"Seven doctrines, one mistake"

One reading of the curse, and the seven doctrines it built.

You have heard “spare the rod, spoil the child” quoted as Scripture. It is not Scripture. It is a line from a 1662 poem by Samuel Butler. The verse people think they are quoting uses shebet, the shepherd’s rod, the same staff that comforts in Psalm 23. A word for keeping a child off the cliff edge became a warrant for striking him.

That is one example of a single mistake the church has made over and over, and my new essay traces it through seven doctrines. The mistake is simple to name. Genesis 3:16, “your desire shall be for your husband and he shall rule over you,” gets read as God’s design for marriage. But it is not a design. It sits inside a list of consequences: pain in childbirth, thorns in the field, a snake on its belly. Nobody reads “cursed is the ground” as God’s blueprint for farming. Only one line in that passage gets pulled out and called architecture, and it is the line that happened to be useful to people who wanted authority underwritten by God.

The essay does something the marriage conversation usually does not. It shows that the same move, reading a consequence as a command, did not stay in the marriage. It built at least seven houses: corporal punishment, female subordination, male headship scaled up into church hierarchy, suffering treated as automatically holy, dominion read as a license to strip-mine the earth, the curse of Ham handed to slaveholders, and labor turned into sacred poverty. Some of those houses have body counts.

And here is the part that should unsettle anyone who thinks this is a modern complaint. It is not new. Yeshua named it, quoting Isaiah, when he said people worship in vain teaching as doctrines the commandments of men. Jeremiah named it twenty-six centuries ago when he said the lying pen of the scribes had made the Torah into a lie. Ezekiel named it. Paul named it. The warning is older than the error.

The way out was never hidden either. When the Pharisees pressed Yeshua on divorce in Matthew 19, he did not argue about the permission. He went back to the beginning, to how it was before the rupture, and said “from the beginning it was not so.” That is the test. Run it on Genesis 3:16 and the doctrine falls apart in your hands.

Read the full essay, and then do the oldest thing the faithful have ever done. Put down the commentary and pick up the Book.

https://www.sergiodesoto.com/posts/the-seven-deadly-misreadings

PS: Many of you ask so here is the link, my daily reader. https://amzn.to/4dVyGiN