This is the issue when dealing with hypothetical situations, there is an inability to see beyond what we may know, understand or have experienced.
Boilerplate. This is always true in every single situation at every point in history with every single human being, always including the speaker and the speakee -- but what was
your point in mentioning this at this particular point? Clearly you believe you know, understand and have experienced things I haven't, but how much of that resides in the realm of your own assumptions?
we are discussing unmarried women [who] need biblical teaching and nurturing that will renew their minds
Amen, but what I read in the main in your overall post this morning is a reframe of the gynocentric orientation: everything is the fault of men; women just stumble into their circumstances and would be angels if it weren't for the evil, hapless, uncaring and foolish men who victimize them. Noting that individual cases do happen like that is always a non sequitur, because it fails to note either that victimization does also occur in the reverse direction -- in this case, men being victimized by evil, hapless, uncaring and foolish women -- or that these are the exceptions that prove the rule. Ultimately, it's a generally-effective tactic to distract from addressing the truth of what is
usually the case.
I consider men to have
primary responsibility in
everything, but that doesn't remove all responsibility from women. Remember the context of my post: a woman asked what does a (presumably godly) woman do in regard to obtaining spiritual information when her father is dead and she has no godly male relatives?:
Well, the facile response is to break out the violins and white knight her, and I knew we could count on those responses to
@Hisdaughter (whom, by the way, I've met and consider to be a woman who can hold her own, given the bravery she exhibited at last year's summer retreat). My post was meant to address what is almost always present in the
unsaid. Sure, many women have stumbled on their own into The Truth but have absolutely no covering and were just innocent, pure babes who haven't so much as considered uttering a word of ill will in their lives and haven't even contemplated imagining wondering what different equipment men have under all those robes. All those women really need to do is perform the default action of showing up at a church, where they will be smothered with Christian charity and efforts on the part of pastors to pair them with bachelors -- or they can show up here, shed a virtual tear or two, and receive a similar reaction. That, though, I strongly believe, is not what
@Hisdaughter intended with her question, because I contend she wasn't just looking for either a pat answer or an exposition on how, yet again, women are just damsels in distress.
They
are the weaker vessel, but that doesn't make them powerless. They have power based on whatever degree of agency or free will one understands human beings in general and women in particular to have been granted by our Creator. As such, given that I'm oriented toward unearthing untrod ground toward creating transcendent life and spiritual transformation, I looked outside the box that fails to see that women, in a similar way to men, actually generally have untapped personal power that can be harnessed, in pursuit of charting new courses that won't repeat past mistakes but also won't keep them stuck believing they're entirely impotent, by reviewing how they have shot themselves in the foot in the past.
Let's remember we are discussing
1 Corinthians 14:34-35 KJV — Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but they are commanded to be under obedience, as also saith the law. And if they will learn any thing, let them ask their husbands at home: for it is a shame for women to speak in the church.
So we are dealing with the teaching within the church assembly fellowship ekklesia wherein this woman has questions.
I didn't take
@Hisdaughter's question to be entirely constrained by the structure of the OP, but neither did I forget that this was the topic. Please tell me you're not suggesting that she's just supposed to keep her trap shut every time she's among a gathering of two or more in His Name, right?
But, if so, and she wants to learn,
and when she goes home there is no husband, no father and no godly male relatives, are you suggesting that Paul was asserting that a woman in such circumstances just accept ignorance as a permanent condition? [I Corinthians 14:
38: "
Now if anyone
is ignorant, let him be ignorant!" CLNT]
I must acknowledge that I left out this part of my thought process in my previous post, because what I've just described is what went through my head before I began writing. She's at the
ekklesia and can't speak because she's a woman and has no husband. She has no one to question at home. So, hello, what's the most obvious solution to this problem of being in a spiritual-knowledge doom loop, especially given the actual context of I Corinthians, which would entirely preclude her having any access to written Scripture (being just slightly prior to Gutenberg)?:
Get a husband! Then she'd have someone she could query. But needing to
get a husband means she either has never had one or had one and lost him. I refuse to live in fairy tales, so in the real world, other than in the event of being a widow (which wasn't stipulated in the question but could certainly be the case), it's almost inescapable that there are reasons over which the woman has agency that are responsible for why she
doesn't have a husband. Ergo, becoming self-aware enough to identify those reasons in order to be able to work around them, because enlightenment dies in ignorance.
Also, anchored to the real world, it's not rocket science for women to obtain a husband; that's pretty much a matter of saying yes to a man's flirtation. No woman is involuntarily either celibate or unmarried;
any woman who isn't married is guilty of having too-high standards and/or too-high expectations. In the context of this discussion, the window is narrowed down significantly by what I assumed went along with the question: that, if the solution is marriage, the relationship needs to be scriptural and the man needs to be godly, but, again, if any woman can't find a
godly man, then either her standards or her expectations are too high --
and that requires her to either lower those standards/expectations or increase her own value through introspection and correction. If a woman is wide open to polygyny, all that is necessary is to just digitally bat her eyelashes, and the vultures will descend to give her a good look, but even here amongst this presumably more-pious-than-average crowd, those men will still be discerning (more often than not excessively picky, in fact), so they'll be judging, doing cost/benefit analyses and thus hunting for flaws. Again, if a woman has flaws, it's best for her to know what they are. Then she can (a) correct them, (b) be virtuously transparent about them, or (c) determine that learning more about the goings-on at
ekklesias ain't worth the trouble.
Lastly, my reference to the printing press wasn't entirely facetious, because it's the case that perhaps a great deal of Scripture should be considered to be valid
within the context of the times in which it was spoken or written. Forget about Gutenberg; how about DARPA's Internet? Can we deny that what we're doing right here at biblicalfamilies.org is
ekklesia? I don't see how we can see it otherwise, so if we're really going to be sticklers about enforcing I Corinthians 14 in modern times, then I perceive only two realistic answers to her question:
- "Shut up, woman! Don't you know it's shameful for a woman to speak in the ekklesia? Put your hat on and busy yourself with designing prairie dresses that stay just this side of being provocatively showy if you don't want to risk eternal conscious torment." or . . .
- "Well, duh, I guess you would just break the rule like you just did. Say hello to Charles Manson in Hell when you get there." or, I guess there really is a third, which is . . .
- "Confess your sin of speaking in an ekklesia, then go out and perform some compensatory good works (or make donations to the church of your choice), and sin no more."
My post, though, was intended in the spirit of providing an answer that would bridge both worlds, the one in which Paul spoke and the one in which we live these days.
