Bowman and Phil,

Sorry for the delay in replying. Would be happy to talk about the role of prophetic revelation in the church of Jesus Christ, if you would like to. Am also quite happy to drop the subject, now that I have shared what I did. I was afraid not to at least draw it to the brothers' attention, in the light of Ezekiel 3:17-18.

Shalom in Jesus Christ the Lord,

Andrew

Bowman

Part of my reply to Iconoclast was:

‘Or, in this present disagreement, it is clear that Paul is saying that ‘a man is head of the woman’ is a true creation fact. He draws implications from that creation fact in the first century so clearly ‘a man is head of the woman’ in the post-resurrection first century. There are no grounds from the Bible for believing that that creation fact, true in the first century, is not now true in the 21st. century, nor for believing that the implications Paul draws in the first century should not continue to be drawn in the 21st. century’.

By asking you to engage directly I was asking you to say something (agree, disagree and why, don’t know) about the assertions in that extract of my post, namely:

1          Paul is saying that ‘a man is head of the woman’ is a true creation fact.

2          He draws implications from that creation fact in the first century so clearly ‘a man is head of the woman’ in the post-resurrection first century. (The implications are that wives should submit to their own husbands, that (taking 1 Corinthians 11:3, 11:7b-9 together) the woman ought to have authority on the head because of the angels, that he did not permit a woman to teach nor to exercise authority of(over) a man)

3          There are no grounds from the Bible for believing that that creation fact, true in the first century, is not now true in the 21st. century, nor for believing that the implications Paul draws in the first century should not continue to be drawn in the 21st. century’.

Part of what you said in your latest post:

‘What is mainly missing for me in your citation of Genesis is a complete sense of what St Paul was using it to do in the 1C, and how that relates in the Lord to the campaign he has given us to be fighting now-- not for ourselves, but for the love of the world and for his greater glory’.

It seems to me that my reply to Iconoclast does give a complete sense of what Paul was using it to do in the first century with respect to marriage and ministry and that we glorify God and witness to the world now by using it in the same way today. Please can you detail what you see as incompleteness?

I would need to study your whole post to make a complete response but the first thought that comes to mind

John 15:20

Remember the word that I said unto you, The servant is not greater than his lord. If they have persecuted me, they will also persecute you; if they have kept my saying, they will keep yours also.

1 Corinthians 14:37

If any man think himself to be a prophet, or spiritual, let him acknowledge that the things that I write unto you are the commandments of the Lord.

Doesn’t this mean that we ‘prioritise that text-Christ relation in interpreting scripture in any later age’ by carefully reading, understanding and obeying what Paul exhorts and commands us to do?

Phil Almond

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.

Christos anesti, Phil! In a way, we all engage the risen Christ directly, and each other only indirectly, or we are just talking nonsense. More to share Easter greetings than because I have anything new to say, I'll dash this off.

Iconoclast has asserted the relevance of historical context  to the interpretation of scripture, and since nearly all persistent disputes in the village turn on that relevance, it seemed worthwhile to clarify what that relevance is. My hypothesis, with which he, you, or others may disagree, is that if a text has no historical relation to Jesus himself, it is unlikely to be in the canon at all, and that as a matter of faith Christians should prioritise that text-Christ relation in interpreting scripture in any later age. A high doctrine of scripture at some point has to reckon with the high christology that gives it a raison d'etre, and from the beginning the Christians later seen to have been orthodox have known this and read the scriptures accordingly. Our philology is usually, but not always, better than theirs; their faithfulness as readers is usually superior to ours.

All the spokes run to the hub, or they are no part of the wheel. As you will know better than most, Christians of past centuries understood this centrality of Christ to mean that even the Israelites anticipated something of Christ from the scriptures collected as the OT, which we recall together at such times as Advent, Epiphany/Theophany, the Annunciation, Palm Sunday, and the Transfiguration. And because many of these writings are in fact collections and "mash ups" of texts, there is an organic logic to their eventual inclusion in the canon that leads us from diverse chroniclers, psalmists, prophets, and sages to the Entry into Jerusalem and the Emmaus Road.

These writings from ancient Israel remain a very diverse literature, each kind of which has its own interesting connexion to the Lord, so that the reader of law is momentarily mindful of him in a way different from the reader of apocalyptic in another chair. In many instances, these "minds" are their meanings in the "mind of Christ," so that the whole range of the sensibility we experience in them and in him, are formative of the renewed humanity in him in which we believe. For this reason, the study of scripture is not just an exercise of scholarship, but a spiritual practise, one that the "devil who [also] quotes scripture for his purposes" studiously avoids.

Time is not a movie shown over and over again. Our battle under the Lord's banner is not the same as that of any other moment that has been or will ever be. We can learn from the tactics of earlier combatants, but we have to deploy them in the fight that we ourselves are given to fight. In that way, being a Christian is wholly unlike being an adherent of those religions that deny either the reality or the importance of time, or a naif of the sort of secularism that does not learn from history. Still, the age of the decisive confrontation with evil in the Cross and Resurrection shows us in a clearer way just what the fight is all about, and indeed has been all about from the beginning. But to understand the accounts we have, we must read them in Christ, from under his banner, and so much as a general reads another general's memoirs of a war, not so much for the facts as for the mind of a soldier in combat for the  cause of his life.

Phil, I am glad that you cite Genesis in the discussions of the thread, and I have agreed (at lengths that some must have found tedious) that the contrast between the irrigation farmer of Genesis 2 and the child bearer of Genesis 4 reflects something in our nature that any human being ignores at grave moral peril. This contrast is a theme running through the canon because Christ wants us to be, not just better servants of the caesars of successive ages, but better men, husbands, and fathers and better women, wives, and mothers in this creative dialectic that is in our DNA and that glorifies God. And surely the first thing to notice about sex in the scriptural account of the origin of all things is that it is not quite the first thing and is far from the last-- a world for God's glory required stewardship which preceded companionship which begat begetting which founded human society which soon ran amok and led God to make a covenant with Abraham to which all can now belong by faith in Christ. Your insistence (and now Andrew's) that this is not a peripheral matter is one I wish more on all sides would take to heart.

Yet timeless truths smoothly defined with sparkling clarity are not everything. If they were, perhaps we would have had several serene treatises written by St Peter or St James at their leisure in Jerusalem, and not so many field dispatches from a converted persecutor sometimes persecuted himself making tents and arguments deep in the Gentile world. But it has seemed good to the Holy Spirit to give us Christ in that resourceful and contentious mind to the glory of the Father, and so we read him to learn how and against whom to contend for the love of the world and the glory of God. A tough tactical intelligence in the "mind of Christ" is part of what we are to take from reading his general orders. When General Paul inspected his troops, he had some campaign in mind, and overhearing his speeches to them in Christ, it helps us to know better his immediate adversary, his order of battle, his tactics, his choice of terrain, and his plan of occupation. A generation of controversy about such things-- over his view of the Jews, justification, imperial cult, apocalyptic, etc-- is what, in part, gave birth to Fulcrum.

What is mainly missing for me in your citation of Genesis is a complete sense of what St Paul was using it to do in the 1C, and how that relates in the Lord to the campaign he has given us to be fighting now-- not for ourselves, but for the love of the world and for his greater glory. To be fair, it is not clear to me that your critics have done this either, though DavidR has offered some historical hypotheses about particular passages. But you are the one who brought Genesis and so the wider canon into the discussion, which presented the issue that Iconoclast raised, which occasioned my post below. For that, I again thank you in the Lord.

I hope that your Easter was a joyous one! This was pounded out in haste, but God willing, in several weeks I will be more often and more thoughtfully in the village. My prayers are, anyway, with everyone in the Lord.

Extract from Andrew Chapman (first paragraph) 11 March 2013

‘Hi DavidR,

I think the scripture is clear that the reasons for the apostle's instructions are from the order of creation and from the circumstances of the fall, and not from the particular social circumstances of the day.’

From DavidR 12 March 2013 (my italics and bold)

‘I agree with everything you say in the first paragraph. Completely. I have just come to a very different understanding of what the Bible actually teaches on these topics  and am living in faithful obedience to the Word.’

DavidR

From this post I conclude that you completely agree that

‘…the scripture is clear that the reasons for the apostle's instructions are from the order of creation and from the circumstances of the fall, and not from the particular social circumstances of the day’.

Does it not then follow that the ‘…particular social circumstances of the day’ did not influence what Paul wrote and should not influence how we understand what he wrote?

Phil Almond

Bowman

Why don't you interact directly with the points I made in my 23 March 2013 reply to Iconoclast?

Phil Almond

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

The issue you raise is a big issue in itself. I don't want to debate it on this thread. I have expressed a view elsewhere, rightly or wrongly.

Phil Almond