Bygone Eras

The problem we get into when we start looking through our own cultural lens at the text of the Bible is that we end up in a place where we can completely dismiss the Word of God as authoritative, then attempt to change it to suit our own tastes. 

 You've seen this; I know you have. 

So we start with a group of postmodern Christians who are upset that the Bible is so "patriarchal" - by this, they mean that men feature prominently in the Scriptures, that male pronouns are used to describe God and much of the narration of His story, that women are subjugated, that the whole male dominance thing is clearly a product of the time that the characters lived in and not part of God's design. 

Once they've made this argument, they can throw out much of the Bible as "cultural," and not only as cultural, but as outdated or backward. Then, we start getting Christians who try to expand the Bible into the age of feminism by using more inclusive pronouns, by taking out "cultural" rules about things like marriage and sex, and so on. And if God isn't really "He" and the Bible isn't really "he" and "she," well, then, we make room for the gender fluidity that we're fighting about in our own age. 

At the same time, these very same folks will emphasize the roles of women in the Bible, prominent women, to claim that God isn't as patriarchal as the culture was, that God wants us to be feminists, and so on, etc., ad nauseum. 

This is the same group of folks that uses our postmodern understandings of homosexuality to claim that the Bible doesn't actually make any claims against homosexuality. The Bible in its own culture, they say, is talking about the servant-boy type of homosexuality often practiced in Rome, which was about power and not about love, whereas today, our homosexual relationships are about love and therefore, they are more like the lifetime union that God was talking about all the way back in Genesis than they are about the homosexual "acts" that appear to be condemned, by some arguments from the text.

Thus, once again, our culture trumps the authoritativeness of God's Word as we spin things to make sense according to what we think we've already made sense of. 

And we say that God would want it this way because He would not want the culture in which His people lived in a bygone era to cause offense to a new generation of Christians who are just looking for His love. 

So in the very same breath, they are throwing out the Bible while clinging to some versions of its teachings, trying to claim that culture - not God - is everything and that what we need is a Word that speaks to the age that we're in. 

Of course, we know that Bible is already speaking to our age; many are just refusing to listen because the message isn't an easy one...or popular. 

On one hand, it's an easy argument to make. After all, we see God using women in a time when women were appreciated differently than they are today. We see God using the small shepherd to defeat the giant. We see God using the powerless to shame the powerful. We see God using the weak to subdue the strong. We see God making the last first. We see God turning culture on its head, and so it's only natural that as we live in a culture that turns many things on its head, we assume we are doing the work of the Lord and that He approves of our new readings of His Word. It's easy to make the argument that our understanding is the one He wanted all along. 

Unless that's not at all what's going on....