Cultural Lens

We are living in a time of textual criticism - an academic sort of approach (or what passes as one) to the Bible and its stories. We have invested quite a bit of our time and energies into determining the actual cultural and social setting of the words that were written and talking about how those truths affect the perspective that is presented through what is supposed to be God's Word. 

We have spent our time digging and uncovering shards of pottery and slivers of parchment and piecing things back together so that we can get a glimpse of what it looked like to be living in biblical times and how that day-to-day life might affect the way we understand what was written for us. 

We have made excuses for the things that we find distasteful in the Scriptures - things like slavery or this so-called "patriarchy" that is so popular to condemn these days. We have confessed that they are there, but have called them cultural and tried to sweep them away as uneducated, ignorant realities of a bygone era, whereas we are now so civilized as to have moved past them. 

Yes, our criticism seems to have given us a way to approach the Bible more soberly...or so we think. 

And when we have come to conclusions through our criticisms, we have decided that the appropriate response is to update our interpretation according to our higher sophistication so that we can get to the heart of what God really said (and meant) and throw out all that messy, barbaric stuff that has no place in a "progressive" society like ours. 

You know, that kind of Christianity that doesn't "gel" with the "real world" that we live in now. 

Less time has been spent on discovering the biases that we bring from our present culture back into the ancient words of the Bible. 

We think, and we have convinced ourselves, that since we are an ever-evolving species (thanks, Darwin) and since our thinking is more "progressive" today than it was even a generation ago and since we are more civilized and more sophisticated and overall better human beings now than our ancestors were, bound as they were by broken cultures with misplaced priorities, that what we have today is a truth that is worth rewriting history for. 

We've seen it in the ways that we rewrite our secular history to match our modern sentiments, but it's happening at the biblical level, too. 

It's essentially self-righteousness. It's the belief that we are finally in a place where we are right and where we have the truth and where our understanding gives us the right to reframe everything into our lens because our lens is finally correct. Like a world struggling with blurred vision, we, finally, have developed the glasses that bring everything into focus and now, it is not only possible, but it is required of us that we invest ourselves in putting all things into that focus. 

Even biblical, holy, scared things that the Lord our God has told us Himself are eternal. We are now in such a place of cultural superiority that we are starting to think it's time we "improve" upon these things, too. 

So this word - women - struck me as I had a very cultural response to it. But should I have? How much of my reaction was our current culture self-righteously trying to speak backward into history and make the inerrant word of God "better?" 

How do we even begin to reconcile this?