Thread by @MAGuyton

I don’t need to come up with a speculative explanation for why the apostle Paul wrote in some places that women need to be quiet. Inerrancy be damned. The fruit is plain: silencing women has been a disaster for the church. I don’t care what Paul says in those passages or why.

The reason I don’t need to do exegetical acrobatics with Paul’s words is that I read Paul the way he tells me to read him and I’m emulating his playful, creative engagement with his theological tradition. Paul is an irreverent poet, not a high-strung lawyer like John Calvin.

I actually believe what Paul says about God, that he has “imprisoned all to disobedience so that he might have mercy on all” (Romans 11:32). In other words, God sabotages our attempts to feel “obedient” and give ourselves authority in order to crush us with his mercy.

An authoritarian, legalistic reading of Paul is about as profound a slap in the face you could possibly give him. He screams WHO BEWITCHED YOU at the evangelicals who betray him like those confused Galatians who thought they needed to prove their loyalty through circumcision.

Evangelicals believe that orthodox doctrine is the ideological circumcision God requires; Paul says that the true circumcision of the heart is the cross on which we are crucified with Christ and then resurrected to become the wine of God’s mercy.

Being correct in order to have authority is the deepest form of homo curvatus in se that a Christian can fall into. In that much, Augustine is right. Anyone trapped in the curvatus state of authoritarianism cannot experience the belonging of God’s love that is heaven.

I don’t read the Bible for authority; I read the Bible for wisdom. There’s a big difference. Authoritarian biblical interpretation looks for legalistic prescriptions in order to manage a relationship with a distant, punitive God who is never trusted enough to risk being wrong.

If you need to be right about God to be okay with God, then you don’t trust God. That’s why “knowledge of good and evil” is paradoxically a curse. People who seek knowledge about God instead of intimacy with God will never allow themselves to fall into the safety of God’s arms.

Reading the Bible for wisdom means marinating in the metaphorical, archetypal interplay of the text in its canonical dance so that the Spirit can sow scripture into your thoughts when something in your daily spiritual path stirs up one of the archetypes.

The point is to make poetry with God. The theopneustos doesn’t stop with the biblical text. Why would the wind that blows where it chooses not want to breathe God into everything it touches? Why would the light that illuminates all creation stay inside the cover of a book?

“Biblical manhood” and “Biblical womanhood” are toxic nonsense for the same reason that the “knowledge of good and evil” the serpent offered Eve is toxic nonsense. Because authoritarian “knowledge” is a bastardization of wisdom.

What is the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil? In our age, it’s toxic patriarchal religious communities where men who torture themselves with sexual puritanism create a living hell in which women and children are abused in the shadows.

In other words, Genesis 3 is playing itself out RIGHT NOW. The serpent keeps on tweeting his knowledge of good and evil (who’s orthodox, who’s a heretic, etc) and he goes viral, creating a discourse that all the Christian influencers collectively masturbate to.

And yes, if Paul were writing today, he would call much of today’s discourse what it is: theological masturbation. And he would tell today’s authoritarian theobros to do what he told the authoritarian circumcision bros of his day: go castrate yourselves (Gal 5:12).

So that’s what I say too. If you cannot survive a Christianity that isn’t authoritarian patriarchal sexual puritanism, then make yourself a eunuch. Cut out your eyeballs if bikinis are too much torture.

The good news is this. Despite the way that the prince of this world has held the church hostage through its sinful idolatry of patriarchal authority, he is falling like lightning from the Tower of Babel as the fruit of Luciferian Christianity is exposed.

God will make a mockery of authoritarian Christianity the same way he always makes a spectacle of religious authority: through Jesus’ ongoing crucifixion by the church. He comes to his own and his own do not accept him. They have cast their own cornerstone into Gehenna.

But God has chosen the foolish to shame the wise, the weak to shame the strong, and those who are despised and nothing to bring to nothing the things that are. Not one stone will stand on top of another when he’s done. No authority will remain. There will only be mercy.

Just tagging some people who influence my thinking whom I’d love to engage with this thread: @dianabutlerbass @abbynormansays @RevDaniel @KSPrior @aliciatcrosby @masonmennenga @MelissaFloBix @TheAlanNoble @JasonMicheli @sometimesalight @jorymicah