Christians: Is this a Bible contradiction?

Peace,

I'm not a Christian but I was thinking about this today: the Bible says in one place that there is no male and female in Christ (Galatians 3:28,) then in another place it says that the man is the head of the woman (1 Corinthians 11:3.)

Isn't this a contradiction? How can there be no male and female, then the book acknowledges different places for men and women?

Peace,
nunnies

 

I'll take a stab. We need to put these passages in context. Although they've become part of the Christian New Testament, when Paul wrote them they were letters to particular congregations at particular times to address local problems. He wasn't intending to write scripture to address general absolute principles universally applicable to all people at all times in the future, since he thought the world would end in his lifetime and there wouldn't be much of a future for the system of his day.

In the case of Galatians, Paul was facing the challenge that a rival Christian sect was undermining his ministry by preaching that in order to become Christian, people first had to become Jews, males had to be circumcised, and everybody had to keep kosher. Paul said that Christ had erased these barriers, and there would no longer be any distinctions between Jew and Greek, slave and freeman, male and female. All were equal in Christ--equal by nature.

In Corinthians, Paul is addressing a notoriously unruly congregation, and he tries to bring order to chaos. In the process, he places more emphasis on order than equality. Paul doesn't see this as inconsistent, because he drew a distinction between equality in nature (equality "in Christ") and equality of social roles. Paul was not advocating a social revolution. For example, he didn't try to abolish slavery, but he did urge a slave master, Philemon, to show Christian charity to his runaway slave, Onesimus. Likewise, in Corinthians Paul draws an analogy between the relationship between God the Father to Jesus and that between husband and wife. Father and Son are Equal by nature (Philippians 2:6), but Jesus is subordinate to the Father in His role. Jesus acknowledged that "I do not seek my own will, but the will of Him who sent me"(John 5:30). Paul isn't saying women as a category should be subject to all men as a category. Women were as valuable as men, and men shouldn't feel superior to women.

But shouldn't Paul have attacked slavery and the subordination of women? Why wasn't he more concerned with these injustices? First of all, he generally thought Christians shouldn't seek to reform the unjust Greco-Roman domination system, because he thought the world was about to end and all injustices would be swept away. He told people to stick to the status quo and tough it out. It would all be over soon. He advised single people to remain single if they could, married people should stay married, etc. Slavery and gender inequalities were deeply ingrained in Greco-Roman society , as well as Jewish society and challenging them would only get Christians persecuted. If they could just hang on, he thought, the Kingdom of God would soon arrive and inequality and injustice would be eliminated.

I have a problem with the way Biblical literalists treat these passages as though they were universal truths still applicable to gender relations in our own time. Times have changed after 2,000 years, women are legal equals, slavery has been abolished, and the world hasn't ended. In other words, Paul was wrong about lots of things--but he shouldn't be judged by the standards of a modern society he couldn't have conceived of.

 

There are too many contradictions in religions ;-)

 

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