There is a wonderful blog called the Rebelution.
I was scanning some of their previous posts and these two just really stood out to me.
The definition of a real man. I think it is important for girls to read this and search the scriptures and find what a real man should be like. The world tries to sell us a what they call a man, but fall sooo short of what God had planned man to be.
The definition of a real woman. I'm a goal oriented person. If you give me a goal I will do better than if you just throw me in a room point and say do. This breaks down some of the ways that scripture says women should act and behave.
1 comment:
I think it is interesting how much we don't realize how culture plays a role in how we read scripture; or even how the implications of the contextual environment scripture itself was written in.
In our western/modern mindset we have made much more of gender rolls than I think scripture intended by turning them into elaborate systems of hierarchy.
This is not to say that masculinity and femininity aren't incredibility sacred, but that many distinctions that we make are more culturally defined than scripturally.
Jesus and even the wittings of Paul, where most people ironically derive a hierarchical gender system, spoke in a contest where the treatment of women was incredibly oppressive and they preached a Kingdom of God where there is no hierarchy and that in Christ there is no male, female, jew or greek.
Paul's teachings therefore give us a context for how to live that out in the world where sometimes systems are not just; but this is not meant to unnecessarily be an enforcement of the system.
wives obey your husbands, is not any more an endorsement of this system than Paul's command for slave to obey their masters an endorsement of slavery.
Keep in mind the context of Paul's teaching is to "submit to one another". But, there are cultural systems and authority structures in the world and Paul's teachings remind us that we sometimes model Christ best by modeling our freedom in Christ in the midst of humbly serving our oppressors.
Jesus himself did this. He was a Nazarene (lowly among Jews)and a Jew (lowly among the Roman world)and he found a way to live the way of the Father in the midst of being on the bottom of the social class.
I think there is so much more to being a Godly man or woman than just being what we think is a "biblical one"; especially if by "biblical" we think that means reading into the specific cultural application of how men and women lived holy lives in their culture as an endorsement of that particular cultural system.
Ironically in todays world what people think are "biblical" gender roles are very oppressive and counter to the point the biblical writers were trying to make. It like we got lost in the details of how they applied it to their culture thinking and that scripture is a prescription instead of learning the truth behind the deeper and richer concepts so we can apply that truth to our lives in our culture today.
I very much admire the pursuit of Godly manhood and womanhood, I just think we reduce it and the scriptures we use to justify it to mere prescriptions. Both life and god and the scripture are far greater than that.
peace,
James
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