Sexual differences and biblical roles

@Christy @Reggie_O_Donoghue; thought you and @Jay313 would enjoy this.

Complementarian Man Authoritatively Delegates All Decision Making To Wife | Babylon Bee

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Indeed, there is more than a little truth to that, where men can feel like they are good complementarians and still be slackers. It is especially true in many churches.

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Ouch, that hurts (not because I am one --though who knows–but because it can show some hypocrisy that we males can fit into. Al Mohler would, I think, be the first to point that out (though he and I don’t agree about everything, particularly with regard to this and to science).

A little truth to it? It reminds me of my grandmother and her Pentecostal church in the Panhandle of Texas. She certainly agreed, theologically, with “male headship,” but she was so domineering that she ran off every pastor they hired. By the end of her life, she was the de facto minister of her tiny congregation, regardless of the theology.

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You have a very good point. That is the case in more than one religion–I’ve seen it to a certain degree in Islam too.
Anne of Green Gables said that when one courts his future wife, he has to agree with the father in politics, and the mother in religion. Religion is quieter but much more dominant in how the family actually lives its life, I think.

Women are objectively more clever than men. We simply use force to get our way; they had to come up with more clever methods.

well, that’s sometimes the case with my kids, but I’m not sure I want to go to that extent entirely. :slight_smile:
I’ve known the roles to be reversed too!

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You are my favorite person on the forum today for quoting Anne of Green Gables.

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Since there is NO scientific evidence (that I am aware of) that humankind ever enjoyed a state of perfection in a place called Eden, I personally believe that any theological construction based on a Fall into sin is bound to be shaky when viewed using the knowledge we possess today. IMO it makes more sense to believe that evolution produced some animals that occasionally displayed qualities like love and empathy that pleased God. He then wanted a creature who would freely accept the sacrifice of making these qualities an integral part of its nature, even tho it sometimes conflicted with the selfish nature of the evolutionary process that produced them from “the slime of the earth”.

God saw that Homo sapiens, with its large, exapted brain, had this potential, and, (in a way we still do not fully understand), ‘programmed’ this neural network to operate as a Mind with a Conscience. He communicated his desire, for creatures that could act as Image Bearers, to a number of Homo sapiens, but most clearly to the ancient Hebrews. Then those who chose NOT to accept this invitation, this Gift, would be seen as Sinful, but not Fallen, in a strict sense.

Accepting this view as promoting a theology that is less shaky but still Christian requires a more liberal interpretation of Genesis than most evangelicals are likely to accept. I, for one, hope that it still deserves their respect.
Al Leo

Is this so?

You’ve lost me. Is what so?

Oh, my wife and I read together every night and just got done with the entire series for the 2nd or 3rd time (the only runner up to that has been Harry Potter)! My sisters used to quote to each other from the movie–“Bye, Anne!” “Bye, Gil!” That one is even more edifying than the Princess Bride, though not quite as funny.

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I knew my husband loved me for sure when he watched all eight hours of the PBS Anne of Green Gables and Anne of Avonlea movies alone over spring break “to understand me better” and then suggested we go to Prince Edward Island on our honeymoon because it seemed so idyllic. (Which we did, and it was.) End of Anne of Green Gables tangent. :blush:

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I have been told that the Greek term for “submit” used in Ephesians 5:22 is better translated as “respond”, and this is from some very conservative Bible scholars (former head of the Dallas Theological Seminary).

The model put forward for us is that of the relationship between Christ and the Church, which I feel is a good model (no selfishness, power, only love, sacrifice and service)

I feel this was handled poorly on a recent episode of Living Biblically. TV and movies are a very poor source of Biblical information.

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I remember we bought one of those books on tapes of Anne of Green Gables some 30 years ago (along with some others) to listen to on a month long tour of the national parks that the wife and I took with my stepson. We all loved hearing it so much that we bought other of the books in the series along the way which my wife also read aloud to us as I drove and on rainy days in the tent.

She taught lower elementary school for a couple years before moving on to teach art at a private college for 40 years, and boy can she ever make a read aloud fun. But her real forte is performing “Gulp, Gulp went the little Green Frog” accompanied by hand puppet. She was interested in acting before she got interested in weaving, but got tired of being cast as ‘the matron’.

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Well, it’s not really so bad a tangent, really…my wife and I were discussing how gender roles changed since the Anne books. Anne was really quite the master of the house in many ways when she and Gil married, but they did discuss how the aunties and chaperones they had had as single ladies, living in one house and attending college, acted. She was a bit of a rebel in a way, because she got her BA–something one didn’t do as a woman then. In a time when we now stereotype roles as “The Handmaiden’s Tale,” reading a book like that makes one realize that that’s not the entire, or real, story. Thanks.

Also Tom, I understand in the original text, submit is actually not in verse 22, but is only in verse. 21 where we are told to submit to one another, then verse 22 goes on to say something like “wives do likewise to your husbands.” Our translators and editors elected to put a break there, and most often verse 21 is ignored. Perhaps our more scholarly friends here can elaborate.

Women are more intelligent than men

Just my lame attempt at wit. It sounds plausible, though, so I’m surprised no one tried to find an academic paper to “prove” the assertion.

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Here’s an interesting breakdown of how our (apparently equal) intelligence expresses itself differently from gender to gender:

@Reggie_O_Donoghue