Applying standards

Rachel Held Evans, an evangelical Christian, had heard how important it was to practice "Biblical womanhood." What does that mean? Everyone she asked had a different answer. So she spent a year trying to follow every commandment of womanhood in the Bible. She kept a blog, which will be a book next year.

Yes, this is the female side of the book A Year of Living Biblically that came out a few years ago.

Her conclusion, expressed on All Things Considered:

"We're all selective in how we interpret and apply the Bible to our lives — even evangelical Christians, whether they like to admit it or not. So what I have found is that any time you think you have found a sort of blueprint or standard for biblical womanhood, a woman in scripture comes along and is praised for breaking it."

And from her FAQ:

One of my goals in taking on a year of biblical womanhood is to encourage Christian women to cut themselves and one another some slack because none of us are practicing biblical womanhood 100%! We’re all selective!
…
Throughout the experiment I've encountered heartbreaking stories from women who have been abused in the name of "submission"...not to mention several troubling passages of Scripture that are difficult for me to swallow as a woman.

I took a look at her blog. As part of it she and her readers have done a series of interviews with people of a variety of faiths -- Catholic, Mennonite, Calvin -- and even an atheist. It appears Evans introduces the person to her readers and allows them to ask questions. That person writes up the answers for a later blog posting.

One of those interviews (just last week!) is with a gay Christian -- he even writes for gaychristian.net. He is Justin Lee. I found him to be thoughtful and thorough with his answers and worth reading more of what he writes.

As part of a longer answer he said this about the Biblical passages that appear to condemn homosexuality:

In the end, I decided that I needed to be consistent in my approach to the Bible: whatever standards I used for deciding this needed to be the same standards I would take to other issues. … The more I studied, the more convinced I became that we Christians had applied a different standard to the homosexuality texts than we had to other Scriptural texts, and that condemning Christ-centered relationships solely based on gender was actually inconsistent with biblical teaching.

Another posting in Evans' blog is the entry Discussing the Bible: Seven Rules of Engagement. Here are a couple of them:

1) I won't question your commitment to the Bible just because you interpret it differently than I do.
2) I won’t use the Bible as a proof-texting weapon of mass destruction