Post, the second. Here, the first.
2
Adventures in Interpretation
When I was in my late twenties and early thirties, I wondered if I would have had so many faith struggles if I had been born into a more mainstream Christian setting. Because my background was so pre-modern, we just didn't know how to read the Bible in context. So many interpretations seemed to evaporate with just a little bit of contextual light. This especially began to happen when I was learning inductive Bible study at Asbury Seminary.
For a while in seminary, I would get into arguments with my mother when I would come home on break (she insisted they were just discussions). At some point, I recognized it was unhealthy for me to argue with her. She would never change her mind, and I frankly didn't really want her to. I'm an F on the Myers-Briggs when it comes to people ("feeler"), a T when it comes to my own thoughts ("thinker"). That means I'm more interested in people being happy than being right. In my opinion, my mother used her mind to fit the evidence into her existing paradigms. But by mid-seminary, I had shifted to the goal of coming to the most likely conclusion given the evidence.
At one point, she thought me rebellious because she would feed me fundamentalist literature, but I would ultimately end up with the opposite conclusions. But I didn't experience myself as rebellious. Indeed, I loved my heritage and at least initially tried to fit my learning within those same frameworks. However, over time, many positions just unraveled in my mind -- often quite painfully.
Standards
By the time I was born, Wesleyans in general were on a trajectory away from worrying so much about jewelry and how you dressed. But my family was still very connected to the older holiness "standards." In particular, many in my father's extended family still followed those rules extensively.
Predictably, most of the rules related to women. Women should not wear make-up or jewelry (cf. 1 Tim. 2:9-10; 1 Peter 3:3-4). So no earrings or finger rings. They should not wear pants or slacks -- only dresses and skirts (Deut. 22:5). They should not cut their hair but, preferably, wear it up in a bun as a covering (1 Cor. 11:5-6, 11-12).
But men should also be clean-shaven (Lev. 19:27). They should have short hair (1 Cor. 11:14). They shouldn't wear shorts -- hard to find a verse here other than not causing other people to lust after you. Some holiness men didn't even wear short sleeves so as not to tempt others with their sexy elbows. I once heard Exodus 28:42 quoted in regards to shorts. It's a bit funny since the verse is actually telling priests to wear something like shorts under their robes.
I should note that my mother and father were not particularly legalistic about such things. They tried to be respectful of my father's family. Keeping the peace was more the priority. On the Myers-Briggs, we were a "feeling" family. Some of my dad's family were "thinkers," meaning that if they thought something was right, they insisted that everyone else agree with them and follow their rules. This made for some tense moments from time to time.
For example, in 1968, my father decided to follow the merger of the Pilgrim Holiness Church into the Wesleyan Church. Some of his relatives thought this was wrong and strongly tried to persuade him to pull out with them. He didn't. One brother-in-law told him he would pray for his soul.
Sabbath
We had significant rules for keeping the Sabbath, the fourth of the Ten Commandments. As Exodus 20:8-11 says, there was to be no work done on the Sabbath. Over the years, my father would occasionally have opportunities to work overtime for GMAC on weekends -- for example, to assess hurricane damage on vehicles. But he would not work on Sunday.
This extended beyond us working to eating out where you were facilitating someone else working on Sunday. Following Nehemiah 10:31 and 13:15-22, we did not buy or sell on the Sabbath. My father extended this rule to watching television on Sunday. He feared he would spend all day watching football if he let himself watch TV on Sunday. So Sunday was a television free day in my house -- much to my disappointment when Star Wars and other movies debuted on TV.
You see, we didn't go to movies either. Movies were associated with loose morals, especially when it came to relationships. People had affairs in movies. And the actors themselves were seen as being people of loose morals -- frequently divorced. My dad's family didn't even believe in having a TV, let alone watching one. For years, my dad suspected that his parents wouldn't visit our home because they thought he had a TV -- even though he didn't at that time.
There's a fun story about a family rule about violence on the television. Although my dad was in WW2, his mother originated in the Old German Baptist community, which was pacifist. So while my family was not pacifist, there was a strong aversion to violence. So, my older sisters were not supposed to watch television shows that had shooting in them.
To get around the rule, they would turn the volume down if it looked like someone was going to fire a gun. On one occasion, they were not quite fast enough. My sister Patricia shot down the hall to get to my father first. "It was in self-defense!!" she exclaimed.
You've probably picked up that Sunday was understood as the Sabbath, and all the Sabbath rules of the Old Testament were transferred to Sunday. I heard that one of the Bible teachers at Frankfort had a very clever Greek argument for this transfer of days based on the idiom, "first of sabbaths" for Sunday. Noting this expression in Luke 24:1 and John 20:1, the teacher suggested that, after the resurrection, Sunday had become the new Sabbath. Ingenious!
Sunday was thus to be set apart as holy. As a child, that equated to being the most boring day of the week. I supposed I would have taken it over going to school, but as an attention deficit boy, it was a bit painful to go to church twice and Sunday School on Sunday. That meant sitting still and listening to whoever was talking (more often, not listening). During revival, we went to church every night during the week too.
Then in the afternoons you did quiet type things, probably took a nap. We didn't play catch or play with friends really. I was once kicked off a playground on Sunday at Hobe Sound because Sunday is a serious day.
The best part of the day was after church Sunday night, when we often cooked hamburgers and started to transition back to normal time. Sunday lunch was often a highlight too -- the best food of the week. When my brother-in-law and then my sister was pastor of the Fort Lauderdale church, there was usually a family meal with them doing the cooking. (My Depression-raised mother was not a particularly good cook.)
Dancing, Gambling, Drinking
We did not believe in dancing. Square dancing might be ok. Later, if it was choreographed, that might be ok. I went to a Sweet 16 party for Geni Clements in high school. She tried to get me to dance with her, but I just stood there, following the rules. I would have really liked to dance with her. I wasn't sure why we had that rule. But I dutifully resisted.
We did not gamble. In fact, playing with face cards itself had the "appearance of evil" (1 Thess. 5:22, KJV). It's actually a misinterpretation of the verse, but you weren't supposed to do anything that even looked like you might be doing bad things. No candy cigarettes, for example. So we could use Uno cards but no real cards. My dad's family even used a spinner to play Monopoly instead of dice.
Drinking was of course totally out. You could have NyQuil in later years. Definitely only grape juice for communion. Smoking was forbidden as well.
to be continued...
No comments:
Post a Comment