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Originally Posted by Ohio
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What about Jesus? What did he teach on women? Pretty much nothing from what I can see. They got treated same as everyone else. They got healed, forgiven, fed and admonished. They are sinners who need redemption, and who evidently were also disciples.
To me that's the first salient point. They had access to Jesus. Not through their husbands, but directly. In this Jesus seems to have been quite "progressive", as we'd put it today. He was an observant Jew, and dutifully regarded gentiles as 'dogs', but he never told anyone to 'know their place'; in fact it seems people repeatedly by-passed social strictures and he didn't care much. So the current fundamentalist reactionaries seem to miss the point of his ministry.
Now, behavior is a different matter. He wasn't permissive. But that's pretty clear. I don't think we need to confuse the issues.
Secondly, the poor, the despised, the weak, the widows, the sick; they got the grace. So if women are upset with their treatment and we say, "Too bad for you to be born female. Live with it", we miss the point of his ministry. Women had the short stick all along. Unless we see a few verses from Jesus, we shouldn't wave them away with a few verses of Paul.
Lastly, I find the fundamentalist "It's in the Bible" pose to be full of hypocrisy. I already have written repeatedly on the genesis of the movement. Women assumed leadership roles in activity and doctrine. Who (re)discovered the 'three parts of man' in LC folklore? A woman. Who discovered the secret rapture? A woman. See Darby and the genesis of this idea. He was chief promulgator but he didn't originate it. Some woman got it in a feverish dream on her sick-bed.
I knew of a LC couple where the woman's a professional, earns hundreds of thousands. Her husband stays home and raises the kids. They go to meetings, I was there with them for several years. No one, not once intimated Paul's dictum that she stay home and "be saved through child-bearing" or child-rearing. Why not? Because that 'truth' isn't expedient for the coffers. They were paying customers.
Selective application abounds.