tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7801770731118039118.post7069778632762954093..comments2023-06-16T05:34:19.575-07:00Comments on Men and Women: Leaders Together: Excursus on Ancient PatriarchyRebecca Merrill Groothuishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14792830203814433318noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7801770731118039118.post-78701979486201583552008-11-16T15:35:00.000-08:002008-11-16T15:35:00.000-08:00“Yet even these analogies I could swallow if God w...“Yet even these analogies I could swallow if God would give only one statement rejecting those human values ("Hey, white and black people are actually equal [or males and females], but since you idiots think the way you do..."), but there's not one single statement rejecting patriarchy or polygamy in the OT.”<BR/><BR/>But God does say it in the New Testament, and it’s not because he’s changed his mind on the subject, but because he is completing his covenant with his people, including at last the whole truth of who he is and who he made us to be, setting forth the fundamental principles of new life in Christ that do not discriminate between male or female, strong or weak. There are not certain classes of people with special privileges. All are now one in Christ.<BR/><BR/>Even in the Old Testament, God occasionally bursts forth with impatience and frustration over the whole cultic sacrificial system that God himself had set up, saying, in effect, “This is not what it is really all about!”<BR/><BR/>In the Old Testament God accepted the imperfect until the perfect was to come. One of these imperfect things was patriarchy. That was the only culture functioning at the time, and God worked within it. But this does not entail that God endorsed the fundamental concept of patriarchy: that men are inherently and fundamentally endowed with authority and women are not. He could not have endorsed this, because in the OT he did occasionally endorse leadership authority in women, and when this occurred it was never presented or remarked upon as though it were an oddity or an exception.<BR/><BR/>I think it is also significant that nowhere in the OT is there any explicit law or statement that woman must be subordinate to man. It is only implicit, a cultural given. The custom of male rule—even among the multitude of detailed laws in the OT—is never explicitly commanded as a moral imperative.Rebecca Merrill Groothuishttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14792830203814433318noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7801770731118039118.post-14404565938603221012008-10-17T16:29:00.000-07:002008-10-17T16:29:00.000-07:00Hi Rebecca,Thanks for tackling this question for m...Hi Rebecca,<BR/><BR/>Thanks for tackling this question for me. I especially appreciated your observations in the section entitled "Not Like the Law of the PC World Today." That in itself shows that even if God approved of ancient patriarchy, that doesn't mean God approves of the PC view since it is so different.<BR/><BR/>However, I still can't shake off the thing that most bothers me: the OT really does seem to endorse patriarchy. Or if not endorse, at least reinforce. In Good News for Women, p.32, you quoted Eileen Vennum as saying, <I>"The Old Covenant priestly qualifications were tied to what human beings valued in each other. They were related to accident of birth, or station in life, or visible physical characteristics that had nothing to do with the heart or the character of a person. However, God, the Great Teacher, used human ideas of specialness to teach us about God's own specialness."</I> In other words, God uses human values, including the value of males over females, nobles over peasants, non-leprous over leprous, as metaphors of how valuable, special and pure God is.<BR/><BR/>The problem is this: using these human values as metaphors is accepting and reinforcing those human values, and certainly doesn't communicate that God actually rejects those values. By this argument, God could have said to the western world 200 years ago, "You all think that white people are superior to black people. Well, hey, I'm just like a white person, and you're just like a black person. I'm superior to you!" Wouldn't such an analogy be totally disgusting? The very use of the analogy is an endorsement of the claim that people with lighter skin are superior to people with darker skin. In the same way, if God says something like "You think that men are holier and cleaner than women. Well, in that case, only men can represent me because I'm pure and holy!" how is that not an endorsement of the cultural value of men over women? <BR/><BR/>Yet even these analogies I could swallow if God would give only one statement rejecting those human values ("Hey, white and black people are actually equal [or males and females], but since you idiots think the way you do..."), but there's not one single statement rejecting patriarchy or polygamy in the OT. But there are tons of laws and statements that seem to endorse the discriminatory values of the culture. That's why I'm bothered.cokhavimhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14688216898190988522noreply@blogger.com