As I think about it, though, it wasn’t really until the influence of Jesus, the spread of the gospel and discipling, that the status of women and marriage was elevated. The Jewish men up to and including the time of Christ practiced the old custom of marrying more than one woman, “putting away” without benefit of a divorce any with whom they grew bored or dissatisfied. It was that practice that prompted Moses to tell them to give her a bill of divorcement. Not until the New Testament was translated–mistranslated, if I may–did the expression “put away” get replaced one or more times with the word “divorce,” causing no end of pain for so many Christians, ever since.

I still really, really like your discussion of the topic in your comment, above.

We are probably down to quibbles, but I’m having a good time – so here they are:

1) You may be right on marriage in general, but there may be exceptions. I know an African pretty well, and his description of marriage in their pagan tribal world is quite different than what you say. Men have more than one wife, but the society is matriarchel. Women tend to be the owners of property and priests who guide society. Each woman has her own house, men are around to do hard larbor. In his case, his mother was the owner of fishing boats, and the men would rent them for fishing. Tribes have chiefs (my friend is in line to be one), but they generally don’t control ownership.

I imagine some of this was influenced by the English colonization (Ghana), but its a little hard to believe that the English created a matriarchal society from a patriarchal one.

Maybe my example is an exception which proves the rule.

2) Progressives and Marxists each have their own “human nature theory”. If you accept the notion that these theories are “unreasonable”, then the lack of reason is a lot older than you and me. Marx created his theory in the 1870′s (I think) and Dewey created his in the early 1900′s. Of course, these theories didn’t actually turn into popular culture until the 1960′s. But for the ideas to become popular, they had to be injected into the population somehow – which was done in public schooling in various forms much earlier than the 1960′s.

So I guess if you say that the theorists rejected reason starting in the 1880s, but the rejection didn’t effect society until much later, then I guess we are in agreement.

One more quibble. The rejection of transcendent truth isn’t sufficient to cause the devolution you are talking about. If a person rejects transcendant truth, then uses anthropology and psychology to get an understanding of human nature – and then accepts it as a given, the society he tries to build from his findings will be very close to yours. Of course, for the person who does this, it wouldn’t be a very satisfying answer, since all he did was a bunch of research to find something he could have found by just reading the bible.

Take care.

James

Thanks for your thoughts. A few of my own: marriage, of course, long predated Christianity. What Judaism did, and Christianity subsequently refined, was the transformation of marriage from a mere vehicle of sex and engendering progeny to something far higher. Marriage in virtually all ancient cultures involved keeping a wife as a possession, no more than property, with no inherent rights. She served the purpose of sexual gratification, engendering children, and a servant to the man, while he was free to dispose of her at his whim, or seek his sexual gratification elsewhere — with male or female, adult or child — with no questions asked. The consequences of this both for children and society were substantial: for an excellent contemporary example, look at marriage in the Islamic faith. The wife — or more commonly, wives — are treated as property with no rights, and the resulting treatment of women at large in society is profoundly retrograde. The impact this has on the children of such marriages — both men and women — is enormous. The Judeo-Christian transformation of marriage was indeed radical: monogamy, lifetime commitment, and the elevation of the status of women from property to partners standing equally before God. This tectonic shift in the status of women, and the relationship between men and women, had a profound effect not only on their resulting children, but on society as a whole.

I agree with you on the current state of secular “progressive” society, wherein reason is increasingly irrelevant to individual or societal behavior. We are in transition from a modern (i.e., scientific secularism) to a postmodern society, and, as I hope to explore in subsequent posts, I believe this is the normal evolution — or perhaps better, devolution – of the detachment of reason from transcendent truth. Reason detached from truth becomes unreasonable; logic apart from divine Logos becomes illogical, and ultimately returns to anarchy and barbarism.