Feminism: A Corrupt Seed That Yields A Rotten Crop

Picture from AgFax.com

In my prior post, It Is Not About Getting Rid Of Gender, It Is About Getting Rid Of Men, I argued that the "transgender" and "gender fluidity" movements are mostly about ridding our culture of any actual masculine expression. I also made the statement that I think women are, by and large, not terribly happy today in spite of "feminist progress" and by implication that they would be more happy if the men in their lives acted more like men. In fact it often seems to me that things that are supposed to make women happier, like having more women with careers outside of the home and going to college, are actually conspiring to make women less happy and satisfied. As an example of this I quoted the disproportionate female-male ratio at most colleges in an article, Unequal Gender Ratios at Colleges Are Driving Hookup Culture, but the broader issue of that post was that the shrinking male population at university is actually benefitting the men enormously, at least from a standpoint of sexual promiscuity.

Women at disproportionately female schools talk openly about their frustrations. “Everyone’s self-esteem takes a hit,” a young woman at 75%-female Sarah Lawrence College told me. One reason: Sarah Lawrence men have little interest in exclusive relationships. “Why would they? It’s like they have their own free harem,” she grumbled. “One of my friends was dumped by a guy after they’d been hooking up for less than a week. When he broke up with her, the guy actually used the word ‘market’—like the ‘market’ for him was just too good.” 

A male Sarah Lawrence student offered a similar assessment of life there—though he wasn’t bemoaning the school’s hookup culture but celebrating it. The young man told me he had had sex with more than 20 of his female classmates. “There isn’t really a culture of monogamy or even dating here,” he offered. “Sometimes it feels like you can have anyone you want.”

It turns out that men and women still like to be with each other and when men are scarce, women end up having to or at least feeling like they have to, compromise what they want (monogamous, steady relationships) for what men seem to want (casual sex) in order to have any relationship with men at all. Certainly plenty of academic "experts" will tell you that casual sex with no commitment is healthier than old fuddy-duddy notions of monogamy and relationship but I don't believe that to be true for a second. Having once been an unregenerate college guy, albeit one with a steady girlfriend that I got engaged to halfway through my first year of school, I can say with some confidence that being in a culture where you are having sex with so many different girls that you number your partners in the dozens would be fantastic. Marriage traditionally acted as a civilizing influence on young men, especially young men who are outside of the faith, but now most men can get sex on demand with no corresponding commitment. If you want to see an unclothed woman, you don't have to buy a girlie magazine with a brown paper cover over it from the drug store, you can just click a few buttons and see whatever kind of woman you want doing anything you can imagine and quite a few things you can't even begin to imagine.

I have been working over a post literally for years now that I need to finish one of these days that argues we are living in the Golden Era of Male Irresponsibility. Ironically it is feminism that has made this happen. Very powerful and educated men are doing more than fine in our culture. Lazy, ne'er-do-well young men who want to live at home, play video games and watch porn are doing just fine in their pursuit. The vast majority of men who just want to be a good father and husband and productive member of society are the ones who are struggling.

The struggles of most men is mirrored by the struggles of far too many women. Women from affluent homes are also doing great it would seem. But the majority of women in America seem far from doing just fine. They are pulled in a million directions, told that they don't need a man to be happy but at the same time constantly bombarded with marketing tell them that they need this or that to appeal to men. Women have been told that they shouldn't allow men to objectify them but the culture has led to a situation where teen girls are sending nude photos of themselves to boys that often aren't even steady boyfriends. My experience of decades in the professional work environment was that of a lot of women, I would say the majority of them, were equal parts resigned to "having to work" and longing to spend more time with their kids. Having a picture of your six month old daughter on your desk and texting the daycare is no substitute for being there for her. That may sound judgmental and cruel, and maybe it is, but it is also true. Each successive generation of Western women seems less equipped for caring for their own children but in spite of efforts by some feminists to shame the maternal instinct out of women, it is still there but women today are ill-equipped to respond to that instinct.

A perfect example of this came up this week with the cinematic release of the Fifty Shades of Grey bondage-porn sequel Fifty Shades Darker. In the spirit of full disclosure I have not read any of the books or watched the film but I have run across enough in terms of plot summaries to get the gist of the movie. The series is wildly popular. The first book, Fifty Shades of Grey, apparently sold more than 125 million copies. According to Barnes & Noble (I didn't check at Amazon where I almost exclusively shop for books because I don't want to see what else looking at Fifty Shades would cause Amazon to recommend for me), the hard copy retails for $12.95 and the e-book for $7.99 so taking the average price of the two and multiplying that times 125,000,000 copies means roughly $1.3 billion in sales. That is a pretty big number for a book. The first film adaptation made over $166,000,000 at the box office in America and more than half a billion worldwide according to IMDB. It sounds like estimates are that the sequel will earn almost $50 million during the opening weekend alone.

As you would expect just from the general hype, the book buyers are 80% women. What I found interesting when I looked at the buying profile from Bowker was what kind of women were buying it. The cultural narrative is that it is bought by bored and sexually frustrated soccer moms but that is not what Bowker found in 2012:

Compared to the typical adult fiction consumer, buyers of the Fifty Shades books are more likely to be women, live in the Northeast, and have a significantly higher household income.

Interesting indeed! I think a lot of midwestern soccer mom types tend to consume the "Amish romance novel" genre but why would substantially more affluent, presumably more educated and more "enlightened" women in the Northeast (i.e. Boston to New York to Washington, D.C., our power corridor and where you are most likely to find powerful, "successful" career women) buy a book about a disordered and male dominated sexual relationship?

Why in the world would women in our supposedly enlightened world with decades of feminist indoctrination in the schools and our pop culture, want to spend upwards of a billion and a half dollars to read/watch about what ought to be the nightmare of feminists, a wealthy older White man who apparently uses his wealth and power and *GASP* dare I say privilege to seduce a virginal, younger woman and dominate her? Everything about this storyline seems to run precisely counter to what women are supposed to truly crave. Wouldn't a better story line that would appeal to women like this be something like a professional woman, like a high power lawyer, who has a mutually respectful but open relationship with a guy who is an artist of some sort and works at Whole Foods to make ends meet but who mostly depends on his much smarter, more worldly and far more successful female life partner to pay the bills while he keeps their condo clean, feeds the cats and cleans the litter box and makes cruelty free, fair trade vegan meals and rubs her feet when she gets home?

Curiouser and curiouser.

My theory is probably not surprising. Men and women are men and women and you can market and indoctrinate the crap out of them but that doesn't change their basic nature. The Bible is again proven to be accurate in describing the human condition when it comes to gender (ex. Genesis 3:16 ). When these modern, feminism-saturated, independent, strong women get a few minutes to themselves, one hundred million or so of them read about or watched a movie about a man who sexually dominates a woman. Tens of millions more read various romance novels, including the wildly popular Amish romance genre and the Amish idea of gender is about as counter-cultural as you can get. It is almost like women really are actually craving a strong man who will lead in their relationship instead of some flaccid, milquetoast Nancy-boy that has to ask his life partner to open the pickle jar for him.

Feminism is an agenda driven ideology that really has morphed into a matriarchal religion, a religious worldview that has been mostly destructive to women, to men and to children and families. The ideas that it claims to put forth, like equality of opportunity, have long since come to fruition and what we see now are mostly policies and positions that can only be properly described as anti-male, anti-children and anti-family. The future is not female but to ensure a better future for females we must collectively reject the lies of feminism for the sake of our wives, sisters, mothers and daughters.

Repost: Headcovering: Now More Than Ever

About a year ago I posted this little essay on the topic of headcovering. Given the absolute trainwreck that is happening in our culture, headcovering seems like a pretty minor topic. Don't we have bigger fish to fry? I would argue that we will never be truly faithful in the big stuff if we neglect the "small" stuff. I say "small" because nothing recorded in Scripture is small or minor. As we observe our cultural crashing down around us, it is more important than ever that we stand firmly on Scripture. It will increasingly set us apart as peculiar and "out of step" but that is how we should have been all along. So here is my post from last year, maybe you will find it interesting.

As an aside here are a couple of fairly recent posts from others on the topic of headcovering:

Should Single Women Wear Head Coverings?

Why I Love To Wear A Head Covering
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Now I commend you because you remember me in everything and maintain the traditions even as I delivered them to you. But I want you to understand that the head of every man is Christ, the head of a wife is her husband, and the head of Christ is God. Every man who prays or prophesies with his head covered dishonors his head, but every wife who prays or prophesies with her head uncovered dishonors her head, since it is the same as if her head were shaven. For if a wife will not cover her head, then she should cut her hair short. But since it is disgraceful for a wife to cut off her hair or shave her head, let her cover her head. For a man ought not to cover his head, since he is the image and glory of God, but woman is the glory of man. For man was not made from woman, but woman from man. Neither was man created for woman, but woman for man. That is why a wife ought to have a symbol of authority on her head, because of the angels. Nevertheless, in the Lord woman is not independent of man nor man of woman; for as woman was made from man, so man is now born of woman. And all things are from God. Judge for yourselves: is it proper for a wife to pray to God with her head uncovered? Does not nature itself teach you that if a man wears long hair it is a disgrace for him, but if a woman has long hair, it is her glory? For her hair is given to her for a covering. If anyone is inclined to be contentious, we have no such practice, nor do the churches of God. (1 Corinthians 11:2-16)

This is a weird passage for a lot of Christians, one that makes a lot of people uncomfortable. It deals with a couple of awkward issues, like submission and a command to wear something on your head. You can see this awkwardness in the general way that it is treated in most sermons when the pastor comes to this passage and generally skips past it as fast as he can, The typical treatment of these verses is to dismiss them based on an alleged, unspoken cultural question that really has no bearing on the church today in our enlightened age. In general it is dismissed as a quaint, kind of confusing cultural relic that has no place in our modern church.

I would argue just the opposite. My wife has covered for many years, even when she was the only person in a gathering who did so. The practice kind of was in vogue in some circles a few years back and I blogged a bit about it but seems to have cooled off. Here in 2015 I am hoping to revive this conversation because if ever there was a time when the church needed it, it is now. I am not going to go back through and review the arguments for an actual covering versus long hair or a covering being replaced by a wedding ring, I have posts on those topics already if you are interested.

A covering is more than just an external sign of a submissive heart, although it is not less than that, The covering is also a quiet act of subversion against the culture that tells us that gender, like race, is whatever you want it to be, whatever you feel like at that moment. The covering reminds us that God intentionally made man and He intentionally made woman, He made them in a specific way and order and He made them to be distinct, interdependent and complementary. The two genders and how God designed them to relate with one another is integral to God's design for humanity and even for His plan of salvation. When we read the opening of the Gospel according to Matthew we see the genealogy of Jesus Christ, generation after generation. When we see the curse in Genesis 3 we also see the promise that would be fulfilled in Christ Jesus through the seed of the woman. When we see the promise to Abraham we know that it is fulfilled in the children of the union between man and woman. The covering is a critical, external symbol of recognition of the pivotal place of gender. Absolutely the heart is even more critical in this equation but you simply cannot negate the external sign commanded in Scripture, just as Christians are called to actually be baptized in water as an external sign of an inward reality.

As I said, the covering is a subversive statement today, a counter-cultural act that quietly witnesses to and stands in defiance of the prevailing culture. The culture says "be whatever you want to be, feel free to mutilate the canvas of your flesh". The cover says "I am a daughter of the Most High, made as a woman in His image and by His design and for His glory". The culture says "Men and women are indistinguishable and interchangeable" , the covering says "I am unique and irreplaceable as a woman and I have no desire to be a man". A woman with a covered head leaves no doubt as to the nature of men and women and her embrace of how God has made her. A husband blessed to have a wife at his side with a covering is a witness to the complementary nature of the genders and a recognition of his own incompleteness apart from his spouse. I don't want a woman who looks and acts like a man, I want a woman who is "a helper fit for him" (Gen 2:18).

The culture wars are over and the religious right lost. The casual immorality and confusion we see all around us speaks this truth loud and clear. Now is the time for the quiet way of the cross, a way that does not shout or seek power but also does not seek to hide or accommodate. Rather than seeking to blend in through capitulation or fighting for the last vestiges of political coercive power, we instead can follow a third way of quiet subversion via witness. The covering is an ancient symbol but one that carries with it powerful ramifications and a similarly powerful witness without saying a word. It says to the world that no matter what the nonsensical, ignorant chattering heads on The View or the writers of People magazine have to say, God has already spoken definitively on the question of men and women.

Sometimes the ancient practices are the best response to the modern errors.

Swing And A Miss

I know Bo is kinda distracting but I love me
some Bo Jackson.

Baseball is a game of inches, especially at the Major League level. The difference between a great hitter like Miguel Cabrera hitting a fast ball and missing it is usually determined by a tiny difference in when and where he swings. I would say the same is true in theology. Usually the most dangerous false teachers are not nutjobs like Jim Jones, David Koresh or Victor Hafichuk because they are obviously crazy. No, the really dangerous false teachers and teachings are those that modify Scripture just a little bit. Even among generally orthodox Christians this can be true.

I was reminded of this when I saw an article from the Gospel Coalition on headcovering by Benjamin Merkle, Should Women Wear Head Coverings? .The genesis of his essay is the very real problem posed to complementarians when they talk about why women are forbidden to teach men in the church. A common response, one I have gotten several times, is to ask why passages like 1 Timothy 2:13-14 are universal and binding but the church doesn't teach that women should wear a covering apart from some rare examples in Reformed churches, the "Plymouth Brethren" and conservative Anabaptist groups. It is a legit issue, one I have raised before. I can answer someone who asks that question by affirming that my wife does indeed wear a covering and that she is the one who broached the topic with me, not the other way around but most other Christians need to come up with a legit excuse. This is pretty typical of the response. Benjamin affirms that both passages above make their argument from creation but then says it doesn't apply to headcoverings:

A closer examination of the two texts, however, shows it’s consistent to reject the need for women to wear head coverings (1 Cor. 11) while affirming they are not to teach or have authority over men (1 Tim. 2). The reason for this distinction is that in 1 Corinthians 11 Paul only indirectly uses the argument from creation to affirm head coverings for women. The direct application of his reasoning is to show that creation affirms gender and role distinctions between men and women. Therefore, Paul’s argument from creation which demonstrates men and women are distinct cannot be culturally relegated. The application of this principle (i.e., head coverings), then, can and does change with culture. In contrast, the argument from creation in 1 Timothy 2 applies directly to Paul’s prohibition, and therefore is not culturally conditioned.

He later says that coverings only point to a greater reality:

Third, it’s important to notice the passive nature of a head covering. A head covering was a sign or symbol pointing to a greater reality. It had no meaning in itself, but was a concrete expression of an intangible truth. Thus, Paul isn’t concerned with head coverings per se. Rather, he’s concerned with the meaning that wearing a head covering conveys.

I see where Benjamin is going astray here. I would heartily affirm that headcoverings are not the main question. Male headship based on the created order is. Amen! However that doesn't negate the fact that women in the early church, not just in Corinth, wore a visible, recognizable symbol for submission to male headship in the covering. The problem is his assumption that while in the early church, and the broader church for much of post-resurrection history, women did cover their heads, they don't have to today:

Christian women are not required to wear head coverings today when praying, since the symbol of a woman’s head being covered is different today than it was during the time of Paul (at least in many cultures).

OK, so what is this different symbol. How does a typical evangelical Christian wife in an evangelical church setting demonstrate the principal involved here? *crickets*. What about long hair? What about a wedding ring? The problem here is that neither of those indicate submission to male headship. Lots of women, including single women, have long hair but no one looks at a long haired woman and assumes she is a Christian submitting to her husband's male headship. The wedding ring is worse because most people that are married wear those and women who are anything but submitting to their husband's headship wear them. Of course there is also the problem of substituting something (jewelry) for headcovering when the wearing of external adornment is problematic at best and we are never given permission to do so in Scripture. What we end up with is a muddled argument from Benjamin that demonstrates that he doesn't really understand the arguments for headcovering at all. No one I know thinks headcoverings are the point in and of themselves. What we argue is that the physical, visible covering is the external symbol of headcovering is a commandment that has not been abrogated and the covering on a woman's head cannot be replicated by something else.

Let's look at a different example and apply Benjamin's reasoning. Baptism is an external sign of an internal change. I am born-again, which is not visibly apparent, so I follow the command of Scripture to be publicly baptized to show outwardly what has changed inwardly. Now the practice of baptism or ceremonial washing is deeply embedded in the culture of the 1st century. Based on his reasoning toward headcovering, we no longer use ceremonial washing in our culture so we shouldn't baptize new believers. In our culture we could maybe post on Facebook in place of baptism or tweet "Born again!". That is how people nowadays show externally to the world what is happening with them. You might say "That is silly, baptism is necessary because there is greater meaning in baptism that can't be replicated, like identifying with Christ by being buried with Him in the water and coming out of the water to represent new life!". I would say "Amen!" and "Exactly!" and then I would show how a woman having a symbol on her head to show that she is covered by male headship cannot and must not be substituted for anything else because it loses the critical symbolism. The word "head" is used for a reason and a different word makes no sense. To say that "The husband is the foot of the woman even as Christ is the foot of the church" makes no sense. The head is the top of the body, where our mind resides in our brain. Having a symbol there is not something you can substitute with something else.

I would imagine that anyone who advocates for a gender-less church and home is going to see right through Benjamin's argument because it is as flimsy and transparent as ziplock bag. I can't see how anyone who thinks women should teach men in the church and wonders why complementarians are so inconsistent in their hermeneutic is going to do anything but chuckle at his argument. I don't even think they are the audience. His audience seems to be male church leaders who bang the drum for complementary gender roles in the home and church but are afraid of saying anything that would offend evangelical women by suggesting that they need to cover their head. The hatred of Muslims in our culture doesn't help because a lot of people assume if my wife has her head covered she is either a Muslim or Amish. Where we live that isn't the case because so many women cover but in most of America that has been true. I would say that fear is the same reason we don't hear preaching from  the pulpit about why women shouldn't adorn themselves because in our culture getting dressed up and looking good for church includes jewelry and nice clothes. A pastor who depends on the offering plate for his living is probably dumb to suggest that those who put the money in the plate shouldn't get dressed in external adornment and instead should dress modestly in a comprehensive manner. This essay from the Gospel Coalition is completely counter-productive, providing flimsy cover (pun intended) for those who are afraid of offending the church with such a primitive notion like headcovering while at the same time confirming to those who oppose Biblical gender roles that we are hypocritical and inconsistent.

I know some may wonder why worry about something this silly when we have Planned Parenthood aborting babies. Let's fight the demonic anti-Christ of "choice" and leave this sort of stuff to the theologians. I don't see this as an "either-or" situation. Here is why.

First the obvious. Nothing is in Scripture by accident or as a superfluous detail. Everything that was preserved by God's sovereignty was preserved for our benefit. If Paul took the time to address headcovering in a church with issues like unrepentant and perverse sexual sin (1 Cor 5:9-13), we should not be so quick to dismiss it.

Second, those two issues are not distinct and unrelated, to the contrary they are very much related. The move to a consequence-less sexual free-for-all that has led to abortion on demand to sweep the results of promiscuity under the rug is the same movement that denies gender distinctions in the home and church. We have got to stop treating issues that face the church as if they are unrelated to one another!

In other words there are no unrelated issues in the church because they all have a common authoritative source, namely the Bible. Give Benjamin's article a read and see if you agree with my assessment.

I feel guilty, gimme a job!

This post has so many of my most favoritest stuffs. Professional paid "ministry", women in church leadership and of course the ever-present entitlement mentality. It is like an early Christmas present! I present to you Women, Leadership, and Guilt by Sharon Hodde Miller and posted by Ed Stetzer. Sharon is a "recent doctoral graduate of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School" and in her research she discovered that many women who are pursuing formal theological vocational education feel guilty about it. See below:

What happens when you discern a call to ministry that seems totally impractical? What happens when you enroll in seminary without any assurance of a future job?

Those are the uncertainties facing the women I interviewed for my doctoral research last year. I sat down with female seminary students at three conservative, evangelical seminaries for the primary purpose of understanding “what worked.” What encouraged them to enroll in seminary when so few of their peers do the same?

Throughout the course of my research, I discovered numerous encouraging findings about how church leaders are identifying the gifts of women and equipping them for ministry. However I also uncovered a surprising obstacle. In addition to the expected hurdles of tuition costs and lack of job prospects, I found that over a third of the women wrestled with an abiding sense of guilt.

One woman confessed, “I thought maybe I was being selfish by wanting to attend. Like, I wanted to prepare myself for my career, instead of supporting my husband’s.” Another woman also admitted to feeling selfish for enrolling, that she ought to “give to people instead of giving to [herself].” One student described her own feelings of “guilt and shame,” while another expressed her fear of attending seminary “for the wrong reasons.”

Keep in mind that feeling guilty is about the worst thing that can happen to someone in our culture. If someone feels guilty or ashamed or anything other than warm and fuzzy, that means that someone else has done something bad and must be punished. This nonsense infects the "Christians" part of out society in much the same way it does the broader culture.

She does make an accidental correct point:

No Christian tradition denies the goodness of women equipping themselves to better serve God, so this sentiment is terribly misplaced.

Amen to that, the church absolutely ought to be very concerned with equipping our sisters. The question is not quite that simple because from that statement she makes a number of leaps including the grossly erroneous notion that equipping anyone in the church, male or female, requires or suggests formal theological training leading to a job at a seminary. In contrast we see that when Paul wrote to Titus he set out for us how we should equip women as well as the setting:

Older women likewise are to be reverent in behavior, not slanderers or slaves to much wine. They are to teach what is good, and so train the young women to love their husbands and children, to be self-controlled, pure, working at home, kind, and submissive to their own husbands, that the word of God may not be reviled. (Titus 2:3-5)

So what is the proper way for women to be equipped in the church? It is a lot like the way men should be equipped, namely by the emulation of more mature Christians. In contrast to the "send more women to seminary" model being espoused here, what Paul commends is that younger women learn from older women right where they are and that what they are to learn is how to behave respectfully and reverently, to love their husband and their children, to keep the home and submit to their husband as the church submits to Christ. In the pages of Scripture we have no example of women leaving home to get a vocational ministry degree in order to be a leader in the church. Of course there isn't an example of that for men either. What this is symptomatic of is the contemporary secular mindset that demands that women have "a career of their own" to be fulfilled, a mindset that has been immeasurably damaging to our broader culture and even more so in the church. Of course what the Scriptures have to say on this topic isn't all that important in light of our enlightened modern sensibilities. What is really important is that some women feel guilty about this whole thing!

What then is the solution to this guilt? Well if you are unsure if you can get a job and that makes you anxious, then we should create more jobs for ya!

"In addition to providing more paying jobs for women with ministry gifts, church leaders need to be intentional about how they talk about gifts—not only the gifts of women, but men also." 

So....some women feel guilty about getting an expensive degree from seminary so to assuage that guilt the church should make up yet another paid job in "ministry"? A chicken in every pot and a full-time staff job for every seminary grad? This just assumes an endless pot of money to provide paychecks to everyone that wants a church job. Given the decline in attendance, that just doesn't make a whole bunch of sense, setting aside how unscriptural it is on so many levels.

I must have missed the part in Scripture where the church exists to provide full employment for people who feel "called" to ministry. How about we encourage people to minister right where they are rather than insisting that they have to get specialized vocational training and in turn demanding a paycheck to minister? What we need in the church are not more "paying jobs" for men or for women but more engagement from the rank and file who sits mutely by while the professionals are expected to do the work of ministry. That is true for men and for women.

One would be hard pressed to argue that women need less help in caring for their home and family and more help in getting a seminary degree. As I have argued for, well pretty much for as long as I have been blogging, if we really want to help our sisters in the church we ought to be telling them "It is OK to want to be home with your family". I don't know of many women who have the "being a mom and wife" thing all figured out and are bored looking for something else to do, just as I haven't met a single man who has the "being a father and husband" thing figured out.

Snarkiness aside, we have to get out of the professional ministry mindset. The best training ground for the church is right at home where we live, work and raise our families. There is a place in the church for academics and professionals but it isn't the place for most of us, not for men and especially not for our sisters who are already overburdened by the pressures of raising a family and caring for a home in our modern era. The best teachers in the church are not the guys with the fancy degrees and a litany of letters after their name but rather are the men and women who live the lives others ought to emulate. You don't have to go to a seminary to find them, they probably live right by you and best of all watching and imitating them is free!

Ecumenism is not the same thing as unity

In less than a week religious leaders from around the world and across the religious spectrum will gather in Vatican City under the authority of the Roman Catholic Church to discuss marriage. The conference, called Humanum, purports to be "An International Interreligious Colloquium on The Complementarity of Man and Woman". If you read me very often you know that I am a big advocate of complementarianism so surely I am all in favor of this. Actually no. Quite the opposite.

When I examine the speaker list as an American evangelical I see some names I recognize and a lot I don't. At the top of the list that I do recognize are men like: Russell Moore. N.T. Wright. Rick Warren. Johann Arnold, current leader of the Bruderhof. Along with them are a host of men and

women from other religious traditions, or as I like to call them false religions. A whole bunch of Roman Catholic dignitaries who ironically are forced into an unbiblical vow of celibacy and yet are considered authorities on marriage. A top mormon leader. A lot of Muslims. A smattering of more esoteric religious groups. What is glaring from the invitee list is that there are a few people who are Christians and a lot more that are not talking about something that models and demonstrates the New Covenant relationship between Christ and the Church.

An event like this doesn't happen in a vacuum. Like two sides of a sand dune, the dual forces of the cultural religion of America are collapsing at breakneck speed. While "progressives" are racing one another to see who can deny the most central tenets of the Gospel, the "conservatives" are desperately making alliances with unbelievers and blasphemers in a desperate attempt to maintain their political power and influence. As a result many men that I respect and that publically hold to the "right" positions are nevertheless making common cause on issues they would admit are secondary to the Gospel. It is symptomatic of the mindset that compelled Albert Mohler to not once but twice speak to mormons about our common ground. It brings to mind the Manhattan Declaration and other attempts to find common ground where the sole foundation for common ground is absent, namely the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Make no mistake. To speak to people who deny Christ in a framework of the picture of husband and wife as a type of Christ and the church is to put the cart before the horse. Worse yet is for a Christian to attempt to speak on marriage without framing it in that way. You simply cannot truly begin to understand the blessing of marriage apart from the New Covenant relationship with Christ. Sure I loved my wife and cherished her and all of that before I was a Christian but I didn't understand what it meant to be united with her in a complementary relationship and I still am only scratching the surface of how I am to love her like Christ loved the church. Christian marriage as ordained by God is so much more than two people of the opposite sex pledging themselves to one another until death do us part and seeking some sort of fuzzy common ground, lowest common denominator definition and understanding of marriage inevitably diminishes marriage as instituted by our Creator.

Just to clear the air, yes what I am saying here is that Christians corner the market on understanding marriage. No, that doesn't mean that Christians are better at being married, that they make better husbands or wives or that unbelievers can't have fulfilling, loving marriages. It is simply to say that any understanding of marriage apart from the New Covenant in Christ is by definition incomplete and inferior. That sort of talk makes a lot of people twitchy. Too bad. In fact if you don't believe that I might gently suggest that you don't really understand the New Covenant, the eternal purpose of marriage (hint, it ain't about tax breaks and wedding registries) and the grand design of humanity made in the image of God as two distinct, equal, immutable and complementary genders.

Traditional marriage is not the Gospel. Religious liberty, whatever that means, is not the Gospel. Complementarianism is not the Gospel. The Gospel is the Gospel. What is on display here is trying to find unity in spite of the Gospel when the church can only have unity because of the Gospel. That unity is impossible to have with groups, sects and cults that deny that same Gospel that not only saves us but defines marriage for us. Russell Moore, anticipating the objections to his attendance, posted a preemptive strike with his post Why I’m Going to the Vatican. While I don't doubt the sincerity of his words and his conviction, his excuses ring hollow to me. The best thing he could do in an assembly hall full of unbelievers is not to talk about marriage but to preach Christ and Him crucified and call on those present to repent and be baptized. To do anything else is a betrayal of the Great Commission, even if done for the noblest of intentions.

I am going to try to watch and read what I can from this conference because it should be interesting. I suspect that it will be a lot of eloquent speech that amounts to nothing. I hope that in their time in Vatican City my Christian brothers have the opportunity to share the Gospel with the lost among them and that the Holy Spirit would soften those hearts. We can't preach marriage without preaching Christ. I pray that the fruit of this conference is not merely lovely speeches but changed hearts that are turned to Jesus Christ our Lord. 

The Institutional Mindset and Gender Roles

There are some conversations that keep coming around and around so I blog about them again and again. Reformed theology used to be one of those but I haven't bothered in a while because it has been hashed over so many times that it just wore me out and the Arminian answers are just so awful. So now I write about things like non-violence which also gets a visceral reaction and of course gender. Today was one of those gender days and as usual the discussion has gone around in circles, circles based on whether we should examine what Scripture says to inform our decisions on application or whether we should look to see what Scripture doesn't say to override what it does. I know that is a loaded and smarmy statement. 

One of the common arguments against the historical and I would say glaringly clear teaching on gender in the Bible is the notion that Paul is addressing an issue in the culture of the day, making concessions or teaching for pragmatic reasons or dealing with some specific problem. The accuracy of this is pretty easy to ascertain by simply reading what Paul wrote. What is Paul's reasoning for his teaching on gender (emphasis mine)?

I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man; rather, she is to remain quiet. For Adam was formed first, then Eve; and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor. (1 Tim 2:12-14)

Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands.

(Eph 5:22-24)

But I want you to understand that the head of every man is Christ, the head of a wife is her husband, and the head of Christ is God. (1 Cor 11:3)

For a man ought not to cover his head, since he is the image and glory of God, but woman is the glory of man. For man was not made from woman, but woman from man. Neither was man created for woman, but woman for man. (1 Cor 11:7-9)

So we have the creation order. We have the relationship between Christ and the church. We have man as the glory of God but women as the glory of man. An image of male headship that is not incidental or cultural but intentional. God could have created Adam and Eve simultaneously but He did not. He made Adam, declared him incomplete and in need of a helper and created Eve out of Adam. There is a very explicit pattern here that is repeated in 1 Corinthians 11:7-9 and it deals with the order and method of creation.

So what we have to work with is sufficient to inform our interpretation and application but what we don't have is almost as important. No hint of the culture of that day. No suggestion of pragmatic reasoning. Nothing that implies that this is something only for this time and place, having no universal application. I have said this all before but many who find the Biblical teaching on gender odious and embarrassing in our enlightened era simply refuse to accept it.

Here is what is so troubling about this to me. Because we can't get past our institutional religious setting we think that "If you ain't a pastor, you ain't nothing". The only service and leadership in the church that matters is "preaching". Ironically "preaching" as we understand it doesn't even appear in Scripture so we have elevated an extra-biblical practice to a position of overwhelming prominence and in doing so have diminished every other calling in the church and especially diminished the calling of wives and mothers. This is true even among those who, on the surface, reject institutional religion but still can't let go of that need for ecclesiastical recognition.

Being a mother and raising children. Caring for the home. Submitting to a husband who is often an idiot but needs your support anyway. Those are infinitely more important and difficult than preparing and delivering a 45 minute sermon once a week that no one will remember next month anyway. The church should be doing everything in our power to support and encourage our sisters in this noble endeavor. Instead we subtly look down on them and say they are not good enough. You need a career! You must be allowed to "preach"! You must be granted a religious title! Being a mother and wife is hard enough without piling on extra expectations. The simple fact of human beings is that we cannot do it all. We are not made to do it all. There are 24 hours in a day and about a third of them we need to sleep. There are only a limited number of years to bear children. We exist in time and space so if you are in location A doing activity Y you cannot also be in location B doing activity Z. We should encourage wives in what they already have on their plates instead of piling on more. 

Being a mom and wife is stressful enough without making our sisters feel like they are not doing enough. If you care about women, care enough to affirm and support their calling as women and quit trying to make them into something that God never intended regardless of what the culture around us might say.

Dividing Over Gender

Not sure how I missed this. In November a fairly prominent commentator on religion called for a wholesale schism in the church. Now if you don't know anything about this you might assume that one of those terrible complementarians is calling for schism in the church, since they are bad people and all. You would be wrong. No, the person calling for schism a month and a half ago is none other than Tony Jones, he of the so-called "red letter Christian" camp. Here is what he said in November:

The time has come for a schism regarding the issue of women in the church. Those of us who know that women should be accorded full participation in every aspect of church life need to visibly and forcefully separate ourselves from those who do not. Their subjugation of women is anti-Christian, and it should be tolerated no longer.

That means:

• If you attend a church that does not let women preach or hold positions of ecclesial authority, you need to leave that church.
• If you work for a ministry that does not affirm women in ecclesial leadership, you need to leave that ministry.
• If you write for a publishing house that also prints books by “complementarians,” you need to take your books to another publishing house.
• If you speak at conferences, you need to withdraw from all events that do not affirm women as speakers, teachers, and leaders.

That is, we who believe in the full equality of women need to break fellowship with those who do not. The time for dialogue and debate has passed. The Spirit has spoken, and we have listened. It’s time to move forward with full force.

Well there you go, you have your marching orders. According to Tony, "gay rights" is something we are still working on but "The full equality of women and men, however, is an issue that has long since been settled." Well, glad he settled that for us (and defined anything other than radical egalitarianism as "inequality"). Apparently the discussion is over. I must not have been on the distribution list for that memo because I don't think the "debate" is over and settled once and for all in favor of "egalitarianism". Quite the opposite.

The sheer hubris of that is breathtaking. Here is some guy on the fringe of orthodoxy, and that is being generous, with a disturbingly large audience deciding on behalf of the church that a contentious issue is settled and anyone who doesn't agree with him should shut their yap or get in line to be voted off the church island. Tony offered a more "nuanced" position in a later post but even there he said, regarding the arguments for "full inclusion in ministry", that "Anyone who is not paying heed to those arguments is willfully ignoring them." Yeah that must be it, the old ploy of suggesting that anyone who doesn't agree with your scintillating argument must either a) not understand it or b) be willfully ignoring it because no one could study an issue and come to a contrary position. Sorry to break it to you Tony but I do understand your argument and I am not ignoring it, I am simply rejecting it. According to Tony embracing complementarianism is "anti-Christian" and "subjugation". Those who hold to that position are no longer welcome in polite company. After all "the Spirit has spoken". Not sure what he means by that but it sounds like he and other egalitarians have received some sort of special revelation that the knuckle-draggers in the complementarian ranks like me are not privy to. Not surprisingly Tony admits to being befuddled by the mere presence of complementarians, as if they are some fringe kooks that only exist in the backwoods of the less "progressive" and genteel corners of the church.

As an aside, I liked some of the comments on the article, especially the ones that point out that Tony Jones and company pick this issue to divide over but seem content to welcome pretty much any other heterodox error in the cool kids camp.

The "egalitarian" position is a pretty recent phenomena. As far as I can tell it did not have a major influence on the church until the 20th century and in many major wings of the evangelical world it still does not. Something being around a long time doesn't make it right but it does mean you should try to examine your new, enlightened understanding in view of the weight of history. My position on this question is unequivocal. Functional gender egalitarianism is based largely on conjecture and "evidence" that is not in the Bible yet trumps what the Bible explicitly teaches. I don't think my egalitarian friends are heretics, just misguided.  Yet we have people like Tony Jones calling for wholesale schism in the church, dividing the church up into two camps based on their understanding of the functional roles of men and women in the church. Ironically while Jesus never mentions egalitarianism by word or deed, He does speak powerfully about unity in the church.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I would not gather on a regular basis in a group where women teach men. I think the Biblical prohibitions against this are clear and I will not be party to someone being disobedient even if they don't think that they are. Would I refuse to share a public platform with them? Refuse to publish books from the same publisher? Would I force them into the position of being an enemy of Christianity and drum them our of the church? Would I refuse to engage in works of ministry with them? Hardly. I am not so uncertain of my positions that I fear a public discussion of them. Taking your ball and going home is childish and so is this ill-conceived call for schism in the church, especially when you hide behind "the Spirit has spoken" as your excuse.

There are some things that the church is rightly divided over. There are even some issues that we should separate over. Is gender one of those? Should we refuse to even so much as share a stage with the unclean advocate of a position on gender that we don't agree with? I don't think so. The irony of the open-minded "progressive" position being the one that is marked by sticking their collective fingers in their ears and singing "La-la-la, I can't hear you" is not lost on me. I get that my position on this issue, or at least my stridency in bringing it up, is not popular with a lot of the limited pool of my regular readers. Likewise among those that agree with me on gender there is a distaste for my less than traditional view of the church. On both issues the New Testament speaks forcefully and regularly. Because it does, I think it is an issue worth debating and discussing. I also think that chasing out anyone you disagree with is the very opposite of charitable dialogue. If we only allow people we agree with to be engaged in the conversation we end up with the sort of destructive theological in-breeding that hampers spiritual growth. Anyway feel free to tell me you think I am wrong. I won't excommunicate you over it.

Why Complementarianism?

John Piper, Tim Keller and Don Carson talk about why The Gospel Coalition is complementarian and why this is an important issue. The video is 17 minutes so it is not a quick watch and it covers some deep issues but I think it is worth your time. If you are not going to watch and interact with the video, please don't comment.

Why Is TGC Complementarian? from The Gospel Coalition on Vimeo.

 

I think Piper is at his best here and his best point is this one:

"We live in a culture where for the last 30 or 40 years, the collapse of the meaning of biblical masculinity has not produced a beautiful egalitarian society," Piper observes. "It has produced a brutal masculine society."

That is exactly true. I have been toying with a post about this but egalitarianism in the church and more broadly feminism in the culture has not made life better or happier or more fulfilling for women and it certainly has not been beneficial to families and especially not children. The only people it has benefited are those in the swelling population of child-men, men who reap the benefits of an egalitarian society but don't do much to contribute. It is the cruel irony of feminism that the primary beneficiary of feminism has been the most irresponsible of men.

This is an interesting video. Piper is right on the mark most of the time, again where he speaks of how we handle 1 Tim 2:13 or Ephesians 5 (at around the ten minute mark) and what that implies about how we handle Gospel texts as well as a powerful statement about how our unwillingness to stand against the culture on this issue speaks to whether we will stand for other issues.

I think they stretch the point a bit in places but I obviously believe this is an important issue Some suggest that these questions are divisive and distract us from the more important stuff. I reject the idea that we should ignore issues like this and just concentrate on the "big stuff". If God deigned to reveal and preserve something, He did so with a reason. As Carson points out, the relationship between husbands and wives is so deeply interwoven with so many other issues (esp. Christ and the church) that if we start to miss this issue we will start to miss other issues and pretty soon the church devolves into an anything goes religious club that does good work but misses the big truths that the church is founded on (for evidence of this see pretty much every "mainstream" and egalitarian denomination).

This is an unpopular  topic but one that demands more than platitudes and "I thinks". How we handle these passages speaks volumes about how consistent we are about other passages.

A Different Perspective

Eric Carpenter has an interesting post this morning on women and the church. Eric's title pretty much lays it out: One Good Reason For Women To Speak. Eric states up front that he is not looking at the traditional restrictive passages but instead offers up his reason why women should speak during the church assembly:

The reason: women offer a different perspective than men do.

If we are honest we will all admit that men and women are very different. This is how God made us. These differences were apparent before the fall, thus ensuring that these differences are a good thing. God has designed men and women to complement one another, not to be carbon copies of each other. Frankly, life would be a lot duller if we were all the same.

A great reason for women to speak during church assembles is that they often provide differing perspectives than men do on all sorts of things. This might mean a somewhat different interpretation of a scripture passage. More often than that, it is the application of the passage that is different. Women are usually more nurturing than men, and therefore have important things to say about passages containing the "one anothers."

What do you think about that? God clearly made men and women differenly, with few exceptions we all agree on that. The question I have is this: can we discuss this issue without addressing the verses that traditionally have been interpreted to restrict women from speaking in the church gathering, whatever that looks like?

I have disabled comments on this post, please read Eric's post and comment over there. Little surprise I disagree with his assertion but I would be interested in seeing what others have to say.

Not A Monolithic Movement

Like almost anywhere else in the church, the house/simple/organic church is not a monolithic movement although it is sometimes stereotyped that way. There are Arminians and Calvinists, home schoolers and public schoolers, complementarians and egalitarians.

For example, Frank Viola posted today on the topic of women in ministry, Rethinking Women in Ministry. Ironically it seems he views "ministry" in the same way that the traditional church does, namely as the person "leading" from "up front". His essay is being widely read and cited today. I found it pretty lacking in persuasion if not in volume but then again I already have a pretty firm position on this issue. While Frank's position is the majority report among simple/house church types (notably also Jon Zens, another prominent leader in the house church setting that holds to egalitarianism), it is by no means the only view.

A Facebook friend, who seemingly disagrees with me and agrees in part with Frank, sent me a great link to something written by Steve Atkerson writing for the New Testament Reformation Fellowship, has a very different and far more traditional understanding of gender relations and functions in the church. His essays, Correctly Interpreting 1 Corinthians 14:33b-35 (Part 1) and (Part 2) come to a very different conclusion than Viola. No surprise I find Steve's essay far more compelling and a lot better interaction with the text rather than appealing to external sources to override the text in favor of a culturally palatable interpretation. I especially appreciate that Steve makes the obvious point, one that is missed by many who quote 1 Cor 11: 2-16 as a defense of women teaching/speaking in the gathered church, namely that those passages in no way refer specifically or even infer that they are directed at church gatherings.

Anyway, these are great essays on both sides and they demonstrate that far from being a simplistic, lowest common denominator movement, many proponents and practitioners are in fact serious Biblical exegetes who take the Word of God and its study quite seriously. If you have a fair amount of time, give both of them a read and let me know what you think!

The cult of child hatred

James Taranto, a secular editor for the Wall Street Journal, posted an interesting item last week as part of his popular "best of the web today" column, The War on Fertility. James was looking at an essay by Lisa Miller in the Washington Post, Romney, Santorum and archaic ideas on fertility. Apparently Ms. Miller takes umbrage that some Republican presidential candidates have large families and have the arrogance to not hide them away during the campaign. If you missed this column, you need to read it because it is equal parts fascinating look into the anti-child mindview and important lesson for believers. Here is the intro...

Between them, Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum have as many children — 12 — as there were tribes of Israel. Ron Paul has five of his own, and in an early debate, perhaps unwilling to be outdone by Michele Bachmann’s fostering of dozens, Paul boasted that when he worked as a physician he delivered “4,000 babies.”


There’s nothing wrong with big families, of course. But the smug fecundity of the Republican field this primary season has me worried. Their family photos, with members of their respective broods spilling out to the margins, seem to convey a subliminal message that goes far beyond a father’s pride in being able to field his own basketball team. What the Republican front-runners seem to be saying is this: We are like the biblical patriarchs. As conservative religious believers, we take seriously the biblical injunction to be fruitful and multiply.

Especially worrisome is the inevitable corollary to that belief: Women should put their natural fertility first — before their brains, before their ability to earn a living, before their independence — because that’s what God wants.

Gasp, there is nothing worse than a believer that...believes! It cracks me up that she has assigned a blanket, unspoken motivation that covers all of the past and present republican candidates even though that group contains a libertarian Christian man in his 70's, a much younger evangelical woman, a Roman Catholic and a mormon. She seems more put out by large, intact families than by Newt Gingrich and his serial adultery.

Needless to say, when she writes "There's nothing wrong with big families, of course", it is inevitable that she does think there is something very wrong with having a large family, namely that having a large family and daring to show them in public is somehow striking a blow against "women's reproductive freedom". How else to explain the "smug fecundity" of these...these....parents!

Of particular and unpleasant interest are the comments that follow her essay. If you thought she was a bit over the top, you ain't seen nothing yet! It is always instructive as well as ironic to read the vitriolic rants of people spewing hatred, stereotypes and intolerance toward those they accuse of....hatred, stereotypes and intolerance.

I have never, not once, heard anyone among the "Christian right" tout any of the candidates for their large family size. That doesn't mean that nobody has made that case but I haven't seen it and I certainly spend more than my fair share of time reading places where that should come up. This isn't really an issue among the "Christian right" at all as much as it is a visceral reaction among the secular Left to large families, at least large in the eyes of people in New York, D.C. and Los Angeles what qualifies as a large family. Where we live a family with five kids is not all that unusual but I can assure you that even in the Midwest large families garner a gasp and head shake response, perhaps more polite than in larger population centers but a shocked and disbelieving reaction regardless.

Although many people would classify me as intolerant because, for example, I think murdering unborn children is wrong, I don't presume to tell anyone else how many children to have. Of course I also don't presume to tell anyone how many children are enough. I think that decision is something left to each family to decide for themselves. For Christians it becomes more complex because we do have some explicit teaching from the Bible that describes children as a blessing from God which we ought to embrace rather than avoid, something that is formative rather than something to put off until the last moment. That doesn't mean that the Quiverfull folks are correct but I certainly am more sympathetic to their view than those who view children in a manner little different from the world.

That really isn't my point here. It is hardly news that "traditional" families seem to agitate people of a certain political viewpoint, especially if they are large families. Of greater concern to me, and what is sure to get some people wound up, is the way that feminism is being integrated into the church. From Taranto's post:

...why does it so bother Miller that the Romneys, Santorums and Pauls (and also the Palins, whom she mentions in another paragraph) made the choice to have large families? If she cared about choice, she would recognize it's none of her business. But contemporary feminism does not actually value choice, except as a means to an ideological end, which is the obliteration of differences between the sexes. The biggest such difference consists in the distinct and disparate demands that reproduction makes on women. Thus in order to equalize the sexes, it is necessary to discourage fertility. Implicit in contemporary feminism is a normative judgment that having children is bad.

James Taranto, an admitted unbeliever, seems to understand something that a lot of Christians are missing. Feminism is not a force for the "liberation" of women, it is a method for ideological transformation. A lot of Christian are buying into a form of feminism dressed up in Christian sounding language and in doing so are unwittingly buying into a worldview that has a goal far beyond women pastors. It is a worldview that diminishes the importance of family, replaces mothers with institutionalized childcare and ultimately denies the image-bearer understanding of humanity as unique in the world. It is lived out in the disbelieving looks large families get and the subtle insults (don't you know what causes that?) even in the church and in the burgeoning literature of neo-feminist Christians who consistently misinterpret and misrepresent Galatians 3:28.

I make no apology for sounding the warning against the influence of feminism in the church. To me it is no different than any other worldly influence, whether patriotism or materialism or environmentalism, that seeks to pervert and diminish the worldview that should be the focus of Christians. Just as patriotism conflates national identity with the church and militarism flips the peacemaking life of the disciple on its head, feminism seeks to replace the complementary and interdependent structure of the family with the radical but false independent life that reduces women to occasional baby-makers before sending them back into the work force as a unit of production. Let me be clear, women are not "liberated" by going to work outside of the home. We are living in a culture that rapidly is becoming one where staying at home, once the norm, is becoming something only the very well to do can afford (see this excellent comment on this very topic by the same columnist, James Taranto: The Unchained Woman). When staying at home with your children becomes a sort of luxury good and status symbol, who is really benefiting from feminism? Not the women who scramble all week to get their kids up, ready for school and daycare, rush to drop them off before trudging off to work only to do the same scramble in reverse at the end of the day. Certainly not the children who are raised by and large by strangers because the harried schedule of their parents and economic pressure of a two-income society reserves full-time parenting to the country club elites.

As the church we are called to look at life and the world differently, to not be carried along by every wind and whim of the culture but to hold fast to the timeless and counter-cultural teaching of Scrpture. This is true for the family more than almost any other facet of life and not surprisingly the family is often ground zero for attacks from the Enemy. Not every Christians is called or able to have a large family and having a large family is not a sure sign of theological maturity but we must be wary of worldviews that teach beliefs that run contrary to the Bible. Even if those beliefs are not overtly anti-Christian we must examine the underlying worldview of those who teach worldviews contrary to Scripture, whether in the family, in education, in the church or anywhere else. Although some honest opponents of the faith will be open about their opposition, many others utilize a more subtle influence that often is dressed in religious language and aimed at tickling our ears. We must constantly be wary and hold up every belief to the Word and the influence of the Spirit working in conjunction. Otherwise we invariably will be led astray by those who deny the Son of God. The more we look and think like the world, the less we look and think like Jesus.

Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect. (Romans 12:2)

Focusing on can rather than can't

Few discussions in the church generate more heat and less light than gender discussions. As a topic it is heavily influenced by our prevailing culture which makes it doubly difficult to have a calm discussion. This is tragic because it is an important topic to understand, both from an interpretive standpoint (for example why Jesus speaking to the woman at the well was so scandalous) and from the standpoint of practice in the church and in the family. It is easy for me to point the finger at those who I believe are influenced by the prevailing feminism of the day and are trying to force those contemporary cultural mores into the Scripture. I make no apology for that but I also recognize that on our end those holding to and advocating for a more traditional understanding of gender roles have done a pretty poor job of approaching a topic that carries so much cultural and emotional baggage. Part of the problem has been that we somehow have ended up with Mark Driscoll as the most visible figure in the complementarian camp. That certainly doesn’t help especially given the serious scholars and academic work that has been done by less…flashy…spokesmen, men like Wayne Grudem and John Piper. The other problem, and the one that I think is far more crucial, is the way the issue has been framed.

I think we have gone the wrong way by focusing on what women can't do instead of encouraging them in what they are called to do. Most arguments about gender roles, complementarianism vs egalitarianism, patriarchy vs Christian feminism, whatever you call it focus on the negatives and go like this:

- Women can't be elders. Yes they can!
- Women can't teach men. Yes they can!
- Women are to be silent in church. No they aren't!
- Wives are to submit to their husbands as to the Lord. No they aren’t!

Round and around we go, getting angrier and more strident as we do. Whether these are valid and applicable, and I believe they are, it turns discussion on gender to the negative leaving complementarians saying "You cannot" and egalitarians saying "Sure you can!". The debate centers around restrictions on what the church, wrongly, assumes to be crucial functions like "preaching" and often ignores what women are called to do which tend to be overwhelmingly what the Bible values most highly, functions like serving and caring for others.

Let's face it, no one likes to be told what they can't do.

Conversely, telling someone what they want to hear is always easier but it is rarely helpful.

Our sisters don’t need us to tell them what they can’t do as much as they need us to support and encourage and equip them to fulfill the noble calling of being a wife and mother. This requires two steps.

The first is kind of easy, at least compared to the second….

We as men in the church absolutely need to equip and encourage our sisters who are married in their calling as wives and mothers. The Bible speaks both positively about what women are called to, whether through example (like Mary anointing the feet of Jesus with oil and wiping His feet with her hair) and through exhortation (Titus 2:3-5; 1 Peter 3:1-6 ). There is a virtually unlimited need for the sort of service and ministry that women are not only called to but inarguably best suited for. We don’t need more people to give sermons or lead worship music or teach Sunday school. There is plenty of that already going on. We do need more serving of others, more loving homes, more mentoring of younger women by older women. This is not true just for our sisters who are already married with children. We also need to prepare our daughters and other unmarried sisters for this calling, not by sitting around pining for a husband but by ministering in and out of the Body in the ways that honor God and their calling as women and sisters in Christ. Being engaged in service and ministry before marriage is some of the best training to be a wife and mother that serves and ministers later on.

The second step is much harder, at least for me. The church desperately needs for men to step up so women don't have to fill in the gaps. That doesn’t involve watching mixed martial arts on pay-per-view, just FYI. I doubt that outside of a few ideologues who have an agenda to pursue that you would find many wives who don’t wish that their husbands would step up more in the church and the home. I fail at this on a regular basis and I am guessing most other men do as well. For the complementarian position to work, both sides need to be complementing the other and this often is an unbalanced situation where wives carry the lions share of the relationship.

If men would do a better job of encouraging women in their calling and serving as God has called them to do, I think a lot of the squabbling over gender roles would go away. Sure there are always going to be those who have a book to sell but among the "regular" folsk I think the debate would simmer down. A properly functioning, complementary and balanced marriage is one of the best witnesses to the world we have and the very best atmosphere for raising children but that sort of marriage won’t happen on its own. It is not enough and is in fact disingenuous to pound the pulpit about uppity women if we are not going to do everything we can as husbands to encourage our wives and rise to the challenge as men in our own callings.

I am not going to stop writing on this topic although I am aware that it rubs a lot of people who read my blog the wrong way. It is a subject that gets a lot of ink in the New Testament and that is reason enough for us to study it humbly and seek to apply what the New Testament teaches us consistently. I am going to try to spend more time focused on what our sisters are called to rather than what they are restricted from. I have made my position on the boundaries around gender roles very clear and now I need to spend more time working through how we equip women to serve in the vital ways that they have been uniquely called.

Don’t let anyone tell you that “just” being a wife and mother is something to be ashamed of or that you need to "do more" to be a valuable part of the Body of Christ. As I said, we have plenty of “preachers” in the church but we can never have enough wives and mothers carrying out that unique ministry.

Mutual Submission?

One of the most popular buzz phrases in the gender discussion is “mutual submission”. I see it all the time and it is often laid down as a conversation stopper, a trump card of sort. The notion of "mutual submission", a fairly recent invention, is based primarily on a single passage of Scripture, Ephesians 5:21, that allegedly commands all Christians to submit, without distinction or definition, to one another. That is a bold claim and one that bears examination. If it is true, then centuries of gender relationships in the church and home are out of step with the Bible. If it is false, as I will assert, then what we are seeing today is an attempt to subvert the teaching of Scripture and replacing it with a culturally palatable sidestepping of a crucial relationship.

(More after the break)

Driscoll eating his peas

(I am going to use "eating your peas" as a code for anything unpleasant in honor of our President and his condescending comments the other day. FYI. Until it gets boring.)

So Mark Driscoll posted a response of sorts to the issue raging in  the blogosphere that I blogged about yesterday. Apparently the email campaign worked, not to silence him but to call him to account a bit:

I then put a flippant comment on Facebook, and a raging debate on gender and related issues ensued. As a man under authority, my executive elders sat me down and said I need to do better by hitting real issues with real content in a real context. And, they’re right. Praise God I have elders who keep me accountable and that I am under authority.

Mark is going to actually engage the issue more, not less and I am glad for that:

So, we are working on a new website where I can speak to these real issues in a fuller context. Lord willing, sometime in September, after my trip to Turkey with my family and a lot of other people, and then some recovery time, we will launch a new website.

In the past, I’ve not had a regular place to work out personal commentary on social issues, and so I’ve erred in sometimes doing so in places like Facebook, Twitter, and the media, where you can have a good fight but don’t have the room to make a good case.

The first content on the new website will be about gender, and much of it will be around a book my wife, Grace, and I have completed together called Real Marriage: The Truth about Sex, Friendship, and Life Together, to be published by our friends at Thomas Nelson in January.

Both Grace and I will be blogging at the new site on issues related to gender and marriage, including mistakes we’ve made, sins we’ve committed, and convictions we agree on. And, we’ll have lots of other content on other issues as well. Until then, have a great summer, and a sincere thanks to all my critics who sometimes have good wisdom that helps me out.

What I am hoping comes from this is more serious writing from Driscoll and others on gender issues. We certainly need more people to talk about this given the massive confusion in the church regarding men and women and the sheer volume of references in the Bible. As I mentioned, Mark is a very bright brother and when he isn't being juvenile makes some great points. Lets hope he stays away from silliness and gets down to the serious issues.

What is up with Junia?

I read something interesting the other day regarding Junia, mentioned in Romans 16:7...

Salute Andronicus and Junia, my kinsmen, and my fellowprisoners, who are of note among the apostles, who also were in Christ before me. (Rom 16:7)

Junia is one of the many people named in passing in the Bible that we don't know much about. I imagine that during eternity we will have plenty of time to get to know them! We do know that she is known among the apostles in some way and is somehow affiliated with another relatively unknown figure, Andronicus.

Anyway, Matt Slick who writes apologetic works for CARM (Christian Apologetics and Research Ministry), penned a fairly in-depth study of Junia and what we know and more importantly what we don't know about this intriguing individual. This is especially pertinent because some people take this passage about Junia and her relationship to the apostles as "proof" that there are no gender distinctions in Scripture in terms of who leads and how they lead. Matt's article, Was Junia in Romans 16:7 a female apostle in authority? , debunks this idea.

I think what Matt's article demonstrates is that what we know of Junia is pretty sketchy. Was Junia a "he" or a "she". Probably a she. Probably. Was she an apostle or known among the apostles or known by the apostles? It depends on the translation but it certainly seems plausible that she was well known by the apostles. Who is Andronicus? Her brother or her husband? Maybe a married couple like Priscilla and Aquila. If she is a she and if she is an apostle, what does that mean? She wasn't one of the twelve. She wasn't an apostle like Paul. Who did she minister to? Who did she teach? Half of the church were probably women, so can someone be an apostle (one who is sent) and minister/teach exclusively among other women?

Junia appears all of one time. Once is enough to recognize her for who and what she is but to try to override other, more clear and explicit teachings on an uncertain reference to an otherwise unknown individual seem pretty sketchy to me. Suppositions are OK but not when we use them to trump explicit teachings.

The neo-Reformed shock jock versus the neo-feminist egalitarian

In one corner we have the bad boy of the "young, restless, reformed" crowd, Mark Driscoll.

In the other corner we have the popular egalitarian blogger/author/speaker Rachel Held Evans.

The main event? A post by Mark Driscoll on Facebook that was supposed to be funny but came across as anything but:

So, what story do you have about the most effeminate anatomically male worship leader you’ve ever personally witnessed?

Needless to say this didn't sit well.

This is going to be a long post, so I am going to throw a break in. If you are interested readig in the rest, follow the link below...

Biblical Patriarchy: A Conclusion

So after all of those lengthy posts, what exactly is my point? It is pretty simple. God created men and women differently and likewise has called them to function differently. As it relates to gender the Scriptural evidence is crystal clear and overwhelming. God has called men to sacrificial and loving leadership as the head of the home and as servants in the church. God has not called men to abuse their headship or even to focus on authority or making their wives submit. The submission of a wife to her husband is an act of obedience on the part of the woman and the sacrificial love of a husband for his wife is not predicated on her submission to her. Likewise a woman’s submission to her husband is not based on how much her husband loves her but rather how much she loves Christ.

I am a big boy. I know that there is not a single man who has ever loved his wife the way that Christ loves the church. In our sinful, finite existence it is by definition impossible. I also recognize that I especially fall far short of the mark here, both in loving my wife and in leading the family. Here’s the rub. Our perceived failures don’t give us license to rewrite the Word. We are called to roles by God and in spite of our failings the calling remains the same. The problem is not in the Scriptures, it is with us.

Taking this a step further. The failures of male headship in the church are caused by the weakness and failings of men, not with the underlying principles that are so clearly laid out for us in Scripture. The failure of Biblical male servant leadership in the church and in the home shouldn't lead us to teach our daughters to assume the roles reserved for men, it should cause us to redouble our efforts to raise our sons to be godly, humble and loving leaders in the church and home. In other words we as parents need to raise our sons to embrace loving, sacrificial Biblical headship in the home and male servant leadership the church and we need likewise to raise our daughters to seek husbands who understand, embrace and seek out their God ordained role in the church and family.

As the church we likewise need to mentor young men to be the men they should be in the home and family and provide examples for them to follow. Instead of age based segregation in the church, putting "young adults" in one class and "senior saints" in another, we should encourage the different generations to mingle and form friendships. A 65 year old brother may not be up to speed on the latest smartphones or who the coolest contemporary Christian music groups are but he has knowledge that is timeless and precious and all too often ignored and lost with each passing generation. How often are couples who have been married 40 or 50 years encouraged to form bonds with newly married couples? We don’t need to recreate the gender wheel with every couple, we have already been given timeless wisdom in the Word and invaluable experience in the older generations of Christians. Anyhoo, off my soapbox….

Have we culturally outgrown the old fashioned gender roles we see in the Bible or have we abandoned those important doctrines in favor of modern sensibilities? It strikes me that when we have a disparity between what we see in Scripture and our current cultural norms, the Bible should win out. This is true in places like sexual immorality and propitiation as well as in gender roles. Our culture today is hardly superior to that of the first century. Men and women have not fundamentally changed and the world is still in the grips of sin. Every effort to conform the Scriptures to the whims of the culture has ended disastrously.

Male headship, patriarchy, whatever you want to call it, is not merely a social construct of the ancient world that we have outgrown. It is deeply tied into the entirety of Biblical revelation from Genesis up to the image of the church as the Bride of Christ. While the term and the idea have been hijacked by some in the so-called "patriarchy movement" that doesn't mean that the underlying idea of male headship in the home and church, demonstrated by humble and loving servant leadership, should be discarded in favor of a more socially acceptable egalitarianism. Our standard is always the Word of God and the consistent theme throughout Scripture is of different and complementary roles for men and women that are established in Genesis, demonstrated in the Old Testament and reinforced strongly in the New Testament. What is acceptable to the culture, what is pragmatic, what is equitable is irrelevant to those who follow Christ.

A quick word regarding the so-called “Biblical Patriarchy movement”. I am not a part of this movement, nor do I seek to be part of any other “movement” whether it be homeschooling, Reformed theology, house church, headcovering, etc. The danger of so any “movements” in the church is that they often elevate secondary doctrines to positions of preeminence and likewise divide the church. I experienced and participated in that with Reformed theology and in doing so likely alienated many fellow believers. While I believe that Reformed theology, i.e. the Five Points and the Five Solas, is an accurate summarization of the soteriological message of the Bible, it is not the Gospel no matter what Charles Spurgeon said.

I hold to a patriarchal position because I think the Scriptures clearly present this as God’s plan and intent in the design of human beings, the family and the church but I do not impose it as a barrier to fellowship or cooperation. I think that the various types of gender egalitarianism are in error but I also think that infant baptism is an error (you can replace infant baptism with dispensationalism, arminianism, etc.). That doesn’t mean that I reject fellowship with those who differ from me. I find it disingenuous to acknowledge someone as a fellow believer in Christ in words but to reject their fellowship and cooperation in Kingdom work in deeds. Nor do I seek to be an evangelist for patriarchy (or believers baptism or Calvinism or….). My intent in this series was and always has been to present a counter-voice to those who push for egalitarianism and the blurring of Biblical gender roles, a movement that is prevalent in the simple church crowd and a position that I say unapologetically is an error. I am not at all interested in using secondary, important to be sure but secondary, issues as a wedge between believers. I have tried very hard to avoid bashing or slandering those who disagree with me on this issue even as I recognize that some who are advocates of patriarchy have not done the same. Of course as I mentioned there is undeniably plenty of vitriol, slander, ugliness and half-truths on the other side of this position as well. Wherever that sort of unpleasantness crops up, whether from people I agree with or disagree with, it is unscriptural and damaging to the unity and witness of the Body of Christ. There is plenty of work to be done for the Kingdom without expending so much of it tearing into those we should be laboring alongside of. Patriarchy, complementarianism, male servant headship, whatever you call it, is important and needs to be given a fair hearing in the church but it is also not the Gospel and never will be. I hope if nothing else that this series has given you cause to think or rethink your position and that it spurs you onto greater love, greater sacrifice and greater service in the name of Jesus Christ our Lord.