soft shroud’s folding

oh hell yeah

can we please get a statement from the PB, or the HoB, or the PHoD, or executive council, or *somebody* saying that to blow up people clinging to a chunk of boat debris in the water with a big missile is to provoke the holy wrath of the living God??

it is really genuinely possible that such statements have been made and I haven't seen them but like, this is the lowest hanging fruit imaginable

sorry can anybody tell me if there have been official statements from the episcopal church or any of its substantial subsidiaries on how the us government has been bragging about using the us military to extrajudicially murder people in international waters? for months?

perhaps one need not, but I am myself not only willing but happy to go several of the steps he fearmongers about!

and so then it becomes something that you just have to... I mean, we have to try to understand as best we can. what did it mean then, what does it mean now, why did he say it, what can it teach me? wrestling wrestling wrestling, not to defeat but to get a blessing by some means

it's harder this way. but I really think it's not avoidable, this work, unless one is going to try to LARP the first century greco-roman world in a more thoroughgoing way than any of us are likely to manage. we *have* to do some amount of sifting and sorting. the Q is where the line falls

I think for me this really is part of what it means to work out salvation with fear and trembling, part of what it means for the Spirit to lead us into all truth, part of why we were given stories, poems, laws, parables, letters, visions, etc and not just lists of facts and lists of rules

it's really hard to figure out how to square 1 Cor 11 with Galatians 3; it feels like you have to make one or the other functionally dead-letter. I don't know.

yes. for me, a bedrock principle is that I cannot hold to any way of interpreting the scripture that doesn't have a way to account for the legitimacy and necessity of the 19th century reinterpretation of scriptural language about slaves and slavery, a way to see the Spirit in abolitionism

I believe the Old and New Testaments are the Word of God, and that they contain all things necessary to salvation. For real. Not like, as a metaphor or with my fingers crossed. I think the scriptures are *the* norming norm, are what makes theology Christian, or not. *But I can't not interpret.*

this was a huge problem for me as an elementary schooler. it was the inerrancy equivalent of "can God create a rock so big he can't lift it"

what could it possibly mean for a verse of scripture to say "what I just wrote just now was my private opinion not a Word from God"??? etc

but all I can do is try to interpret with integrity and a genuine willingness to hear a Word that challenges me rather than merely agreeing with what I already want to find in it

because I *do* want to interpret in keeping with a high theology of scriptural authority. and I *don't* want to say "ah, those silly olden-times people with their silly superstitions! we know all now, because Science!" I think this is real fear-and-trembling territory

and I can already feel myself walking out onto ice that's thinner than I'm comfortable with, here!

so if a case-study conclusion he derives from a Spirit-given moral truth is based on his best understanding of the facts, I do feel like my task is to say "how can I apply that principle in light of what we now know"

But I don't think Paul had generally infallible knowledge of facts of reality by virtue of his Spirit-inspiration. About science and nature, history, etc

But much of it reads particular. I expect that what he condemns in his letters, I too would condemn, given the context.

in general I am also very invested in reading the letters as Spirit-inspired *letters to specific congregations* with specific problems and needs. when he speaks about Christ, about God's love and God's plan for the redemption of the cosmos, all of that reads universal to me.

that is; when he talks about "modesty," his specific examples are probably spot on examples for the people he is writing to, but not meant as eternally-true determinations for what is and isn't modest in every time and place

that's possible! I tend to think of it like... I think that Paul is inspired by the Spirit in a broad sense, but not in an individual word-choice sense. but I would say I am more likely to identify the inspiration with the animating moral logics he's offering, and not the individual case studies

I don't think that's... that is, I think this way of reading scripture is compatible with a high view of scriptural authority. I don't intend for it to be otherwise. I'm trying to understand what's going on there, and how God's will and fallible humanity interact in the events reported

even if the text itself, for very good reasons, does not present it in terms that depend on conceptual developments that hadn't occurred yet

in the same way that I need to know the language and something of the culture to interpret any parable of Christ, I think knowing how a particular culture thought about division of labor and sex roles is important - but there's not a single timeless natural through-line to find in scripture, imo

I would not say that scripture addresses the question of whether some or all of the gender roles it depicts are conventional - but they aren't internally consistent, and things Paul says ("nature shows us men shouldn't have long hair") are... not how masculinity and femininity work universally

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and I want to answer, earnestly! just need to clarify what you're wanting

do you mean "where does scripture say/suggest they are conventional" or "where does their conventional nature manifest itself in scripture" or

group of old timey scientists: silly scholastics and their "powers" group of scholastics: well, what makes things work, then? isaac newton, looking consternated: "forces"

it's literally so ridiculous that I don't even know what to say about it