The Bible and context

A well-known rule for the reading the Bible is that we have to read it "contextually." What we mean by that can be easily illustrated by the example of the position of the earth in the cosmos. Five hundred years ago everyone thought that the sun revolved around the earth (the geocentric cosmology). That was the way people read the Bible, too: the earth is fixed, built on an unmovable foundation, and on the earth rests the firmament of the heavens, above which the heaven of heavens is located, the place where God's throne is to be found. The sun, the moon, and the stars revolve in their orbits around the earth, as God has decreed.

Thanks to people like Copernicus, we now know that because the earth is revolving around its axis, it looks like the sun, the planets, and the stars are revolving around the earth, but that in reality the earth, just like all the other planets, revolves around the sun. Not the earth, but the sun is at the center of our solar system (the heliocentric cosmology). For the church this discovery meant a culture shock.

However, doing justice to the Biblical text means to take into account, emphatically, that God revealed His Word first to Israel, thus in language and terms from the Near East, and in relation to images which were understandable at that time.

It is in relation to these images that God speaks in a liberating way: contextually. That it to say, He both adjusts to, as well as opposes, current views. He transforms and transcends them, and makes it in this

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way possible to understand, from very diverse backgrounds, His revelation, and to serve Him. In this way His Word has full expressive power in our own lives today.

What does this mean regarding man-woman relations in the Old and New Testament? We must realize that the LORD in Genesis 1-3 tells about the first human couple and about the creation of the world and humanity. The foundational lines which are drawn there, at the beginning the history of the world and salvation history, are of great importance. At the same time we must realize, as we read, that God revealed this first of all to the Israel of that day. Genesis 1-3 cannot be lifted out of its context. These chapters have to be read, first of all, literarily, canonically, and also culturally, in connection with the stories about the marriages of the patriarchs and the legislation about marriage and sexuality in Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy.

"The factual answer to the question about the authority of the Bible regarding these kind of issues (the abolition of slavery, another view of poverty as social injustice, the view of the place of the woman in society and church, the view of marriage, fertility, relations, of physical and mental limitations, of ecology) is seen to be given in a continual interaction between culture, context, and the Bible."⁷⁸ This starting point leads to a striking perspective on man-woman relations.

First of all: the Biblical texts do not, in the first place, think at all in terms of the individual (the man) over against the other (the woman). Both are, together, created in God's image, but are representatives as "the human being," and "the living one," again and again of a greater whole, humanity. That is to be seen from how both are called, but also by the way in which Genesis 5 and 1 Chronicles 1 portray the beginning of humanity.

Whoever reads this in the context of the patriarch stories and the legislation of the Pentateuch discovers that no individual in Israel can be seen separately from his or her family, and from the

"father," the person who is head of the family.

Whoever, in reading, weighs the meaning of this context, sees how the cultural environment of the text resounds in it. In the unsafe society of the ancient world, it is scarcely possible for the individual to survive without being imbedded in greater whole. Certainly the relatively weak, such as women and children, need the physical and economic protection of the men and of a greater whole. The "house of the father" (and, infrequently, "of the mother," Genesis 24:28) offers that protection, and, self-evidently, there a man is at the head. In this way, Adam was head of the first family.

In this cultural context the secondary position of the woman in the Bible is truly something self-evident, a presupposition. And that's why it is so that this self-evidently secondary position of the woman is assumed in all kinds of passages.

In our time and culture, we live in a society in which the government and the legal system function so robustly that, on that basis, safety can be guaranteed. We no longer have "extended families," not to mention a "pater familias," who with regard to the safety and well-being of all involved has the right to decide, for example, about marriages and other relationships.

We think in the first place from the standpoint of the individual human being, who has been created in God's image. Man and woman form now a primary social unit. Their living together is an individual decision, with or without it being made explicit to and supported by a broader social and church setting. Women occupy social positions at all levels. Christians have, legitimately, no objection to this.

78 Van den Brink, G., van der Kooij, C., Christelijke dogmatiek, Zoetermeer: 2012.

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To get a good idea of this subject, we proceed, in the following pages, to describe a number of differences, determined by time and culture, regarding the relations between men and women.

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II. The difference between the Biblical and the contemporary age