reading: Everything Must Change

I'm still reading "Everything Must Change," by Brian McLaren. I just got through a great chapter, though. The book touches on the global crises in the world today, and how we as a human race (Christians needing to be the catalysts) should respond. To understand that, he goes back and examines the crises back in the time of Jesus, and how Jesus reacted to them and ultimately changed humanity.

In this particular chapter, he describes the Roman Empire of the day, and how it was supposed to provide this "prosperous life" for everyone, but in fact only provided that for an elite few... and how everyone had "freedom of speech, religion, and thought" - as long as your speech, religion and thought agreed with the imperial policy. The chapter ends with:

"...if their religion came into conflict with the patriotic ethos of the empire - perhaps by doubting the supreme, divine authority given to the emperor - they'd better keep quiet about it, or they may experience the dark side of the empire: the cross." (read: crucifiction) "How ironic that the cross - the icon of the dominating Roman framing story - became the icon for the liberating framing story of Jesus..."

Another part of the chapter that stood out to me was how women were treated in the empire. "A woman's primary job was to bear as many sons as possible to be soldiers to protect the empire." There were high death rates in childbirth, as well. "The average girl in the Roman Empire had to marry by the age of fourteen and begin bearing children immediately. Simply to maintain the population, the empire depended on her to raise five children to adulthood, on average."

In the footnotes, he adds to the discussion. "This reproductive pressure helps explain the great appeal of celibacy in the early Christian movement. Celibacy wasn't simply a privation; instead, it represented liberation from an oppressive Roman system that valued a woman for her ovaries and little more. In contrast, a celibate woman in the Christian community was valued for her virtue, her piety, even her mind and work."

This reminds me: I used to think of the Old Testament laws as sort of an 'instruction manual'; that they were written in the beginning, like guidelines made for humans before they even existed.

But over time I have seen that this isn't correct; that these laws were written by people, and were borne out of the time and culture that these people lived in; they were responses and reactions to policies/lifestyles/philosophies/etc. that they knew weren't consistent with God's idea of life. With guidance from their creator, they formed these laws in order to try and become a people living the life God created them to live... not to oppress themselves, but to liberate themselves.