Tag Archives: gender

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I have learned that great articles disappear off the web.  So, with a clear disclaimer that if the author wishes, I'll make it private (so only I can read it,) and with a clear link to the article and appropriate credit, here is the text of

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A Vision for Biblical Complementarity

By Colin J. Smothers

In Recovering Biblical Manhood & Womanhood, John Piper speaks about two methods that can be used to commend a vision for biblical complementarity—the teaching that God has created men and women with distinct differences for His glory and our good.

The first method is careful, exegetical argument that demonstrates the plain teachings of the Bible on complementarity. We need people who do this, and we should be thankful for people like John Piper and Wayne Grudem for doing just this.

But the second method is just as important. This method is a robust portrayal of the vision of complementarity, and we are in need of people who do this, too. We need people who are able to show that God’s ways are good, that God’s ways are most satisfying.

Complementarianism is true not just because it is right, but also because it is beautiful.

And so I have excerpted below the introduction to John Piper’s chapter in Recovering Biblical Manhood & Womanhood because of the way he portrays his faithful parents living out complementarianism. Piper’s reflection on manhood and womanhood through the lens of his childhood is not only beautiful, it is compelling. It is compelling because it is God’s truth, and God’s truth resonates with us. It is what we were created for.

When I was a boy growing up in Greenville, South Carolina, my father was away from home about two-thirds of every year. And while he preached across the country, we prayed–my mother and my older sister and I. What I learned in those days was that my mother was omni-competent.

She handled the finances, paying all the bills and dealing with the bank and creditors. She once ran a little laundry business on the side. She was active on the park board, served as the superintendent of the Intermediate Department of our Southern Baptist church, and managed some real estate holdings.

She taught me how to cut the grass and splice electric cord and pull Bermuda grass by the roots and paint the eaves and shine the dining-room table with a shammy and drive a car and keep French fries from getting soggy in the cooking oil. She helped me with the maps in geography and showed me how to do a bibliography and work up a science project on static electricity and believe that Algebra II was possible. She dealt with the contractors when we added a basement and, more than once, put her hand to the shovel. It never occurred to me that there was anything she couldn’t do.

I heard one time that women don’t sweat, they glow. Not true. My mother sweated. It would drip off the end of her long, sharp nose. Sometimes she would blow it off when her hands were pushing the wheelbarrow full of peat moss. Or she would wipe it with her sleeve between the strokes of a swingblade. Mother was strong. I can remember her arms even today thirty years later. They were big, and in the summertime they were bronze.

But it never occurred to me to think of my mother and my father in the same category. Both were strong. Both were bright. Both were kind. Both would kiss me and both would spank me. Both were good with words. Both prayed with fervor and loved the Bible. But unmistakably my father was a man and my mother was a woman. They knew it and I knew it. And it was not mainly a biological fact. It was mainly a matter of personhood and relational dynamics.

When my father came home he was clearly the head of the house. He led in prayer at the table. He called the family together for devotions. He got us to Sunday School and worship. He drove the car. He guided the family to where we would sit. He made the decision to go to Howard Johnson’s for lunch. He led us to the table. He called for the waitress. He paid the check. He was the one we knew we would reckon with if we broke a family rule or were disrespectful to Mother. These were the happiest times for Mother. Oh, how she rejoiced to have Daddy home! She loved his leadership. Later I learned that the Bible calls this “submission.”

But since my father was gone most of the time, Mother used to do most of those leadership things too. So it never occurred to me that leadership and submission had anything to do with superiority and inferiority. And it didn’t have to do with muscles and skills either. It was not a matter of capabilities and competencies. It had to do with something I could never have explained as a child. And I have been a long time in coming to understand it as part of God’s great goodness in creating us male and female. It had to do with something very deep. I know that the specific rhythm of life that was in our home is not the only good one. But there were dimensions of reality and goodness in it that ought to be there in every home. Indeed they ought to be there in varying ways in all mature relationships between men and women.

I say “ought to be there” because I now see that they were rooted in God. Over the years I have come to see from Scripture and from life that manhood and womanhood are the beautiful handiwork of a good and loving God. He designed our differences and they are profound. They are not mere physiological prerequisites for sexual union. They go to the root of our personhood.

Excerpted from John Piper, Recovering Biblical Manhood & Womanhood (Wheaton: Crossway, 1991), 31–32.

May God enable our churches and our homes to reflect His glory in living out His design for manhood and womanhood. Let’s not just know that God’s truth is true, let’s demonstrate that God’s truth is true.

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It's been a couple of weeks (TWO trips to California - one northern, one southern)

From Good Friday - Ordinary Pastor -

How would you like to be a liberal “preacher” tomorrow? Some of these guys will moralize, emotionalize, sensationalize, or trivialize the work of Christ. They gloss over the wrath, sacrifice, blood, sin and guilt. Instead the focus is on us and the hopefulness of humanity.

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Well, here's one of my own!  I highlighted this in my Kindle book, "Fierce Women."

“It was as if they were not making marriage, but being made by it, and, while it held them, time and their lives flowed over them, like swift water over stones, rubbing them together, grinding off their edges, making them fit together, fit to be together, in the only way that fragments can be rejoined.” —WENDELL BARRY1

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This is timely for me, from Resurgence

7 Prayers for Jesus' Church -

Jesus has been building his church, is building his church, and will continue to build his church (Matt. 16:18) until he returns in glory to redeem his bride. And absolutely nothing and no one can get in his way.

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Why I Will Keep Talking About Biblical Womanhood -

2 excellent takeways:

Because as long as the culture feeds us an image of women that is contrary to God’s word, I will keep talking about biblical womanhood.

and

Because at the end of the day it’s not about biblical womanhood at all. It is about the authority of God’s word. Do we believe it to be true? Do we believe God has really spoken and we can take him at his word? Or do we need a new interpretation or a new vision for a new day?

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Friday I linked to a blog post by Karen Campbell on "Patriarchy on Trial" - which included

At one time I can remember reading articles from the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood that were edifying; now their website is a scary place if you are a woman.

Scary.

I read Manhood Marred: Is Male Supremacy Biblical?

Unfortunately, all too many Christian men act or behave in a male chauvinistic fashion. Some would even go so far as to say that the bible speaks to the supremacy of the male gender. This, of course, requires scriptural ignorance or an intentional twisting of biblical manhood from a position of self-sacrificial authority into a mechanism for the diminishing of women and the magnification of men. Frankly, the Lord has not instituted a gender bias. Using scripture to justify a sense of male supremacy is exploiting or confusing position for power.

Is that so scary?

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Long, but useful - Al Mohler's "God and the Gay Christian?"It's a PDF, and it's easier for you all just to read it.~~~Rethinking Spiritual Growth -

For me, the elusiveness of measuring spiritual growth occurs because the focus has always been on the individual Christian in the individual church. It’s a bedrock principle that what we’re measuring is how a lone Christian in a lone Church grows.

But I wonder if we’re getting this all wrong from the first step.

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Karen Campbell linked to one of my posts twice (same article, two different places.)

 

What I find interesting is that Campbell freely states that

The first point I want to make today is that I see the most common views of men and women within the body of Christ in more recent times as being on a continuum.

So...putting thoughts, beliefs, actions on a continuum is an okay thing.

But when Grudem does it...(the article I posted by Grudem came as a result of people asking what he believes women can do in the church.)

Grudem puts positions on a...continuum...and describes where he believes the line is.

Campbell describes that as:

That discussion has shifted to listing all the things women cannot do outside of working in the nursery and putting on potlucks.

Obviously that statement "overlooks" the many, many articles at CBMW that discuss many, many other things.

It also creates a double standard:

When Campbell puts things on a continuum and describes where the line should be:  good

When Grudem puts things on a continuum and describes where the line should be:  bad.

"one set of rules for them...another for everybody else."

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Reading "Surfing For God"

When I was in high school, my best friend's dad smoked a pipe.  Coming from a Baptist family, who were all non-smokers, had only used pipe cleaners in craft projects.  I was waiting for Denise one day, at their dining room table and amused myself with what was available.

Now...imagine the horror that she felt when she discovered that I had made little animals out of all of her dad's pipe cleaners!  Imagine my confusion when told her dad used "pipe cleaners" to...well...clean his pipes!  She was afraid that her dad would be angry at the wrong use of his pipe cleaners.

There was a legitimate use of the pipe cleaners that I didn't quite have the experience to "get."

(this is not a good parallel, but it meant something to me.)

In reading "Surfing for God," the author, Michael John Cusick, related a story:

My friend Danny is passionate about baseball. He is also deeply committed to working on his soul—understanding his brokenness and walking with Jesus to be restored. In 2005 we drove together to the Colorado Rockies’ opening day game. During our drive he shared that he hadn’t missed an opening day game in years.

Through his involvement in a men’s group, he realized that he “needed” to attend opening day the way an alcoholic needs a drink. Danny had recently discovered that opening day numbed the pain of growing up with an absent father because it symbolized the minimal time and attention his father gave him. His legitimate desire for fatherly involvement attached itself to a designer gift—a legitimate good.

But because attendance at opening day was an attempt to protect himself from the pain of his wound, the legitimate good became a counterfeit good. He was turning stones into bread. The game we attended was the first time his heart was free from the need to be there. (1)

It reminds me of something that C.S.Lewis wrote

If Dualism is true, then the bad Power must be a being who likes badness for its own sake. But in reality we have no experience of anyone liking badness just because it is bad... But pleasure, money, power, and safety are all, as far as they go, good things.

The badness consists in pursuing them by the wrong method, or in the wrong way, or too much...I do mean that wickedness, when you examine it, turns out to be the pursuit of some good in the wrong way. You can be good for the mere sake of goodness: you cannot be bad for the mere sake of badness.

Goodness is, so to speak, itself: badness is only spoiled goodness. And there must be something good first before it can be spoiled...In order to be bad he must have good things to want and then to pursue in the wrong way: he must have impulses which were originally good in order to be able to pervert them.(2)

Cusick echoes this:

Every gift from our Designer has a corresponding gift from the deceiver—a “shadow” gift. And you can bet your three hundred ringgits that every deceiver gift is a counterfeit. Satan cannot create anything; he can only take what has been created and twist it against its design. So, we are tempted to overindulge the Designer’s gift of food. We might make a god out of alcohol—turning to it addictively to meet all sorts of inner needs—or maybe we make a god out of not drinking alcohol. We are deceived into believing that deceiver gifts will actually make us flourish.(3)
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So, something in the sermon on Sunday reminded me of those pipe cleaners, which triggered the memory of this segment of the book.

I had taken a "thing" with a use - a use for which the thing was made, and made something frivolous of it.   I cannot see making animals out of pipe cleaners as "bad" - but it certainly isn't the intended use.

Food isn't bad - God gave us the good gift of food.  But abusing food twists the good gift into a bad use.

God gave us the good gift of sex, with an intended good use.  We can twist that good gift by using it outside of the intended arena.

I've written on "lady porn" - trashy romance novels that twist the good gift of romance into mere fodder for emotional flights of fantasy.  This abuse of a good gift can twist a marriage into a competition of sorts, where the husband feels the need to live up to the "romance" of his wife wanting to be swept off her feet by a "knight in shining armor."

More and more current studies show that women share the porn problem with men.  Women may get different things from porn than men do, but the problem gets shared.  Women twist the good gift of sex and intimacy just as easily as men do.

Cusick wrote:

We begin our journey from slavery to freedom when we expose the counterfeits at the root of our brokenness and admit our thirst for the real thing.(4)

.When a woman uses porn (or lusty romance novels, or food, or anything else) because we thirst for something else...what do we thirst for?

When I feel stressed at work, I do this crazy thing:  I hit the quarter machine.  You know, you put in a quarter and turn the knob and it gives you 11 or 12 Good~n~Plenties.  But I can't just eat them.  I need to line them up...pink and white and pink and white...and I need to eat them in the right order.  When I thirst for order and control, I feel that I can quench that thirst by arranging and eating pink and white candies in the right order.  That's some sort of twisted...

Humans twist all sorts of things, and the point of this post centers on porn, but it doesn't need to...throughout life test all things...do you have the "right use" in mind?  or something else?

 

  1. Cusick, Michael John (2012-06-05). Surfing for God: Discovering the Divine Desire Beneath Sexual Struggle (Kindle Locations 1174-1183). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.
  2. Lewis, C.S.  Mere Christianity, Book 2
  3. Cusick, Michael John (2012-06-05). Surfing for God: Discovering the Divine Desire Beneath Sexual Struggle (Kindle Locations 1183-1187). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.
  4. Cusick, Michael John (2012-06-05). Surfing for God: Discovering the Divine Desire Beneath Sexual Struggle (Kindle Locations 1195-1196). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

 

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A mash of links to articles I found interesting:

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Why it is so Easy to Doubt Christianity:

Following my God is not easy. He calls on us to have a holistic faith. He does not want a trivial relationship that fails to get into quite a few wrestling matches. Previously, I said that Christianity is the most falsifiable religion there is. Of course, this does not mean that Christianity is not true. It just means that it exposes itself to the possibility of being wrong, precisely because it is right.

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"A Christian End to My Life"

This post is going to come off so tacky and unsentimental that I think it will bother some people. I’m not insensitive to that, but I can’t get to a larger point without saying something that may seem kind of rude. Make sense? Hope that helps, for those who decide to keep reading.

It worked for me...I've been there and one that; said my share of tacky and rude things...

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"The Compound Effect"

Here’s how it works. If you are a Christian then you must daily give yourself to reading the Bible, contemplating it, delighting in it, and studying it (Ps. 1). Like tea leaves in steeping in the water so too the Christian just steeps in the Word. They are just absorbed with the truth and it begins to seep into every crevice of the soul.

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"The Stewardship of Pain"

Having watched, and lived through, a chronic pain, these words sunk in:

Stewarding our pain well can only be done with the future in view. If we merely looked at the present we would grow weary rather quickly. Instead, like so many who have gone before us, we must look to the eternal home, healing, and rest that awaits us with our Lord. It is impossible to steward our pain well on our own and with tunnel vision. We need God to give us an eternal perspective and the hope that Christ will reign victorious over even the most excruciating pain we face.

along with "Ten Things to do During Suffering" (by way of Challies.com)

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Here's a few on the Hobby Lobby/Obamacare.

"On Hobby Lobby, how does the Supreme Court measure up?"

"Babara Boxer Compares Viagra to Birth Control.  Wait What?"

"Care that Liberty Cannot Afford"

A link to more links from The Achoress

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"50 Crucial Questions: Slavery and Gender" - since these arguments are also being used to promote gay "marriage," this is worth a read, as are the rest of the 50.

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and the "gay thing"

Links from CBMW:

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There's a case in Michigan that just had closing arguments on Friday; the judge will rule within a couple of weeks on whether or not Michigan will become the next state to fall to this madness.

Part one:

In an article from February 24, this caught my eye

"Nothing says family like a marriage license," DeBoer told reporters before entering the courthouse hand-in-hand with Rowse, her partner of eight years.

I've worked in public schools for a number of years and I've seen many (politically correct) books say that this is NOT true.  We've been pushing the idea that "families come in all forms" - if a child is being raised by a single mom, that's a family.  If a child is being raised by a single dad, that's a family.  If a child is being raised by his or her grandparents, that's a family.  If a man and a woman (or a man and a man, or a woman and a woman, or a person and their cat) are living together without children, that's a family.  Mom and boyfriend/Dad and girlfriend...family.  You get my drift.

What a surprise to find out that it's a "marriage license" that says "family!"

What about faith?

The point of this madness is not to give gay folks the "right to marry" - it's not only to normalize that which has never been "normal."  It is to GLORIFY that lifestyle choice, and to force EVERYBODY to accept it, applaud it, normalize it.

remember the Borg?  "You will be assimilated."

People of faith who do not agree that "government sanctioned gay relationships" are wrong?  Via Tammy Bruce

Having been a liberal “community organizer” in my past, I immediately recognized the strategy being employed. This is an effort to condition the public into automatically equating faith with bigotry.

To make faith in the public square illegal and dangerous, you need legal cases and publicity. Voila, lawsuits against small business resting on the notion that acting on genuinely held faith is bigotry per se.

Under these rules, freedom of conscience is squashed under the jackboot of liberals, all in the Orwellian name of “equality and fairness.” Here we are dealing with not just forcing someone to do something for you, but forcing them in the process to violate a sacrament of their faith as well.

If we are able to coerce someone, via the threat of lawsuit and personal destruction, to provide a service, how is that not slavery? If we insist that you must violate your faith specifically in that slavish action, how is that not abject tyranny?

And now, we wait.

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Government sanctioned same-sex relationship edition (since I can't bring myself to call it "marriage") - we can shorten it to GSSR

BRUCE:Why the veto of Arizona’s religious freedom bill is alarming:

To make faith in the public square illegal and dangerous, you need legal cases and publicity. Voila, lawsuits against small business resting on the notion that acting on genuinely held faith is bigotry per se.

Under these rules, freedom of conscience is squashed under the jackboot of liberals, all in the Orwellian name of “equality and fairness.” Here we are dealing with not just forcing someone to do something for you, but forcing them in the process to violate a sacrament of their faith as well.

Refusing to Photograph a Gay Wedding Isn't Hateful:

Some opposition to same-sex marriage is rooted in bigotry and some isn't. Assuming otherwise is itself prejudice rooted in ignorance.

Thwarting the Wedding Cake Fascists Passive Aggressively

Maybe the response for florists, bakers and photographers is to tell gay couples if they hire their services for their weddings that they will be donating 100% of the profits to a sanctity of marriage group.

Drops the bomb right into the laps of those who for whatever reason want to force religious bakers to bake cakes and photographers to take pictures.

Religious Freedom Reframed So Gay Rights Trump Them:

“Freedom loses when fear overwhelms facts and a good bill is vetoed,” he said in a statement. “Today’s veto enables the foes of faith to more easily suppress the freedom of the people of Arizona.”

Business and Conscience:

Yet Christ's call to servanthood is for us to yield our desire to live for ourselves and instead submit to him, in doing so we live for others. But this is not a call for others to demand of us what they desire.

What will be the terms of our surrender?

Douthat is right. What unfolded last week reveals that this latter scenario is the most likely outcome. Gay activists and gay marriage supporters seem to have very little interest in a live-and-let-live diversity of opinion on the issue of marriage. They are making sure that the government imposes coercive sanctions on anyone who fails to affirm the moral goodness of gay unions. As last week revealed, the press has been happily passing along the propaganda of gay marriage supporters without any thoughtful consideration of the other side of the argument. They are backing us into a corner.

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"What Married Women Really Want"

The author puts this mostly hidden divorce statistic up front:

About two-thirds of all divorces in the United States are, at least officially, initiated by women. One of the key factors [they cite] is the emotional quality of their relationships. In other words, if they feel that their marriages are high-quality relationships, they're not likely to seek divorce. If they feel otherwise, however, women are much more likely to head for divorce. One of the implicit concerns of this study was to figure out in what kind of context women are most likely to be happy and then are, of course, indirectly, less likely to divorce.

I get from the article, though, that women file, it's still the men's fault.

The following paragraph is something I've written about here (the accusation that Christians shouldn't discuss "whatever" because Christians are just as likely to get divorced as unbelievers) and you usually need to dig deep if you want to break down the numbers and get at the truth. (Emphasis is mine)

Based on my earlier research, evangelical women tend to be happier in their marriages than other women, particularly when both the wife and the husband attend church on a regular basis. This idea that Christians are just as likely to divorce as secular folks is not correct if we factor church attendance into our thinking. Churchgoing evangelical Protestants, churchgoing Catholics, and churchgoing mainline Protestants are all significantly less likely to divorce.

And gender roles play in:

Women who have more traditional gender attitudes are significantly happier in their marriages. They're more likely to embrace the idea that men should take the primary lead in breadwinning and women should take the primary lead in nurturing the children and managing the domestic sphere, managing family life.

Spouses who share weekly [church] attendance had happier wives. Spouses who share a strong, normative commitment to marriage—that is, who are opposed to easy divorce, who believe the kids should be reared in married households—have wives who are markedly happier. This factor is as strong as who works outside the home or who earns the lion's share of the income. It's also extremely important that the wife considers the division of housework to be fair to her. A sense of equity is extremely important, but equity is not equality. Women want things to be fair in their homes, but they don't equate fairness with equality.

And this bears saying again:

A sense of equity is extremely important, but equity is not equality. Women want things to be fair in their homes, but they don't equate fairness with equality.

I consistently, as Complementarians do, make a distinction between equality of personhood vs. equality of authority.

Within a hierarchy of authority, there is still equality in humanity.

I know two people. One is an elder, who works at a public school, the other an administrator in a public school, who attends the elder's church. In one context, he is the authority, in another, she is. There are two hierarchies, but total equality of humanity.

The dictionary says that "equity" is fairness and justice in treatment.

So, if a woman feels as if she is being treated fairly and justly, while being under the authority of her husband, she is more likely to be happy, and less likely to file for divorce.

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My friend, Phil and I were talking about the article on Christianity Today - John Piper, Is My Femininity Showing. I kept asking, why can't they get that Piper made it clear that he wasn't talking about the female body - he was saying that, as a Complementarian, he believes that a woman should not have spiritual authority over a woman.

(run down...see my post from yesterday)

Phil didn't use these words, but we have used these terms before. It's the narrative.

The author of the article made a (false) assumption that Piper's concern was about the female body...and ran with that assumption...ran fast and hard.

Once the narrative was set, no amount of reasoning was going to shift the conversation to where PIPER had his concerns...women in authoritative teaching positions over men.

It's the narrative. And we hear the familiar refrain: words like evil, bigoted, hateful, comparisons to Islam...even the theory that he's not comfortable with the menstrual cycle (???) or that he cannot get beyond the "allure" of the female body...

Unable to discern between reading a book and sitting under authoritative teaching in person...I seriously don't get that. Example: I've read several of Rob Bell's books. I've gotten some good information...but I refused to even visit his church, with was only around 10 miles away from me (he recently left) - reading his book, I can put it away...in his church, with him in the pulpit, he become my teacher. But (you know...) it's the narrative.

I'm sure that these are not unintelligent people, but they are unwilling, or unable to veer from the narrative. It is not for me to judge whether unwilling or unable, but veering they will not or cannot do.