Cheryl

Don,

“It is like these verses are a mirror, the interpretation shows more about the interpreter than about the text, as gaps get filled in based on the interpreter’s working assumptions.”

You are exactly right here.  We all have working assumptions and how we interpret certain texts is a big mirror to show these assumptions and sometimes eve our heart attitude.  I think sometimes it is just easier to take our assumptions and run with them than to push into the text to see past these assumptions.  For example if a person said to another person “You are not to smile” we can see this command in different ways.  Why are you not allowed to smile?  Is smiling a bad thing?  Smiling isn’t a bad thing so there must be something wrong with “you”.  This is where the assumptions can come in.  Maybe there is something wrong with you because you are the wrong color, or the wrong class or the wrong gender.  But maybe there is something else going on that we haven’t considered because we think there are only two options.  We think that either there is something wrong with smiling or there is something wrong with the person because they are told that they can’t smile.  But maybe, just maybe we have stopping thinking with two options when there is a third or fourth option that we haven’t considered.  Maybe it isn’t smiling that’s wrong or the person that is wrong by nature to smile, but maybe it is the circumstance where it is wrong for everyone to smile.  Maybe this instructing someone how to tell a person that their loved one has died.

Maybe 1 Timothy 2:12 is one of those cases.  Maybe it is okay to have Paul prohibiting two things because if a person is completely deceived there are several things that they must not do.  Sometimes I think we are afraid to say that a woman cannot teach, but I think that the prohibition would have been no different if it was a man who was deceived and a wife that was the one who was not deceived but who was allowing her husband to carry on in his error and teaching her things that are opposite of what she knows to be true.  Would Paul have said “I do not allow a man to teach or push his way onto a woman (or spiritually murder her by teaching her his error?)”  I think that he would have said that same things, but I think we would not have considered Paul stopping all men from teaching all women.  The reason we make this a general prohibition instead of a specific situation is because many of us have been raised to think that women are somehow less than a man.  So many of us immediately take the position that there must be something wrong with all women that make them not good enough to teach men.  When we come to the text with a preconceived notion that women are not good enough or the quality of their work is inferior to a man’s work, then we can read into the text an agreement with our internal values.

What I want to bring to the table is not to have to do anything about changing the two things that are prohibited into one negative thing, but allowing the context itself to determine the negative.  I want to propose that the negative meaning of the prohibition comes from the example that Paul gives for the reason for his prohibition.  Paul states that it is connected to the situation in the garden with the first marriage couple and the fact that one wasn’t deceived and the other one who was created second was deceived.  There is so much in that statement that needs to be explored but the very foundation is embedded in deception.  If the prohibition’s foundation is to be looked at through the lens of deception then we should be able to see that Paul’s prohibition has nothing to do with gender or with good teaching at all.  It has everything to do with spiritual death.  Someone who is spiritually dead is offering the “fruit” of what has caused their spiritual death to the person who they love but who is also the one who is still alive.