General v. Specific Submission--Submission in Marriage

[Chaplain David]

Yes all have sinned, and all equally "seriously". But I absolutely believe that there are some tendencies toward certain types of sin behavior that are gender related.

I try to keep it simple. Sinful thoughts and/or behavior is sin. If an attempt is made to classify behaviors toward the respective genders then the thing that sometimes happens is that the sins of the respective genders are classified in a hierarchical fashion. This sin is worse than that sin.

A general example is the sin of homosexual behavior and how it is looked upon by some of the Christian community. You'd think they were lopping off the heads of babies. Certainly it's sinful according to Scripture but it's not the worst or most evil of sins.

Another good example is the way in which women are viewed as compared to men for sexual sin. Take fornication and adultery. For women, all kinds of negative labels arise: loose woman, hussy, tramp, etc. For men not so much negativity there with remarks like: what a swordsman, has a way with the ladies, etc.

In our society there is a disparity in how the different genders are looked on depending on the sin that is committed. There is also a catagorization of severity depending on what sex commits certain sins. As stated previously, sin is sin. And as Scripture states there is only one unforgivable sin.

 

[Athene]

JohnNZ

I am all for taking the cultural context into account to understand what is being written. It just seems like some people, (not pointing at you here) will assume "Paul only wrote that because of X in their culture." When we talk about egalitarianism, Paul still told wives to submit to their husbands. He didn't do this because he was influenced by his culture. He was teaching what was right. It was right for the Grecco-Romans, and it is right for us.

Slavery was right for the Greco-Roman empire.

We are coming from a different mindset from Grecco-Romans. We err in bringing a kind of feminist egalitarian mindset from this culture into marriage. The Romans had a lot of authoritarian ideas, and like you pointed out, the head of the household could be someone other than the woman's husband. What we need to do is do what the New Testament teaches, whether we are coming from the situation the Grecco-Romans were in or some other situation we were in.

We are coming from a different minsdet from the Greco-Romans. We err in bringing a kind of abolitionist mindset from this culture into our attitudes on slavery.

I am also skeptical when, lo and behold, some scholar or nonscholar discovers some new secret meaning of the original Greek which contradicts 1900 years of scholarship and the writings of people who spoke a dialect of Greek fairly close in time to the authors of the New Testament.

[/QUOTE]

There was also a lot of resistance to the Reformation, so I've heard.

 

[ChrisBot]

This thread was split automatically after 1000 replies and this thread has been automatically closed.
The new thread automatically created is here: "General v. Specific Submission--Submission in Marriage (2)"