A Human Experience

We've gone from contextualization with our Bible through feminism and the addition of women into the Scriptures to a gender neutral understanding of the Bible where male and female don't matter at all, and that brings us to the crux of the argument that these gender-contextualizing folks want to make: 

Marriage cannot be limited to only the union between a man and a woman. 

That's a cultural understanding, they say, and culture has changed. That may be how it was in the patriarchal societies of biblical times, but it's not how things are today. That may have been important when virgin daughters were of high economic value and when homosexual relationships were often coercive and abusive, but this is the Twenty-First Century! We don't live in that world any more. 

But if the Bible is gender neutral, if it never really means to identify us as male or female, then it has no ground to stand on in saying that a man leaves his family to cling to his wife. Or vice-versa. In fact, if what happened in the Garden very early on is that God created nothing more than a "helpmeet" for Adam, then what God declared - it's not good for man to be alone - holds whether man finds companionship in a woman or in another man. 

Do you see how the slippery slope of just starting with saying that the biblical culture is outdated for our time got us to the point that culture wants to make? 

This is how the world thinks it destroys the faith. It slowly, quietly, deliberately changes the definitions that Christianity has taken for granted for thousands of years, and then it throws them back in our faces and taunts us, saying that we aren't even living the way that the Bible would want us to live. Then, it prooftexts our Bible for us, through its own lens of contextualization, and shows us that we must be wrong. 

And if we're wrong about that, what else are we wrong about?

It's this kind of understanding - this feminist-turned-gender-neutral contextualization - that has also led the world to hijack other words, words like "love" and "tolerance," and tell us that we're getting those wrong, too. It's this kind of contextualization that has led them to a Jesus who indiscriminately not only loves everyone, but approves of every single thing they do as an expression of that love. A Jesus who has no standards. A Jesus who issues no calls to repentance. 

A Jesus whose Cross is shameful, not victorious. How can it be victorious if there's nothing to gain victory over?

But by the logic the world has followed, starting with the "academic" ventures of a small group of Christians, there is no other logical conclusion. It naturally comes to this point. This makes absolute sense. 

Because if the Bible doesn't say what it means to say when it comes to gender but is only culturally influenced by the time period in which it was written and if he doesn't mean he and brother includes sisters and if there really is no male or female but only companionship and helpmeet, then of course, we have a Mother God who not only tolerates, but affirms every relationship on the merits of its mutuality alone because we aren't having a gendered experience; we're all just having a human experience. There is no other logical conclusion. 

But there is another way.