Green and Blair believed in God’s sovereignty to command the obedience of all nations. Ultimately, their sermons are just longer reflections on what the psalmist said in so few words: “For dominion belongs to the LORD and he rules over the nations.” But notice that their point–and that of the biblical text–is not devoid of grace. Certainly, God is just, but he is also merciful. For Blair, if he and his countrymen would only show “real contrition for, and conversion from our evil ways, we may hope for the blessing of God” (30). This is not the evangelism of “winsome politics” but simply a political application of Matthew 4:17: “Repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand.”

On a late spring day in 1798, two ministers stepped behind pulpits to deliver important messages to their congregations. Both were Presbyterians and in Philadelphia, a city of importance for both the nation (it was the capital city at the time) and their new denomination (the PCUSA). Rev. Ashbel Green was at his home church, historic Second Presbyterian. In 1789, it hosted the PCUSA’s very first General Assembly. Just blocks away, Samuel Blair was addressing those gathered at First Presbyterian, an older congregation pastored by the eminent Rev. John Ewing who was near the end of his ministry.
The occasion for this midweek service was a solemn one: a national day of “fasting, humiliation, and prayer.” The young republic was facing its first major international crisis. 
Seven years earlier, the newly formed French Republic declared war against Great Britain. When President George Washington announced an official position of neutrality in the conflict while also sanctioning the Jay Treaty with Britain, many in France’s revolutionary government saw it as a betrayal by their one-time ally. Frustrated by America’s noninterference, French privateers began raiding American merchant ships who were trading with the enemy. When America stopped paying its war debts in response, the two nations moved toward the brink of war.
International pressure produced an ominous mood in the country, and Adams called on America’s spiritual capital for aid. Far from seeing it as an inappropriate syncretism of church and state, these men believed encouraging their congregations to greater piety was both a religious and civil duty. Indeed, both Green and Blair would serve as Chaplains to the House of Representatives, demonstrating their commitment to a harmonious relationship between the eternal and temporal spheres for mutual benefit.
France, by their estimation, had violated this divinely appointed order by rejecting God and embracing “infidel reason” (Green, 46). America, by contrast, had so far resisted the atheistic impulse, holding fast to Nature and Nature’s God from its founding. 
These addresses are worth studying for many reasons. Their comparisons of the French and American revolutions are fascinating, but my intentions are more pastoral and, I hope, relevant: the remarks by these ordinary pastors, and the ease they felt expressing them behind the pulpit no less, reveals a serious deficiency with the present state of political theology in our churches. The problem is twofold.
The first part relates to biblical interpretation and application. For sermons addressing national concerns, Blair and Green both chose passages from the Old Testament: Isaiah 1:5 and 2 Chronicles 15:2 respectively. The reason why Blair and Green picked these texts and the point they intended to make is straightforward: just as God dealt with Israel, blessing or cursing her for the people’s attention to the law, so too would God deal with America.
Sirens immediately begin to ring in our modern ears at such a proposition. That ministers would try and apply lessons from Old Testament Israel to the American republic is a hermeneutical Rubicon no self-respecting preacher would dare cross today. Israel occupied a special place in God’s redemptive plan. America does not. Any comparison between the two is not only flawed but dangerous. Or so we’re told. 
But invoking a comparison between Israel and America did not mean these ministers were ignorant of other significant differences. Israel was a “theocracy” while America is not, admitted Green (11). Israel’s polity flowed from the institution of “a complicated ritual of ceremonial observances and temporary regulations,” he explains, which reinforced God’s position not only as the common “supreme governor of the world” but also as their unique “civil chief” (11). In this way, Israel was manifestly different from her peers then and now. Moreover, the salvific purpose of the covenant-nation of Israel presently continues in the international covenant-people of the church–a key theme of the biblical canon not lost on Green or Blair.
But the Israel of the Bible was also one nation among many, all of which appear to be held by a common and divinely ordained standard to obey the moral law. This is Green’s main argument, which he proves by pointing to both sacred and secular history. “What was the cause of the destruction of the Canaanite (sic) nations?” he asks. After all, they did not have the “special revelation” afforded to Israel. Yet, God destroyed them because they violated “those great principles of religion and morality which the light of nature taught” (25).
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Political liberty is a tremendous social good. But it can only work when there is restraint on our appetites, and when we put limits to our cravings.

Freedom, in the biblical understanding, is much different than what most folks think when discussing freedom. They believe that freedom means being able to do whatever you want to do. The biblical view says that freedom involves doing what is right. And it involves the idea of being free to serve.
Most folks do not think of servants or slaves as being free. But paradoxically, the biblical notion of freedom has to do with being a slave – a slave to Christ and a servant to others. That is why 1 Peter 2:16 says the following: “Live as people who are free, . . . living as servants of God.”
Paul also speaks in such terms. In 1 Corinthians 7:22 he says: “the one who was a slave when called to faith in the Lord is the Lord’s freed person; similarly, the one who was free when called is Christ’s slave.” And in Romans 6:18 and 22 he says similar things: “You have been set free from sin and have become slaves to righteousness. . . . But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the benefit you reap leads to holiness, and the result is eternal life.”
Three general things can be said about the biblical view of freedom and serfdom. First, there is a marked contrast between the Christian and the non-Christian. The non-believer might think that he is free, but in reality he is a slave. He is a slave to sin and self. The above passages from Romans makes this clear, as do others.
Acts 26:18 for example speaks about how the unsaved are bound by “the power of Satan”. Galatians 4:8 speaks of how non-Christians are “slaves to those who by nature are not gods”. And Hebrews 2:15 talks about the unconverted as those who are “held in slavery”.
Martyn Lloyd-Jones put it this way: “We are never free. Everybody in the world today is either the slave of sin and Satan or else the slave of Jesus Christ.” Or as R. C. Sproul has said, “The only freedom that man ever has is when he becomes a slave to Jesus Christ.”
And again: “If ever there is a genuine paradox to be found in Holy Writ, it is at the point of freedom and bondage. The paradox is this: When one seeks to rebel from God, he gains only bondage. When he becomes a slave to God, he becomes free. Liberty is found in obedience.”
James Montgomery Boice put it as follows: “The only real freedom you are ever going to know, either in this life or in the life to come, is the freedom of serving Jesus Christ. And this means a life of righteousness. Anything else is really slavery, regardless of what the world may promise you through its lies and false teaching.”
So the non-believer can carry on all he likes about being free – especially being free of God and his requirements. But he is a slave nonetheless. He is a slave to his own sin, to his own selfishness, to his own lusts, and to his own desires. As John Piper says:
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Written by Aaron M. Renn |
Friday, March 22, 2024
Review of  “How Feminism Ends”… “if this is the end of feminism, then it doesn’t quite feel fair. If women are finally “free,” then why is it still so hard to be female? And why, after all of our hard work, are the best parts of history still made by males?”

Ginerva Davis has a very interesting review of French writer Emmanuel Todd’s book The Lineages of the Feminine in the new issue of American Affairs. It’s titled, provocatively, “How Feminism Ends”
Todd is a self-described liberal, and supports the right of adults to change their gender and, to the extent it is now medically possible, their sex. But in the places where our current moment is excessive, or historically aberrant, Todd finds an unambiguous common thread: the presence of females.
Females control the universities where such sex-denying work is produced. Females are disproportionately concentrated in the academic fields—anthropology, biology, sociology—that have most radically changed their ideas on sex and gender (in contrast, history, a more male-dominated field, has stayed largely above the fray). A female sociologist wrote the book about how menopause is a social construct; a different female anthropologist wrote another study Todd cites which argues that females should, actually, have evolved to be taller and stronger than males. (Todd responds that “natural selection is there only to be lamented over.”)
Females increasingly control the levers of cultural power; if a topic feels “ideologically central,” then it is because females made it so. At the very least, they constitute the majority of reporters who cover health, social issues, and family policy. The “gender ideology” Todd abhors runs through numer­ous female-dominated professions: it is promoted by journalists, legitimized by doctors, and codified into law by a growing number of female government officials. Todd also finds that it is almost always “mothers” (i.e., female parents) who have the final say over medical treatment for their children. And so while debates about “gender-af­firming” care tend to be sex-neutral—“parents” making decisions about the bodies of their “children”—much of the contemporary “transgender movement” amounts to a trend of older females helping younger ones escape their sex.
…
The result, Todd argues, is a split consciousness on the status of “women.” Males see women everywhere: women police them in HR departments, mock them in the news, and, to add insult to injury, continue to insist that they are members of a protected class.
Females, however, are still haunted by a lack of female “greatness”—the same problem posed, seventy-five years ago, by Beauvoir. They work under male bosses. Their countries are run by mostly male leaders. Males continue to define the cutting edge in tech­nology and industry, while females play catch-up in remedial programs (“Women in tech!” “Women in business!”). And even the most liberated female must still take her pills, and count her cycle, and watch her fertility “window” while pretending that she doesn’t care. The female condition, one of constant self-monitoring and self-suppression, is now oddly similar to that of the gender-dysphoric, which is perhaps why we females are so obsessed with them (I never felt quite so understood as a female until I read the work of Andrea Long Chu, whom Todd cites as a leading chronicler of the transgender experience). It also seems designed to create a degree of self-loathing: females are constantly set up to compete at tasks at which they are slightly disadvantaged, and are promised a life which, any rational mind will quickly discover, they will never achieve. Social media aside, it is unsurprising that a growing num­ber of women now report that they hate themselves.
Todd argues that the recent wave of Western feminist agitation that we have witnessed in the past decade (#MeToo in America, #BalanceTonPorc in France) is not the result of a massive backslide in female liberation but the opposite—external barriers to female equal­ity are falling by the year. Women are waking up to their new condition and finding it a bit upsetting. And they are looking desperately for something, anything, else to blame—femicide in a foreign country, their still-male bosses, and even the word “woman” itself.
Because if this is the end of feminism, then it doesn’t quite feel fair. If women are finally “free,” then why is it still so hard to be female? And why, after all of our hard work, are the best parts of history still made by males?
In another recent article, Stella Tsantekidou writes on “the desperation of female neediness.”
Do you know what it’s like to be a woman who wants a relationship but can’t get one? It is incredibly common and yet hardly acknowledged.
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