Phil

Since to you name me ... I am not the only one to have argued on more than one occasion that the controlling conviction behind the whole context of relationships in Ephesians (and thus in the Christian church) is 'mutual submission'. I am not persuaded that means mutual - except in marriage. I can see the logic of your position but I don't agree with it. I don't think you intend it but you do have a way of restating your own position on these threads as if you are unaware that anyone here has previously engaged your view or offered a different possible reading. They have, and more than once. With all respect I for one don't really want to repeat this debate all over again.

Bowman  Thank you for some very perceptive comments and especially your challenge to move away from contemporary romantic notions of matrimony back to  Genesis and what you call the 'traditional' view. But can I invite you to spell out what the traditional view actually is and how it contrasts with the romantic?

It has always seemed to me that the introduction to the marriage service traces marriage back to 'the gift of God in creation' but immediately claims a great deal more for the relationship than the Genesis narrative ever does, embedded as it is within the assumptions of an ancient patriarchal culture.  

Phil .. we are off thread. I agree with you of course. I have got your point. But just for the record I still have no idea if you have got the point I was making in the first place. Have a good bank holiday.

Phil  .... of course they were. 'All have sinned'. But have you missed my point?

The difference between the sinners and the 'Good and the Godly' in the gospels is that the sinners seem to have known they were sinners. It is the welcome and love of Jesus that overwhelms them. In fact only the sinners seem to understand the gospel - because only sinners know their need of it.  

In the gospels we never read of sinners, tax collectors conspiring to kill Jesus or grieving and angering Jesus for their hardness of heart do we. Instead Jesus points them out, ahead of the rest, entering the kingdom. 

The deep, abiding, violent resistance to the gospel comes from those who know their bibles inside out, are morally scrupulous, who are devout and passionate about God, commited to utter holiness of life -  public models for everything considered God and good .... and it is they who reject Jesus and bring him to the cross. In such a spiritual climate Jesus found the word 'good' to be so polluted that he even refused it of himself.

'Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from a religious conviction'. Pascal

Andrew. Greetings, Not sure why your post of 25 April is addressed me but some brief responses.

'All almost all aspects of the gospel message are offensive to sinners, I would have thought'. Well I note that in the gospels it was the sinners who welcomed the gospel actually. The people that found it the most offensive were the religious good and godly. It was the offended good who put Jesus on the cross not the tax collectors.

You include 'Christian feminism' after fornicators and idolators and those who violently persecute Christian men (you only mention men here). Have you ever stopped to wonder why what we call feminism ever appeared in the first place? Why do you find feminism undermining actually? Is the insistence that a Christian nation should give women vote as well as men? Or that women receive a full education alongside men and have the same career options  and rates of pay according to their gifts and unrestricted by their gender alone? Is it an insistence that women deserve the same levels of health care and contraception .... and legal, property and divorce rights as men? Surely not the undermining of a society in which sexual exploitation of women, access to pornography, levels of rape, sexual and domestic violence against women remain appalling high and where conviction rates remain disgracefully low? Perhaps it is undermining a church which unlike Jesus has for too long refused to honour and bless the presence of women alongside men in the gospel.  But what we would know of the struggle for any of these Andrew - we're men?

Well if Christian feminism is undermining any or all of that I will add my alleluias to yours but not until then.

Phil Thank you for your response. Forgive me but pressure of work over the next few weeks prevents me answering at any length - which always gets unwieldy on these threads anyway.

I still think Petersen's rendering of that verse neatly clarifies what Paul was saying to men and women in Corinth about their created mutuality. He thus steers them away (the men and the women)  from assumptions of hierarchy in Gen 1-2.  Not sure what you want me to add to it. 

As to your questions - I am not willing to connect the word 'head' with the conservative idea of 'headship' at all. Headship/male led hierarchy is simply not in Gen 1and2 pre fall by any reading I can see. So your questions to me 'is it before or after' the Fall do not make sense. Eve is created as 'ezer' to Adam. This word is often used of God coming to help/save Israel. There is no notion of submissive service in it. In Hebrew useage 'ezer is always the gift and provision of a powerful ally or one who saves/helps those in trouble. Furthermore if you wish to argue for significance by ordering the creation accounts start from the least to the most important - which is the wo-man, to be 'ezer' to the needy and incomplete man.

But I am very grateful to djr for his summary of Bailey's work on this text. Thank you. This is what I base my own exegesis on. Bailey argues convincingly that Paul structures his epistle by use of 'Hebrew parallelisms'. These take various forms, including what he calls 'ring compositions'. This is the interpretative key key to understanding the way Paul develops his arguments. But it an largely unfamiliar way of reading these texts for Western Christians and our own imposition of chapters and verses on the original text mask this still further. It is a very particular Hebrew literary style, much used in the Prophets  and that Paul would have been trained in himself. It means that to understand any one verse within a passage you need to understand the structure and rhythm of the whole section. So the meaning and significance of  'because the man is the head of a woman'  for example, can only be found in understanding the structure of that part of the epistle. A Western reader will tend to take that verse off the page as robustly factual and unambiguous in meaning. But when read as Bailey outlines  we discover that verse is held in balance by texts that move in other directions and set the whole debate in a wider context rather than saying and meaning 'one thing'  - and it warns us about imposing our own hierarchy of meaning on much more subtle approaches to theology.  

But you are getting this very partially and second hand here and it is too important to miss. Given your passionate concern for scripture and its faithful interpretation may I strongly encourage you to read Bailey? 

Phil  Not sure why you think I need challenging to say what I think. I am a regular contributor to threads on this topic - at least 10 since September 2012. I don't wish to repeat myself. But by way of summary of my position.

a. Community.  In the NT both women and men are growing into new identity and new ways of relating. This causes tensions. Both sides need addressing. When Paul refers back to the creation texts I think he does so as a corrective to one group or other - or both. 1Cor 11 is a good example of this and Petersen captures this sense well. 'The first woman came from man, true—but ever since then, every man comes from a woman! And since everything comes from God anyway, let’s quit going through these “who’s first” routines.' (The Message). 

b.Context  This is about Christians living in a majority non-Christian context/culture. Paul's teaching has an immediate local context. It is applied theology. The overriding concern is expressed in Eph 4.1 – ‘live up to your calling’ ….  and not as the pagans live'. There will be a tension in such contexts between public behaviour and relating within the new community - but even when the community is gathered there Paul teaches caution. Head covering is a good example. Making complete sense of an otherwise notoriously strange teaching, Bailey argues that the 'angels' are literally 'messengers'. The practice of the wealthy and curious in those times was to send servants/observers to check out something that had caught their interest and report back (this happens at HTB Alpha evenings too actually).  Women are to cover their heads in worship 'for the sake of the Lord' - for the sake of mission - because otherwise the reports back to the outside world could easily discredit and cause scandal. 

c. Mission. Then, as now, to witness distinctively new patterns of relating into any society/culture needs wisdom. So in some parts of the world today Christians live publically in respectful submission to patterns of social life that do not actually reflect Christian teaching but which are a necessary honouring of the culture in order that any kind of positive witness can be offered rather than just causing scandal. An example would be the way a woman missionary in conservative muslim culture adopt the dress code of that faith and culture in public and the way Christian married couples relate in public. This is accepted  ‘for the sake of the Lord’ (a theme that runs through Ephesians). But this is not the same as an endorsement of the ordering itself at all. In reality Christians are expressing and growing towards a new kind of community marked by mutual submission, a mutuality of ministries as the spirit gives (rather than restricted or defined by gender) and an approach to service and authority based on the example of Christ who came not to be served but to serve.

d. Trajectory.  The NT is not a systemmatic document outlining belief and practice. There is always a sense that this is theology, faith and practice in progress. (Witherington argues persuasively that a developing of  theology and practice can be traced from Colossians to Ephesians. It is an ongoing discussion). This is what I mean by trajectory. If so let's be cautious in where we presume to find universal principles of Christian ordering and practice. The clue is to pay attention to the local issue that is being addressed. So where, for example,  the older language of patriarchal headship is apparently re-asserted my suggestion is that this is Christian community working out a call to radical new life together in a mission context . That this needs a Godly pragmatism remains true in many parts of the world today -  ‘for the sake of the Lord’. 

Final comment: When is comes to observers watching the UK  church today the irony is that the scandal is now reversed.  A persistent conservative insistence on male hierarchy and the submission of women is offensive to the watching world and is actually obstructing our proclamation of the gospel. 

Phil you have said all this before, more than once. I am not sure why you are repeating your case again.

What would be new is if you would share some of the theological sources you are drawing on to shape your views on these texts. I have asked you more than once if you would. I have done this often, as others have. It doesn't guarantee I am right of course (but it does flag up what good company I am keeping in my reading of these passages). With whom are you testing and shaping your ideas here?

Phil you have said all this before, more than once. I am not sure why you are repeating your case again.

What would be new is if you would share some of the theological sources you are drawing on to shape your views on these texts. I have asked you more than once if you would. I have done this often, as others have. It doesn't guarantee I am right of course (but it does flag up what good company I am keeping in my reading of these passages). With whom are you testing and shaping your ideas here?

Phil

No, not at all.

1. I have agreed with you and Andrew,  that the Paul draws on the creation narratives to teach into the life and ordering of the early church, women and men - and so into ours.  But I do not agree (any more than I think Paul would)  with what you both think the creation narratives actually teach about women and men together in the world and church.

2. What Paul is addressing is precisely the 'particular social circumstances of the day'. He is writing to Corinth. To a particular community in a particularly time and place - to their world, context and the questions they raise in their letters to him. How can we claim it is not so? And if our interpretation of scripture is to speak transformingly into our age we must first understand how it spoke to the church in Corinth.

Greetings Bowman. Thank you for your helpful reflections on philogical vs historical readings. But I do not believe my position to be reading scripture as  'only a document from sacred time'. But I have been arguing that the historical context is a vital part of the way we seek understanding from the text - not least these texts in question. My concern is that Phil and others appear unwilling to accept any consideration of the historical in the work of interpretation.   

Andrew   I wonder if you ever saw Ian Paul's article  - http://www.fulcrum-anglican.org.uk/page.cfm?ID=634?  It offers a convincing and  strikingly wider, inclusive perspective on men and women in scripture than your summary which I find very one-sided. If you want to convince people like me of your view point you need to show you have engaged much more directly than you do with the relevant scriptures.