In 1997, Promise Keepers fielded an event that was supposed to be epoch-making. Stand in the Gap brought together eight hundred thousand men (or one million men, according to PK accounts) to the National Mall in Washington on October 4 th, 1997 to recommit to marriage and family.And the aftermath? Within a few months, Promise Keepers had all but closed its main offices. The collapse of the movement was far more spectacular than the Washington event.

What happened?

David Usher provides a compelling analysis  of the movement’s catastrophic contraction in an article published in Men’s News Daily. Usher’s overview of Promise Keeper’s collapse begins with a widely read article by Bill McCartney on the eve of Stand in the Gap. Usher explains:

The collapse began with the widely-publicized article in the September-October 1997 issue of Policy Review, titled “Promise Makers”, which hit the newsstands just a few days before Stand in the Gap. This article received tremendous national attention.

Many conservatives were quietly expecting this watershed article would signal the beginnings of a real marriage movement. Instead, it was perhaps the most spectacular public display of self-deprecation witnessed in modern history.

The first few paragraphs of Bill McCartney’s Policy Review article were a shocking adoption of knuckle-dragging neanderthal feminist theory. It blamed men for all of society’s problems. In fact, it was so feminist I thought it could have been written by the National Organization of Women.”

Bait and Switch

In the above-linked article by Usher, he demonstrates the radical feminist critique of American Christian manhood with copious quotations from McCartney’s article in Policy Review. I strongly urge you to read all of Usher’s critique as well as McCartney’s Policy Review article, available here online. Certainly McCartney’s article was read by thousands of men who understood it as a form of bait-and-switch. Promise Keepers held out the hope of reinvigorating a Christianity that was unashamedly masculine, that affirmed Christian manhood and sought to promote it. Instead, from its own founder, Promise Keepers became just one more mouthpiece for feminists (whether Christian or not) who viewed male headship in marriage, family, and church as a flaw to be fixed, a disease to be cured, a sin for men to repent of. No wonder Promise Keepers melted as quickly as a snowball in hell.

Since the contraction which Usher explains, Promise Keepers has continued to contract. A careful reading of their own history shows a declining number of men attending stadium or similar events since the 1997 Stand in the Gap and the contraction which followed. By their own testimony (laced with a generous dose of positive spin) they have continued to contract over the past decade. In fact, the contraction has gone far enough that McCartney now candidly speaks of an upcoming Promise Keepers event in Boulder, Colorado with these words  :

Our journey will begin with a stadium event in Boulder, CO, on July 31-August 1, 2009. We’ll celebrate our 20th anniversary as a ministry back where it all began–and where it will be re-launched–at Folsom Field.

Fish or Fowl?

Promise Keepers has always claimed it was a ministry to men. But with the relaunch, McCartney highlights three distinctives that will characterize the re-launched Promise Keepers. Claiming to take his cue for the relaunch from the First Century Church, McCartney claims that this church did three things:

Proverbs 31:31: They celebrated virtuous women at the city gates. We expect men to invite thousands of women to “A Time to Honor.” This will be powerful. We need to rally around women and raise the bar for what it is to be virtuous. The next generation must have a true model for womanhood.

Acts 2:43-48: They shared their resources equally. As the days get more difficult, the church that is truly anointed will be one that opens its arms to the less fortunate. We want to catalyze men to serve the poor, the oppressed and the needy through their local church.

I Corinthians 4:15: Honoring the Spiritual Fathers of the Faith. Paul said that though we may have countless teachers in the faith, we will not have many fathers. And he became our father through the Gospel. We want to honor the Jewish Believers who are the spiritual fathers of our faith.

Apostolic Christianity or Jewish Evangelism?

Concerning Spiritual Fathers: This sounds decidedly quixotic. It is one thing to argue in favor of evangelism of Jews, particulary based on Paul’s “to the Jew first, and then the Greek” statements. Two of PK’s Board members are involved in Jewish evangelism (Rabbi Jonathan Bernis) and encouraging “Gentile believers in Jesus Christ to embrace the Messianic Jewish community” (Dr.Raleigh Washington). But McCartney doesn’t even seem to have evangelism of Jewish unbelievers in view here, but rather “Jewish believers who are the spiritual fathers of our faith.”

It’s unclear who these “fathers” are. Paul evangelized the Corinthians and thus claims to be their father in the gospel. Is Paul, therefore, ipso facto the father of all believers today? Or, perhaps McCartney is referring to the Apostles who left us the New Testament. But, still, while some Christians have become believers by reading the New Testament alone, most have been evangelized by Gentile evangelists. Just what McCartney is talking about here awaits further developments.

Christian Welfare?

Concerning the sharing of resources: why is this agenda singled out as somehow unique, or distinctive? Yes, the sharing of resources marked the communal life of early Christians. But that has more or less been the case ever since. Today, there are scores of Christian aid agencies that are international in scope, alongside countless soup kitchens, second-hand clothing distribution networks, and single-mother ministries in churches across the land. Entire denominations have cast themselves as agents for social justice and aid to the oppressed. Why is this “new?”

It’s Still About Women, Evidently

But, the first distictive in McCartney’s list looks decidedly like a retread, and a confused one at that. Citing a verse from the poem on the Virtuous Women (who is obviously a member of the aristocracy during the Golden Age of Solomon) in Proverbs 31, McCartney claims that the early church “celebrated virtuous women at the city gates.” So far as I know, the Apostle Paul commends a number of women for their character and works of mercy. But, to say that Christians themselves were “celebrating virtuous women at the city gates” is almost certainly false.

Christians (Jewish and Gentile alike) were mocked and persecuted and schemed against in the city gates. Jews and Pagans alike, threatened by converts to Christianity, persecuted Christians. To imagine the Christians themselves “celebrating” (what, exactly, is this supposed to mean???) in the city gates … it’s a preposterous fiction forced onto the NT and the early writings of the post-Apostolic fathers.

But, this is the 21st Century. The Evangelical Church is now feminist. And, if a ministry to men is going to have a snowball’s chance in hell, it’s going to need to bring the women in. Here’s how the PK website puts it :

1) Why are we inviting women?

The time for Proverbs 31:31 is long overdue! It’s time to bring our wives and daughters so that we can honor them together. They need to stand side by side with us as warriors of the faith.

Hmmmm. Evidently, Christian men don’t praise virtuous women in the gates (hence, it’s long overdue). I’m not sure why the burgeoning population of women in evangelical seminaries doesn’t count here. In another generation, evangelical pulpits will have as many or more women in them than men. Count on it — the seminaries’ Forward Looking Committees have it all figured out. The next generation of evangelical leaders are in today’s evangelical seminary classrooms. Count the division of the sexes and know the future!

I wish PK had been a less foggy about that warrior thing.

Do they mean this: “They need to stand side by side with us men who as men are warriors for the faith?”

Or do they mean this: “They need to stand side by side with us men, joining us to be warriors for the faith?”

You know, in the current climate there’s whole organization of women led by Carolyn Custis James who claims that the Bible calls women to be warriors. Women now populate all the armed forces, including combat units, so it’s a sure thing they can claim to be warriors for the United States. Is PK conforming to popular feminist and egalitarian notions about the warrior-ness of women? Looks like it to me.

Down with Male Headship

Meanwhile, the entire, long, and tedious battle for the past 25 years has been whether or not men are heads of their marriages, families, and churches. On that issue, PK is quite clear :

What does PK think the role of women should be?

The role of women is not a topic we address at our events; however, we do believe husbands are called to love their wives just as Christ loved the church (Ephesians 5:25).

I do not know how more studiously Promise Keepers can ignore the Scriptures than this. Paul has a lot of very clear things to say about the role of women in Ephesians 5. On one hand PK urges us to honor our spiritual fathers in the faith — including the Apostle Paul, for crying out loud — and at the same time refuses to quote the Apostle when he gives an answer to a question they themselves acknowledge is “out there.”

Promise Keepers makes a big deal out of integrity and courage. They would be a lot more convincing if they showed more integrity in how they handle the Bible, and less cowardice when facing the spirit of the age.

The blog sponsored by Christians for Biblical Equality can be counted on for showing us the cutting edge of egalitarian thinking, the sort of stuff that egalitarian leaders in academe look for in order to know where to place themselves so they’re at the head of the popular mob.

It is also a way to look at things ostensibly “Christian” through egalitarian glasses. An excellent example of this is found in Trevor’s analysis of how/why we have created “a church of gender division.”

His evidence includes the following:

• We encourage separate men’s and women’s meetings, rallies, conferences etc.
• We encourage separate men’s and women’s study Bibles and Bible helps.
• We encourage the genre of exclusive male to male and female to female authors.

So what? Ministries targeted at women and men, ministries pursued by men in concert with men (and women with women) are hardly new, going back to the very beginning (cf. 1 Tim. 3, or Titus 2). And so it has been for about 2,000 years now. The underlying premise of ministries aimed at either sex is simply that men and women are different, and that this difference should be acknowledged and accomodated by church ministry.

Admitted, the advance of technology (printing, video, travel, etc.) makes the opportunities for such accomodation more frequent. Again, so what? If ministry to men alone facilitates such ministry, as with women (as commenters reluctantly acknowledge), why frustrate this ministry by cutting back on it?

• We encourage male supremacy and primacy within marriage and family.
  
• We encourage marital role separateness when we promote hierarchy as a marriage model.
  
• We encourage the language of biological differentiation when we talk of his needs, her needs.
  
• We encourage difference between the sexes through accepting the thesis of books like, “Men are from Mars – Women are from Venus.”

Again, such “observations” ignore what everyone has always easily known. Moreover, it ignores the Bible’s own mandate that men be heads of the marriage, family, and church. This mandate has been ground zero in Church conflict for several generations now, and evangelicalism seems to have pretty well settled into camps where compliance with Biblical norms are honored (a minority now), and those where these Biblical norms are flouted, ignored, or mocked (e.g. the so-called egalitarian church communities, whether they be congregations, denominations, or parachurch institutions).

What puzzles me is the “we have …” in these observations. It sounds as if this egalitarian is lamenting that the egalitarian agenda hasn’t been more comprehensively implemented in supposedly egalitarian churches.

We encourage segregation and individualism by all of the above which leads to dissatisfaction and the breakdown of balanced gender relationships, including marriage and family.

Flummery. American evangelicals are the “freest” Christians history has ever seen. Their ecclesiology (actually, their lack of an ecclesiology)  allows them to do what they routinely do as often as they change their socks: change churches to suit their tastes in virtually anything, including how the church handles ministry to men and women.

The NT scriptures are addressed to believers generally, not to genders specifically. While instructions are given to husbands, wives, children, slaves and slave owners these instructions are to be culturally considered.

Here we have egalitarian falsehood and egalitarian flummery in one sentence.

First, the OT and NT Scriptures are generally address specificially to the men, and when context indicates that the entire congregation is intended, it is the inclusive masculine gender that is used in the Biblical text. The Ten Commandments, for example, are addressed to men, because men are the heads of the various social units within Israel (marriage, family, tribe). But, no one ever questions that “Thou shalt not steal” is a commandment women are obliged to follow. Specifically, “You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife …” does not leave the women free to covet their neighbor’s husband. No specific prohibition directed at women is needed, because her moral duty is included in the moral duty of her head.

And, what about those Scriptures known to address specific — gender specific — groups, such as husbands (as opposed to wives) or wives (as opposed to husbands)? According to CBE’s blogger, these are to be “culturally considered!” That’s egalitarian code words for “ignored” or “dismissed.” On this score, the entire Book of Proverbs should be dismissed, because it is compiled by men for men as men. Its purpose is to equip young men to take their places in the gates as older, wiser men.

May women profit from The Proverbs? No one ever said otherwise. Does the Book of Proverbs contain exemplary models for women to emulate? Of course it does, primarily Lady Wisdom. Models of women to reject? Of course it does, primarily Woman Folly. But, even those passages are primarily crafted for the express instruction and development of men’s characters and wisdom. In this way, the Proverbs are typical of the Bible as a whole — addressed to the heads of the believing community for the benefit of all.

While some may disagree, it is my belief that many of our differences are culturally adapted rather than biblically mandated.

Yet that’s what the quarrel is all about! Egalitarians take the Bible’s mandates regarding the nature and relationship of the sexes and dismiss them out of hand in favor of some pansexual or asexual inclusiveness.

The BBC is breathlessly reporting something that I’ll be NO ONE EVER knew before:

Women are prouder than men, but men are more lustful, according to a Vatican report which states that the two sexes sin differently.

A Catholic survey found that the most common sin for women was pride, while for men, the urge for food was only surpassed by the urge for sex.

I can just Homestar Runner now:  “Seeweeouswy, Strong Bad!  Can you buh-weave it?” 

The BBC has shown us how late in the Empire we are, that this would be news.  Actually, it’s more than news.  It’s subversive, which is why it’s coming out of the Roman Catholic Church, that paragon of Western Patriarchal Purgatory, in which all men are gods and all women are bare-foot and prego.

Not that the Romans have any monopoly on this sort of thing, of course.  It used to be that American Protestantism was rife with sexist oppression — women covering their heads in worship, wearing dresses instead of short-shorts to Church.  Do you realize that not many generations ago there were no female worship leaders?  No generous swathes of female belly-flesh undulating from what old cranks pompously called “the sanctuary?”  No navels winking merrily at the congregation? 

It’s taken a long hard fight, but Broadly American Evangelical Protestantism has finally reached the gender heights of what George Bernard Shaw proclaimed as the proper gender division within humanity:  male, female, and clergy.  Except if you’re female clergy, you’re still permitted to flaunt your femininity.  If you’re male clergy, however, you’d better not speak or act in any way that a woman wouldn’t be comfortable speaking or acting.

Still, those Catholics think there’s a gender component to sin. 

The Pope’s personal theologian backed up the report in the Vatican newspaper.

“Men and women sin in different ways,” Msgr Wojciech Giertych, theologian to the papal household, wrote in L’Osservatore Romano.

“When you look at vices from the point of view of the difficulties they create you find that men experiment in a different way from women.”

Msgr Giertych said the most difficult sin for men to face was lust, followed by gluttony, sloth, anger, pride, envy and greed.

For women, the most dangerous sins were pride, envy, anger, lust, and sloth, he added.

Oh yeah??  Who says??

Actually, it was the Catholic sinners (or, at least, those who still go to confession) who provide the shocking evidence.

The report was based on a study of confessions carried out by Fr Roberto Busa, a 95-year-old Jesuit scholar.

Protestant ecumenists with their gender priorities straight (or, should that be straight/gay/lesbian/transexual?) need to redouble their efforts to liberate Catholic clergy and laity from the deplorable sexism of the past.

Tony Esolen’s final (alas!) pondering on Joe the Plumber’s interview making the rounds of the internet focuses on “first principles.”
 
… in that interview, [Joe the Plumber] showed that he rejected the idea that he should vote for a fatter wallet, since even if he had been persuaded that Mr. Obama’s policies would fatten his wallet (and he was not persuaded that they would), they would still amount to what he called “socialism”. That’s what he rejected, as unworthy of American love of liberty.

I think that Joe was right about that, but that’s not my point here. I’m struck first of all that anybody can still talk about first principles.

And, that got me to thinking how “first principles” is a notion that sheds some light on how and why egalitarians go careening off into the theological ozone while mere Christianity has remained more or less stable for over two millennia as far as notions about the sexes are concerned.

Esolen observes:

There are some people who cannot logically appeal to first principles. Utilitarians can’t; all they can do is whip out the happiness calculators, their political equivalent of a magic wand. Materialists can’t; they cannot even recognize the real existence of principles, except as prejudices. Others cannot appeal to first principles, because it would be political suicide for them to do so.

For egalitarians, it would be programmatic, doctrinal, and – yes – political suicide for them to appeal to first principles, for those principles in Holy Writ dissolve egalitarianism as salt dissolves slugs.

Consider, for example, how egalitarians read Genesis 2. Their conclusions exactly contradict the Apostle Paul, writing in the Spirit, who notes that woman was made from the man and for his sake, not the other way round. The man is the woman’s very reason for existing. Say such a thing (he is her reason for being) and watch an egalitarian’s knickers twist tighter than dental floss.

But in all their sputtering indignation, none will ever mention the first principle Paul sees embedded in the Genesis text – “For man is not from woman, but woman from man. Nor was man created for the woman, but woman for the man.”

Another observation by Esolen:

… one of the professors at my school (and Providence College is a paragon of good health compared to most) tells his students that they are idiots for reading anything written before 1950, since none of that matters anymore. Another professor derides students for majoring in English, since there is no real knowledge you can gain from poetry.

Again, we see that egalitarianism is modernism’s running dog, exactly what you’d expect, as egalitarianism is leashed to the World. The World has been enthralled with its own navel for at least the past century in the West, and the attitude reported by Esolen is found in all quarters of modern culture, because it is … well, modern. It scorns the past because it is the past. Modernists insist that they are the people and wisdom will die with them.

So, for example, egalitarians are quite sure that the Church has misunderstood 2 Timothy 2:12ff until sometime in the mid 1970s. Egalitarians are quite sure the pervasive patriarchy of the Old and New Testaments are lamentable errors, or lamentable accomodations to errors, until the Holy Spirit remembered to tell them what He really has in mind. Egalitarians are so confident that “El Shaddai” means “God with breasts” while the LXX translators – more than 2,000 years closer to the culture and language of the Hebrew text – were quite mistaken.

There are, indeed, first principles in God’s Word (cf. Hebrews 5:12). But, these principles cannot be acknowledged by egalitarians, lest they abandon their infatuation with the world.

In his third installment on Joe the Plumber, Anthony Esolen examines the sub-text in Joe’s interview with Media-babe on the topic of authority. Esolen sets up his ponderings on the political left with this snippet of the interview:

When the reporter asked him about Obama’s intention to take money from the supposed rich, Joe, who is not rich, did not at first ask “How much” or “Who’s giving” but “By what authority?”

 And, so, Esolen goes on to explain the wide-ranging ways that the political left opposes any authority, while arrogating to itself the only sort of authority it can understand: the blunt exercise of power.

 In my collateral musings on Esolen’s thoughts, I note that religious egalitarians have the same notion of authority (the blunt exercise of power) as political leftists. In the latter case, power must be accumulated and then coercively deployed against non-Leftists. The religious feminists, however, appear to take a different tack, viz., to champion the eradication of all authority, replaced by everyone submitting to everyone else so that there is, virtually, no exercise of authority.

 Put that way, it sounds silly, of course. Yet when egalitarians apply this notion to marriage, you get the standard egalitarian notion that husbands are servant-leaders (e.g. they serve, but never lead) and wives have equal “authority” to teach men, lead their families, and rule the church. And, so, the abundant, obvious, and pervasive patriarchalism of the Old and New Testaments is bent into unrecognizable shapes.

 For the egalitarian, it is impossible for Christ to be the head of man, as man is the head of woman, as God is the head of Christ. Nor can an egalitarian concede that Paul denies woman authority (!) to teach men or to rule men in the church. But, far more than a few scattered verses in the NT are at stake here. It is the entire trajectory of Scripture, its pervasive patriarchalism, which the egalitarian must deconstruct and reconstruct along feminist lines.

Esolen’s second essay on Joe the Plumber’s encounter with a media-babe is now online.  Enjoy.

Esolen highlights but does not mention or expound directly the fact that at the heart of masculinity is unadorned, uncultivated dirt.  That is the first and most direct reason given in Holy Writ for his creation – to cultivate the dirt (cf. Genesis 2:5).  This aspect of his origin appears today in the things Esolen discusses about authentic men:

[Joe the Plumber] was about to handle hard, sometimes apparently intractable, materials, things that don’t oblige our utopian dreams.  The iron pipe does not condescend to political correctness.  It won’t say, “I see that I should move into place no matter who or what is lugging me, because that would be the democratic thing to do.”  There’s a bracing reality in such things as iron, or earth, or even PVC, not to mention water, that wondrous bringer of life that can bring ruin, too, if it’s not under control. 

Man’s raison d’etre is uncultivated dirt, to cultivate it and bring forth from it what could not be without cultivation.  Woman’s raison d’etre (according to Genesis) is the man, already functioning in a stewardship, responsible to God for the Garden.  Her being from him and for him goes a very long way to account for the distinctives of men over against women and their relationship to one another.

To judge by the mainstream media attention given to Joe the Plumber, you’d think the photo on the left represents the media’s opinion of Joe’s work.  If only Obama had been vetted even a tenth as much as Joe!

Tony Esolen has noted the way Joe pairs up with those who demand he explain himself to America.  Referring to one encounter between Joe and a TV interviewer that is circulating on the internet these days, Esolen comments:

What fascinates me about the interview was that it seemed we were watching creatures from two utterly different universes, or from two different epochs.  The anchoress — I’m not sure who it was; I don’t watch them — was all smiles, all makeup, with her expensive coif and her neat business suit.  Then you have Joe, nearly bald, stocky, wearing an ordinary sweat shirt and jacket, hardly smiling at all; it was as if he thought that the election hinged upon matters that transcended the moment, and that were certainly more important than his own brief burst of notoriety.

I don’t think Esolen’s point in this particular blog is to expound the gender perspectives, though I’d expect those to pop up in future blogs on Joe the Plumber.  Esolen promises to write something each day for a week (if I understand him aright) on this interview.  Stay tuned here for updates.

The following is a transcript of an address by Fr. Bill, delivered in a chapel service at an evangelical seminary on October 1, 2008. Citations for quotes were not provided during the delivery of this address, but are included in hyperlinks below.

Thank you for that welcome. It is a honor to speak with you this evening, about something I suspect you have already been talking about among yourselves for several weeks now: Sarah Palin.

Within a couple of days after Palin’s debut as a vice-presidential running mate, the internet forums that I regularly read and my wife’s email inbox began to fill with anxious queries from those who were obviously conflicted by Palin’s meteoric rise to national fame. For those of us who have contended for the truth of the Bible about the sexes, Sarah Palin has become the perfect storm.

PALIN THE PERFECT STORM

We have watched for someone like Sarah Palin for the past 25 years. Our ministry originated at the end of the 1980s, when secular feminism was consolidating its cultural supremacy in America. By that time, the feminist world-view had its hands firmly on all the levers of secular power: state and federal legislatures and the courts, the public education establishment from kindergarten through graduate schools, the media in all its forms – film, radio, television, newspapers, and magazines.

And at the end of the 1980s, secular feminism presented itself at the door of the church for baptism. From the 1990s to the present day, religious feminism has recreated American evangelicalism in its own feminist image..

In 2006 Wayne Grudem, a founder of the Council for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, published a book entitled Evangelical Feminism: A New Path to Liberalism? I do not know if he meant his title to be ironic or not. When you read his book, you find an air-tight case that Evangelical feminism is liberalism. And at the end of his book, Grudem lays out the evidence for the triumph of feminism in American evangelicalism, a triumph as complete as feminism’s triumph in secular culture by the end of the 1980s.

Today, by Grudem’s analysis, feminism reigns in all the evangelical institutions – its seminaries (this current seminary is a very rare exception), as well as its publishing houses, its mission boards, and its parachurch organizations.

Just a year before Grudem published that book, Russell Moore, the Dean of the Theology School at Southern Baptist Seminary in Louisville observed, “Egalitarians are winning the evangelical gender debate, not because their arguments are stronger, but because, in some sense, we’re all egalitarians now.” He is right. With exception of the Southern Baptist Convention and isolated independent congregations scattered about, evangelicals are virtually egalitarian today.

But, even a voice from the Southern Baptist Convention has recently dismayed and confused many by giving away the farm to the feminists who demand surrender.  Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptists’ flagship seminary in Louisville, had this to say on one of his recent blogs  that comments on Sarah Palin’s national candidacy:

The New Testament clearly speaks to the complementary roles of men and women in the home and in the church, but not in roles of public responsibility. I believe that women as CEOs in the business world and as officials in government are no affront to Scripture. Then again, that presupposes that women — and men — have first fulfilled their responsibilities within the little commonwealth of the family.

Mohler – and many evangelical leaders like him, including many leading complementarians such as James Dobson and CBMW’s current director David Kotter  - all unite in what they view to be a silence in Scripture concerning women in the public square, a silence that allows evangelical women to fulfill the feminist ideal – that is, the virtual interchangeability of men and women in social roles and functions. According to these complementarian leaders, the headship of males is something restricted to home and family, the private spheres of personal faith, while outside these spheres women may do anything a man may do, including to lead the most powerful nation on earth.

But why should the little commonwealth – Mohler’s term for the family – why should that little commonwealth limit the roles of men and women, while the great commonwealth liberates men and women to be all they can possibly be? Why should the church organize itself along gender lines when the world insists that a person’s sex is so irrelevant that women should serve in the armed forces, including combat roles?

PALIN AND THE CHALLENGE TO EVANGELICALS

Kotter of CBMW is wrong. Palin poses a critical dilemma to evangelical Protestants in America. On one hand, her pro-life values encourage evangelicals who have fought long and hard since the days of Francis Schaeffer against the slaughter of millions of defenseless children. Sarah Palin’s fecundity encourages those who take the Bible’s opinion at face value, that children are a blessing from the LORD. Her refusal to abort her last pregnancy when she learned that Trig had Downs’ syndrome shows that her pro-life values are genuine rather than politically expedient.

Yet, at the same time, Palin is not like Geraldine Ferraro or Hillary Clinton. Those women entered the contest for political office after their child-rearing days were completed. Sarah Palin launched her political career with children still at home. She completed a speaking engagement after her water broke with Trig, and after the speech she flew back across the continent to Alaska to give birth. Three days after that, she was back in her governor’s office.

But, the most powerful challenge to evangelicals comes from Palin’s ardent feminism. When asked about the care of her children, she replies, “Why not ask the other governors about their parenting?” Of course, she means the other governors who are men. Her retort arises from the premise that fathers and mothers are interchangeable. She further comments that there should be “no doors women should not walk through” and she exulted in her first national speech as a vice-presidential candidate that her election would “shatter that glass ceiling once and for all.”

And, so Sarah Palin presents evangelicals with a tightly packed conundrum. How shall we parse it? What are we to make of it, no matter how we vote on election day?

PALIN IS NO DEBORAH

Before I answer that question, I must dismiss an answer, one that many complementarians offer to justify their delight with Palin’s position on the national horizon. Many point to Deborah as the precedent for someone like Sarah Palin.

But, you do not have to look closely at Deborah to learn that Deborah is no precedent for Sarah Palin.

Deborah did not mince words that it was the cowardliness of Barak and other men in Israel that made her ministry needful in the first place. It was Deborah who praised those men in Israel who finally showed up for the fight, a fight in which she resolutely refused to participate. At Barak’s pleading, she accompanied him as far as the battlefield, but she refused to join him on the battlefield. Deborah did not run around the battlefield in a chariot, as so many starry-eyed feminist evangelicals suppose. Instead, she exhorted the wimpy Barak do his duty as a judge.

Deborah never crowed about breaking glass ceilings. Deborah never demanded that all doors open to men must also be open to women. Deborah was one unconventionally deployed mother among millions of mothers in the midst of a thoroughly patriarchal culture. Sarah Palin is just one more feminist among of millions of feminists in the midst of a thoroughly feminist society. Deborah is a whale in a bathtub, while Palin is a guppy in the Atlantic. There is no parallel, no point of contact between Sarah Palin and the wife of Lappidoth.

PALIN IS THE EVANGELICAL SAMSON

On the other hand, there is a character in the Book of Judges whose career sheds light on a phenomenon like Sarah Palin. That character is Samson, and Palin’s impact on evangelicals parallels Samson’s impact on the Israel of his day. I can see all your eyebrows crawling toward your hairlines, but hear me out.

The significant similarities between Samson and Palin are these:

First, both Palin and Samson embody conflicting values that spring from antagonistic agendas. Samson was the LORD’s anointed set against the Philistines who ruled over God’s people. On the other hand, Samson wallowed in unclean food, unclean sex, and a penchant for sleeping with the enemy and then slaughtering the enemy.

Palin doesn’t hold an office in the Church by virtue of divine commissioning, but she is certainly recognizable as “one of us” who champions values and agendas that evangelicals are known to champion (i.e. pro-life values). And, yet, like Samson who repudiated the holiness God demanded from Israel, Palin repudiates two millennia of Apostolic faith and practice concerning how women should advance the kingdom of God. She would have women move out of the domestic realm into the public arena.

It’s the audience in that public arena that alerts us to Palin’s most long-lasting impact. In Samson’s case, it is clear that the LORD wanted to upset the cozy truce Israel had forged with her Philistine rulers. Samson’s provocations against the Philistines should have rallied Israel to repent of their sins and to throw off the pagan oppressors.

Instead, Israel tied Samson up and delivered him to the Philistines, to protect their own peace and safety under Philistine rule. The only good that Samson achieved was to temporarily discomfit the Philistines. Meanwhile, Samson’s career occasioned a great hardening of Israel’s heart. Israel preferred peace under Philistine rule rather than to rebel against God’s enemies.

In a similar way, Palin is pushing evangelicals to a crucial choice. Today, evangelicals are double-minded in a way that Israel was double-minded during Samson’s days. Evangelicals are enchanted with religious feminism, but they are troubled when a mother of five, four of whom are still at home, leaves her family to rule Alaska, and now America; leaves her compliant husband to raise the kids while she attempts to lead the world’s most powerful nation. The old feminists used to think they could have it all, until bitter experience showed them they were wrong. Now Sarah Palin is declaring that women can, indeed, have it all – or, at least, the trappings of it all.

The outcomes for evangelicals are the same as the outcomes on Israel when it was challenged by Samson’s contradictions. On one hand, evangelicals should look at Palin and repent of their double mindedness about the sexes, repent of their lip service to motherhood and family, to repent of cheering their wives and daughters who compete with men in the public arena.

On the other hand, evangelicals might harden their hearts. Evangelicals might unite with secular feminists in proclaiming that the Bible is wrong, outmoded, and dispensable as far as anything it says about the sexes in marriage, family, church, and society.

Palin presents evangelicals with a fork in the road. One path abandons the faith once delivered to the saints. The other path leads first to repentance, and then to taking up the cross and following Christ through the hatred that the world always aims at Christ and those who follow him.

REPENTANCE FOR EVANGELICALS

If anyone sets out on the right road, the first steps will be steps of repentance. I cannot possibly expound in detail all the areas where double-minded evangelicals and confused complementarians need to repent. Perhaps you can think of some of those areas now. Perhaps the Spirit of Christ is even now showing you areas of repentance especially pertinent to your own double-mindedness or confusion.

However, I wish to quickly note three areas where evangelicals generally are in desperate need of repentance as we face the future that Sarah Palin will usher in, no matter whether she is elected or not.

First of all, evangelicals must repent of the confusion about the struggle within our churches over the nature and meaning of the sexes. One hopeful sign of this kind of repentance was offered by Dr. Russell Moore in February of last year. During a conference in Minneapolis, Dr. Moore said this:*

We have to understand that this [debate about the sexes] is not an intramural debate. Quite frankly, that’s the way we’ve been treating it for too long. We’ve been treating it like the kind of conversation dispensationalists and covenant theologians may have with one another. … That is not what is taking place.

What we have to ultimately understand is that the Gospel itself is patriarchal. It has to do with the Fatherhood of God, a Fatherhood that is not abstract, a Fatherhood that is not theoretical, a Fatherhood that the entire Bible lays out as a God who is giving a covenant inheritance to his Son. It is not just the individual texts; it’s the whole trajectory of Scripture,…

Related to this observation by Dr. Moore is yet another repentance that evangelicals sorely need – to repent of their acceptance of egalitarianism as just another valid form of Christianity. In 1923, Princeton professor G. Gresham Machen published his book entitled Christianity and Liberalism. The book’s very title announced its thesis that Christianity and liberalism were different religions. Today we badly need a chorus of evangelical leaders to proclaim that Christianity and egalitarianism are different religions.

There is no book out there entitled Christianity and Egalitarianism, but you can find a few voices proclaiming this very unwelcomed thesis in the evangelical wilderness. One of them is Dr. S. M. Hutchens, a senior editor of Touchstone and a regular blogger at Touchstone’s blog Mere Comments. Of all Touchstone’s editors, Hutchens has brought the most trenchant indictment of egalitarianism as a false faith. Recently, he offered these words in Mere Comments:

Because of the relation of God and man in Christ, any anthropological heresy also inescapably infects theology and becomes a theological heresy as well . . . . A Christ who is Human in the egalitarian sense cannot be Man in the orthodox sense, [The egalitarian Human Christ ] is merely the apotheosis of the egalitarian ideal. He cannot be the head of the man as the man is the head of the woman as God is his own head. The ordinal relations of which the Apostle spoke, and in which the Church believes, are utterly broken on the egalitarian wheel. That is why egalitarianism is a heresy and no orthodox Christian can be an egalitarian.

Dr. Hutchens knows, as you and I know, there are many who claim to be authentically Christian and egalitarian, and to their own unexamined hearts that claim appears credible. But, the human capacity for duplicity, self-deceit, and equivocation is almost infinite. That is why such folk must repent if they are to ever see the Kingdom of God. Their doctrine is a lie, and our Lord was shockingly clear that outside the eternal Jerusalem are dogs and sorcerers and sexually immoral and murderers and idolaters, and whoever loves and practices a lie. [Rev. 22:15]

Is egalitarianism a lie? I submit to you that it is one of the most basic of all lies. Egalitarianism is one diabolical answer to Satan’s perennial question: Hath God said …?

Is woman created from and for the man? Or are men to submit to women in all ways that woman submit to men?

Does Paul restrict women from teaching or exercising authority over men? Or, should women serve as elders and bishops, ruling men and teaching them as officers of the church?

Are women a weaker vessel? Or are they warriors, as Carolyn Custis James tells us?

Is a woman’s domain private and domestic, as Paul tells us in Titus 2? Or should she excel as a corporate CEO, or as a president of the United States?

Did God really mean it when he declared it a shame for a nation to be oppressed by children and ruled by women? Or is that idea simply the whining of an ancient patriarchal prejudice?

In another place on Touchstone’s blog, Dr. Hutchens explains why he is willing to incur the wrath, indignation, and scorn of the evangelical academy, for identifying egalitarianism as the enemy of the gospel. Here’s what he had to say:

There was a time when I was much younger that I hoped all this wouldn’t be so. How much more friendly and comfortable and status-filled life might have been if I had not come to the convictions on this that I did, for believe me, I am an unpopular man, and don’t enjoy being ill thought-of by nice people with whom I would like to be friendly. But to hell with all that: life is short, and I must soon give an account of myself and my teaching to the Lord. I would rather experience some discomfort in this life than to have him identify me as a coward, a toady, and a false teacher.**

And there, my friends, is the third area where evangelicals need desperately to repent: evangelicals simply must repent of their infatuation with the applause of the world. And, the world applauds wildly when those who name the name of Christ repudiate the obvious and expansive patriarchy of the Bible – and not just the Bible, but what the Bible says to bind the consciences of Christians as to their relationships with one another in marriage, family, church, and public society.

And if we repent of this infatuation with the world and its applause, what must we embrace instead? Again, the New Testament is riddled with the answer. We must take up our crosses and follow Christ. We must confess, defend, and believe that those who would live godly in this age will be persecuted. We must believe that our Lord spoke truly when he told us that in this world we would meet persecution. And, we must also heed his exhortation not to fear, for he has overcome the world.

For some of you here, I have said some dismaying things. Sarah Palin and her debut may lead, eventually, to a revival of godliness. Or, history may look back on this election season as God’s judgment on evangelicals for their culpable double-mindedness. Sarah Palin may, in fact, be a strong delusion for a people who had eyes but would not see, and ears that would not hear. Time will show us eventually what sort of legacy Sarah Palin leaves in her wake.

But tonight, I hope you understand that whatever Sarah Palin turns out to be for evangelicals, you have in your hands an opportunity that most American Christians have never seen – the opportunity to obey our Lord in a time of great darkness, in a nation whose Christians are being sifted as wheat. If you can find the grace to be faithful when faithfulness will most certainly cause you to be marginalized and mocked, you can by your faithfulness lay a foundation of righteousness for your children and grandchildren.

We did not come to this situation quickly. And, we will not recover from it quickly. But, absent the Lord’s return, the time will come when the double-mindedness and confusion that characterizes evangelicalism today will blow away – first by the cleansing wind of persecution for righteousness’ sake, then by that same mighty Wind that vivified Christ’s Body at the beginning. The righteous will get more righteous yet, the filthy more filthy yet.

And that future day of spiritual health and cultural vitality is in your hands tonight. The revival of godliness always has a season of preparation, in which the Holy Spirit works through those who are usually never seen, those whose faith and faithfulness are the seeds of righteousness that flourish years, perhaps decades, later.

With Sarah Palin planted at the fork in the road, God grant that you shall choose the right path.  And may he  give you grace to persevere upon it for the sake of the Church in a later generation.

Again, thank you so much for this opportunity to speak to you.

*Moore’s remarks are contained in an MP3 file available here.  A transcription of the relevant portion of the audio file may be found here.

**Hutchens’ talent for speaking straightforwardly in this way may be seen in a recent blog entitled “Naming Heresy“ wherein he not only explains why egalitarianism merits the label heresy, but he also takes to task those evangelical leaders who know that egalitarianism is heresy but fail to say so forthrightly in their public communications.

Temporarily off this scene

I thank all four (five?) of my readers for checking back from time to time.  Brother Mike, in a comment on the blog below, hopes things are well with me.  They are.

Things are so well that I’m busier than a one-eyed cat watching nine rat holes.  That means that some things simply have to wait till things calm down a tad.  Like this blog.

Meanwhile, I’m racing to the starting line — that’s right, starting line.  September 28 my bride and I take off on a 17 day road trip through the southeast states on a speaking tour that brings us to Southern Evangelical Seminary in Charlotte, multi-church meetings in Raleigh NC, Yorktown VA, and Canton, OH.  Lord willing, we’ll be visiting a few of you along the way. 

Much to discuss — not least of them Palin.  I’m distilling an analysis of that phenomenon for presentation on the speaking tour (it’ll be the main burden of my chapel presentation at the seminary).  After it’s been honed and seasoned by questions from listeners, I’ll post it here on this blog.

Lord willing, there will be further graduates within our family, but this month we see the last graduate from high school, as Veronica — the baby of the family — graduates.  With her departure this summer to take up residence with her oldest sister while she begins undergraduate school at the University of Texas, our nest here at home will finally be empty, except for the periodic return of our nestlings for a visit.

Honestly, I’m not sure how Barbara and I are going to navigate this change.  I expect us to find ourselves conflicted with relief and sadness.  It won’t be boring, as we’ve learned when our eldest (Alexa) and her younger sister (Geneva) both departed for university studies.  In many ways, parenting simply changes gears at that point.  What’s going to be different this time is that the nest — which Barbara and I will continue to occupy — will no longer domicile our daughters.  Some months down the road, if I find myself with something to report about that time, I’ll let you know.

Meanwhile, our days are filled with much coming and going.  This photo shows me and Veronica at the Belles and Beaus Ball.  Later, if I can figure out how to do it, I’ll post a video clip of me and Veronica walzing at this ball.