Perhaps it’s best to explain my sigh :).

I see no benefit in these sort of pulling down posts and negative labelling. It doesn’t help anything other to make people feel good about their own position.

I disagree with Ali.

I found the linked post both helpful and enlightening. My formation (in the French sense) has been strongly influenced by both secular feminists and conservative open Brethren Christians, as well as more ‘middle of the road’ evangelicals. The gender roles strictly adhered to amongst my Brethren connections seem to frequently lead to a treatment of women that seems foreign to my understanding of God. They seem to me to be based on readings of individual verses but are contrary to the Bible as a whole.

However I am nervous of my own ‘Bible as a whole’ argument. The Bible is a great big book, and it’s a big claim to make: that I have a handle on it’s overall message against which I can correctly judge various interpretations of particular passages. How can I be sure that I’m not just channeling the secular feminists who also had such a big role in my development? I don’t want to have to be a doormat, but I want to defy God even less.

So I found the post to which you refer most refreshing. I didn’t initially realise it was a spoof (many people have labelled me naive over the years and I came to it from a link that gave no more commentary than ‘this looks interesting’). I was surprised and intrigued to ‘realise’ that there was a Christian community somewhere who had such doctrines – who had constructed from the Bible essentially the opposite argument from the one I was familiar with. Some of their points were obviously ridiculous, but you get that with the standard submission arguments, too, and plenty of them seemed easily as strong.

So now, even though I now know there is no such community, the post gives me a bit more confidence in refuting what people say the Bible says about women. If you can make the Bible say the exact opposite just as easily, then it seems likely that these ideas come from our fallenness rather than from God. Looks like ‘Bible as a whole’ arguments, flawed though they may be, might be necessary, along with careful reading of context etc. (I’m working my way through that ‘Journey into God’s word’ book you reccommended at the moment).