I have recently read in two blogs (neither is CBE’s Scroll) that Jesus sometimes treated women rudely. Each cites John 2:4, where Jesus addresses Mary as “woman” at a wedding feast. Unfortunately, both bloggers have fallen prey to an elementary interpretive fallacy: The implications of a word or phrase in one culture are not necessarily [...]
“And here is an interesting bit of info for you, from another Iranian friend. Apparently, Farsi has a second-person pronoun which is gender neutral but still personal, unlike our English “it.” As a result, he tells me that Farsi translations of the Bible don’t use “He” for God, but this neutral pronoun! He also tells [...]
There’s no denying that God created humans male and female. Everyone would agree on that fact. However, any instructions to God’s people in the Old Testament and Jesus’ disciples in the New Testament are pertaining to how to relate to God and each other. The ten commandments embrace all of the experiences of life at [...]
Baptism in Christ: Giving Words Their Full Meaning Recently a friend of mine received a very distinguished award from her denomination for her long-term leadership in promoting the “maximum baptismal role of women in the Church.” As I pondered our baptismal role, I remembered that many baptismal fonts from the early church had Galatians 3:26-28 [...]
Imagine a sanctuary filled with teachers and students of various ages singing: “It’s the child on his wedding day, It’s the mommy that gives him away, Something beautiful” A child on his wedding day… given away. Pause for a moment and think about that. Young, teenage boys married off to older, wiser, and more [...]
I have just been browsing a website which promotes roles for women and men as God’s ordained will for all time. It showed again the enormous power of words to create impressions and convince people of a point of view. History shows that many strong people convinced others that what they promoted was the ‘truth’ [...]
The following is from the second paragraph of the United States’ Declaration of Independence. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights, governments [...]
