Tag: Christianity

A failure of dialectic

This account of feminism perverting theology is an excellent example of the way in which dialectic is impotent when faced with a literally unreasonable opponent:

The meaning of head in Ephesians 5 is critical not for egalitarians, nor even for traditionalists.  Even if head meant “source” in Ephesians 5, the passage still tells wives to submit to their husbands, and it is merely one of many which does so.  Egalitarians are lost even if they win this argument, and traditionalists are largely unfazed even if they somehow lost it.  On the other hand, the meaning of the word head is critical for complementarians, because complementarians twist themselves into knots to avoid telling wives to submit to their husbands out of a fear of seeming harsh, demeaning, and male supremacist.  The only way complementarians can sound traditional while avoiding preaching submission is to focus all of their energies on the responsibility of the husband to act in such a way that his wife naturally wants to submit.  This is not the biblical model of marriage, it is the complementarian model of marriage.  The closest to a biblical justification for this invention is the word head in Eph 5.  This is true despite the fact that even the word headship is discomforting to complementarians, who have coined the term servant leader and focus on cartoonish chivalry.

Even so, Grudem has done a great service by vigorously refuting the spurious claim about head.


Why did I do this? So that commentaries, Greek lexicons, and Bible translations in future generations will accurately teach and translate a crucial verse in the word of God. If head equals “authority over” as has been shown now in over sixty examples, then the ballgame is over. And even today, twenty-four years after my first article, there are still zero examples where a person is called “head” of someone else and is not in authority over that person. Zero.

But as Grudem notes, despite the original claim being made without evidence, and having been thoroughly debunked, the Bible is not (and never was) the issue:


That kind of evidence would normally settle the debate forever in ordinary exegesis of ordinary verses.


But this is not an ordinary verse. Because the evangelical feminists cannot lose this verse, they continue to ignore or deny the evidence. I think that is very significant.


It now seems to me that, for some people in this dispute who have thought through the issue and are committed to the egalitarian cause and have the academic knowledge to evaluate the evidence for themselves, what the Bible says on this question is not decisive. And, sadly, InterVarsity Press (USA), in spite of being given evidence of multiple factual errors in Catherine Kroeger’s article on “head” in Dictionary of Paul and His Letters,5 still continues to refuse to make any changes to the article.

Grudem goes on to recount his recollection of the founding of the CBMW.  I won’t summarize it here, but you can read it in the linked piece.  After the CBMW was founded, Grudem had his second major learning experience with egalitarians. Christians for Biblical Equality (CBE) asked for CBMW leadership to meet with them in an effort to find common ground.  At CBE’s urging the CBMW created what they expected would be a joint statement on abuse.  The CBMW leadership did not seem to understand that feminists are very open that their focus on abuse is about eradicating headship, not on actual abuse.  Even worse, the CBE was merely trying to take the CBMW off message, and had no interest in a mutual statement:

As we talked, there seemed to be agreement that one thing we could do together would be for both organizations to agree publicly that abuse within marriage is wrong. So we agreed to work on a joint statement on abuse. After the meeting, Mary Kassian drafted such a statement, and we got some feedback from the CBE people, and we were going to issue it. But, then on October 10, 1994, we received a letter from them saying that their board had considered it, and they would not join with us in the joint statement opposing abuse. I was shocked and disappointed when the letter came. I wondered then if their highest goal in this issue was to be faithful to Scripture above all and stop the horrors of abuse, or was to promote the egalitarian agenda. We ended up publishing the statement ourselves in CBMW NEWS (later renamed The Journal for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood).

Even after this, Grudem seems to have still expected good faith from egalitarians.  In yet another incident, Grudem and the CBMW were assured that the gender neutral version of the NIV had been scrapped:


But just before the meeting began, the IBS issued a statement saying they had “abandoned all plans” for changes in gender-related language in future editions of the NIV. So we thought the controversy was done and the NIV would remain faithful in its translation of gender-related language in the Bible.


Little did we know, however, that the Committee on Bible Translation for the NIV had not “abandoned all plans”! Far from it! Unknown to anyone outside their circles, for the next four years the Committee on Bible Translation, apparently with the quiet cooperation of people at Zondervan and the International Bible Society, continued working to produce a gender-neutral NIV. They had publicly “abandoned all plans,” but privately they were going full-steam ahead. Then suddenly in 2001, they announced unilaterally they were abandoning the agreement not to publish gender related changes in the NIV, and they published the TNIV New Testament in 2001 and the whole Bible in 2005.

In his conclusion Grudem says he originally thought the whole feminist rebellion would blow over once he and others carefully explained the correct meaning of Scripture:

I am surprised that this controversy has gone on so long. In the late 80s and early 90s when we began this, I expected that this would probably be over in ten years. By force of argument, by use of facts, by careful exegesis, by the power of the clear word of God, by the truth, I expected the entire church would be persuaded, the battle for the purity of the church would be won, and egalitarian advocates would be marginalized and have no significant influence. But it has not completely happened yet!

Unspoken in this (and complementarianism at large) is an attitude that Christian feminists are not rebelling against God in a pattern that dates back to the fall, but are the natural reaction to a suddenly harsh generation of Christian men.  This is why Grudem and his colleagues repeatedly fell for the feminist ruses, and why to this day they are most concerned with showing how reasonable they are.

I have a simple and efficient metric that permits me to avoid such problems. Any time anyone relies on “equality” for any aspect of their argument, I assume they are, at best, deluded, and on average, dishonest. I take arguments that appeal to, or rely upon, equality, about as seriously as those that rely upon “unicorns” or “leprechauns” as their justifications.

I have yet to see anyone make an honest and compelling argument that utilized equality. It is an intrinsically evil concept that always leads even otherwise honest men astray.

Mr. Grudem could have saved himself 21 years of pointless argument by applying this extraordinarily reliable metric. But at least he did the rest of us the favor of demonstrating that Churchian equalitarianism is every bit as evil and deceptive as its worldly counterpart, and that it is only a matter of time before Christian feminism drops the adjective as well as the concept of Scriptural authority.

What a pity that even Biblical scholars don’t know how to utilize the wisdom of Proverbs.

A continual dripping on a very rainy day and a contentious woman are alike; Whoever restrains her restrains the wind, and grasps oil with his right hand.
– Proverbs 27:15-16

The fear of woman

Is the beginning of dyscivilization. Pastor Doug Wilson addresses one way in which modern Churchians have attempted to neuter the Christian man.

If over the course of a few months of pastoral counseling, say, I encounter three instances of husbands and fathers getting angry in the home, you can expect that problem to start showing up in sermons—either in sermons on anger, or passing illustrations about anger in sermons on something else. My assumption is that the instances I have found out about are the tip of the iceberg.

Now suppose—just suppose—the presenting problem in three marriages I am trying to help is the problem of lazy and idle housewives. Is there any practical way, without becoming a Pariah for the Ages, to preach on “Lazy Housewives”? I could get myself into a fit of the giggles just thinking about it.

Anything said along these lines will be immediately translated into an “attack on all women.” The violent response will insist that what you said about a small subset of women is to be understood by the entire world as an attack on all women, and the violent response will be led by women who also insist that they are every bit as rational as men, and should therefore be trusted to preach and teach and handle the text of Scripture, and they will do this when they have just finished parsing a statement that some mammals are marsupials into the clownish doctrine that all mammals are marsupials, and how dare you say that all mammals have pouches? Whales don’t have pouches, you maroon.

The reason for this reaction is that Satan hates women, and does not want them to have any pastoral care. He does not want them to have husbands who protect them. He wants them to be surrounded by feckless cowards, who refuse to tell them the truth.

He wants them to have men in their lives who would rather lie than lead.

I don’t know if I can go along with this hateful attack on women. After all, did not Judeo-Christ say: “I do not permit a husband to criticize or to assign blame to his wife; he must be silent in his servant-leadership. For Adam was formed first, then Eve.”


I am confident all right-thinking Churchians will agree with me that it is both wrong and sinful for a man to criticize any woman, but particularly a woman to whom he is, or was formerly, married, and that the proper role of a husband is to provide, without complaint, for his wife and his wife’s son.

Who needs Jesus?

It’s a joke, obviously, but one does wonder what the women-can-do-no-wrong pedestal preachers think is likely going to be the consequence of their extremely extra-Biblical teachings.

According to reports coming out of Hope Community Church, first-time visitor Brittany Wilson remains unsure about why she needed “this Jesus guy” in her life after the pastor spent the entire Sunday sermon reiterating how awesome, amazing, unique, and special she is.

“The message was super-encouraging. It was all about how I need to let the goodness within me shine and ‘just do me,’ without worrying about all the haters,” Wilson said after the service.

“But then the pastor said I needed Jesus, out of the blue. Like, what? It made no sense. I’m not sure what He has to offer that I don’t, based on how wonderful the pastor said I am.”

Women are not only every bit as fallen as men, but they have been the primary weapon utilized by the architects of the decline of the Christian church. I won’t attend any church with a female pastor, nor will I attend any church that habitually excoriates men while elevating women. Whatever it is that they are teaching, it isn’t from the Bible and it isn’t compatible with Christianity.

The severed branch dies

A professor of religion and culture only requires five years to observe the obvious in the Washington Post:

Mainline Protestant churches are in trouble: A 2015 report by the Pew Research Center found that these congregations, once a mainstay of American religion, are now shrinking by about 1 million members annually. Fewer members not only means fewer souls saved, a frightening thought for some clergy members, but also less income for churches, further ensuring their decline.

Faced with this troubling development, clergy members have made various efforts to revive church attendance. It was almost 20 years ago that John Shelby Spong, a U.S. bishop in the Episcopalian Church, published his book “Why Christianity Must Change or Die.” It was presented as an antidote to the crisis of decline in mainline churches. Spong, a theological liberal, said congregations would grow if they abandoned their literal interpretation of the Bible and transformed along with changing times.

Spong’s general thesis is popular with many mainline Protestants, including those in the United Methodist, Evangelical Lutheran, Presbyterian (U.S.A.) and Episcopal churches. Spong’s work has won favor with academics, too. Praising Spong’s work specifically, Karen L. King of Harvard Divinity School said in a review of Spong’s book that it “should be required reading for everyone concerned with facing head-on the intellectual and spiritual challenges of late-twentieth-century religious life.” Harvard Divinity professor and liberal theologian Harvey Cox said “Bishop Spong’s work is a significant accomplishment,” and indeed, Cox himself has long been at the task of shifting Christianity to meet the needs of the modern world. Thus, liberal theology has been taught for decades in mainline seminaries and preached from many mainline pulpits. Its enduring appeal to embattled clergy members is that it gives intellectual respectability to religious ideas that, on the surface, might appear far-fetched to modern audiences.

But the liberal turn in mainline churches doesn’t appear to have solved their problem of decline.

Over the last five years, my colleagues and I conducted a study of 22 mainline congregations in the province of Ontario. We compared those in the sample that were growing mainline congregations to those that were declining. After statistically analyzing the survey responses of over 2,200 congregants and the clergy members who serve them, we came to a counterintuitive discovery: Conservative Protestant theology, with its more literal view of the Bible, is a significant predictor of church growth while liberal theology leads to decline. The results were published this month in the peer-reviewed journal, Review of Religious Research.

We also found that for all measures, growing church clergy members were most conservative theologically, followed by their congregants, who were themselves followed by the congregants of the declining churches and then the declining church clergy members. In other words, growing church clergy members are the most theologically conservative, while declining church clergy members are the least.

A nominally Christian church that does not believe in God or Jesus Christ has no reason to exist. By severing themselves from God’s Word, the Bible, and freeing themselves from its strictures, they inevitably decline and die.

It is a reliable predictive model. Welcome women into the pulpit in defiance of Scripture and your church will almost instantly go into decline. Once Jesus Christ is evicted from the building, the genuine Christians soon follow.

Anti-Christian hate crime

Israeli parliamentarian destroys the New Testament and declares that Christianity “belongs in the garbage can of history”.

MK Michael Ben Ari (National Union), a member of the Israeli parliament tore up a copy of the New Testament and threw it in the trash, an act that was apparently caught on camera. Ben Ari and several other Knesset members received by mail on Monday a copy of the New Testament, sent by the Bible Society in Israel, an organization that distributes religious books.

In the letter sent with the book, director of the Christian organization Victor Kalisher wrote that the new edition “sheds light on the Holy Scriptures and helps understand them.”

“We hope the book will help you and illuminate your way,” Kalisher furter wrote.

However, while most MK’s chose to ignore the book or return it to its sender, the rightist lawmaker chose to term the book a “provocation,” tore it up into shreds and then threw it out.

“This abominable book (the New Testament) galvanized the murder of millions of Jews during the Inquisition and during auto da fe instances,” Ben Ari said adding that “Sending the book to MK’s is a provocation. There is no doubt that this book and all it represents belongs in the garbage can of history.”

Imagine the outrage if a U.S. Congressman tore up a copy of the Talmud and denounced Judaism on camera.

There is no such thing as Judeo-Christianity. It does not exist. There are no “Judeo-Christian values”, any more than there are “Islamo-Christian” or “Hindu-Shinto” values.

What many naive Christians need to understand is that many Jews absolutely hate Christians and Christianity. Such Jews are neither our friends nor our allies, but our overt enemies.

That does not mean that all Jews are enemies of Christianity. It doesn’t even mean that most of them are. It simply means that they are a distinct people with their own distinct interests, a nation who should neither be favored nor trusted on the sole basis of their religious or ethnic identity. And like everyone else, Jews should be judged as individuals, on the basis of their individual statements and actions.

As for Israel, the USA should support it to the extent it is in American interests to do so. As a regional power in the volatile Middle East, Israel is much more useful to Americans as an ally than as an enemy. But Christians nevertheless need to understand that many Israelis, including some Israeli political leaders, are their open and avowed enemy.

Now, I realize there are more than a few Jews and Christians alike who would prefer to bury all signs of this Jewish enmity for Christians and Christianity for one reason or another. This is understandable, and it may even be well-intentioned. But if you are inclined to knowingly keep the deceived in the dark, I think you really need to ask yourself whom you are serving in that regard.

Merry Christmas!

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning.  Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.  In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.
– John 1:1-5

This is the true hope and promise of Christmas. The light shines, even in the darkness that engulfs the world today, and the darkness will not overcome it.

Whether you are surrounded with love and family and decorations and presents, or whether you find yourself in a motel surrounded by nothing more festive than a wi-fi connection and few empty cans of beer, you are not alone today. You are part of the great celebration of the miracle, the great golden net of believers that reaches all the way around the world and binds the Church together.

Because at its heart, Christmas is not about togetherness or silver bells or snow. It is about the Word becoming flesh and coming to dwell among us, the spark that lit the fire in the hearts of men that will never be extinguished.

Merry Christmas, everyone.

The end of progressive Christianity

This is an insightful piece by an intelligent observer of the battle between historic and progressive Christianity, and I think his conclusion is essentially correct:

The historic Christians believe their religion is revealed by God in the person of his Son Jesus Christ, and that the Scriptures are the primary witness of that revelation. They believe the church is the embodiment of the risen Lord Jesus in the world and that his mission to seek and to save that which is lost is still valid and vital. Historic Christians believe in the supernatural life of the Church and expect God to be at work in the world and in their lives.

Progressive Christians believe their religion is a historical accident of circumstances and people, that Jesus Christ is, at best, a divinely inspired teacher, that the Scriptures are flawed human documents influenced by paganism and that the church is a body of spiritually minded people who wish to bring peace and justice to all and make the world a better place.

I realize that I paint with broad strokes, but the essential divide is recognizable, and believers on both sides should admit that “historic” and “progressive” Christians exist within all denominations. The real divide in Christianity is no longer Protestant and Catholic, but progressive and historic.

When I say “divide” I should say “battle” because both sides are locked in an interminable and unresolvable battle. Interminable because neither side will yield and unresolvable because the divisions extend the theological and philosophical roots of both aspects.

However, it is true that if you look at the dynamic of progressive Christianity, you will see that by the end of this century it will have either died out or ceased to be Christianity.

At this time, modernism still wears Christian clothes in the mainstream Protestant churches and in parts of the Catholic Church.

This cannot last much longer for 11 very simple reasons:

The most powerful reason, of course, is that progressive Christians do not actually believe in the supernatural, which means that in the most basic sense, they cannot reasonably be described as Christians at all.

Michael Sebastian makes much the same point, in rather less elevated language, on Return of Kings:

This message that God promises people a wonderful life has had a deep impact on the lives of many modern Christians. It is a message that fits perfectly with our hedonistic culture that puts pleasure above duty. Christian couples forego having children so they can travel or drive luxury cars. Lukewarm Christian women divorce perfectly good husbands in pursuit of the Prince Charming they think they deserve. Bishops and pastors preach only those parts of the gospel that make them popular with the secular culture.

Modern Christianity is also compromised in other ways. Rather than standing against the culture, Christian churches have tried to accommodate as much of the culture as possible. Some denominations have embraced Christian feminism, push for left wing social causes such as open borders, and bless gay marriages. For that reason, if you want to learn what real Christianity is, you will have to ignore recent teaching in favor of the past.  A good rule of thumb is to simply avoid reading Christian material written after 1900. Listen to your Sunday Sermon but take it with a grain of salt.

Repent. Return to the fundamentals of the faith. Read the Word. Preach the Gospel. Go forth and multiply. And ignore all who tell you to follow the world on its broad and easy path to Hell.

Race and religion

It’s one thing for one’s life to be transformed by the power of Jesus Christ. It is real. I have seen remarkable transformations of people’s hearts, character, behavior, and spirit take place in the lives of friends, acquaintances, and strangers. That being said, I’ve yet to see Christianity do much to transform one’s intellect, one’s height, or one’s intrinsic capacity for empathy or logic:

Black women have great faith in God, but they have a twisted understanding of His role. They do not pray for strength or courage. They pray for results: the satisfaction of immediate needs. One of my clients was a black woman who prayed in a circle with her accomplices for God’s protection from the police before they would set out to commit a robbery.

The mothers and grandmothers pray in the hallways–not for justice, but for acquittal. When I explain that the evidence that their beloved child murdered the shop keeper is overwhelming, and that he should accept the very fair plea bargain I have negotiated, they will tell me that he is going to trial and will “ride with the Lord.” They tell me they speak to God every day and He assures them that the young man will be acquitted.

Before you dismiss the observer as a hateful racist hater, consider that as a public defender of liberal persuasion, he not only spends more time than anyone reading this with low-income Africans attempting to help them, but has probably bled a considerably greater quantity of hearts-blood over their fates as well.

There was a fair amount of talk about EQ a few years ago, and there is an increasing amount of discussion of pathological altruism. What is gradually becoming apparent to me is that Western civilization not only requires a base level of intelligence, but also a base level of empathy. Any population group with an average level of either intelligence or empathy that falls below that level is not going to be able to participate in European civilization or sustain a reasonable facsimile on its own.

Christianity certainly helps support the development of empathy in an individual by providing a strong rational justification for it, but it observably does not create it ex nihilo in the human breast. I suspect it would be eucivically useful if there were standard tests for empathy as reliable as those for intelligence.

Churchian theocrats

It’s always easy to tell when a group of people have given themselves over to untruth. Their philosophy, their theology, and their politics all rapidly become observably incoherent. Evangelicals, and many of the evangelical organizations, are now following the example of other Christian denominations in walking the broad and easy path towards Hell, and they are doing so on the basis of their mealy-mouthed Sunday School Churchianity.

As the election retreats like a hurricane heading back out to sea, first responders are assessing the damage left in its wake. One casualty is the reputation of evangelicalism. Evangelicalism was closely associated with the campaign of Donald J. Trump, and more than 80 percent of white evangelicals voted for the president-elect. This, despite large numbers of African-American, Latino, Asian, young and female evangelicals who were fiercely opposed to the racism, sexism and xenophobia of Mr. Trump’s campaign and the hypocrisy of a candidate who built a casino empire while flouting morality.

As a result, much of the good that went by the name “evangelicalism” has been clouded over; now a new movement is needed to replace it.

When it comes to religious identity in America, the fastest-growing group is the “nones.” Nearly a quarter of all Americans, and over 35 percent of millennials, report no religious affiliation. Nones, many of whom grew up within evangelicalism, often still affirm faith in God. They left the church because they gave up on evangelical leadership. Nothing sums up their objections more clearly than evangelicals’ embrace of Mr. Trump. Didn’t Jesus say, “Blessed are the meek” and “Love your enemies”?

Throughout the campaign, there was dissent even within the ranks of evangelicalism’s most conservative institutions. While the old guard, like the Focus on the Family founder James Dobson, were ardent Trump supporters, the best-selling evangelical author Max Lucado and the Southern Baptist leader Russell Moore were both early critics. At Liberty University, the largest evangelical college in the country, thousands of students signed a petition denouncing the support of its president, Jerry Falwell Jr., for Mr. Trump and insisting that they were more interested in being Christian than in being Republican.

Andy Crouch, the executive editor of Christianity Today, criticized both candidates, writing that enthusiasm for Mr. Trump “gives our neighbors ample reason to doubt that we believe Jesus is Lord.” He added, “They see that some of us are so self-interested, and so self-protective, that we will ally ourselves with someone who violates all that is sacred to us.”

As white male evangelists, we have no problem admitting that the future does not lie with us. It lies with groups like the National Latino Evangelical Coalition, led by Gabriel Salguero, or the Moral Monday movement, led by William Barber II, who has challenged the news media on its narrow portrayal of evangelicals. For decades, we have worked within evangelicalism to lift up the voices of these “other evangelicals.”

But we cannot continue to allow sisters and brothers who are leading God’s movement to be considered “other.” We are not confident that evangelicalism is a community in which younger, nonwhite voices can flourish. And we are not willing to let our faith be the collateral damage of evangelicalism.

We want to be clear: We are not suggesting a new kind of Christianity that simply backs the Democratic Party. Jesus is neither a Democrat nor a Republican — even if, as William Sloane Coffin Jr. once said, his heart leans left. Many faithful Christians did not vote for Hillary Clinton because of their commitment to a consistent pro-life agenda. True faith can never pledge allegiance to anything less than Jesus.

But Jesus-centered faith needs a new name. Christians have retired outdated labels before. During the late 19th century, when scientific rationalism fueled the questioning of Scripture, “fundamentalism” arose as an intelligent defense of Christianity. By the 1930s, however, fundamentalism was seen as anti-intellectual and judgmental. It was then that the term “evangelicalism” was put forward by Christianity Today’s first editor, Carl F. H. Henry, as a new banner under which a broad coalition of Jesus followers could unite.

But beginning with the culture wars of the 1980s, the religious right made a concerted effort to align evangelicalism with the Republican Party. By the mid-’90s, the word had lost its positive connotations with many Americans. They came to see Christians — and evangelicals in particular — as anti-women, anti-gay, anti-environment and anti-immigrant and as the champions of guns and war.

Mr. Trump did not create these contradictions, but his victory has pulled the roof off the building we once called home. It’s time to build a new home.

The amusing thing about their philosophical ineptitude is that they don’t realize they are making an overt case for Christian theocracy, the reality of which would of course horrify them because they have absolutely no intention of abiding by anything genuinely Christian at all; this is nothing more than shallow pandering to the worldly zeitgeist using a few inappropriately applied Bible verses as justification.

Moreover, it demonstrates that at least when it comes to Churchianity, race trumps religion in the hierarchy of identity politics. As usual, the Alt-Right perspective is the only one that makes any sense of this incoherent and degraded evangelicism.

Here is a useful metric for Christians: if the New York Times Carlos Slim’s blog is affording you space for your views and generally striking a positive tone about them, you are absolutely wrong and whatever you are pushing is antithetical to genuine Christianity. No one – no one – is ever going to be inspired to follow Jesus Christ as a result of your pandering to the approval of the global elite. It is literally anti-evangelist evangelicism and its new home is godless churchianism.