Biblical Literalism - the Proper Way

[BirdOfTheEgg]

This is a bit of a joke via self-reflection.

At this point I’ve adopted a more interpretationist, historical, contextual, loose view of the Bible. But when I started of, I was very literalist with it. I wanted to be as pure as possible with it and not get anything wrong. I have to say, the Bible, at that time, looked like a very simple, easy-to-understand document. This was all in the company of conservative fundamentalists, who also were literalist, one of them was a YEC, too.

So I was slowly reading the Bible and I began developing concerns over this evangelical church that I went to. You see, it was not biblical enough.

Women actually talked in the church. They were most definitely not silent. They talked in pews, some of them assisted the pastor a few times with some messages, some sang, and one woman was interpreting for a guy who was mute. This clearly flies in the face of 1 Timothy 2:11-13. Instead, I was told that 1 Timothy 2 is used to prevent women from being pastors. I argued it says nothing about pastors (not that they wouldn’t get auto-excluded), but it does speak of teaching - and this church has a Christian school under it where I’m sure plenty of women are teachers. Furthermore, various authoritative offices would be improper since that would be taking authority over a potential man. I was similarly concerned with having my head uncovered, and that nobody else had their head covered, and that some seemed to carry some jewelry (interestingly, I possess no jewelry).

Following in the spirit of 1 Timothy, I had some argument about the fact that all women must marry since they’re obviously saved through childbearing. I similarly made arguments that the whole anabaptist thing was bunk (a lot of people there were baptist) since Scripture clearly says in Acts 2:38 - And Peter said to them, “Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit." I insisted for a while that I was not a Christian since I wasn’t baptized.

To continue, relating to some 1 Corinthians 14 verses on women, I engaged into extensive conversations with my teacher (who was a guy a bit older than me) about whether or not women should all stay at home and not work, and never speak in churches. I kept wondering what women are to do if they do not have a husband, so I just used my teacher for that (this is funny considering how I feel about the teacher). After expressing this to my teacher, he told me that I am taking it out of cultural context, and that the sexist views of the world are creeping into my interpretation (please note I am a staunch feminist of the anti-porn type. To be accused of sexism to me is hilarious). He nevertheless affirmed that he is against women pastors.

Strangely enough, I did not find ECT, Penal Substitution, or Original Sin in the Bible (I never got to Revelation, though), mostly because I adapted a “Calvinist” view of “What God wants, God gets” rather quickly (with some influence from my teacher, who seems to be an ArminoCalvIDon’tKnowWhat), and read that God wants all to be saved. I found the issue of Atonement and Hell rather unclear and irrelevant, and the sin issue obvious. Fortunately, I left the Old Testament alone due to Paul’s “law is abolished”, that would be a whole another can of worms (women wearing pants. Blasphemy).

So, just some commentary on a literal reading of the the Bible. Now, I believe there are churches who do everything in a proper manner - women can’t speak or teach anything ever and are all stay at home moms. But gee there are a lot of heretics out there.

[snitzelhoff]

One of the big questions in Evangelicalism centers on something called the “perspicuity of Scripture.” It’s the idea that the Bible’s meaning is, well, perspicuous–that if you read it carefully in any English translation, its meaning will become clear to you. Some will say that as long as you “let the Holy Spirit guide you” or pray about the passage sincerely or whatever, the meaning will be clear, but it all boils down to the same basic idea: there’s no need for a study of the historical and cultural context of the passage, no need to look at fuzzy translation issues or any of that. It’s there in plain English, and you just have to read it. And so we get these weird, contradictory ideas about Paul. He wants women silent in churches, but they can prophesy? They can’t teach, but they can be apostles? And so forth.

Unfortunately, for many in the Evangelical world, a rejection of perspicuity is tantamount to a rejection of inspiration. The argument is that if God wanted us to have Scripture, obviously He would’ve made it so we could understand it (never mind that He apparently wanted us to have it in fragmented bits of long-dead dialects and left it up to us to translate it in the first place!). Many would think that the question, “What did it mean to the first readers?” is rather odd, since how could it have meant anything to them that’s substantially different than what it means to a 21st century American reader taking an English translation at face value?

I once had a Christian use the perspicuity argument on me to counter my Universalist arguments. He basically said that God wouldn’t have let the translators get this stuff wrong. The irony was that he was gay and (in other threads on that forum) argued that Scripture didn’t really condemn homosexuality, and one of the key points underlying that argument is that certain texts have been mistranslated in most of the major translations. Of course, perspicuity is always a doctrine held at one’s convenience: the Bible is “plain” when it comes to one’s pet doctrines (Hell or “complementarianism” or whatever) but when Jesus says to hate your family, you have to understand it in terms of cultural context.

Paul gets a lot of flak (or support) for all the wrong things. I’m actually of the opinion that he was much more egalitarian than the Sammich Passages (the passages that a troglodytic “Christian” husband might cite right before, “Now go make me a sammich!”) are often understood to suggest. I’m not one for reinventing the wheel, so on that note, I’ll leave you with the best exposition of those passages I’ve yet come across, by N. T. Wright: ntwrightpage.com/Wright_Wome … Church.htm

There are a few typos in that essay because it’s actually a lecture that someone transcribed, but you shouldn’t find them too distracting.

[Dondi]

Good article, snitzelhoff.

I think one of the fundamental reasons people don’t buy into the idea of UR is that they are relying on the Bible as “a plain book”. They read the Bible pretty much at face value without studying the context, culteral background, and intended audience for whom a specific book of the Bible is addressed. So this is one of the reasons I kinda struggle with the apparentness of UR in this thread: Why isn’t UR obvious?

When it comes down to issues like “should women pastor?”, in light of Pauls statements, we ought to look very closely at the context and historical background of Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians. It would first be helpful to recognize that in the historical context, the Corinthian church had multiple problems of which Paul contended here in his letter. They had divisions in the church (I am of Paul, I am of Apollos, etc), they were carnel, even babes in Christ, some were puffed up, there were fornication problems (a man desiring his father’s wife), they were suing each other, they had young people burning with passion in which Paul suggested they get married lest they remain distracted, others he exhorted not to divorce, he had to teach them about stumbling blocks to weaker Christians.

It’s a wonder after all these things that Paul would be so concerned about matter such as hairlength and whether women should keep silent in the church. But it seems to me that the hair length issue was an ordinance of Paul (I Corinthians 11:2) , and I’m not sure if these ordinance were in keeping with the culture of that day or just some policy of Paul’s. Certainly the argument can be made that men should look like men and women like women. But how much of this is really binding for today.

Same could be said of women keeping silent in the church (I Corinthian 14:34). Paul mentions that this is the law. But what law? I don’t recall it being an OT law, but even if it was, didn’t Paul say earlier that all things are lawful, but not all things are expediant? Or if it is a local ordinance of the community, then it should have no bearing on today. Besides, I think all Paul was doing here is to keep some kind of order in the church of Corinth. He just finished a whole discourse of proper order in the manner of speaking and interpreting tongues and it seems this exhortion to women is just an added attempt to maintain that order.

On other thing to keep in mind is that while many churches will use this to keep women from being pastors, it seems like issues like this are straining the gnat. Didn’t Jesus heal on the Sabboath and was criticised by the Pharisees? And did He and His disciples eat in a field on the Sabboath and likewise criticised?

But what was Jesus’ reply to these things?