Of course it is, spiritually speaking. But you seems to want to apply it to humanly speaking.
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How connected is attitude towards women and inerrancy?
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Thats an interesting paradox... many of the woman shall be silent in church types are cessationists.
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One must to a proper exegesis of the Scripture from the culture and mind-set of those in the First Century. We also have to consider the context of the 1 Corinthians 14 verse by examining the verses around it. If this verse is not consistent with the flow of what Paul was talking about, then it could have been a verse included in a later manuscript and might not have been spoken by Paul at all.
The Timothy Scriptures concerning women, teaching and leadership need to be examined in the light of the patrarchistic society of the First Century where women were treated as second class, without educational opportunities, possessions of their husbands, and expected to remain at home, cooking the meals and looking after children. Men dominated the society, and women had no real human rights.
When we come to hermeneutically examining the Scriptures to see if they are applicable to our 21st Century society and culture, where women are educated, have the power to vote, have careers of their own, and are treated as equal partners in marriage and the home, also that they have valuable ministries to add to the body of Christ. So we have to decide whether the 1 Corinthians 14 and the Timothy Scriptures are culture-dependent (First Century) or transcultural (equally applicable in our culture).
It is quite clear that women's ministry in churches is fully supported by the Holy Spirit and welcomed.
But there are churches that are bullying women into a First Century culture which is not realistic 2000 years later. I see that as sexual discrimination and abuse, and I don't see the Holy Spirit supporting those churches, so I believe that it is a religious spirit that is controlling them.
It is also interesting to see that Peter and Paul saw conversion and filling of the Holy Spirit as one and the same thing. So, in First Century Christianity, one either had the Holy Spirit or he didn't. There were no converted people who did not have the Holy Spirit. The "second blessing" or "baptism with the Spirit" as a second experience after conversion was unknown to First Century believers.
So if a professing Christian is abusing women by imposing sexual discrimination in his church, and is therefore not having the Holy Spirit, then from a First Century perspective, is he really converted to Christ?
Food for thought.
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I would want to be careful here. While I have a clear position on the ministry of women, I would not want to say that the Spirit is not present and active in groups of Christians who disagree on this point. I would be concerned that to deny God's grace in those people would come perilously close to blasphemy.
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I see your point. But I do maintain that church leaders who force women into the restrictions of First Century culture instead of allowing them to find their calling and ministry in the Spirit will have to give an account for their actions one day. The works of those churches may be destroyed by fire as wood, hay and stubble, but those leaders may be saved as of by fire with little reward to show for their work.
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there is a fundamentalist style mindset that says God is not present unless every belief and practice is 100% in line with HIS teaching and wishes. The problem with said mindset is it disagrees with a few different NT scriptures. Instead of freedom in Christ there is a very narrow view that allows no freedom for anyone.
In a first century Jewish view, there was a LOT of wiggle room. You had at least a dozen different groups, and even those groups had factions. But probably no one except the Essains condemned the other groups as not compliant with Moses and Judaism. And by setting up their own priesthood they were even more non compliant.
Paul understood there could be a range of beliefs and practices.
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This comes about by putting the cart before the horse.
Exegesis - determining what the Scripture means from the First Century perspective, and how First Century readers would understand it. This means that the historical and cultural mind-set, as well as who wrote it, and who was it written to, and what was the author's intention, and whether it is culture-dependent or transcultural.
Hermeneutics: Determining from the exegesis how this would fit into our 21st Century, culture, history, church development, social development and mind-set.
The problem with many is that they put Hermeneutics before Exegesis,and therefore "shoe-horn" Scriptures into our present theology without realising that the original writers and readers would have absolutely no knowledge of 21st Century values, theology, church development or anything else.
This is why some churches are acting inappropriately and unfairly toward women because they are forcing them to adopt a First Century culture where women were second class, domestic slave possessions of their husbands.
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I think that if Paul were to visit our churches today, he would welcome Women's leadership and ministry in the church. He would say, "I know what I thought and said in the First Century, but I now see how that women are educated, resourceful, have their own role in the body of Christ, and the Holy Spirit is fully supporting what they are doing. I still don't believe they should usurp the authority of their church leadership, but then again, I don't think men should either."
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I believe it, because he didn't stop Aquila and Priscilla from having their husband and wife ministry, and he viewed them as leaders in the church. I think it was they who sorted Apollos out and got him on the right path.
I think Paul wrote those instructions to Timothy because he saw that in some places women were usurping authority, but then again, he saw the same sort of thing in the Corinthian church were there were divisions among those who put Paul, Peter, and Apollos on their own respective pedestals, when Paul said that he and his fellow ministries were mere servants owned by everyone in the church. John identified a guy who "loved the preeminence" and was going to sort him out and show him that he is just a servant to the people and nothing more.
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The laws of interpretation are sadly neglected but to neglect those laws is to start from a compromised position. One cannot interpret something in the past tense and something else in the present tense etc without compromising the outcome. The only way that is possible is for it to go thru a metamorphosis of creation from old nature to new to come to a single interpretation.
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I'm not sure whether I agree with that.
By careful exegesis, considering the historical, cultural and religious context. we can get a good idea of the times and mind-set of those who lived during the period when the Scripture was written. Then we can look carefully at the intention of the author, and his motivation for writing what he wrote. Was it in response to a problem, a situation, or questions that arose? Also, we can get clues on how the people who first received the writing actually understood it. I don't think that this type of exegesis can be "short-cutted" if we are to get the best understanding of the passage as it was written for the people for whom it was written.
Before we can hermeneutically determine if and what of the passage can be applied to us in our 21st Century cultural and religious context, we have to gauge the comparisons and contrasts between the understanding of, say. First Century readers, and 21st Century readers, because both time periods are vastly different - for example, First Century readers who have no idea of modern technology, culture, or churches. Therefore we have to examine the passage to see whether it is culturally-dependent or transcultural.
So, hermeneutics is actually determining if and how a passage can be applied to our own culture, technology, and religious situation. Without accurate exegesis, we have no basis to be able to apply hermeneutics without ending up in error and actually twisting the passage to mean something that was never intended.
For example, a passage that refers to the problems about eating food sacrificed to idols in pagan temples, would mean much to First Century believers, but would mean nothing to us today, unless we went and visited a Hindu temple and ate a meal there, which, for most western church believers would not be in the least part of their experience at all. So, hermeneutically, we would have to say that the passage is culture-dependent and not transcultural to be applied to 21st Century believers.
Also to apply First Century cultural Scriptures about women wearing men's clothing and outlawing trouser suits for women, or that long hair on a man is inappropriate, when to have a haircut requires using a pair of scissors, interrupting something that is occurring naturally, is questionable as well.
But having the necessity of having the fruit of the Spirit determine our conduct is transcultural, because it would apply as much to us as it did to First Century believers.
So it is not just a matter of changing the grammatical tense of a passage as I have pointed out. Also I think that studying the evolution of culture, technology and religion over the last 2000 years would be a lot of time and energy which might not be worth the hard work, because once we have the understanding of how, say, First Century believers understood what Paul wrote to them, it is no use trying to understand how believers in succeeding centuries understood what Paul wrote, but we can bypass all that and gauge how we as 21st Century believers should be understanding it.
My view is that if Paul wrote something based on his intention and understanding, and his readers understood what he was writing, then to bring to 21st Century believers that First Century believers did not understand it to read, would be absolute nonsense. This is to change the understanding to something that Paul never wrote at all, but it is a twisting around of what was written to mean something entirely different.
So to maintain that what Paul said to First Century Timothy about women, according to their culture concerning the state and position of women, is still just as applicable to women in today's culture and religious context is nonsense, because the status of women in society and our churches is fundamentally different.
Some of the teaching of churches in the way they twist Scripture out of context is just as ridiculous as saying that if the KJV is good enough for Jesus and Paul it should be good enough for us!
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That’s all fine but I think the mindset of Paul was to realistically describe what he saw of the culture at that time and then to systematically build a shadow that encompassed the reality. Simple shortcut that applies consistently.
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What Paul stated as a central principle was that there was no more difference in Christ between male and female than there was between free and slave or Greek and Jew.
He was not able to force any of that principle across Graeco-Roman society--the extent the principle could not be fully exercised in public at the time without getting the Body of Christ exterminated as anti-social by appearance rather than substance.
That was then. This is now, when we can openly practice, "neither slave nor free" and "neither Jew nor Greek." And also, "neither male nor female."
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I don't quite agree with that.
In all those cases, Paul was framing spiritually spritually principles in terms of how they should be effective by then-current social customs.
The concept of non-ostentatious dress for members of the Body of Christ, for instance, is just as spiritually significant today as it was then.
The difference is what kind of dress is considered "ostentatious."
Back then it was women wearing gold-braided hair. Today it's pastors in $5,000 Nike basketball shoes.
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Paul never set out to be a theologian. His letters were just that - letters - to churches that had problems that needed correction. His letters were often responses to letters written to him from churches asking him questions and advice how to deal with the problems they were having. Much of what he wrote was specifically to those churches and therefore culture-limited to them. But many things he did say was transcultural, in that they would apply to all believers matter what their culture is.
Also, his letters were written to missionary churches - churches that were just planted and going through the first stages of growth. The fact is that most of the issues we encounter in our modern churches are never addressed in Paul's letters. What Paul wrote in the First Century were for First Century believers in "infant" churches that were still struggling to be established. Take the Corinthian church for instance. The folk who attended that church were converted straight out of paganism. They knew nothing else. There were the Old Testament Scriptures, but they were still coming to grips with having to learn them in relation to what Paul was teaching them. All they had otherwise was what Paul taught them when he first planted the church, and a couple of letters dealing with the normal problems of an infant church trying to get away from the paganism that they had beforehand. None of our modern churches are in any way like that, so we have to determine which of Paul's statements directly apply to our churches or what is written for our education in order for us to formulate sound doctrine that works for us, as well as in keeping with the foundations of the gospel of Christ.
So, we can't just lift a verse out of First Century writing and apply it directly to us, without studying the First Century context and seeing how it could apply to us in our context.
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True. That is a good example of a transcultural statement that Paul made.
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You say he was never a theologian but treat his papers from every aspect of theology. Kinda a oxymoron way of comparing wouldn’t you say. But facts reveal that he did use a system to establish ‘his gospel’ that progressed till his trip to Jerusalem when the Holy Spirit confronted him on his way there. The prison letters were meant to clear up any misunderstandings as to his intent. As said earlier the unity sought for was neither Greek/Jew, slave/free or male/female but one in the new creation.
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Without having to remove one tittle from the bible the teaching about women can be applied to the finer points of relationship with God, just like the adornment of women can be applied equally to tennis shoes. Shortcuts instead of long cuts that involve tearing the bible apart and putting it back together minus the finer points makes absolute sense except to those who can’t see themselves under authority to the Headship of Christ. Because everything that was written to the church, whether male or female, he wrote the same to slaves and free. And everywhere the purpose was unity in Christ. That cannot be trivialized. So whether you identify with male, female, slave, free, jew or gentile the Word does not change. Yet so many can’t see that and prefer to write their own great worth into the equation.
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