(Modesty and Christianity, part 2) When Angela first posted on Modesty (which is what inspired my previous post), I made this comment on her site: I remember when I was dating Angela, and we would talk about modesty. I told her that it was o.k. to dress in a way that I could tell that she was a female. I think some Christians think that women should look like women from the neck up, and perhaps from the ankle down, but that they should look like a flat board in between. (In essence, to look like a man from neck to ankle.) The problem is that God did not create women to look like a flat board. Possessing a "bosom" is not a defect to be hidden, though it is not an asset to be shared with the world, as Angela said. For a women to dress in a way that one can tell that she is a women, but not in a consciously provocative way is MODESTY. For a women to dress in way that she looks like a man from her neck to her ankles is ANDROGENY.
This may have sounded outrageous to some, but I want to offer this little bit of evidence:
This is from Iran, where there is a concerted effort to impose modesty standards which are backed up with police force. "One shopkeeper selling evening dresses told us the moral police had ordered him to saw off the breasts of his mannequins because they were too revealing."
To employ "modesty" as a standard, but to define it without any eye as to the culture you are trying to impose it on will lead to this. As I said in the previous post, Islam differs from Christianity in that the Koran definitely imposes a prescribed "Islamic culture" that is meant to replace whatever culture is present in the land that Islam takes over. The Christian Bible does not do so. The Koran is the "word of Allah." The Bible is the "word of God given in human words unto human culture in a particular historical setting." (Whoa, Pope Benedict said roughly the same thing last year, and provoked riots with several Christians being martyred.) The Christian keeps one eye on the Bible, and one eye on the culture, so that he or she may see what his God is saying NOW to the people in his particular culture. The Muslim has no eye on culture because what Allah said to 6th century arabic culture is valid for all cultures. The problem is that many Christians today understand the Bible in the same way as the Muslim does. When the "fundamentalist controversy" of the 1920's erupted, it was far easier (and more spiritual sounding) to stand up for the Bible as "the Word of God," without getting into details, than it was to teach Christians how to handle the Bible repsonsibly. As Gordon Fee, the great Pentecostal scholar, demonstrates in his bestselling How To Read The Bible For All It's Worth, you have to see what the "Word of God" was to THEM (the people it was originally written to) before you can understand what the "Word of God" is to US (the people that God is speaking to now). If you ignore the context of what God was saying to them, you will miss what God is saying to us now. For example: CHRISTIAN WOMEN MUST WEAR HEAD COVERINGS (1 Corinthians 11) Was the Word of God to the Corinthians really that it is God's will that women wear head coverings in all times and in all places? If so, then the majority of Christian women living in America are living in sin! But if you look closer at the passage, you will see that the apostle Paul is not giving some divine decree straight from the throne of God for all women in all places at all times.At least twice he refers to something being a "disgrace" (1 Cor 11:6,14). He is castigating the Corinthian women because they were doing something that made the culture unneccessarily look down on the Christians. They used their newfound freedom in Christ as an excuse to remove the head coverings that women in their culture wore, and it became a stumbling block to the non-Christians around them. While there are some things that the Bible is clear are always wrong, like homosexuality, even though it offends modern culture; I can think of others that were not meant for all time that Christians today cling to and allow to remain as a stumbling block, keeping the lost from facing up to the only real stumbling block- the cross. (Hmm...such as no women pastors, male headship, no birth control, equating Republican politics with God's will, 6 day creationism, special robes for clergy, outdated music, etc.....) UPDATE- As I said in the comment on Angela's post, modesty can be taken to an extreme where it becomes wrong for a woman to even dress in a way that shows that she has the form of a woman and not a man. In this article on the Iranian modesty crackdown, I found this: Nazanain, 28, a reporter who thought she had dressed more modestly than usual, said she had been stopped in Vanak Square in Tehran and told her coat was tight and showed her body shape.
When modesty is pushed without a view to what the culture considers modest, then there is NOTHING to stop it from being pushed all the way. There is nothing to balance it with. If the Bible is the paint used to make a painting that God is making, then the various cultures of the world are the canvasses He chooses. Culture is the context that the Bible speaks into. God's word was not delivered into a void. | 
