LNE

Pinklight,

I think people often keep and defend traditions that agree with their personal desires, like in this case, for male power and privilege in a world that is shifting from male-dominance to female-male equality.
Some people just like feeling better than others at an ontological level (despite the fact that they’ll say men and women are ontologically equal, some don’t really seem to believe that, even calling women easily deceived by God’s original design.), or they fear egal interpretations are liberal and will destroy the Church.

But some I think are truly deluded, they don’t know how badly their modern English translations have butchered the meaning of some of God’s words. They can’t imagine that flat-out interpretations are put into their Bibles as if they were in the text itself by trusted conservative translators (like “veil” or “symbol of authority” in 1 Cor 11, and changing “no such custom” to “no other custom”), or that the grammar in their NIV isn’t wholly faithful to God’s inspired text. Honestly, I think many don’t even understand that grammar is important.

Some comps, like myself in the past, truly fear God and wish to obey Him, even if He says hard things; they just think He’s saying what the English Bible says and they make doctrines from it. They don’t know the controversies surrounding words like authentein, they don’t even know they need to look for such things.
They think the words are all translated right, and its only the interpretation that is the issue, because they trust that scholars wouldn’t distort translations as much as they do. You can get a significantly different picture of manhood and womanhood from using the ESV than from using a Greek interlinear or a literal translation.

I was a strict comp until I stumbled upon the blogs and egal scholars that would make clearly known to me for the first time the distortions in the translations that most of the “good” conservative website like Carm didn’t mention and even perpetuated.
I was afraid to question the “good guys” of CBMW, the Grudems, the Pipers, the MacArthurs, the conservative heroes that I admired. Little did I realize how strange and unlikely some of their beliefs and interpretations were.

It was the “bad guys”, the egalitarians (aka “feminists” according to many complementarians), that seemed to have much of the truly convincing textual data on their side.

But it took me years before I realized this, because I trusted that Bible scholars wouldn’t lie, keep information hidden, and distort the text. I thought they feared God like me. Some do I’m sure, but they have blind spots, and they need God’s chastening.

There is a lot of ye olde worldliness in “good” “conservative” Christianity that isn’t good nor truly conservative.
I thought Jesus telling us NOT to Lord over or exercise authority over one another in His Churches like the heathen, but to be servants, and to mutually submit to each other, and to consider others before ourselves, would make any man fear to distort these things, but some are not deterred.