Carol Alvin (caralv@caralv.auto-trol.com) wrote:  > In the New Testament (sorry I don't have a Bible at work, and can't > provide a reference), women are instructed to be silent and cover > their heads in church.  Now, this is scripture.  By your definition,  > this is truth and therefore absolute.   > >Do women in your church speak?  Do they cover their heads?  If all  >scripture is absolute truth, it seems to me that women speaking in and  >coming to church with bare heads should be intolerable to evangelicals.   >Yet, clearly, women do speak in evangelical churches and come with bare  >heads.  (At least this was the case in the evangelical churches I grew  >up in.) > >Evangelicals are clearly not taking this particular part of scripture  >to be absolute truth.  (And there are plenty of other examples.) >Can you reconcile this?  The problem you see here is that some Christians claim things about the Bible which they don't actually believe or practice. I've known all sorts of Christians, ranging from the trendiest of liberals to the fire-breathing fundamentalists, and although many on the  conservative side of the Christian faith do claim that the Bible is a (perhaps *the*) source of absolute truth, I don't know of anyone who treats it as anything other than a valuable part of a living tradition. While I am not a Roman Catholic, I believe this is close to the official position of the RC church (perhaps an RC would like to comment).  The particular practice you refer to will usually be explained in terms of the social context of the time. You would think the fact  that the conservatives seem to have to break out the tophat-and-cane  and give you some big song-and-dance routine about why this  (other passages as well) aren't directly applicable today would  show them that what they claim about the Bible and what they  actually practice are two different things, but mostly it doens't.  While this thread is supposed to be about the arrogance of Christians, I would suggest that some of the problem is really hypocrasy, in this case, making claims about the Bible which the claimants don't actually put into practice. But if we step back from the name-calling and look at what people are attempting to say, we see that they are trying to express very concisely the unique place the Bible holds within the Christian faith. So when people use such words or phrases as "Word of God", "inerrant", "infallibale", "The Manufacturer's Handbook", "The only rule of faith and practice in the church today" to describe the Bible, we should try to hear what they are saying and not just look at the mere words they use. Some of the above descriptions are demostratably false and others are self-contradictory, but in my experience people are generally pretty good at picking out the intention of the speaker even when the speaker's words are at variance with their intentions. A Biblical example is from the garden of Eden where God asks "Where are you?" and Adam explains that he was naked and afraid and hid himself. If Adam had answered God's words he would have said something like "I'm here in this tree." The problem seems to arise when Christians insist that these words are indeed accurate reflections of their beleif. Most people have not made a determined effort to work out their own understanding of the place of the Bible within their own faith and so rely on the phrases and explanations that others use.  I hope this helps. --                                                                      ___ Bill Rea                                                            (o o) -------------------------------------------------------------------w--U--w--- | Bill Rea, Computer Services Centre, | E-Mail   b.rea@csc.canterbury.ac.nz | | University of Canterbury,           | or     cctr114@csc.canterbury.ac.nz | | Christchurch, New Zealand           | Phone (03)-642-331 Fax (03)-642-999 |