I’m not aware of anywhere in the Bible where Sarah is praised for calling Abraham lord. It is a fact that she does call him lord in Gen 18:12, which is a term of respect and wives certainly should respect their husbands. However, respect and obedience are two different things, and the Bible never commands women to obey their husbands. Sarah’s respect is a good example for us of how to respect our husbands. Abraham’s treatment of Sarah is a good example for men as well. When he asked her to say she is his sister, he didn’t TELL her and expect her to obey. The word used there is the Hebrew word “na’” and it means: “pray or please, used in entreaty or exhortation.” It is the same word used many other times of people praying to God, asking for help. He asked her, they came to an agreement and then they acted.

I am discovering the same type of weirdness in the Christian parenting teaching that I adhered to for years. I consider myself to be currently in recovery from that type of Christian parenthood; I’m still trying to rediscover the genuine article. It was never that I didn’t love my children (and probably the same is true of the “experts” I was listening to.) It’s just that I was taught that if I REALLY loved my children, I would do certain things (many of those things I now would label as unkind, unmerciful and disrespectful – all, ironically, very un-Christian behaviors!) But I did them anyway because I had become convinced that to do less would endanger my children’s souls.

And the kicker was that when my children would act badly (no doubt because they were on the receiving end of unkind, unmerciful and disrespectful treatment), the verdict was always: you’re just not doing it right.

when i was *much* younger [late teens] i was *obsessed* with a “radical notion”: put WOMEN in charge for a few hundred years. women PLAN, and they CARE about *PEOPLE*, ya know? we wouldn’t get into stupid wars over stupid things [like oil or drugs or religion] and men would finally learn A) that women are just as competent as they are, B) that women are BETTER than men, because we wouldn’t do to them what they did to us.

15+ years later…
i mean, no, we wouldn’t necessarily do the SAME things – we just aren’t as visually orientated – but we can do similar. and wars are wars are wars – they’re going to happen, however much i deplore them.
and ALL men who think women aren’t REAL PEOPLE would get is “and now the evil feminazis have done what they threatened and they’re going to come castrate me any day now!”

i was imagining a world where children were cared for by everyone, where differences were embraced and utilized or corrected, depending on the individual’s needs and wants. a world where a big hit movie does NOT require “fan service” of a “sexpot” woman getting nekkid, or wet, or whatever. where rape was treated as the travesty it is, but what one does to one’s OWN BODY [including drugs] doesn’t matter UNLESS it can be shown that it affects OTHERS [for instance - a person with kids doing heroin?! *shudder* a dying cancer patient? PLEASE! pain bad! a 19 year old smoking pot at home? no big. same kid smoking while driving is bad. because it might cause an accident... etc]

but, as you say, it was a “Utopian Ideal” and thus unrealizable and completely artificial.
i still believe that societies where women held power were better, OVER ALL, than societies that screwed women over and made them, at best, legal children for their entire lives or at worst less than property. equal power. we don’t even have THAT yet… sigh

You know, I just made a connection– these teachings are just another form of utopianism. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, people thought they could create utopian societies where all of life’s problems would be solved and everyone would be blissfully happy. The only problem with making people happy was the people themselves. They needed to be fixed and changed and molded to fit the ideal, so the ideal society would actually work. But it never did, somehow. . .

The result? Complete subordination of individual autonomy and worth, to the utopian ideal. And nobody was happy.

Idealized, fantasized perfect happiness, somehow just doesn’t work. Apparently part of the reason is that in order to be perfectly “happy,” what you can’t be is free.