Stopping the cycle of self-hatred requires the humility to give over to God your dreams for yourself. This is one of the best exchanges we could ever take, since by doing it we gain clearer eyes to see Jesus’ love for us, which is far more powerful than our self-hatred could ever be.

They were the Greek gods of autumn. Green fields were their domain, and each fall we found ourselves drawn to those fields to see them play. They were the junior high soccer team in a small Christian school without the budget for football. But no one was thinking of that. These were the deities of our small world.

Soccer season was tough for doughy boys who like books. They didn’t measure up well to the lean warriors whose skill was so prized in our community. I was as aware of this as anyone, and it filled me with dissatisfaction. One evening this dissatisfaction boiled over, and I indulged in something I never had done before. I spoke out loud a thought that had been in my head plenty of times before. And I did it in front of my mother.
“I hate myself.”
You have to know something about my mother. She uses her words like a nesting hen uses her wings, always gently and for the care of her own. When I looked up, though, she was not looking at me. Her face had a strange steel in it. When she finally spoke, her voice had steel too.
“You have no right.”
I had awoken a deep offense in her. I’d expected pity. What I got was far better.
The Experience of Self-Hatred
We were made to perceive ourselves as God perceives us. Self-hatred means something has gone wrong with our perception of ourselves.
This post is part of a series that attempts to show how Scripture gives a framework for addressing different ways our hearts respond to the world that aren’t mentioned in their specifics. The introductory post laid out our guiding principle: God designed people to respond from the heart to the unique situations in which He has placed them. So the question this post addresses is, How should we understand self-hatred as an expression of the heart?

Self-hatred is your heart’s attempt to condemn the person you are in preference for who you wish you were.

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This demolition job on sex, biology and reality is not only senseless and silly, but it is also diabolical and destructive. And if these folks are having a real hard time telling us just what a woman is, that is because these same churchmen seem to have been struggling of late to tell us what biblical Christianity is. The two go together.

When the church follows the world instead of the living God, it is heading down the same slippery slope to hell as the world is. When the church sells its soul to the devil in order to be hip, trendy, cool and “relevant,” you can be sure it is just as lost as any pagan ever will be.
We have seen countless examples of the church selling out and simply imbibing of the secular left’s radical agenda items, including all things woke. The latest example of this should come as no surprise. The Church of England has been on a long, slow downward spiral, and its latest inanity is simply another indication of a church that has well and truly lost its way.
Now it seems it no longer knows what a woman is. Or at least some within its ranks have gone down this moronic path. For a church that was so proud of how it treated women and sought to put them in leadership positions, to now all of a sudden not knowing what a woman is, is the height of woke insanity. Consider how one English newspaper puts it:
The Church of England has admitted it does not have a definition of the word woman. A bishop said yesterday that the meaning of the word used to be ‘self-evident’. But he added that there are now ‘complexities associated with gender identity’ which a church project about sexuality and relationships is exploring. The admission, in an official report prepared for the gathering of its governing body this weekend, stirred criticism last night. It comes despite Anglicanism continuing to oppose same-sex weddings – and only recently allowing women to be bishops.
Campaigner Maya Forstater said: ‘When the Government redefined women through the Gender Recognition Act, the Church of England could have stuck with its long-established understanding, which makes sense whether your starting point is biology or the Bible. ‘It is shocking that they so readily gave up the definition of man or woman for the state to amend, as if this fundamental truth did not matter.’
And Rev Angela Berners-Wilson, who in 1994 became the first woman ordained as an Anglican priest, told The Telegraph: ‘I’m not totally happy with it. I mean, I do think certain things like “men can’t have babies”, just to say the complete obvious thing.’ But she added: ‘But I think we need to be very sensitive and maybe we need to re-examine our boundaries.’ It comes after months in which the definition of the word woman has gripped politics. Several Labour MPs refused to define it, while leader Sir Keir Starmer said it was wrong to claim that only women could have a cervix.
By contrast, Cabinet ministers have been clear that biology defines women and that anyone born male should not compete against women in sport. The church was put on the spot in one of almost 200 questions submitted to its ‘parliament’, the General Synod, in York this weekend. www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11000401/Church-England-woman-decide.html

Good grief. No, there are not complexities involved here. Men and women are different, and have been ever since God first created them.
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Written by Carl R. Trueman |
Monday, January 9, 2023
Institutional unity is important as a witness to the truth. I for one do think it ridiculous that in the USA alone there are numerous presbyterian denominations who hold substantially the same doctrinal position but exist as separate institutional bodies. Yet even so, the problem of defining Protestant orthodoxy is not simply a Protestant problem.

Taking his cue from my recent article at First Things, Rod Dreher asks a most reasonable question: what is orthodox Protestantism?
The problem with defining the term is that orthodox Protestantism is, in one sense, an abstraction. It correlates with no single institution. Thus, the Roman Catholic is here at an advantage, at least in theory: orthodox Catholicism is what the Roman Catholic Church upholds as true and practices in her worship. The unity of the institution makes the question straightforward. As there is no single orthodox Protestant church, the question is inevitably more challenging.
The way I was using the term in the article was with reference to the points of consensus of the Protestant confessions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Thus, when one compares, say, the Lutheran Book of Concord with the various Reformed confessions, significant points of agreement emerge: on the Trinity, on the Incarnation, on the uniqueness and sufficiency of Christ for salvation. We might summarize this as agreement upon the creedal faith of the early church, refracted through the debates over sacraments, salvation, and ecclesiology in the Reformation. Significant points of antithesis do exist within Reformation Protestantism, particularly on the Lord’s Supper as a point of division between Lutherans and Reformed, but aside from this significant issue, there is a high degree of fundamental commonality.
When one looks specifically at the Reformed confessions, the consensus is even stronger. E.F.K. Müller’s collection of Reformed confessional documents, Die Bekenntnisschriften der reformierte Kirche, is fascinating in this regard: the documents are drawn from across Europe and represent the productions of churches in a wide variety of linguistic, political, and cultural contexts. Yet there is substantial unity on all major topics. From the doctrine of God through the Incarnation to grace, justification, the word of God, the church, sacraments, and the afterlife, a clear core of orthodox Protestant teaching is there, despite the diversity of contexts–a diversity arguably much greater than that represented by the bespoke diversities of today, given the lack of information technology, easy and efficient transportation, and pop cultural unity in the sixteenth century (no international Manchester United Supporters’ Club in Luther’s day), things that are now a commonplace in our globalized world.
Catholics will no doubt respond that I am offering a false unity here. I have chosen those texts that reflect the core of Christian belief I myself prefer and, by privileging them as normative, have granted Protestant orthodoxy a coherence that it did not possess then and does not possess now.
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