Which Commands Are Culture-Bound

Four times Paul tells a congregation to greet one another with a holy kiss, and Peter says the same thing in different words. Jesus washes his disciples' feet and says that they should do the same for one another, grounding it in an example he gave them on purpose. These are imperatives. They are repeated. They are not obscure. And the overwhelming majority of Christian congregations in the world do not practise either of them literally.

Say that plainly before going further, because it establishes the point on which this whole lesson turns: you already sort. Every reader of the New Testament divides its commands into ones that bind directly and ones whose binding form is something other than the literal act. The question is never whether to sort. It is whether you can state the rule you are using, and whether you apply it consistently when the answer is inconvenient.

The usual reason given for the kiss is that it was the ordinary greeting of that society, so the command is about warmth and mutual welcome in whatever form a culture expresses it, and a handshake or an embrace obeys it. That is a good answer. Notice its shape: the command has a cultural form and an enduring substance, and it is the substance that binds. Notice also that Paul added the word holy, which suggests he was already regulating a practice with known risks, and that the early church went on to regulate it further, eventually separating men and women for it.

Foot washing is harder, and the honesty rule bites at once. Some churches do practise it, as an ordinance, and they are not eccentrics. The Church of the Brethren, many Mennonite and Anabaptist congregations, the Grace Brethren, some Primitive Baptists and a number of others wash feet, and their argument is not weak: Jesus commands it, gives a reason, and calls it an example. Meanwhile the Roman Catholic and Anglican and many Protestant churches practise it once a year on Maundy Thursday, which is a third position. So 'nearly everyone agrees' is accurate and 'everyone agrees' is not, and a teacher who says the second has already started shading the evidence.

Two more cases show how far the agreement extends. Almost nobody argues that 2 Timothy 4:13, where Paul asks Timothy to bring the cloak he left at Troas, binds anyone. Almost everybody agrees that 'love your enemies' binds everyone, everywhere, in the literal form given. Between those poles lies everything difficult, and no rule yet proposed sorts the middle to universal satisfaction.

1 Corinthians 11:2-16 is the best training passage in the New Testament for this problem, because it is culturally remote enough that almost nobody is defending the literal practice, and yet Paul's reasons for it are the same kinds of reasons that are treated as decisive elsewhere. Working it carefully will make you slower and better.

Start with the exegetical cruxes, all of which are genuinely open. First, what is the covering? The standard reading is a garment or veil, but verse 15 says long hair is given to her as a covering, and Philip Payne and others have argued that the whole passage concerns hair, worn loose or bound, rather than cloth. Second, what does kephale mean in verse 3? Anthony Thiselton's commentary on 1 Corinthians sorts more than eighty publications on the word into three camps. Authority over, argued from Greek usage by Wayne Grudem and by Joseph Fitzmyer. Source or origin, argued by Gordon Fee, Philip Payne and others and clearly used in that sense by some Greek Fathers. And preeminent or foremost, which is where Richard Cervin's 1989 rebuttal to Grudem lands, along with Andrew Perriman: Cervin allows that kephale can occasionally mean source while denying that it is at all common, and judges preeminence the better reading of most of Grudem's own examples. Thiselton leans to the third camp and reports that the evidence for both of the first two is shrinking. Three live options, and none of them commanding the field. Third, verse 10 says a woman ought to have a sign of authority on her head. The Greek has just the word authority on her head, with nothing meaning sign, and the BSB's footnote at that point reads 'Or have authority over', so the phrase could mean authority over her or authority she exercises. Fourth, nobody has securely explained 'because of the angels', and the proposals run from angelic presence in worship to the watchers of Genesis 6 to human messengers. Fifth, verse 16 ends the argument by appealing to the practice of the churches, which is an argument from custom.

Now notice the structure of Paul's reasoning, because this is the transferable lesson. He appeals to creation in verses 8 and 9, woman from man and for man. He then qualifies it in verses 11 and 12, saying that in the Lord neither is independent of the other. He appeals to nature in verses 14 and 15. He appeals to shame and propriety in verses 5, 6 and 13. And he appeals to universal church custom in verse 16. That is five kinds of warrant stacked behind one instruction.

And yet the near-unanimous conclusion of Christian readers today, across the traditions that disagree about everything else in this lesson, is that the literal practice is not binding, while something it symbolised is. What that something is remains disputed: distinction between the sexes, marital respect, order in worship, or the avoidance of shame in one's own culture. A small number of congregations, including some Plymouth Brethren assemblies, conservative Mennonites and many Eastern churches, do keep the practice, and their position is at least consistent.

Hold on to the awkward fact this produces, because it belongs to both sides of the next section. A creation appeal in 1 Corinthians 11 does not, for most readers, settle that the practice attached to it is permanent. Whether the same is true of the creation appeal in 1 Timothy 2:13 is exactly what is argued about, and neither side can treat the answer as obvious without ignoring what they already do with this chapter.

Two passages carry most of the weight. 1 Timothy 2:11-14 in the BSB: 'A woman must learn in quietness and full submissiveness. I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man; she is to remain quiet. For Adam was formed first, and then Eve. And it was not Adam who was deceived, but the woman who was deceived and fell into transgression.' And 1 Corinthians 14:34-35: 'Women are to be silent in the churches. They are not permitted to speak, but must be in submission, as the law says. If they wish to inquire about something, they are to ask their own husbands at home; for it is dishonorable for a woman to speak in the church.' What follows states each case as its own best defenders state it. Read both before judging either.

Before the two cases, notice where the BSB itself has already made small choices inside these verses, because they run in both directions. In 1 Timothy 2:12 it renders authenteo 'exercise authority', which is the sense the complementarian case argues for; the egalitarian case argues for something nearer domineering or assuming authority, and the BSB prints no footnote there. In the same passage it prints 'woman' and 'man' but footnotes the ambiguity of the Greek words: the note on verse 11 reads 'Or wife; also in verse 12' and the note on verse 12 reads 'Or over her husband', which would confine the passage to marriage, a reading that neither headline case below is built on. In verse 15 it prints the plural 'Women, however, will be saved through childbearing, if they continue', while its footnote says the Greek is literally 'She, however, will be saved'. In 1 Timothy 3:11 it prints 'the women' and footnotes 'Or their wives', so whether the text names women deacons or deacons' wives is visibly open, and the BSB's text does not decide it. In Romans 16:7 it prints Junia and 'outstanding among the apostles', which is the reading that counts her an apostle, with a footnote 'Some translators Junias'; the alternative reading appears below. In 1 Corinthians 14 it footnotes that some manuscripts place verses 34-35 after verse 40 and that some translators begin a new paragraph after 'peace' in verse 33, so that 'as in all the churches of the saints' may go with either sentence. Take each of those as the translators' judgment, not as the Greek.

The complementarian case. The prohibition in 1 Timothy 2:12 is given a reason in verses 13 and 14, and the reason is not Ephesus but Genesis. Paul grounds it in the order of creation, before the fall, which is the same kind of appeal he makes in 1 Corinthians 11:8-9, and appeals to creation in Paul mark what is not negotiable by circumstance. Had the problem been local false teaching, Paul had every opportunity to say so, and instead he reached back to Adam and Eve. On the key word, Andreas Köstenberger's syntactical study in Women in the Church examined about a hundred instances of the specific ouk to oude construction, fifty-two in the New Testament and forty-eight in Greek writers from the third century BC to the third century AD, and found that it joins two terms of like connotation, either both positive or both negative; since teaching is a good thing throughout the Pastorals, authentein cannot be a negative word like domineer, and must mean exercise authority. So Paul is not merely banning abusive leadership. Nor is the text isolated. The same apostle orders the marriage relation in 1 Corinthians 11:3 and roots it in Christ and the church in Ephesians 5:23, and the qualifications for an overseer in 1 Timothy 3:2 and Titus 1:6 describe a man, 'the husband of but one wife'. The restriction is also narrower than critics suggest: what is in view is the authoritative teaching office in the assembled church, which is why 1 Timothy 3 follows immediately with those qualifications. Complementarians affirm, from the text, that Priscilla instructed Apollos (Acts 18:26), that older women are commanded to teach younger (Titus 2:3-4), that Timothy's faith came through his mother and grandmother (2 Timothy 1:5), and that women prophesied. On Galatians 3:28, they answer that Paul is arguing about who inherits Abraham's promise through faith, not about roles in the assembly, and that the man who wrote it wrote 1 Corinthians 11 as well. On 1 Corinthians 14, the silence commanded in verse 34 is specific to the weighing of prophecy introduced at verse 29, which removes the clash with 11:5 without removing the verses; verse 33 frames it with 'as in all the churches of the saints' (on the BSB's footnote that paragraph break is disputed, as noted above); verse 34 appeals to what the Law says rather than to local custom; and no Greek manuscript omits verses 34 and 35. Nor is this a men's position: Claire Smith, Mary Kassian and others argue it in print. Finally, this reading was held by virtually the entire church for nineteen centuries, across communions that agreed on almost nothing else, and its defenders take that to be strong evidence that it is what the text naturally says.

The egalitarian case. 1 Timothy is written into a named crisis: false teaching at Ephesus (1:3-7), people forbidding marriage (4:3), younger widows going from house to house (5:13), and in the second letter people captured by false teachers in households (2 Timothy 3:6-7). Against that background, verse 11, that a woman should learn, is the liberalising command, since formal instruction for women was uncommon, and verse 12 restricts a particular activity from people who have not yet learned. The word Paul chooses carries much of the weight here: authenteo occurs once in the New Testament, and Paul had ordinary words for exercising authority available and used none of them. Cynthia Long Westfall, Linda Belleville and Philip Payne argue from the cognate authentes and the sparse Hellenistic usage for a sense of self-originated or domineering action, and Payne argues that oude here joins the two infinitives into a single idea, teaching in a domineering manner, so that what is forbidden is a manner rather than a role. Verses 13 and 14 then fit the situation rather than overriding it: Eve was deceived because she was the one who had not received the instruction directly, which is exactly the danger among untaught women in Ephesus, and the remedy Paul prescribes is the learning commanded in verse 11. Read as a universal ground, verse 14 would have to mean that women are constitutionally more deceivable, a claim most complementarian scholars themselves reject, and it would bar women from teaching children as well as men. Verse 15, about being saved through childbearing, is obscure on every reading, which should lower everyone's confidence that this paragraph is transparent legislation. The wider canon then supplies what the restriction is measured against: Galatians 3:28, 'male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus'; daughters prophesying at Pentecost (Acts 2:17) and Philip's four prophesying daughters (Acts 21:9); Phoebe, called a servant of the church at Cenchrea in Romans 16:1, the same word, diakonos, that Paul uses of himself, and which the BSB footnotes as 'Or deaconess', and in verse 2 'a great help to many people', where the Greek is prostatis, often rendered patron; Junia in Romans 16:7, a woman's name, whom Chrysostom praised as worthy of the title apostle; Priscilla named before her husband and teaching Apollos; Euodia and Syntyche, who contended at Paul's side for the gospel (Philippians 4:2-3); Nympha with a church in her house (Colossians 4:15). And 1 Corinthians 11:5 has women praying and prophesying in the assembly, which sits badly with an absolute silence three chapters later; verses 34 and 35 also stand after verse 40 in the Western witnesses, including the Greek and Latin Codex Claromontanus and a group of Latin manuscripts and Fathers, and Gordon Fee argued on that basis that they are a later insertion. The BSB records the displacement in its own footnote at verse 35.

Now each side's strongest answer to the other. Complementarians reply that the negative sense of authentein is asserted more often than demonstrated, that the extra-biblical evidence is thin and late and includes instances meaning simply to have authority, and that Köstenberger's argument from oude has to be answered on its own ground rather than set aside; that even if Junia is a woman called outstanding among the apostles, Paul uses apostle broadly for sent representatives, as in 2 Corinthians 8:23 and Philippians 2:25, where the BSB renders the Greek apostolos as 'messengers' and 'messenger', so the verse does not establish an office; that diakonos in Romans 16:1 is a wide word meaning servant or minister, and prostatis a real honour rather than a teaching office; that the interpolation argument for 1 Corinthians 14:34-35 removes an inconvenient text on the strength of a displacement in one manuscript family while no Greek manuscript lacks the verses at all, and that Metzger's committee retained them, though Payne replies that his case does not need a Greek omission, pointing to the Latin Codex Fuldensis, where the scribe wrote verses 36 to 40 in the margin after verse 33, and to the marginal marks in Vaticanus; that if untrained teaching were the problem, the remedy would be training, yet verse 12 does not lift the restriction once a woman has learned; that Galatians 3:28 lists Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female in an argument about who inherits Abraham's promise by faith, and the man who wrote it regulated households in the same letters, so it cannot carry the weight placed on it; and that in Acts 18:26 Priscilla and Aquila take Apollos aside rather than correct him in the synagogue where he had been speaking, which is precisely the public and private distinction the position draws. Egalitarians reply that a creation appeal cannot by itself prove permanence, because 1 Corinthians 11 grounds head covering in creation in verses 8 and 9 and almost no complementarian requires the covering, so the same reasoning is already being treated as culturally expressed in one chapter and transculturally binding in another; that Burer and Wallace's influential 2001 study arguing that Romans 16:7 means known to the apostles rather than outstanding among them (the BSB prints the second) has been contested at the level of its Greek evidence by Richard Bauckham, Eldon Epp and Linda Belleville, who finds the inclusive sense without exception in comparable constructions; that 1 Corinthians 11:5 must be accounted for whatever one does with 14:34, and that the weighing-of-prophecy harmonisation does not fit what verse 34 actually says, since 'not permitted to speak' and 'dishonorable for a woman to speak in the church' are wider than evaluating a prophecy, and verse 35 grounds the instruction in asking questions at home rather than in assessing anyone; that the overseer qualification in 1 Timothy 3:2 is an idiom for marital faithfulness, since the matching phrase, wife of one husband, describes the widows' roll in 1 Timothy 5:9 (the BSB renders it 'faithful to her husband' and footnotes 3:2 'Or faithful to his wife') and nobody reads that as restricting the roll to men, so the lists describe the typical officeholder rather than excluding women by grammar; that the headship of Ephesians 5:23 is governed by the mutual submission of 5:21 and defined by dying for the other rather than by ruling; and that the argument from nineteen centuries of agreement proves less than it seems, since the church was similarly near-unanimous about slavery, head coverings and lending at interest.

Finally, the hardest question each side has to answer, stated without softening. Complementarians must explain, not merely assert, why the appeal to creation order in 1 Corinthians 11:8-9 does not make the covering binding while the appeal to creation order in 1 Timothy 2:13 makes the restriction binding. They do have answers, chiefly that a permanent reality can be signalled by a changeable sign, and that the sign is what 1 Corinthians 11 regulates while 1 Timothy 2 addresses the thing itself. Whether that distinction is drawn from the texts or brought to them is a fair question. Egalitarians must explain why, if the problem was a local crisis of untaught or deceived women, Paul's stated rationale goes to Adam and Eve rather than to Ephesus, at precisely the point where naming the crisis would have settled the matter. They too have answers, chiefly that Eve functions as the analogy for deception rather than as a ground of permanent disqualification. Whether that reading survives the connective 'for' at the head of verse 13 is a fair question. And it is worth recording that each side has produced arguments its own scholars have abandoned: Catherine Kroeger's proposal that authenteo referred to ritual or sexual practice is now rejected by egalitarian specialists as unsupported, and the argument that verse 14 shows women to be inherently more gullible has been abandoned by the complementarian specialists who once made it, Thomas Schreiner having argued a version of it in the 1995 first edition of Women in the Church and revised it for the second. A position is not refuted by its worst argument, on either side.

What is settled: both passages are in the text and no Greek manuscript omits them; women in the New Testament prophesy, host churches, carry letters, instruct, are named as fellow workers and patrons, and one is called a servant of her church; and nobody serious holds that the New Testament either silences women entirely or makes no distinction anywhere. What is not settled, after decades of technical work by competent people of deep conviction on both sides, is what authentein means, how 1 Corinthians 11:5 and 14:34 relate, and whether the creation rationale in 1 Timothy 2:13 fixes the restriction for all time. This course will not pretend to settle it for you. It will insist that you be able to state the other position in a form its own defenders would recognise, and that you notice which of the two you find it harder to do.

Now the case where the church has reached a conclusion, which is why it is the most instructive case of all. The New Testament nowhere condemns slavery as an institution. It regulates it. The household codes in Ephesians 6:5-9, Colossians 3:22 to 4:1, 1 Timothy 6:1-2, Titus 2:9-10 and 1 Peter 2:18-25 tell slaves to obey, in one case explicitly including harsh masters. These codes take a recognisable Greco-Roman form, the household management discussion that runs back to Aristotle, and modify it: masters are addressed as accountable to a Master of their own, which was not a commonplace. But modification is not abolition, and it is dishonest to present it as such.

Philemon is the nearest thing to a test case, and it is genuinely ambiguous. Paul sends Onesimus back. He does not command manumission. He asks Philemon to receive him 'no longer as a slave, but better than a slave, as a beloved brother' (verse 16), offers to cover any loss himself, and writes in verse 21, 'Confident of your obedience, I write to you, knowing that you will do even more than I ask.' Generations of readers have heard manumission in that last sentence, and generations have replied that Paul could have written the word and did not. Even the basic scenario is contested: Peter Lampe argued in 1985 that Onesimus was not a runaway at all but had deliberately sought out Paul as a friend of his master to intercede for him, a recognised Roman practice, which changes the letter's whole dynamic. And 1 Corinthians 7:21 turns on a translation decision: the BSB reads 'Do not let it concern you - but if you can gain your freedom, take the opportunity', taking the freedom reading in its text with no footnote, while the Greek can equally be rendered as an instruction to make use of your present condition instead, and commentators divide.

Then the history, which every student of hermeneutics should know in detail. In the American debate of the eighteen-thirties to eighteen-sixties, both sides were Bible-believing and both argued from scripture. Thornton Stringfellow's tracts assembled patriarchal precedent, Mosaic regulation, and the household codes into a case that slavery was a scriptural institution. Richard Fuller debated Francis Wayland in print in 1845 on exactly these grounds. Albert Barnes and Theodore Dwight Weld argued the abolitionist case exegetically, and the churches split anyway. Mark Noll's The Civil War as a Theological Crisis (2006) sets out the outcome with painful clarity: on a narrow, verse-by-verse, literal reading, the defenders of slavery had the stronger hand, and the most effective antislavery arguments increasingly appealed to the whole direction of scripture, to the spirit rather than the letter, and to moral intuitions their opponents dismissed as sentiment rather than exegesis.

The church now holds, with no significant dissent, that the defenders of slavery were wrong. Sit with what that means. A reading that was more literal, better supported verse by verse, held by a majority of serious Christians in a whole region, defended by learned pastors who prayed over their sermons, was wrong. And it was not overturned by new manuscripts or a new lexicon. What the abolitionists themselves argued, and what Noll's account of the crisis describes, is that the verse-by-verse method was too narrow to see what the canon as a whole was doing. Whether that diagnosis generalises beyond slavery is precisely what the next paragraph shows the two sides of today's arguments disputing, so do not take it from this lesson as a settled principle of interpretation.

Both sides of today's arguments use this history, and both uses are real arguments rather than debating tricks. Egalitarians say: this is the pattern, and the same narrow method is producing the same kind of error again about women, and the appeal to nineteen centuries of agreement is precisely what was said then. Complementarians reply: the analogy fails at the decisive point, because scripture nowhere institutes slavery and repeatedly limits it, whereas it grounds the matter under dispute in creation itself; and the trajectory argument that defeated slavery has since been used to revise sexual ethics in ways most of its users at the time would have rejected, which shows that the method proves whatever the reader's era already believes. Both of those are serious. What the history plainly does establish is narrower and harder: sincerity, learning and literal fidelity to individual verses are not sufficient protection against being badly wrong, and you are not exempt. Hold your conclusions on contested texts in a way that would let you be corrected, because the people who could not do that are the cautionary example.

So is there a method? Several have been offered, and none commands consensus. Fee and Stuart's chapter on cultural relativity gives a working list: identify what belongs to the central core of the message and what is peripheral; distinguish matters that are inherently moral from matters that are not; note where the New Testament speaks with one voice and where it varies; distinguish a principle from its specific first-century application; ask what cultural options were actually open to the writer; stay alert to differences between that world and yours; and exercise charity toward those who sort differently. Those are sensible and they are not an algorithm, as the authors themselves concede.

The most developed proposal is William Webb's redemptive-movement hermeneutic, set out in Slaves, Women and Homosexuals: Exploring the Hermeneutics of Cultural Analysis (2001). Webb asks the reader to plot three points: X, the surrounding ancient culture; Y, what scripture actually says; and Z, an ultimate ethic. Where an instruction sits between the surrounding culture and that ultimate ethic, he argues, the text is doing incremental work within what its first readers could receive, and the direction of travel is itself revelatory. He distinguishes three kinds of movement: against the practice of the surrounding nations, within Israel's own domestic practice over time, and across the canon from one Testament to the other. He insists that Y is inspired and authoritative rather than a discarded waystation, and that Z is read off scripture's own trajectory and its statements about the new creation rather than off present opinion. He then offers eighteen criteria for telling a culturally framed instruction from a transcultural one, graded by strength into persuasive, moderately persuasive and inconclusive rather than presented as equally decisive. They include whether the instruction runs against the surrounding culture or with it, whether it is grounded in creation before the fall or in the curse, whether the canon contains seed ideas and breakouts that press beyond the instruction, whether a purpose statement is attached, and whether it is stated as a specific practice or as a principle. Applied, he concludes that slavery and patriarchy are culturally framed and that the movement should be carried through, and that the prohibition of homosexual practice is transcultural, because it is grounded in creation before the fall and the canon shows no movement on it at all. That combination is worth noticing on its own account: the method reaches a conservative result on one of the three subjects in its own title, which is Webb's answer to the charge that it simply ratifies whatever the reader wanted.

The objections are substantial and they come from more than one direction. Wayne Grudem's long review article in the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society in 2004 argued that the method makes the New Testament's ethic provisional rather than final, that it places the interpreter's reconstruction of the ultimate ethic above the text, that the eighteen criteria are subjective enough that a reader will find in them whatever he brought, and that Webb's distinction between the issues he treats as culturally framed and the one he does not is unstable, so that the method cannot supply the stopping point Webb insists it has. Thomas Schreiner pressed similar concerns, and added that reading a text for its direction of travel invites the interpreter to treat what scripture says as a stage rather than as the word, which is a change in the doctrine of scripture and not only in method. Webb replied in the same journal in 2005, and the reply deserves hearing rather than summarising away. He argues that his critics conflate development within a closed canon with going beyond the canon, and that he claims only the first; that the New Testament's authority is final while a concrete instruction inside it can still be culturally framed, which is a distinction every reader already uses on the holy kiss; and that the criteria are cumulative and graded, so an objection has to engage the grading rather than treat all eighteen as equally loose. His stopping point, he argues, is principled rather than improvised: what marks an instruction transcultural is grounding in creation before the fall together with an absence of canonical movement, and he holds that both tests are met on the sexual-ethics question and neither is met on slavery, so the asymmetry falls out of the criteria rather than being imposed on them. From the other side, some egalitarians object that Webb concedes far too much by granting that the biblical texts are themselves patriarchal, which they deny outright, and that a method premised on that concession weakens the case it is meant to serve; others argue that an ultimate ethic drawn even partly from present moral consensus will always end up ratifying the present. Both Grudem's review and Webb's reply are free PDFs on the journal's own site, so a student can read the exchange whole rather than trust anyone's summary of it, including this one. I. Howard Marshall and Kevin Vanhoozer engaged the same question more sympathetically in Beyond the Bible (2004), which is the fullest treatment if you can get hold of a copy.

Where does that leave you? With something less than a procedure and more than nothing. In practice, the questions that do the most work are these. Is the instruction tied to a state of affairs that no longer exists, and if that state of affairs returned, would the instruction obviously return with it? Does the text itself give a reason, and does the reason reach beyond the situation? Does the instruction run with the surrounding culture or against it, since an instruction that cost the first readers something is less likely to be mere social convention? Is the practice's meaning in its own society recoverable, and is that meaning preserved or destroyed by keeping the practice here? Does the rest of scripture press in the same direction? And is the same test you have just applied one you would accept if it were applied to a command you hold dear?

That last question is the one this lesson exists for. The kiss and the foot washing are not warm-up exercises; they are the place where you discover what your actual method is, before the stakes are high enough to bend it. Where the church is divided, on head coverings and on the teaching ministry of women, this course states both cases at full strength and declines to hand you a verdict, not out of timidity but because an honest teacher does not manufacture a consensus that does not exist. Where the church has reached a settled judgment against a reading that was once dominant, as on slavery, this course says so plainly. And where you disagree with a brother or sister who has done the work, you owe them the version of their argument they would recognise, and the admission that you might be the one who is wrong.