God that was unchanging.
Yes but John's Gospel wasn't the cause of "deciding Jesus was divine" but rather the effect. The cause was twofold:
1. What he did and said while on this earth;
2. The messianic prophecies of the OT.
Both of which predate John's gospel.
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This is the last sig I'll ever write for you...
Posts: 63536 | From: Washington | Registered: Jul 2001
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Laura
General nuisance
# 10
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Posted
The early church was quite clear that women were inferior to men, as Ruth pointed out on the Priestly Genitalia thread not long ago:
quote:
Originally posted by RuthW:
the_grip, I'll deal with most of your points at some later date, but this one I cannot let stand.
quote:
The tenets of the church have always upheld women. Nowhere in the church's claims have you ever found a proclaimation that women are inferior to men before God.
This is patently false. The church has for centuries consistently claimed that women are inferior to men before God. You may read here all about the church's tradition of holding that women are inferior to men. If you want context, there are plenty of links on that site to the full texts of the documents.
The church has a long and ugly history of despising women. Here's little taste: Tertullian called us "the devil's gateway". St Gregory of Nazianzum said, "Fierce is the dragon and cunning the asp; But woman have the malice of both." St. Ambrose claimed that women were not in fact made in the image of God. St. Jerome said, "Woman is the root of all evil." St. Augustine's regard for women was so low that he couldn't figure out why we were created at all, until it occurred to him that without women there would be no children. Naturally, he concluded that procreation was the sole reason women were created.
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Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence. - Erich Fromm
Posts: 16883 | From: East Coast, USA | Registered: Apr 2001
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Nicodemia
WYSIWYG
# 4756
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Posted
Only just come into this thread, but Weed, I'm with you all the way on the women and inferiority thing. You must be the same generation (if not age) as me! Oh, boy! Was it hard in those days to get something that today's women just take for granted (and lightly throw away, sometimes!)
And, I might add, men of our age/generation still haven't got round to thinking women aren't inferior!!
Now you can all go back to your academic discussions. I'll try and keep up!
Nicodemia
Posts: 4544 | From: not too far from Manchester, UK | Registered: Jul 2003
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Laura
General nuisance
# 10
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Posted
This should not be only an academic discussion. It has an effect on the whole of human society and deserves both practical and academic discussion!
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Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence. - Erich Fromm
Posts: 16883 | From: East Coast, USA | Registered: Apr 2001
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Callan
Shipmate
# 525
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Posted
Originally posted by Levor:
quote:
It is Protestant egalitarians that are out of step, as far as I can work out.
I wonder if part of the reason why the link between the relationship of the Father and the Son and the question of headship (and women's public ministry) has only occured in conservative evangelical circles is because it hasn't been fought as strongly on egalitarian grounds in Catholic and Orthodox circles? In evangelical circles the analogy has only been brought in to refute the argument that
submission = inferiority
I wonder. I would not rule out a theory which has been defended by the late, brilliant Colin Gunton in his wonderful "Homage to Cappadocia"* but I do feel a degree of unease with the idea of the subordination of the Son. I think the problem with it is that it imports ideas of human power relationships and status into the Godhead which is clearly beyond that sort of thing.
In the Divine Comedy Dante puts a kind of hierarchy of perfection in Heaven but then backtracks by having the souls of the Blest both in their respective layers and in the Empyrean Heaven. Dante's point is that whilst, on the one hand, there is a hierarchy in the created and redeemed order, on the other hand in the realm ruled by 'the Love that moves the sun and other stars' the concept of hierarchy is only of limited value. The souls in the heaven of the moon are clearly 'lesser' than the Blessed Virgin Mary, but, OTOH, they are loved equally. This is a paradox that Dante, with a poet's sensitivity, is unwilling to resolve because a resolution on either side would be untrue to the life of the redeemed creation.
Taking the analogy further, on the one hand, the language of subordination may be used to explain, in certain instances, the relations of the persons of the Holy Trinity but to define dogmatically (in the proper sense of the word) the son as being definitively subordinate to the Father seems wrong as I don't think that the Trinity relate to one another in that way. The relationship is one of mutual self-giving. The language of subordination, held lightly to, is one thing. To treat it as some kind of propositional reality is like inserting a head by Picasso into a landscape by Claude. It just doesn't work.
Originally posted by Gordon Cheng:
quote:
The point being that it doesn’t take a lot of reading to work out that my mental image of a shepherd only corresponds very vaguely to what is there in the Bible, and in the end I am far better off just looking up the words “sheep” and “shepherd” in a concordance, chasing up the references, and working out what I can from there.
Now undoubtedly someone who’s done archaeology and dug up a lot of first century sheep bones will be able to tell me a bit about first century sheep and how they were microchipped, but really how will that help? The only thing that will do for me will be to throw up plausible possibilities about what the Bible verses about shepherding mean. And if there is some unknown local Galilean variant of shepherding where shepherding is done in a very different way from the rest of the Ancient Near East, then even what I do know about the first century in general terms will be of little use.
Sorry to rabbit on about sheep but the point I hope is clear. Cultural reconstructions are at best tentative and can only be used to suggest new possibilities for textual interpretation of the Bible. The Bible must ultimately be self-interpreting.
That seems vaguely obscurantist, to be honest. Abandoning shepherds for the moment - rather amusingly I have preached sermons in which I have contrasted modern and ancient ideas of shepherds with the message - 'ware the idea that the Bible is self-interpreting ![[Biased]](wink.gif) - consider the use of the word 'Lord' in the Bible. For most of us we may think of "The House of Lords", "Lord's Cricket Ground", "Lord Irvine", or "Lord Hailsham", "Everyone loves a Lord", "Drunk as a Lord" or even an episode of a 1960s espionage series entitled "But He's a Lord, Mr Callan". The sheer terror and power and the connotations of more than human power behind the Greek "Kurios" is absent from any of these modern allusions. Of course, we can go to a concordance, keeping the amount of modern scholarship we rely on to a minimum - but the scholarship neutral concordance has yet to be invented. There is going to be some echo of modern thought in our reading of scripture whether we will or no. Should we take it on unknowingly and unconsciously, or should we take it on through the lens of Holy Tradition and seeking the best possible scholarship?
Actually, we're quite safe with 'Lord' because it has been safeguarded by Holy Tradition. But given that the meaning and understanding of words shift the idea that we can merely refer to the Bible without reason and Tradition seems naive. Karl Barth objected to fundamentalism on the grounds that it only allowed for the divine inspiration of the writers of scripture and not the readers. This seems to me to be deeply profound. Any interpretation of scripture will arise out of an interaction between the reader and the text and the most dangerous readers are those who are unaware of this fact.
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How easy it would be to live in England, if only one did not love her. - G.K. Chesterton
Posts: 9757 | From: Citizen of the World | Registered: Jun 2001
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saysay
Ship's Praying Mantis
# 6645
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Gordon Cheng:
I think I’ve answered your question as best I can, but there remains possibly some curiosity as to what contemporary application would be. I believe that the answer is that we should retain Paul’s concern for physical signifiers in our dress of the difference between men and women: that is, that a deliberate attempt to obliterate the distinction by having women dress exactly like men in every respect is an indication that male authority is being usurped, and therefore not good. Oh, and before you ask, yes women are allowed to wear trousers or jeans on this view, and it’s not compulsory for them to wear dresses — unless the wearing of trousers or jeans signifies in that context a rebellion against the created order.
I'm curious - in what context does my wearing jeans or trousers signify a rebellion against the created order and an attempt to usurp male authority?
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"It's been a long day without you, my friend
I'll tell you all about it when I see you again"
"'Oh sweet baby purple Jesus' - that's a direct quote from a 9 year old - shoutout to purple Jesus."
Posts: 2943 | From: The Wire | Registered: May 2004
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Siena
Ship's Bluestocking
# 5574
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Posted
Perhaps if you're wearing them underneath an alb with stole? ![[Devil]](graemlins/devil.gif)
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The lives of Christ's poor people are starved and stunted; their wages are low; their houses often bad and insanitary and their minds full of darkness and despair. These are the real disorders of the Church. Charles Marson
Posts: 709 | From: San Diego, California, USA | Registered: Feb 2004
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Gordon Cheng
a child on sydney harbour
# 8895
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by saysay:
I'm curious - in what context does my wearing jeans or trousers signify a rebellion against the created order and an attempt to usurp male authority?
It's very hard to think of examples because most of the time, we wear clothes for fashion, comfort, vanity, perceived attractiveness, functionality and so on. It's unusual to wear clothing to make a deliberate ideological statement; something which may have been going on at Corinth judging by by Paul's reaction to it.
Back in the '70s there used to be a fashion style which was broadly described as Unisex, which meant that men and women dressed almost identically, and deliberately so. This may have been ideologically motivated in some cases, and if so, would be an example. Or it might just be yet another sign that the 70s was the decade that fashion forgot. Or not, if you liked that kind of thing.
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meow
Shipmate
# 9273
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Posted
It seems that for weddings, the traditional dress codes still apply. Not many women seem to wear trousers for their wedding.
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Posts: 104 | From: New Zealand | Registered: Apr 2005
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Levor
Shipmate
# 5711
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Weed:
I can't resist adding my twopennorth after Levor's interesting contribution. It's a case of fool's rushing in because I have nowhere near the theological background to justify arguing with those who've studied this more than me.
Weed, I apologise. That wasn't meant to be a disempowering "I'm the expert" kind of statement - given that I tend to wax long and academic I was simply trying to explain why I was about to jump up and down about the issue. I think you can hold your own on these things quite well.
quote:
The trouble comes, IMVHO, when, later in that 1st century with John's Gospel and beyond with the Councils, we get a quite different approach which inform the trinitarian view held over the last 1500 years or so. Please excuse my argument's lack of subtlety but I think that once people decided Jesus was divine they had a problem with how to reconcile that with a monotheistic faith and especially with a God that was unchanging. The only way to do that was to hold that Jesus was the eternal Son of God, begotten before time. Two isn't a nice number so we have to have three, so we bring in the Holy Spirit who therefore also has to have existed before time despite the fact that Jesus tells us that the Godhead is spirit anyway.
It is a good argument, but it doesn't fit with what I read when I read the early church fathers. I don't get the sense that they are trying to solve an intellectual puzzle. I get the sense that they are trying to understand what Jesus Christ has done and (consequently) who he must be as a result.
They invariably argue soteriologically, not 'logically' - from the nature of salvation to the nature of God and of Jesus Christ. So your reconstruction doesn't account for what I see when I read them.
I'll pick up the men-women side later, if that's ok.
quote:
Originally posted by Callan:
I wonder. I would not rule out a theory which has been defended by the late, brilliant Colin Gunton in his wonderful "Homage to Cappadocia"* but I do feel a degree of unease with the idea of the subordination of the Son. I think the problem with it is that it imports ideas of human power relationships and status into the Godhead which is clearly beyond that sort of thing.
Agreed. At one level, the intratrinitarian relationships are so different from human-human or human-divine ones that there can be no analogy. Athanasius has an important section in his Orations against the Arians where he argues from Genesis 1 that the Son is the Father's Word and so the Father never addresses the Son with some other word. The Son never learns the Father's will and goes and does it like an underling for the Son is the Father's Will. The Son is the Father's living Will, the agent who does what the Father wills and the Father's Word to creatures - the One through whom the Father's will is communicated.
This is an argument against 'subordination' and 'obedience' but not because of a flat relationship of authority (for Athanasius says that as soon as the Father wills the Son does it) but because the Father-Son/Word relationship has some extremely unique features. There is no other relationship where one person is the will and word of the other person.
quote:
Taking the analogy further, on the one hand, the language of subordination may be used to explain, in certain instances, the relations of the persons of the Holy Trinity but to define dogmatically (in the proper sense of the word) the son as being definitively subordinate to the Father seems wrong as I don't think that the Trinity relate to one another in that way. The relationship is one of mutual self-giving. The language of subordination, held lightly to, is one thing. To treat it as some kind of propositional reality is like inserting a head by Picasso into a landscape by Claude. It just doesn't work.
I think we're close at this point, but the difference is important. I think when the Nicene Creed says that the Son is eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, light from light, true God from true God that these are all attempts to make statements of propositional reality and they are all 'subordinationist' statements because they point to the Father as the Cause and Source of the Son. But they are also the reason why the Son is equal to the Father: precisely because he is true God from true God he is homousious with the Father. His "equality" is a consequence of his "subordination".
And I think the mutual self-giving talk that is common among many Protestant theologians at the moment is an attempt to replace the begetting of the Son (and the procession of the Spirit) with perichoresis as the unifying principle of the Godhead. It is an attempt to replace the early Church's view that there is a primary self-giving of the Father to the Son and the Spirit that the Son and the Spirit then give back in response with a flat, mutual self-giving. It is an attempt to redraw the Trinity on egalitarian grounds.
I think it is a different Trinitarian theology then that represented by Nicea. From what I can see, Moltmann seems to go in that direction. Millard Erickson claims that the Arians were right and if the Son was begotten then he is inferior, and Miroslav Volf tries to separate off the relationships of origin (begetting and procession) from the way the operations of the Godhead function. They are all, in their different ways rejecting classical trinitarian theology as not reflecting the kind of 'equality' they believe in.
When they then say that the Son being 'subordinate' to the Father is Arian, I'm increasingly of the view that they should come clean and say outright that the Nicene Creed is Arian. The idea that Nicea is the triumph of Arianism is well, fairly ironic.
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in Christ,
Levor
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mousethief
Ship's Thieving Rodent
# 953
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Posted
Levor you clearly are a well-read person. ![[Overused]](graemlins/notworthy.gif)
I like what you say about the moderns painting Nicea as a victory for Arianism. How ironic, indeed! How human (menschlich, allzu menschlich!) not to see how one's own presuppositions colour how one sees another's position.
ETA:
I wanted to make a more general remark concerning headship. Doesn't St. Paul say, "Submit to one another"? It's not like "mutual submission" was invented in the late 20th century. He says, "Submit to one another, wives to your husbands as to the Lord." It's all one sentence but too many translations break it in two pieces, and put the first half with the previous paragraph and the second half with the next. But it's all one sentence in the greek. We are all to submit to one another; then he emphasizes one subset of that universal mutual submission, and goes on to expand on that one bit. But the "submit to one another" stands. And it seems we have to have some idea of what mutual submission means to make sense of that command, whatever century we find ourselves in.
[ 08. April 2005, 10:36: Message edited by: Mousethief ]
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Adeodatus
Shipmate
# 4992
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Posted
Am I being ignorant here? Or is this just something I've never thought about, given that my interest in marriage is never going to be a personal one? -
What has the subordination (or not) of the Son to the Father got to do with it? I was under the impression that in the NT marriage was an ikon of the relationship not between the Father and the Son, but between Christ and the Church.
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"What is broken, repair with gold."
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mousethief
Ship's Thieving Rodent
# 953
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Posted
More on mutual submission:
quote:
1 Cor 7:4, NASB
The wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does; and likewise also the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does.
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Callan
Shipmate
# 525
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Posted
Originally posted by Levor:
quote:
And I think the mutual self-giving talk that is common among many Protestant theologians at the moment is an attempt to replace the begetting of the Son (and the procession of the Spirit) with perichoresis as the unifying principle of the Godhead. It is an attempt to replace the early Church's view that there is a primary self-giving of the Father to the Son and the Spirit that the Son and the Spirit then give back in response with a flat, mutual self-giving. It is an attempt to redraw the Trinity on egalitarian grounds.
I think it is a different Trinitarian theology then that represented by Nicea. From what I can see, Moltmann seems to go in that direction. Millard Erickson claims that the Arians were right and if the Son was begotten then he is inferior, and Miroslav Volf tries to separate off the relationships of origin (begetting and procession) from the way the operations of the Godhead function. They are all, in their different ways rejecting classical trinitarian theology as not reflecting the kind of 'equality' they believe in.
When they then say that the Son being 'subordinate' to the Father is Arian, I'm increasingly of the view that they should come clean and say outright that the Nicene Creed is Arian. The idea that Nicea is the triumph of Arianism is well, fairly ironic.
I think that Mousethief has said what I wanted to say about self-giving much better than I would have said it.
I don't know enough about the theolgians you have cited to comment about their Trinitarian theology (although isn't Volf a Catholic - from Croatia IIRC, rather than a protestant?) but it seems to me that Athanasius et. al. were insisting on the equality of the Persons in the Godhead in a way that Arius and his chums were rather denying. The language of eternal begetting etcetera was objected to because it went against the common sense observation that clearly a 'son' is in some fundamental sense inferior to a 'father'. Arianism is, fundamentally, an insistence on the subordination of the Son in a way in which Nicene Orthodoxy clearly isn't.
Athanasius (I think) used the analogy of a lit candle. The light is contingent on the wick and the wax but the light exists temporally at the same time as the candle. His point was that we can imagine the Son being eternally begotten of the Father. The Son is therefore subordinate, in the sense that he derives from the Father, but equal inasmuch as he exists with the Father from eternity. There was not a time when he was not. Now I suppose you could say that the flame was subordinate to the wick and the wax of a candle, but how useful or meaningful is such language? A lit candle is, in a fairly important sense, a single united entity. Imagine your candle to be eternal and... well, you get my drift.
Tangentially, I might add: Ruling out those theologians, who have gone Arian, as it were. I suspect that someone from the Plot is going to turn up and argue that a more fundamental cause of theolgians trying to sideline the notions of begetting and procession would derive from the West's following of Augustine rather than the Cappadocian Fathers. But that's another argument.
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How easy it would be to live in England, if only one did not love her. - G.K. Chesterton
Posts: 9757 | From: Citizen of the World | Registered: Jun 2001
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Gordon Cheng
a child on sydney harbour
# 8895
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Adeodatus:
Am I being ignorant here? Or is this just something I've never thought about, given that my interest in marriage is never going to be a personal one? -
What has the subordination (or not) of the Son to the Father got to do with it? I was under the impression that in the NT marriage was an ikon of the relationship not between the Father and the Son, but between Christ and the Church.
Adeodatus: 1 Cor 11:3 and immediate context is a passage often cited to bring out the link.
For those who believe that the intra-trinitarian relationships find reflection in the relationship of male and female, it would follow that there may be a link at this point. The question telates, then, to what we mean by saying men and women are in the image of God.
Mousethief: Mutual submission as a general principle I agree with, although it is not necessarily worked out as straightforwardly as saying that wives submit to husbands and husbands submit to wives in a relational mirror-image. That all submit to all does not mean that every individual submits to every other individual
(any more than in Gal 5:15 every single individual is going to consume every other individual in the congregation)
ETA: I copied Levor's previous post into a purg thread to allow the Trinity discussion to be separated out.
[ 08. April 2005, 11:23: Message edited by: Gordon Cheng ]
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Laura
General nuisance
# 10
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Posted
Admin hat /on
In an unusual operation, this thread is determined not to be dead horse material, as it doesn't meet the requirements (subject that comes up all the time on Christian forums, generates tons of heat, causes Host headaches).
So, hang on to your hats for the upward whoosh!
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Oxymoron
Shipmate
# 5246
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Posted
Coming back to the opening question, might I suggest that a 50/50 power share in a relationship IS actually submitting?
I know for sure that if were not in a relationship I would live quite differently. If you are alone you do not have to think of anyone elses feelings, and you certainly don't have to consider anyone else in a decision.
To arrive at a 50/50 situation means you have had to give up 50%. I would call that submission. It might not exactly be headship, but it's certainly some way to conforming to the scriptures I have read (which suggest both submission on the part of the woman AND consideration on the part of the man).
Posts: 179 | From: Brunel's Kingdom | Registered: Nov 2003
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Divine Outlaw
Gin-soaked boy
# 2252
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Levor:
But they are also the reason why the Son is equal to the Father: precisely because he is true God from true God he is homousious with the Father. His "equality" is a consequence of his "subordination".
Eric Mascall uses the phrase 'derived equality', which I think is better and less prejudicial to other questions. More generally, I think it is vital not to loose sense of the doctrine of analogy when talking about the Trinity. Whatever we mean by 'begetting' when we apply it to filiation is more disimilar to anything we encounter in human experience than it is similar. Thus it is not temporal (the Father's 'priority' as source of divine being cannot imply the Arian 'there was a time when he was not), nor does it imply expenditure on the Father's part, nor need it imply any secondariness of the Logos. Trinitarian theology is an 'owning a the mystery' that takes place at the edge of human language. We should attempt to derive conclusions about human affairs from it very cautiously. An idolatrous overlooking of the proper ratio of divine and human being seems to me to be implicit in much of the headship debate.
The only sound 'way in' could be through looking at the Trinity in the economy of salvation, namely at Jesus' relationship with his Abba. Nonetheless, Rahner's 'the economic Trinity is the immanent Trinity' notwithstanding, we do need to remember that we are looking here at the Logos as Incarnate, and that Christ is 'equal to the Father as touching his godhead, inferior to the Father as touching his manhood.'
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Divine Outlaw
Gin-soaked boy
# 2252
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Oxymoron:
Coming back to the opening question, might I suggest that a 50/50 power share in a relationship IS actually submitting?
If you do look at your relationships in such a quantitative way, then yes you're right. But if I ever found myself consciously staking out my 50% share in my marriage I would be profoundly concerned. Relationships can go beyond quantitative carve ups to free relationship with the other.
Even less does the 50/ 50 thing work for the Father-Logos relationship. Whatever we mean by saying there are three '''persons''' in the godhead, we do not mean that the divinity is carved up, God has no parts. The tradition has held that the divine esse is fully instantiated in each hypostasis. The Father gives fully of his divinity to the Son, who returns the fullness of divinity back to the Father in love by the Spirit.
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Oxymoron
Shipmate
# 5246
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Posted
And if I ever started staking out my 50% share my wife would leave me on the next buss out of town. But I am simply saying that by living in a "modern" relationship, one with give and take, you already are submitting (the give).
And that some of the relevent scripture passages, which can seem incredibly sexist on first reading, actually call for just that, give and take, both female submission and male compassion.
Posts: 179 | From: Brunel's Kingdom | Registered: Nov 2003
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Divine Outlaw
Gin-soaked boy
# 2252
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Posted
Of course, the scriptural passages in question relate analogically to Christ's relationship as head to his body the Church (that is, a human relationship) rather than to the intra-trinitarian relationships. And I'd say that Paul is using ecclesial analogy to call for the preservation of social norms in particular circumstances. As is so often the case, I suspect this turns on how we read Scripture.
[ 08. April 2005, 15:08: Message edited by: Divine Outlaw Dwarf ]
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Ethne Alba
Shipmate
# 5804
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Posted
Isn't there something about....."as Christ loved the Church?"
My muddled recall of scripture leads me to the assumption that any future husband would lay down his life for me.
I could live with that............
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Weed
Shipmate
# 4402
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Adeodatus:
Am I being ignorant here? Or is this just something I've never thought about, given that my interest in marriage is never going to be a personal one? -
What has the subordination (or not) of the Son to the Father got to do with it? I was under the impression that in the NT marriage was an ikon of the relationship not between the Father and the Son, but between Christ and the Church.
As Gordon mentioned, 1 Corinthians 11:3 says quote:
Now I want you to realize that the head of every man is Christ, and the head of every woman is man and the head of Christ is God.
If you can argue that the second person of the Trinity is eternally equal to but subordinate to the first person you can use what St Paul says to show that woman is eternally inferior to, sorry, did I say inferior? I meant equal to, equal to, equal but subordinate to man and therefore women can't be in authority over men and therefore women can't be priests. That's the importance of the headship and the Trinity argument. As I understand it it's the Sydney Anglican, conservative evangelical version, of FIF, or "separate but equal development". It's quite clever, really. You get to have man in a position of authority in the home and church whilst at the same time asserting that women are in every way equal to man. If that's how the Trinity works, and that's what they argue St Paul is saying in the bible verse above, it must be so.
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Weed
Posts: 519 | From: UK | Registered: Apr 2003
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mr cheesy
Shipmate
# 3330
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Posted
Nope I don't understand that. Sounds like everyone is equal only some are more equal than others...
C
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Gordon Cheng
a child on sydney harbour
# 8895
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Posted
Hi Weed,
Back to the points you raised earlier, and a few more made since:
quote:
Originally posted by Weed:
I'm surprised that you should say the issue is the physical appearance of the women as opposed to that of the men as I haven't heard that as a possible interpretation before. Are you saying that St Paul would have been happy if the women had all worn their hair loose but red clothes and the men had worn yellow clothes?
Depends. Would this have signified submission? I doubt it. If it did; then yes, if it didn’t; then no. Paul thought that style of hair signified submission, so he argued for it.
quote:
What I am saying is that as soon as you allow in the cultural argument in the area of headship at all, you have great difficulty in denying it with integrity with regard to what St Paul says about various forms of immorality. Do you see the parallel?
Well yes I do, but as I’ve suggested I don’t think I’m allowing in a cultural argument beyond what Paul has already indicated that he is doing in the text; his appeal to the pracitce of “all the churches” in 11:16. Now in your earlier response you have quoted the immediate context to show that there is also a link to the natural order of things; and so there is. But the natural order of things is not just about hair-wearing! It’s about submission. So Paul supports the latter (submission), insists on the former (hair style) in a situation where all churches are following the same practice— and then leaves later readers to figure out application in their context.
quote:
In a subsequent post, Weed said:
The bible doesn't interpret itself. Do you think St Paul didn't use his intellect and his reason when he compose the first letter to the Corinthians? You can't even understand the words he uses unless you use your God-given brain. Can you read the NT in a foreign language you've never come across before and understand it? Of course you can't. The words aren't magical, somehow conveying meaning without any use of the brain. Why shouldn't we use our intellect and our reason and our study of the ancient history of the Middle East to try to get at what St Paul was saying? The easiest way to to that is to try as far as possible to put ourselves in his position or the position of someone listening to him in Corinth.
Under your method you are using cultural information but only that cultural information that you manage to glean from the bible.
No, I’ve never denied reason and intellect a role in interpreting Scripture, and cultural insights may illuminate meaning. You’re quite right, Scripture is written in human languages and will require us to understand those languages and/or place a reasonable degree of confidence in the translators. Knowing a bit about shepherds leading from the front, or arranged first-century marriages, may well illuminate the meaning; most especially by clearing away the dead wood of our own cultural presuppositions. Let’s face it, the idea about how shepherds need motorbikes is an unhelpful presupposition. Doing cultural studies will disabuse me of it and help me read the Bible with less junk in my head and a better chance of getting at the meaning. But then, just reading the Bible will quickly disabuse me of the motorbike idea too. So the cutural studies stuff is helpful but not essential, and has its own pitfalls too
(for example: one pitfall is a greater temptation to assume that I've got the culture nailed down, now that I've done my archaeology degree; thus dignifying my cultural insights with too much weight in the interpretive process)
My point is that there is enough cultural information to be found in the text for us to be getting on with. Could you name one substantial piece of interpretation that hinges on extra-biblical knowledge of how shepherds operated in first century Galilee? Could you name one substantial piece of interpretation that requires knowledge of first century marriage practices? I mean, knowledge that is not already there in the bible.
On the headship and submission question, you have cited a number of examples: women unable to obtain mortgages or employment pre-feminism; women subject to physical and sexual abuse as a direct result of the understanding of what submission meant. And I agree that feminism has brought to the forefront the invalidity of some of these assumptions about the nature of true submission.
But I would counter that no-one can pay careful attention to Ephesians 5 and the way Christ treated his church, and come away thinking that it is automatically right to deny mortgages or employment to women—much less be violent towards wives— simply and only on the grounds that they are to submit! That in itself is a textual distortion. No doubt it would be possible to argue that in Paul’s first century culture, such things were regularly practised. But at this point, the lack of cultural detail in the bible, and the epistolary nature of much of the NT, whereby we must frankly admit just how much we don’t know of the actual situation addressed, turns out to be a great blessing. We are thrown back to asking what comments the bible itself has to make on the nature of submission, and with it leadership.
Note also how we have various indications that Christian discipleship means radically standing against prevailing cultural norms, no matter how bizarre this will appear. Eg.
quote:
Luke 22:25 And he said to them, “The kings of the Gentiles exercise lordship over them, and those in authority over them are called benefactors.
Luke 22:26 But not so with you. Rather, let the greatest among you become as the youngest, and the leader as one who serves.
Luke 22:27 For who is the greater, one who reclines at table or one who serves? Is it not the one who reclines at table? But I am among you as the one who serves.
If the husband is in any sense a leader in the marriage, then here is an example where the husband may not simply pick up prevailing social mores and apply them to the marriage, but must do the exact opposite.
So, we must struggle with the principles stated by Paul and how to rework them into their contemporary application. We are not free to insist that Paul was simply endorsing a slightly more enlightened version of first-century culture, as a cultural model that must be ossified into the church for all time.
I think I am still waiting for you to define what you mean by "inferiority". You have given examples; examples which I deny are what the bible had in mind when it teaches submission. But you still seem to be insisting that submission will and must equate to inferiority. True, or have I got that wrong?
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Emma Louise
Storm in a teapot
# 3571
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Posted
no way. people still teach this?
Inferiority - not allowed to do certain things that men are simply because of gender. thats inferiority.
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Divine Outlaw
Gin-soaked boy
# 2252
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Posted
The basic question I would want to ask you is why does this handful of passages from St Paul matter so much? They don't seem central to the history of salvation. They've never featured heavily in the tradition. If we removed them from the New Testament it wouldn't look very different (this contrasts with, say, Jesus' teaching about and actions towards the poor). What is it about our current situation and ideological presuppositions, that makes these, apparently incidental, texts the stuff of controversy?
[aimed at gordon, not emma, whom I agree with]
[ 08. April 2005, 23:01: Message edited by: Divine Outlaw Dwarf ]
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Emma Louise
Storm in a teapot
# 3571
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Posted
My huge problem with it is that *in context* the passages would have been hugely liberating for women.
Household codes of the time usaully had "women must, children must, slaves must.." the main point paul was making is that he was revolutionary. He was suggesting those in authority actually had a responsibilty to those they are in authority over.
As in... not only children must.. BUT ALSO parents. not just slave, BUT ALSO owners..
So that would have been the real punch of the passage.
Similarly the husband head as christ is head.. read that bit that says "ahh but i am not talking about marriage, i am talking about the church". He is using a relevant daily metaphor for his purposes, like sheep and shepherds and all that.To argue backwards is bad logic. Like arguing that sheep should be like christians...
In total, it is those teaching that women should have lesser roles than men in todays society that have missed the point of the passages and arent taking them seriously. IMHO.
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Gordon Cheng
a child on sydney harbour
# 8895
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Emma.:
no way. people still teach this?
It's bizarre, isn't it. Positively antediluvian. And to think that I've been married for more than 20 years, that my wife and I share cooking and cleaning, that she has a university degree and that I've encouraged her to work or not, as she chooses, and that our 3 little daughters still seem fairly well adjusted. And I still think I'm trying to live out these principles, and so does my wife! Possibly we're unhappy and don't yet know it.
But I still haven't worked out how different roles in our marriage means that my wife is inferior to me, or me to her for that matter.
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RuthW
liberal "peace first" hankie squeezer
# 13
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Posted
That people have different roles in marriage is unexceptionable. To have those roles determined by sex is sexism.
Posts: 24453 | From: La La Land | Registered: Apr 2001
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John Donne
Renaissance Man
# 220
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Posted
Gordon, if you're willing to share more about the way you pursue your different roles, can you indicate in which spheres you exercise your husbandly authority?
What you've related seems no different to any other husband and wife. When does crunch time come?
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Emma Louise
Storm in a teapot
# 3571
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Posted
exactly (agreeing wtih coot and ruth)
Im convinced men and women *are* different, personally. And any 2 people (male or female) will think differently and relate in different ways, so in a marriage obviously different roles will be taken. Surprisingly I personally would love the house"wife" role, and responsibility for kids.
However, where does leave "authority over". Are you saying you gave your wife permission to work outside the home/ you graciously decided to help her with the washing up... or is the point just academic?
Posts: 12719 | From: Enid Blyton territory. | Registered: Nov 2002
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Custard
Shipmate
# 5402
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Posted
The question here seems to have shifted to consider
"If the husband persistently does not even attempt to love his wife as Christ loved the church, should the wife still recognise his headship?"
To my (limited) mind, the best response would be to speak to him about it, or get someone else to do it. If the wife is a Christian and the husband isn't, it gets a bit trickier though.
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blog
Adam's likeness, Lord, efface;
Stamp thine image in its place.
Posts: 4523 | From: Snot's Place | Registered: Jan 2004
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John Donne
Renaissance Man
# 220
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Posted
Just meandering back to something else for a moment - but I hope Gordo will carry on with the above.
quote:
Gordon:
It's very hard to think of examples because most of the time, we wear clothes for fashion, comfort, vanity, perceived attractiveness, functionality and so on. It's unusual to wear clothing to make a deliberate ideological statement; something which may have been going on at Corinth judging by by Paul's reaction to it.
I was thinking about this and remembered the situation in the 70s when groups of women got together at rallies and burnt their bras. This is the removal rather than the wearing, but the dynamic is the same.
![[Big Grin]](biggrin.gif)
That was most definitely a symbolic and an ideological action and a rejection of male authority - but not against the godly sort of authority (people interpret) Paul as talking about.
[btw, I don't think the wearing of bras need be an indicator of patriarchal oppression or submission to male authority... though an argument could be made for it (women wanting to look beautiful for men or even just themselves, because men have told them they don't look beautiful with saggy tits)]
[ 09. April 2005, 11:06: Message edited by: The Coot ]
Posts: 13667 | From: Perth, W.A. | Registered: May 2001
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Rat
Ship's Rat
# 3373
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Posted
I apologise in advance if this is a simplistic or stupid question.
If Paul gives us guidelines for managing the relationship between slaves and masters alongside guidelines for managing the relationship between husbands and wives, why do we not interperet that as indicating that we ought to keep (or be) slaves? Why is the lack of (legal) slavery in the UK not considered another sign of fallenness (as someone described uppity women)?
Or rather - even if we decide slavery is inappropriate for us, it's not compulsory after all any more than marriage! - by what authority would we assume the right to stop others from doing it?
If the social and political morality of slavery can be rethought without violating Paul, why can't the same rethinking apply to male\female relationships?
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It's a matter of food and available blood. If motherhood is sacred, put your money where your mouth is. Only then can you expect the coming down to the wrecked & shimmering earth of that miracle you sing about. [Margaret Atwood]
Posts: 5285 | From: A dour region for dour folk | Registered: Oct 2002
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Eutychus
From the edge
# 3081
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Posted
By way of introduction:
I've been round all sides of this debate (hi Emma )
I've read the whole thread because Mrs. E told me to ![[Smile]](smile.gif)
quote:
Originally posted by Gordon Cheng:
I think I am still waiting for you to define what you mean by "inferiority". You have given examples; examples which I deny are what the bible had in mind when it teaches submission. But you still seem to be insisting that submission will and must equate to inferiority. True, or have I got that wrong?
Gordon, how about 1 Timothy 2:11, 13-14:
quote:
"A woman must learn in quietness and full submission... For Adam was formed first, then Eve. And Adam was not the one deceived, it was the woman who was deceived and became a sinner"
(tried to link to context using BibleGateway but it seems to be down)
I know this doesn't address marriage but it is held up by Grudem, Piper et al. as an "appeal to a creational principle" as a justification of male leadership which does not rely on cultural context. And it could be construed as pretty inferiorising on Eve and her descendants (who will however be saved if they bear children...) ![[Confused]](confused.gif)
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Let's remember that we are to build the Kingdom of God, not drive people away - pastor Frank Pomeroy
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Emma Louise
Storm in a teapot
# 3571
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Posted
hehe *waves hello to euty* (and apologises for allthe trouble that caused ho hum...)
theres a fantastic book ive got - ill see if i can find it.
Posts: 12719 | From: Enid Blyton territory. | Registered: Nov 2002
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Ethne Alba
Shipmate
# 5804
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Posted
Custard.......I would say the wife has a problem and one only she could resolve.
THAT is the rub with this argument,at what point does either the husband insist or the wife rufuse.
And IF it's ok for the husband to insist then surely it's ok for the wife to refuse....?
On ANY issue. Working where? how? Going out? Staying in? Holidaying in Benidorm or Birmingham... Worshipping at St Cuthberts or Cornerstone...
Where and how does anyone draw the line?
Posts: 3126 | Registered: Apr 2004
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John Donne
Renaissance Man
# 220
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Posted
You know, if the reformed traditions accepted the ordained priesthood, they wouldn't need to get their knicks in a twist over Headship... because they could exclude women from positions of clerical authority by the 'imaging Christ' argument.
![[Angel]](graemlins/angel.gif)
Posts: 13667 | From: Perth, W.A. | Registered: May 2001
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Janine
The Endless Simmer
# 3337
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Posted
What makes variations on male headship work out IRL is when the spouses both have the same or similar underpinnings for their applications of the Scriptures/principles to daily life.
That is, in my experience, if the decision at hand can be tied into somehow mattering as regards Christian witness, Christian living, functional church life, then one isn't submitting in any sort of "inferior" way.
And if I can tie in my desires about decisions to a "Thus saith the Lord" or to an "it's better for the congregation / the family in our witness", then it's not hard for the spouse to submit himself to me. Usually. ![[Razz]](tongue.gif)
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I'm a Fundagelical Evangimentalist. What are you?
Take Me Home * My Heart * An hour with Rich Mullins *
Posts: 13788 | From: Below the Bible Belt | Registered: Sep 2002
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