The Problem of Lacking a Cultural and Historical Self-Awareness

My wife was relaying to me an on-line discussion she was having on the topic of wives submitting to their husbands. It sounded like it was getting hostile and so I asked her what people were saying. One individual suggested that she questioned the validity of those Pauline texts in our current world context based on his immersion in a patriarchial society. I tend to agree with this statement. For too long many such discussions have lacked a historical understanding of time, context, and culture. Paul believed things that reflected the culture in which he was raised, trained, and educated in. I am continually frustrated by people who don't stop to ask several simple questions before reading these writings, questions that should have been learned in elementary and middle school English and History classes. These questions are: who is being written to, when was it written, what was going on in the culture at the time the letter was being written and does that give some insight in to why it is being written. These statements of Paul's have often been turned into hard and fast rules for all time when originally many of them were specific letters written to specific people at a specific place in a specific time. I think that any discussion about a topic like the aforementioned one needs to start here. In doing so, it allows us to be informed about the complexities of various contexts and should make us less prone to throwing judgments all over the place. In questioning the validity of these statements in a current context, however is not to dismiss them entirely in the first century Mediterranean context or to cast stones at Paul for being a pig-headed male chauvinist. And even if he was (a pig headed male chauvinist) what difference does it make, why do people have to put so much stock in what he said, he was just a man? The statements are what they are and I don't feel the need to make value judgments on them, particualarly in light of my own 21st century biases and assumptions. To throw out everything Paul had to say, however, is to make the same mistake on the other end of the spectrum. To dismiss his writings because they do not fall in line with one's current modern cultural context, which many do, is equally unfair and dangerously narrow and arrogant. Furthermore, it fails to realize that perhaps some of his words are in fact universally relevant in all contexts, e.g., love is kind, love is not rude, believes all, etc...