Quote:
Originally Posted by Evangelical
You are reading too much into this verse without considering the many other verses that clearly lay out the social order. . . . We need to read the bible with a degree of common sense.
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I would say that it clearly does not mean that the sense in which a child is to obey parents can be the sense in which a parent could be subject to a child. Yet that is not the whole of submission.
And a slave cannot claim authority over a master. But a master can be subject to the slave in some ways that do not undermine authority.
I think that the problem you have is that "be subject to" is being understood as entirely about authority and hierarchy. There is much to being subject. A parent is subject to the needs of the child. The child even demands of the parent in many ways in which the parent obeys and does as requested. Neither is in all ways omnidirectional.
But in a writing to a culture in which there was a tendency for lording it over in the reverse, there was an extreme response. Your DTS professor may like for it to somehow be a more permanent version of tradition or practice, but it is the preference that makes it so, not the reading of the words without a desire for outcome.
And while I live in a world full of DTS grads and professors, know many of them, and think very highly of every one of them, there are certain ways that they are influenced by the thinking of others beyond what is clearly there. This is most commonly seen when they insist on special theological uses of words that had no such special theological use other than as has been overlaid by commentators of later times.
But let's look at one Lee did the same thing on since you will be familiar with it. It is like saying that "zoe" is simply God's life. That is a patently incorrect reading of the word. It might be argued that the best way to have zoe is to have God's life, but the world is full of people living "zoe." Zoe is simply all that makes up life, including the enjoyment of it. Therefore, those people going for all the gusto they can get as they open that can of Bud (I think that is who had that commercial), they are experiencing zoe. And from a careful study of the use of the term in the Bible (couldn't resist that given Lee's propensity to do the same) you will find that while there may be some uses that could be intending to imply an "only through God" kind of zoe, most do not.
So here we are relying on theologians schooled in an overarching view of eschatology that did not exist until the early-mid 1800s. And heavily influenced by the people who brought you the exclusive Brethren. And you want me to simply take it because one of them is sure that this word is "rich in its theological implications."
Remember. They are implications, not obvious and certain facts. And what they imply may not be agreed to by all.
And when I read what you posted from Wallace, I say to myself, "interesting." But I do not see that he has overcome the objection that he is creating a theological "implication," insisting that it is simply so (sort of like Lee would have), and making a bold declaration of fact that a straight reading of the "facts" that he gives cannot support as "simply so."