Not to mention anyone who tries to do /everything/ the bible says will contradict themselves so much they'll wind up huddled in a corner in the fetal position out of sheer confusion.... This is, of course, assuming they think about it.... Well, we can only hope....The Church shouldn't beat itself up
By Andrew O'Hagan
(Filed: 04/10/2006)
I went to one of those universities where the lecturers talked ceaselessly about "the patriarchy", so you'll forgive me if I don't want to claim first prize in the World's Biggest Male Feminist Competition. A generation of English students has been encouraged to hunt through "classic texts" – everything from Shakespeare to Bridget Jones's Diary – hunting for signs of female subjugation, but it has always seemed to me that the most offending text in this regard is the Big Book itself: the Bible.
The first baddie was Eve, who, on the strength of one spare rib and a longing for vitamin C, invented Original Sin and started all the trouble. Or, as Timothy puts it in the New Testament: "Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection. But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence. For Adam was first formed, then Eve. And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was in the transgression."
People with a lot of time on their hands – and perhaps with some justifiable anger in their hearts – have discovered that there are over 200 verses in the Bible that specifically beat up on women, and most of these make reference either to their uncleanness or the certainty of their being inferior to men. According to the Book of Numbers, a woman has to have the permission of her father or her husband before she can commit herself to religious vows, and Exodus 21:7 sanctions the selling of one's daughter into slavery.
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So far, so bad. The Bible might be one of the most politically incorrect documents in the history of the world, and that could be fun, except that religion in its modern forms has signally failed to put this to rights and thereby to make life better for billions of women. Until this week, that is, when the Church of England published a report, Responding to Domestic Abuse, which was produced by a group ordained with the power to investigate the matter by the Archbishops' Council.
And what do they find? "It is a tragic fact that bad theology, in this case a faulty understanding of God and human beings in relationship, can have the effect – whether intended or not – of betraying victims of domestic abuse and encouraging the actions of perpetrators." That's right. The Bible may be many things, but it is neither fair-minded in the modern sense nor is it generally understanding whenever it is called upon to extend or uphold the rights of women. It assumes that men have a monopoly of good sense when it comes to what best pleases God, which has rather encouraged, as the report finds, the view among male Christians that they are the boss. "Obeying" your husband, as decreed in the Christian marriage vows, can be a recipe for disastrous abuse on the part of some men, and the Church is right to object to this in the strongest terms.
But will Christians accept it? We increasingly live in a world where the literal interpretation of the Bible holds too much sway. Leviticus says that homosexuality is an abomination and many believe it to be so. Exodus assumes that it is natural to kill people who work on the sabbath: what should we do next – stone Sunday shoppers to death in the freezer aisle at Sainsbury's?
But, whether they accept it or not, the Church, by speaking out against such Bible-sanctioned bullying of women by men, is taking an important step towards saving organised religion from its own stupidity. If parts of our society are deemed to be sociopathic, then the traditional Church cannot absolve itself from all blame in the matter, for many under its aegis have used Biblical dogma to justify outright cruelty towards women and children too, claiming it is all ordained by the will of God and the natural order.
In some senses, masculinity is a nightmare from which our societies are still to awake – and I'm not just talking about societies run by people which find themselves in thrall to the likes of the Taliban. Here and there in Britain, in unquantifiable numbers, the less physically powerful are being bullied and sometimes terrorised by men who assume they have the sanction of Him Upstairs, "the Lord".
Feminism has a tough fight on its hands when you see that it is up against the Will of God, but forward-thinking church leaders must question that Will, or reinterpret it, all the better to encourage believers into a state of grace and tolerance.
Defenders of an "equal rights" interpretation of the Bible point to such stars of the piece as
Mary Magdalene, whom Jesus likes well enough, and to Luke 8:1-3, where it is stated that women can be disciples of God just as well as men. But there is no getting round the fact that a literal interpretation of the Bible – one that takes no heed of human developments since the days of the Scriptures' authorship – will only distort what we hope might be true Christian values, and in that way drive yet more millions away from the Church.
By publishing this report, the Church of England, at least, has shown that it will no longer be a silent party to the masochistic leanings of its central text, a book that, common sense alone tells us, does not always serve its readers either well or equally.
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omiconayin's journal, because it makes a good point while simultaneously making me laugh.
