🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <61g8vn$4jr@xochi.tezcat.com> Daniel B. Holzman,
holzman@xochi.tezcat.com writes:
>I'm sorry, but the PKs can either promise not to dominate their wives, OR
>they can endorse Ephesians 5:22-30.  (Ephesians 5:21 is a part of a
>different sentence.)  Ephesians 5:22-24 is quite explicit that this is
>not a partnership of equals, but a hierarchical relationship wherein the
>husband is the head of the wife.  Exhorting the husband not to abuse this
>power does not change the nature of the relationship.

What is really going on here is a conflict between what I would term
"Christianity" vs. "Apostolism".  

In other words, certain people, generally calling themselves
"Fundamentalist Christians", have declared the doctrine that every word
of the New Testament is 100% binding, endorsed by God, etc.  The
significance of this is that what would otherwise appear to be a mere
*letter* to a group of early Christians in Ephesus, written by a high
official in the church, but not the Pope (since Peter was the Pope),
somebody pretty much on the level of Archbishop George, is now being
presented as being the absolute last word on how Christian couples should
relate to one another 2000 years later.

This is a pretty remarkable development, especially in context.  Normally
in Christian theology, a prophet receives a particular communication or
vision from God, often cryptic or highly personal.  His retelling of this
one communication is then taken to be "divinely inspired".  But in the
case of what I'm calling "Apostolism", the assumption is that no less
than 12 people were endowed with the ability to utter divine prophecy,
uncontrovertible, infallible text, for the duration of their lives, in
any context whatsoever.

There are some pretty blatant problems with Apostolism, however.  For
instance, Paul describes a vision from God in which he's ordered to tell
the Christians that they don't have to follow Jewish dietary laws; but if
everything he was saying was divinely inspired, why a vision for that
particular point?  And if all the apostles were infallible, then what to
make of the two *very* contradictory genealogies for Joseph in the New
Testament?  Then, of course, there's Judas, where their trustworthiness
is concerned...

If a person does *not* accept the apostles as infallible, however, then
clearly this causes some inconvenience - it requires thinking; it creates
the possibility of schism.  It's easy to see how zealots of all Dark
Ages, including our own, would have seen this as a problem.  If you don't
believe the two genealogies for Joseph with the ten-generation difference
between them, then maybe you don't believe the whole song and dance about
the three kings carrying chests of gold unnoticed through the back
streets of Jerusalem, the stuff about Mary having been a virgin rather
than just another unwed mother, and so on.  Maybe they made up some stuff
to convince more new worshippers, thinking that they were saving souls by
lying.  After all, it's hard to believe that the two genealogies that
totally differ between Joseph's grandfather and two *different* wives of
the legendary King David, would have been mistaken totally as an accident.

So there are the two different religions.  A Christian would look at the
sort of stuff that Jesus is actually credited with saying, and make his
own decisions about how to love his wife best.  He would assume that
Paul's very hierarchical description of a husband-wife relationship
merely reflected the treatment of women as chattel prevalent at the time,
and would note that his efforts were directed toward getting the husband
and wife to see themselves as one, with a common interest, and hence with
no reason to fight for power.  Meanwhile, an Apostolist would just look
up the rules out the book and try to fit them to the situation.

I think Christianity can be a *religion*, a thing that talks about love
and forgiveness and charity and God and all the high-minded things, while
trying to CHANGE a person's SPIRIT to make them IN GENERAL a better
person.  Whether or not a person believes in it per se, one has to
respect those sort of truly GOOD aspirations.  But Apostolism,
"Fundamentalism" in the worst sense of the term, this is not a religion,
it's merely a code of law looking for a master to enforce it.  It doesn't
want people to believe anything except that they should follow the rules,
and look for someone to give them to them.  It's a worship, truly, of
men, and not of God.


I remain ignorant of which religion the Promise Keepers are promulgating.


P.S.  I ran across one article that said that the head of the Promise
Keepers once "championed" Colorado's Proposition Two, in which city
ordinances prohibiting discrimination against people for their sexual
orientation were in turn prohibited.  But I don't know what "championed"
actually refers to, or whether this effort is reflected in the
organization itself.