1 Corinthians 11:9: Woman Made for Man, NOT Man for Woman?

[OriginalGabrielof12]

In the time of Paul who practiced celibacy and a Lawyer (Pharisee) of the Mosaic law, begins the revelations of how and why God, from the beginning created man and woman. The Jews during Paul’s life time viewed woman as property to be owned. Paul Teaches on the revelations of Jesus Christ in contradiction to these Jewish practiced traditions on divorce, marriage and relations between a man and a woman.
Paul begins the path of raising the status of woman (from the status quo) and a return for why “Woman was made for Man, Not Man for Woman”.

On the subject and order of worship follows; God is the head of Christ, Christ is the head of Man, Man is the head of Woman. Man is the image and glory of God, Woman is the glory of Man. Paul teaches on these subjects as they all relate to the things " IN THE LORD" ( If? one mistakes Pauls teachings of Man and Woman and relates them in a secular sense, this one misses divine revelation).

In the Lord, “the Woman is not independent from the Man, nor is the Man independent from the Woman, For as woman came from man, so also man is born of woman.”

“IN THE LORD”, Woman was created from the open side of Adam (Man), while Adam laid in a sleep, the Church = Woman was created from the open side from the second Adam = Christ, while the second Adam = Christ laid in the sleep of death.

After the first creation of Woman who came from man, now man is born of Woman, the two are ONE. When Christ makes all things new, The Church = Woman came from Christ, now the Church = Woman gives new birth (anothen) to Christ in all her members through baptism, when the two are one.

Christ our Husband while away in preparing a place for His bride the Church, is forever presence to His bride in LOVE presence, Prayer and fasting takes place when the two are separated in time and space. Thus it is with the man and woman, when time and distance separate them, Love between the man and woman sustains one another in all things true, prayer here is the spiritual communication that sustain relations between man and woman, when each one’s presence is not present to one another physically. Here we can say; God is Love, “But everything comes from God”.

When we speak of those things carnal between man and woman, it is the Spirit which supersedes the carnal. The spiritual things are eternal while the carnal things are temporal.

In summary; I Cor.1: 14The person without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God but considers them foolishness, and cannot understand them because they are discerned only through the Spirit. 15The person with the Spirit makes judgments about all things, but such a person is not subject to merely human judgments, 16for,

“Who has known the mind of the Lord
so as to instruct him?”
But we have the mind of Christ.

 

[ChunkMonk]

You"re rewriting.

 

[ModernCatholic]

We cannot just say that cultural context is the reason for this text in the Bible. Do you believe that the eternal, non-changing, holy word of God is contained by cultural context. Do you believe that this holy and good God would have his blessed book book be swayed by common attitudes at that time. Do you think that it was a mistake that God chose Paul out of every single man to ever be born to simply not be taken seriously. Indeed God made man and woman equal but not identical and when we deny these differences, we deny the realiy of the goodness of what God created. It was NOT a mistake that this somehow crept it’s way into Bible. We can’t come to any logical understanding of this if we simply say that it isn’t 100% true. Truth doesn’t expire and God chose to put in his book what he wanted to because he wanted to. We canNOT take the parts of the Bible we want to hear anf ignore the parts we don’t. If we do, then we are just satisfying what we want to be true and not what actually is. Of course it is possible that God dien’t literally make man before woman and take woman from man but this already gives us so much theology and understanding of what God was trying to get at by making us different. And it isn’t an excuse either to say it doesn’t matter or that it is possible to overthink this because it is perhaps the most important thing we could possibly even try to understand in this day and age. Saying that God made man first and woman from man tells us very important and relevant things and one of those is NOT that men are now better than woman. It means something important indeed however and I think that is what the original asker was trying to ask. What exactly this means. How can we even come to start to understand the theology behind ourselves and God’s creation if we can’t even acknowledge it’s existance. If this didn’t literally happen but yet God still allowed that to be put into the first book in the Bible and the idea we would have in our heads of the event until the end of time then I think that that clearly means there is something important there.

 

[MysticMissMisty]

Wow! What a circuitous route we have taken, indeed!

I had no intention of evolution even coming into this discussion so that it took it so far afield.

The last poster was right; I am looking for what Paul ACTUALLY means by his statement that “woman was made for man, not man for woman”. For, on its own, it does appear that he is saying, essentially, that man owns woman (she was made “for” him). Paul even says that the woman was NOT (NOT) made for the man. This could imply that all the woman’s will, desires, etc. are always to be subservient to those of the man and that the man has the ultimate say over them, since SHE was made for HIM, and NOT HE for HER.

And, yes, the fact that we are allowed to believe in evolution which excludes this man-woman order is, in fact, troubling, since Paul uses it to make some broader and more important point here.

Is Paul really saying that man owns woman? At least a few of the Church Fathers would say that, at least, she is not to be considered his slave.

So, then, what does Paul mean when he says that “woman was made for man, NOT man for woman”?

There have been a few interesting and pretty direct responses to this primary question of my post, and they indeed give me some meat to chew on, but I would appreciate either a) elaboration on those things already proposed or b) some new (name removed by moderator)ut on the meaning of this simple yet ultimately controversial turn of phrase!

 

[Darryl_B]

Wow! What a circuitous route we have taken, indeed!

I had no intention of evolution even coming into this discussion so that it took it so far afield.

I was thinking the same thing so stopped reading some time back and just scrolled down to here.

 

[ATraveller]

This could imply that all the woman’s will, desires, etc. are always to be subservient to those of the man and that the man has the ultimate say over them, since SHE was made for HIM, and NOT HE for HER.

Ultimate say? That would be the case if the verse was in isolation. Elsewhere, for example Ephesians, we know God is above the husband and therefore first and foremost the wife is to obey God. So if the husband is wrong but the wife is right, the husband is still wrong.

Is Paul really saying that man owns woman? At least a few of the Church Fathers would say that, at least, she is not to be considered his slave.

Paul was not intending to mean a husband owns his wife.

For the wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does. Likewise the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does. -1 Cor 7:4

 

[PetraG]

St. Paul was not married himself, but he taught that the body of the wife was under the authority of the husband and the body of the husband was under the authority of the wife. (1 Cor. 7:3-4) He did not teach that only the husband had sexual authority, but rather taught that spouses mutually owed each other a marital debt.

 

[catholic1seeks]

Inevitable that the post would enter into our scientific data re: evolution because truth cannot contradict truth. As Catholics, we approach Truth via Faith and Reason. Until not long ago, most Christians assumed the Earth was the center of the known Universe — they had no reason to think otherwise. So if there are biblical passages that suggest a primitive cosmology (which, indeed, there are — the ancient Israelites thought of the “dome” of the Earth separating the water “the heavens” from the water, the sea, below), then we shouldn’t be alarmed.

It’s simply CATHOLIC TEACHING that what is being ASSERTED by the biblical authors is what is true and inerrant. But the biblical authors have their own cultural contexts and assumptions, too. I.e., the author of Genesis is not ASSERTING that the Earth was created in the manner the literary details express word-for-word.

The same thing applies to Paul here. He had no reason to think otherwise: the Genesis account of woman being formed from man was an instinctive “duh” for Jews at the time.

I won’t say more except this fundamental reality: The Catholic Church does not teach that “woman was made for man” if that somehow expresses woman’s inequality or subordinate role. So obviously, we have to interpret Paul in a way that does not indicate woman’s lower status.