"All Christian ministry begins with the announcement that Jesus has been raised from the dead. And Jesus entrusted that task, first of all, not to Peter, James, or John, but to Mary Magdalene. Part of the point of the new creation launched at Easter was the transformation of roles and vocations: from Jews-only to worldwide, from monoglot to multilingual (think of Pentecost), and from male-only leadership to male and female together.
Within a few decades, Paul was sending greetings to friends including an “apostle” called Junia (Romans xvi, 7). He entrusted that letter to a “deacon” called Phoebe whose work was taking her to Rome. The letter-bearer would normally be the one to read it out to the recipients and explain its contents. The first expositor of Paul’s greatest letter was an ordained travelling businesswoman.
The resurrection of Jesus is the only Christian guide to the question of where history is going. Unlike the ambiguous “progress” of the Enlightenment, it is full of promise — especially the promise of transformed gender roles."
Among the comments made on the Fulcrum website about Wright's article is this: "The meaning of 1 Timothy 2:11-12 is clear - the only question is whether we choose to obey the instruction of the apostle who was appointed by the Lord Jesus Christ to open the eyes of the nations and turn them from darkness to light (Acts 26: 17-18), a teacher of the nations in faith and truth (he speaks the truth in Christ and lies not) (1 Timothy 2: 7)."
Giles Fraser comments in The Guardian today that: 'Conservative religious people are generally locked in a self-referencing worldview where truth is about strict internal coherence rather than any reaching out to reality. That's why they treat the Bible like some vast jigsaw – its truth residing in a complex process of making the pieces fit together and not with the picture it creates.'
So, St Paul sent greetings to friends including an “apostle” called Junia and entrusted that letter to a “deacon” called Phoebe. He clearly accepted women in his ministry teams and among the leadership of the churches with which he worked. Yet on other occasions and in different circumstances and contexts he made statements such as that in 1 Timothy 2. 11-12.
To take the Bible seriously surely means to live with the tension of the different and sometimes contradictory statements and actions found within the Bible, both taken as a whole and in relation to its key protagonists instead of trying to 'treat the Bible like some vast jigsaw – its truth residing in a complex process of making the pieces fit together and not with the picture it creates.' To my mind that also includes taking context, both then and now, into account in seeking to understand what God was saying and doing, both then and now, and not simply insisting that particular statements originally made for particular contexts and times necessarily have literal validity for all times and contexts.
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Lone Justice - Don't Toss Us Away.
1 comment:
But then, who says that St Paul wrote 2 Timothy?
(the vocabulary and literary style bear little resemblance to known Pauline epistles, and the first evidenced quotation of it as scripture is after 150AD)
Perhaps those ConEvos should know their Bibles better.
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