Into the Wardrobe

The Church Fathers were the first people to have to sift through the conflicting words of Paul in order to figure out what Paul meant. For example, we have I Cor 12:34 "let the women keep silence in the churches" and Rom 16:1 "I reccommend to you Phoebe our sister, being a deacon in the church in Cenchrea." "Deacon" is translated "servant" in KJV, but this is the same office that is called "deacon" in the later church. How is she supposed to have done her job if she could not speak? These things are difficult and important, and though I do not agree with everything the church fathers say, I appreciate the difficulty of their position. There was no dogma. They had to figure it out. Who can be a servant of the church is still a big mess and this is one of many such problems that the early church was dealing with.

A big one was whether the God in the Old Testament was the same as the Father in the New Testament.

^ I really agree with you here, Girlfreddy. It's very easy, for example, for us to gasp in shock a supposedly sexist comment in biblical writings/commentary, e.g. women being told to cover their hair in church. It is very, very dangerous to superimpose our social structures, ethics, and 'standards' onto the past - we run the risk of them appearing 'more primitive' and us 'more advanced', and so we look at what they say with an attitude tinged with subconscious superiority.

In addition to the necessity to understand, as far as we can, cultural constructs, I think we also should apply exegetical constructs to biblical writings, to try and decode their timeless/eternal meaning.

For instance, it is dangerous also to dismiss comments we find a bit upsetting as mere cultural quirks. In that light we see 'women should cover their hair' as 'oh, well, we wouldn't force that upon our women, but I understand the cultural differences, and in that period, to be seen with unbound hair was not a very good thing for the woman'. It's good to have that cultural context, but you can also glean deeper/exegetical meaning from it - leaving our pre-conceived ideas of oppression-of-women at the door Perhaps asking the woman 'to cover her hair' emphasises the reverence the woman (and all of us) should have in the Mass/ service, and, for a woman, to be careful not to show things that could be perceived as a subtly sexual signal (whether she intends to or not) - in St. Paul's time, unbound/loosed hair was seen as a sexual signal. Now, for example, a top with a very low cleavage could be pretty distracting for another participant at the Mass/service. Going deeper, you could see St. Paul's comments on women as something relating to ideas of chastity, humility, and the appropriateness of where the sexual body is to be seen (for St. Paul, in the conjugal bed), and not seen (in the temple). You could go deeper into exegetical semantics, of course. In short, if we consider it both a) in its cultural context and b) in its spiritual context, the church fathers are really saying something that makes quite a lot of sense.