To the woman he said, "I will greatly increase your pains in childbearing; with pain you will give birth to children. Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you." To Adam he said, "Because you listened to your wife and ate from the tree about which I commanded you, 'You must not eat of it,' "Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your brow you
will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return."If the man should rule over the woman as Grudem and Piper and probably Jensen would exhort then why don't they equally prohibit men from using weedkiller in their gardens and women from using pain relief in childbirth?
Has anybody ever thought the same thing?
It could be I'm just in a theological tangle but I don't worry about asking questions. I reason that with 6 billion people on the planet someone somewhere must have had this thought too. Have you?
3 comments:
Yep. I've actually wondered this for the last few years. it's all part of the same curse! But for some reason they're quite happy to see one part of it as a description of the sorry state of affairs we need to change, and the other part as "God's Divine Order" (sigh)
Rachel, just browsing through your blog and came across this post. Could I commend to you Susan Foh's paper "What Is the Woman's Desire?" WTJ 37, (1975) 374-383. You should be able to find it in the St John's library. I had, oddly enough, reached ,uch the same conclusion as her before I came across her paper.
It may answer at least part of your question here though, as it happens, I read somewhere that in the early days of anaesthesia there were doctors who opposed giving it to women in childbirth on exactly these grounds.
On the topic of weeds, what is the difference between giving them weedkiller and just pulling them up? If you can't use one, surely you shouldn't do the other? ;-)
Thank you John - I'll certainly look it up because I'm very curious now as to what it might say. You're very careful not to give away your thoughts on this issue, but perhaps I'll be able to work them out once I've read the thesis.
Sorry to hear about the difficulties your wife is having with the CRB situation - one of the worst feelings can be to be so out of control and helpless in the face of these powers who won't give you access to information. My thoughts are with you both, during what must be a very frustrating time.
Thanks for your post
God bless
Rachel
Also, frighteningly, I'm beginning to realise that I would tick a lot of the boxes on any complementarians check list. I had two children naturally with no pain relief - does a wee bit of gas and air count? I gave up my career to look after both of my babies until they went to school and I haven't thrown myself on the C of E, as anything quite so daring as a female ordinand! (yet!) but I am paying my own way through theological college, attending when the children are at school. Yiex! What I do add though is that all of these things I did out of choice not because any man told me to. (I also quite enjoy making the occasional sponge cake!!!)
Post a Comment