So this isn’t just to say the easy “hey the context was different, so *shrug*” thing that a lot of people do, but if Christians would actually read the new testament, particularly the epistles but also a lot of what Jesus said, as one part of an ongoing conversation about just what it is that the fledgling movement meant — and particularly what it meant in the context of imperial domination — instead of assuming that the authors were creating ex nihilo prescriptions for the ideal christian life, then so much shit would be much easier to resolve and would make a hell of a lot more sense
like, let’s take Paul’s instructions on family structure in Ephesians. The context in which they all lived was no stranger to men’s domination of women, or husbands’ authority over wives. So it would literally make zero sense for Paul to be using Christian language to craft a “husband is the head of the wife, wives are to obey their husbands” model as if his audience were unacquainted with such a model. It would be nothing new. If the Christian narrative involved domination, Paul would not have needed to write anything about marriage, they would have just accepted the marriage practices around them. So when we see things like “the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the Church,” we should instead read “husband is the head of the wife” as something that was causing problems for early Christians, something that needed to be illuminated. And from there we should not just assume that we know what “husband is the head of the wife” means independently of “just as Christ is the head of the Church.” A redefinition, not merely a definition, is happening here.
And so if we read it as being in response to the church at Ephesus trying to work out how people in a radically leveling movement should engage with inextricably hierarchical social arrangements, we come away with a reading of Paul in which he is instructing them to be “in the world but not of the world,” where he’s saying that yes, we live under social structures, but Christians are to reject the hierarchy entailed in them. In a context where a husband’s headship over his wife was absolute, Paul was saying “but you’re not at liberty to exercise any headship that is not of the most self-sacrificing and christ-like kind.” In a context where a wife’s obedience to her husband was to be complete and unquestioning, Paul was saying “obey your husband as we obeyed Jesus’s message, a message in which obedience was the accepting of life and rejection of the prescriptions and proscriptions that had grounded rejection of others from society.”
It’s hard for modern Christians to not read these sections burdened with the legacy of 2000 years of moralizing and 1700 years of a Christianity married to the state. But if we do intentionally reject those lenses, even the parts of the bible that have been used as justification for domination can be seen to have been written as radical critiques of a culture of domination
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