Love God, and do whatever you want

A few days ago, I got an e-mail from amazon, stating that I was owed a refund of $0.73 because of some lawsuit they lost. Not a lot of money, but I thought, "hey, that means I can probably afford one of their cheap kindle books now. Cool!" So I started looking to see what was in the $2 range, and happened to see Rachel Held Evans' "A year of Biblical Womanhood." I remembered that a friend of mine had received it for Christmas a couple years ago, and really enjoyed it, so I decided to buy it and see for myself if I liked it or not. This book is the first book on the subject that has actually made sense to me.

For those of you who aren't familiar with her, Rachel Held Evans is a Christian blogger, and author. However, she does tend to be quite controversial in Christian circles, because she views things from a more liberal standpoint (she says herself that she is a democrat, and believes in evolution, so you can kind of see where the controversy might lie). However, she is also someone who has taken the time to not only read the Bible, but do all of the historical and contextual research that seems to be lacking in the majority of evangelical christian literature today.

See, I went to a Christian school, but the education I received was vastly different from a normal Christian school education. For 3 1/2 years, I read classical literature, and studied the Bible in a way that was completely new and foreign to me: I read it as literature, instead of just as truth. I learned that in reading it this way, you have to look at the cultural and historical context, because otherwise, it just doesn't make any sense. For example, in  Deuteronomy 22:28-29 it states

 ²⁸ “If a man finds a girl who is a virgin, who is not engaged, and seizes her and 

lies with her and they are discovered, ²⁹ then the man who lay with her shall 

give to the girl’s father fifty shekels of silver, and she shall become his wife because

 he has violated her; he cannot divorce her all his days." 

A basic literal reading of this passage as truth would indicate that we as Christians should require all women to marry their rapists. But we don't. Why? Because a look at this within the historical and cultural context of the time reveals that it was necessary then, but certainly not now. The reasoning behind this passage is that culturally, unmarried women of the time who were not virgins were not eligible to get married. This verse is here to protect the women that found themselves in sucky situations, and provide them with a means to be provided for. 

So, why is it that we take passages such as the above and ignore them; relegating them to the land of cultural relevance; but passages such as Proverbs 31, and tell women that the best possible way for you to be a godly woman is to emulate this woman of valor as closely as possible in our day and times?

In other words, we pick and choose what we want to be christian law that we should follow in order to to be good christians, and ignore those things that we don't like. So my thinking? The Bible is truth. No doubt about it. The stories contained in it actually happened. No argument there. But the purpose of it is to give us principles to follow. Things like "love the lord your God with all your heart" or "be kind to one another, tender hearted, forgiving one another, even as God, for Christ's sake, has forgiven you" are what we should be doing. The Bible was never meant to be turned into law. Law is wearisome. Law is a burden. Christ came to fulfill the law, not give us a new one to follow. 

Looking at one person's attempt to live out the Biblical mandates to women as literally as possible shows us how silly it is in practice. We state that we read the Bible literally,  and follow it literally, but no one who is not viewed as legalistic actually does so. To continue to present our following of it as such does little more than hurt other's belief of what Christianity actually is, and makes us look like little more than hypocrites.

But all that aside, Rachel Held Evans does a much better job of presenting all of this than I do (it was her book after all). You should go read it. It's quite an eye opener. :)