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Pray for All People (v. 1-15)
You should pray for everyone, because God wants everyone to be saved. That is why God sent Christ to give himself as ransom for everyone.
I have a question about this idea that God wants everyone to be saved. If God truly wants this, and he is really all powerful, then why does anyone go to hell? The standard answer I seem to hear to this question is 'free will'. But God doesn't seem to have any qualms about interrupting free will.
Men should pray, wherever they are, and be without anger or quarreling.
I like the no anger and quarreling part, but it seems that praying wherever you are could cause problems. You might think this is some kind of praying in the back of our minds or something, but it says we are supposed to hold our hands up. Also, are we supposed to do this all the time? That obviously wouldn't work.
Women should dress modestly (no braided hair and gold, pearls, or costly attire). Women should be quiet and submissive. Women are not permitted to teach or exercise authority over a man, rather they should remain quiet.
Wow...just wow. I think this is the first time I have seen it explicitly say women are not allowed to teach (I thought I read that before, but I might have just seen other people write about this on various blogs). It is certainly not the first time we have come across some ridiculous misogynist garbage though.
For the overview post (If you think I should add or remove stuff from this list please let me know, I think it would make good conversation)
Good:
2:8 Avoid anger and quarreling.
"I desire then that in every place the men should pray, lifting holy hands without anger or quarreling"
Bad:
2:12 Women are not allowed to be teachers
"I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man; rather, she is to remain quiet"
Interesting:
2:4 God desires that all people be saved. Why doesn't he make it happen if he's all powerful?
"[God,] who desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth."
That misogyny is the kind of stuff I was talking about yesterday. I have seen the "no teacher" thing before. I have seen it used by Christian fundies to discredit female pastors that they disagree with. It is commonly used that way in the comment section at the Christian Post.
ReplyDeletewow. I guess I have spent too much time in california, I didn't really think about it too hard, but I sort of just assumed that people would generally shy away from this type of verse. In the same way that they shy away from many OT verses. I guess I'm just really out of touch with a large portion of this country...we really have a long way to go.
DeleteLike what you have to say. I am going to be picky about this chapter since it contains so much garbage and stuff that is directly contradicted elsewhere in the Bible.
ReplyDeleteVerse 1; Should we pray for everyone?
Verse 2 seems to refer to a tranquil God, but this goes against a lot of parts of the Bible, where he is a bloodthirsty, savage monster. I guess one could argue that its like a nice person who gets crazy when they finally get pissed off. I can get this way myself. I'd like to think of myself as a pretty nice guy, but on half a dozen occasions I've gotten angry. Like scary angry. However, if I spend decades of my life doing missionary work for example, being an upstanding member of the community and I went into a mall and shot a bunch of people, society would label me as a monster. Different standards for God I guess?
Does God really want everyone to be saved? Or does he want some to go to hell? A bunch of these are pulled from stuff we've already read in the NT.
This was also pointed out to me and I thought that it was interesting. Was God a ransom for many or for all? In deductive logic if we set the condition that All X are Y, and are asked "is it true that some X are Y?" It would be valid to draw that as a conclusion. However, it doesn't work the other way around. Any thoughts?
Should Christians pray in public? I think we covered this one in Matthew 6.
The womens rights thing is totally messed up. This book is SO out of date.. It also sounds like Paul believed that the Adam and Eve story was literal and not symbolic in the last few verses. Am I reading too much into that? If not, why has the Catholic church changed it's position on it being a metaphor.
Thanks for the detail, I love stuff like this.
DeleteThe fact that it is so easy to find examples of God being terrible is telling.
The "for many or for all" thing is something that I am not too worried about. While many doesn't imply all, it doesn't contradict it either. It is definitely worth pointing out, and it is confusing to see this kind of thing show up in an infallible book, but there are much stronger contradictions all over the bible, these little ones I don't focus too much on.
I love the connection to the praying in public thing. I hadn't even thought of that connection, but yeah, this chapter is the opposite of that, we are supposed to pray everywhere. Although as I recall, shortly before that even in matthew he went against this idea (let your light shine).
I also hadn't thought of that angle on the adam and eve story, but it does appear that he thinks of it as literal. I suppose it is possible that he thinks it is metaphor but that the message from God is real anyway.
On the Adam and Eve thing, if we read it as a metaphor, as most churches do now a days despite almost all of their history taking it literally, it's still pretty bad. For the sake of argument, let's say that it is. To me, I read it as (13) men coming before women, and thus are better than them (14) as they were not the ones who were stupid enough to be deceived. (15) Thus, they deserve the pain of childbirth for what Eve did. Personally, I don't really see a good way out of it.
DeleteThat's a really good point. If someone tries to get out of it and claims it is metaphor you can just say, "fine, what's it a metaphor for?" I think you laid it out pretty well, I wonder what their answer would be. It reminds me of when people say things have been taken out of context. I think the standard response there similarly should be "well then what is the context?"
Delete