Biblical Gentlemanhood

I believe in gender equality. Not only on ethical grounds but Biblical ones as well. It seems that scholars with any familiarity with the cultural mores of Jesus' time acknowledge that he was positively scandalous in the way he interacted with and affirmed women. (Kenneth Bailey's Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes is an excellent example. He deals specifically with Jesus and women in chapters 14-20.)

At the same time, the Apostle Paul says some things about gender roles that are difficult for modern ears to bear. I'm not going to go through all the passages, but the sum of it all seems to be that men have a more authoritative role, while women are to be more submissive. While for some of these passages I'm quite unsure of what to make of them, I've come to believe in a version of gender roles that I believe still upholds equality. Let me explain.


It's uncontroversial, not to mention provable with DNA alone, that there are biological differences between men and women. Among these differences are that in a strictly physical sense, men are generally stronger than women. Obviously there are plenty of women who are stronger than plenty of men, but men tend to be naturally bigger and to have more muscle mass.

I'm no expert in gender studies, but it would make sense to me to argue that the social differences between men and women, i. e. the current and historical differences in socioeconomic status, rights, privileges, etc., are, in large part, rooted in these physical differences. Because men are physically stronger and more imposing, it is all the easier to assert themselves and have their way in the context of a society. And this is essentially what we have done throughout history and throughout most cultures.

From the Biblical perspective, this is part of the curse of sin. God says to Eve, from that point on, "your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you."

But that wasn't the way God wanted it to be, and it apparently wasn't the way things were before the disobedience of Adam and Eve. And now the New Testament provides us with a different ethic. Paul says in his letter to the Ephesians "submit to one another out of reverence to Christ."

Now if you and I submit to one another, and yet you are of a higher status and/or physically stronger than I, then isn't your act of submission in a sense greater than mine? Submission is always challenging. It always goes against the grain of our instincts. But isn't it even more challenging for the stronger to submit to the weaker? For the older to submit to the younger? For the one with more rights and privileges to submit to the one with less?

This is how I reconcile what the Scriptures teach about equality with what they teach about male leadership. In the truest sense, in Christ, there is no longer "Jew nor Greek, male nor female," etc. However, we are not yet completely free from the curse of sin. So if the husband is to still "rule over" the wife, he is to do so via the act of submission. In other words, he is to do it the Jesus way, laying down his life, as Christ did for the Church. He is to lay down all the rights and privileges and power afforded him by his Y chromosome, just as Christ laid down all the rights and privileges and power afforded by being God. In doing so, he finds the true leadership that comes through servanthood.

This also happens to be the way I make sense of gender roles in dating relationships, i. e. the man initiating, paying, holding doors open, etc. It would seem to me that the whole notion of the "gentleman" is predicating on this idea of having power but not using it for personal gain, always submitting it to the one with less.

Anyway, that's just some thoughts I've been having. Feel free to join in on the conversation. I'm especially interested in hearing some female responses to this perspective.

Thanks for reading!

Bell's Hell: The Controversy Surrounding Rob Bell's New Book

I recently read Rob Bell's new book, Love Wins: Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived. I bought the book primarily because I wanted to be an informed participant in the giant explosion of discussion and debate the book had spawned. Little did I know I would be haunted by the book long after putting it down.

The questions Bell is asking are precisely the questions that anyone who has followed Christ for some time should be asking. They are also precisely the questions that we tend to avoid.

If the common Evangelical view is right--that a person is undoubtedly Hell-bound until they acknowledge Jesus Christ and make a conscious decision to allow him to be Lord of their life, then that means that the overwhelming majority of the 7 billion people on Earth, as well as the overwhelming majority of the people who have lived and ever will live, will experience never-ending torment for all of eternity, with no hope of relief or escape or reconciliation with God.

If that thought doesn't deeply disturb you, you have no heart.

And yet the idea is so familiar that at times it barely fazes us. That's even more disturbing.

We must ask ourselves, and answer with all honesty, are we okay with all of this? Is God okay with it? What kind of picture of God does that create? Has God's plan mostly resulted in a catastrophic failure? Will he really allow endless suffering for most, while relatively few are saved? Is he happy with that? Is there anything he can do about it? Is that truly just? Is it truly merciful? If God has placed in human hearts a deep longing for both justice and mercy, how is it that his way of doing things could seem so unjust and unmerciful? If all this is true, in what sense can the Gospel truly be said to be Good News?

These are all important questions. And yet there's one more that's even more important than all of them: Is this really what Jesus taught?

We can talk about what sounds good or doesn't sound good, what this pastor says or that pastor says. But what does Jesus say?

Answering that question is more than I can do in this writing space, as Jesus talks about Hell an awful lot. So here I refer you to Bell's book. Reading it would not be a bad way to start engaging these questions more deeply. I, for one, am thankful that he is bringing this oft-avoided topic to the forefront of discussion, as it has led me to repent from being too comfortable with Hell.

Baffled, Befuddled, and Bewildered

The world is a baffling place.

The great feats of Newton and the Enlightenment and Baconian science once had us confident that the inner workings of the natural world would soon be known exhaustively. We thought that we would eventually be able to map out, in their entirety, the natural laws that governed all natural phenomena, just like cartographers map out geography.

But ever since the late 19th century, we have been learning that the classical physics of Newton et. al. only describe particular aspects of the world; as for those other aspects, particularly the quantum aspects, it appears that the more we learn about them, the more frequently we are confounded by them. Even though we've come a long way in understanding the quantum realm, we won't have anything near the certainty we once had regarding classical physics until we are able to understand the precise relationship between the micro and the macro and why they operate so differently.

The world is a baffling place.

What's even more disconcerting is that quantum physics isn't the most baffling thing about it. We are.

Our quest to understand ourselves, our societies and cultures, our languages, our behavior and our choices, has arguable yielded relatively little fruit when compared with what we've accomplished in the sciences. For example, we certainly have an exponentially better understanding of the physics of motion than Aristotle did; however, if we ask the question, "Why was Socrates executed?" can any of us legitimately claim to give an empirically better answer than Plato did?

Like someone who's never seen a reflection in a mirror, we seem to understand nearly everything outside of ourselves better than we understand ourselves. Our struggles to understand our very own brains seems like an itch that comes from deep under the skin and all the scratching in the world just doesn't relieve it.

The world is a baffling place.

Even the Holy Bible acknowledges that truth. If you've read Job and Ecclesiastes, then you know that they are books about men who learn faith and humility the hard way, when their philosophies and theologies fail them. They are confronted with the limitations of their minds in the face of a God who refuses, for whatever reason, to spell things out for them.

In fact, this lesson is not only to be found in Job and Ecclesiastes, as most of the Scriptures are written in this way--images, metaphors, parables, crazy stories about people who do crazy things, sometimes brave and noble, sometimes wicked and dumb. And guess what . . . no footnotes!

What baffles me the most then is why on Earth any Christian would feel comfortable being so damn certain all the time.

When the Scriptures talk about faith, it's in regard to what we know about God. Even though we can't by any means prove it, we are to have faith in God's goodness and character, and in the saving work of Jesus Christ.

But faith is not a good way of knowing scientific facts. Nor is it a good way of learning politics. It's not even a good way of knowing why particular things happen to particular people or cities or nations (just ask Job about that one.)

Faith is a way of knowing God, and when it is appropriated in other ways, it is being misused.

Of course, our beliefs about God will influence our beliefs about everything else. That is inevitable, and it's a good thing. But the whole "absolute certainty" thing just isn't Biblical, simply put.

Changes

Hello faithful blog readers!

When I first started blogging, the appeal was simply to have a personal page where I could write whatever thoughts I felt like writing about. Whoever wanted to read could read, and my only hope was that some of my friends would check it out every now and then.

Well, I am excited to say that my ambitions have grown a little bit since then! Many of you that have read my blog have affirmed me as having a gift for writing and sharing thoughts, and over the years that encouragement has lead me to think that perhaps other people than just my friends would be interested in reading my writings.

The changes you see are meant to reflect these new ambitions. I've depersonalized the blog, since I am not a celebrity and people who don't know me won't really be interested in reading about me. Also, I've given it a bit of a focus. Thinking about things related to science and religion has really become a hobby and passion of mine, and I want to try to make the blog exclusively about those things.

I renamed the blog to "Faith + Knowledge," which was inspired by a verse in the Bible in which the Apostle Peter tells us to not be content with simply having faith, but to add several things to our faith, including knowledge. This reflects my personal philosophy that any faith worth having must not be afraid of questions, doubts, new information, etc. My desire is to know Truth, and to be open to all of the methods we have at our disposal for gaining knowledge.

The various portraits in the header are personal heroes of mine. People who had faith, sought knowledge, and accomplished great things as they integrated both into their lives.

To everyone who follows this blog and/or reads it regularly, thanks so much! I hope you will continue to read it and enjoy it. I also hope that other truth-seekers will discover it as well. Not because I have all the answers, but because I know from experience that as people mutually share their struggles with faith, truth, and knowledge, we all learn and benefit.

The Holy Bible: New Oversimplified Version

Don't worry, I totally photoshopped that picture. There's no such thing (yet) as an oversimplified version of the Bible. Many of us would probably be appalled or at least highly amused by such a thing, and few of us would buy it except for perhaps the entertainment value.

However, the striking truth is that many of us buy into an oversimplified version of the Bible every single day of our lives. We really want it to be simple, so we project that desire onto our interactions with the text. We have a sense that it should be simple, which can lead us to interpret it to say what we think it ought to say. But is it really simple? Can you read Ecclesiastes and still say that it's simple? Or what if we asked Job, would he say that it's simple? If it's so simple, why was Jesus so troubled and filled with sorrow in the Garden of Gethsemene?

It's not simple, but we pretend it is every time we tell someone "This verse says [x], therefore [y] is true." We don't take time to consider the context, and we ignore the verses that might seem to contradict the proposed claim.

When considering the idea of Scriptural support for our beliefs, the most important question is NOT, "Can I find a verse or passage that supports this idea?" The most important question is, "Does this accord with the Scriptural revelation of God, particularly in regard to the definitive revelation found in the person of Jesus Christ?"

This is how I will filter my beliefs now. It's harder than the "find a verse" method, but it is also the more honest method of the two.