A very good friend of mine once gave a detailed talk on this subject; I’ll try to relate it as best I can:
When applying scriptural commands to ourselves, it is necessary to appreciate:[ul][li]The prevailing culture of the original addressee[/li][li]The mindset of the writer[/ul][/li]
As a result of this, it may be necessary to perform a ‘two-pass’ translation of commands; the first pass to strip away the cultural and personal peculiarities of the original passage, the second pass to render the core meaning into terms meaningful to us today.
Take for example the instruction “Greet one another with a holy kiss” - instructed by Paul several times in the New Testament.
Does this mean that we Must greet each other with a kiss? are we disobedient if we don’t actually do this?
Taking the view that greeting people with a kiss was a completely normal everyday behaviour in the first century in the middle east; it was simply the way to warmly greet somebody, we could infer that underlying message of the passage is to ‘warmly and sincerely greet one another’.
Translating this again into (in my case) modern British behaviour (all jokes aside), where kissing is generally perceived as a more intimate action than it might have been in Bible times, the instruction to warmly and sincerely greet a person makes more sense when interpreted as ‘eye contact, a genuine smile and a firm shake of the hand’ - in fact we could very plausibly argue that in my country, greeting someone with a kiss actually goes against the spirit of the instruction.
I would welcome responses from anyone on this subject, however, if all you have to say on the matter is “it’s all nonsense because your ridiculous sky deity is imaginary”(caricature), please would you be kind enough to place your post somewhere else.
