Okay, that's the way we should think about monarchy culture.
If we had the Edenic idea in our head,
we would sit and look at that picture and cry.
This really isn't where we need to be.
I don't think that the plan of God, and the goal of discipleship;
to be like Jesus, is helped by not telling the truth.
Okay. And usually, people only think of that as a one-sided question.
Usually, it's, you know, somebody whips out Old Testament passages
and beats the "Bible believer" over the head, and says,
"you don't recognize the oppression here, the negative view of women,
and so on and so forth. You're trying to sort of sugarcoat it.
And you're finding ways to interpret these passages to sort of
get the men and Israel off the hook, or the Torah patriarchy
off the hook. You're being dishonest."
Now, you know, I'm sure there's some of that.
I mean, I've encountered some of that, where people who
don't want to sort of go down this trajectory will do that.
They will try to take a passage and make it sort of not say what it actually says.
To soften it.
I don't think that's helpful. I'll leave it there for now.
But that coin has another side to it.
So, I think on the one hand, we need to avoid sugarcoating passages,
you know, to sort of soften them so that they feel better to us,
us as moderns. And we also need to not impose our sensibilities
and our preferences culturally on them,
and pretend that they would think like us.
I think both of those approaches are pretty flawed.
So, I think both sides of this really need to kind of examine
their assumptions, and their strategies for this.
And I'm just going to jump into some slides before we hit the readings,
I think we have a few things that we really need to remember that are basic.
And that is, when Jesus gets asked questions about divorce and remarriage,
and even to some extent, obviously, divorce and marriage and remarriage
has something to do with gender roles, you know,
in the ancient world and the Old Testament.
And other things, he doesn't bother defending Torah on several occasions.
What he does is, he dips into the Torah, okay, The Five Books of Moses,
and he'll appeal to things in Genesis.
And the most famous is the divorce and remarriage question,
he said; «from the beginning it was not so.»
It's an appeal to creation order. It's an appeal to the way God
really wanted things from the beginning.
And I've said before in this class, again, the culture that was
really handed down by God, if there is such a culture,
is the one that was handed down in Eden.
Because everything else is a post-Edenic, ie post-fall situation.
So, if there's an ideal, it's not Torah, per se, it is the original creation,
it's creation order.
And that informs how we treat each other.
It informs both male and female are imagers,
both male and female are steward rulers of Eden, this is their status.
Again, this is the ideal. Everything else we're dealing with is not the ideal.
Even if it's something that we find in Israelite culture, it's still not the ideal.
What is Israelite culture under Moses or, not the judges
because that's just the wild wild west. But Moses
and let's say the united monarchy under David and Solomon.
That's about as good as it gets.
You know, what's the culture there? It's still a waystation on the way
to reversing humanity and human conditions and the human dilemma.
As it is, it's still a waystation, it is an incomplete picture. They have not arrived.
The new Eden is not under Solomon. Okay, the easiest way to demonstrate that,
get that in your head, is read the narrative about Solomon succession.
Okay, there are lots of people who really are unhappy with Solomon
for legitimate reasons.
That is not Eden. It just isn't. But that's like the apex of the Israelite monarchy.
So, it is a dim picture. Think of it this way; just as after the return from exile
by what's left of Judaism's two tribes and then any other stragglers
from other tribes that go back to the land. Just as they rebuild the temple
and then they sit there, and when they see it and cry.
Because it doesn't look anything like Solomon's temple
in all its glory, okay. That's the way we should think about monarchy culture.
If we had the Edenic idea in our head, we would sit and look at that picture and cry.
This really isn't where we need to be.
It's better than being a slave in Babylon or whatever,
you know, at least we're connected to the land again, we have a temple,
you know, it's better. But it's not what God wanted.
And it's not where the story is going to end.
It's not what he intends. This is a waystation.
So, I often find that when people start critiquing Torah culture, Israelite culture,
and start bashing it, they forget these things.
They import their own assumptions about how people would feel.
Okay, so we have a feeling-based hermeneutic. And that's always really helpful.
That'll never change. That's a great method. Okay.
So, we have a feelings-based hermeneutic and then we forget
that these things were dim reflections on the way to what God wanted to restore.
And Jesus reminds people of that.
Okay, he reminds people of that. This is not where the story,
you know, the days of Solomon and Moses,
that's not where the story is supposed to end.
You're still in exile. You're still in exile.
Okay. You need a messiah. This is the whole point.