Over the course of five decades, the late J.I. Packer (1926–2020) wrote hundreds of articles for Christianity Today, but perhaps none ruffled more feathers than his 1991 piece “Let’s Stop Making Women Presbyters.” It was no secret where Packer stood on the issue, but this piece presented a penetrating analysis in which he summarized how “the present-day pressure to make women presbyters owes more to secular, pragmatic, and social factors than to any regard for biblical authority.”

Packer came out and said what could not be more obvious, on the one hand, but also, for egalitarians, more bothersome, on the other.

Women’s Ordination Made Plausible

Matthew Colvin belabors a similar point in his 2020 review of William Witt’s Icons of Christ: A Biblical and Systematic Theology for Women’s Ordination. Colvin, an ordained presbyter in the Anglican Church in North America, explains that a shift in plausibility structure, brought on by modernity, is the key influence for those who advocate for women’s ordination — by which is meant affirming women to the office of pastor and elder (presbyter). Colvin writes, “Charity toward our forebears in the faith ought to lead us to ask, ‘What has happened to make women ordination seem plausible to people in our day, even though it was unthinkable to all past ages of the Church?’” (“Reviews of Icons of Christ”).

That is a good question, and one that Michael Novak swiftly answers in his 1993 First Things article “Women, Ordination, and Angels”:

This [women ordination] is doubtless because of the intellectual shift in our thinking from “natural law” to “natural rights.” In natural law thinking, natural differences between males and females (“natural” both in the biological-neurological and in the cultural-symbolic dimension) offered sufficient reason for accepting a differentiation of functions and roles. For centuries, the prevalence of organic, role-differentiated thinking allowed the traditional practice of excluding women from the priesthood to seem fitting and right. In the light of doctrines of “natural rights,” by contrast, according to which equal rights inhere in all persons qua [acting as] persons, this exclusion has come to seem arbitrary, and in the end unjust.

In short, the new plausibility structure in which women eldership is embraced, as Colvin describes, is a mixture of the secular egalitarianism Novak chronicled in 1993 and the disregard for biblical authority Packer cited in 1991.

Office for Manly Men

Swimming in such a plausibility structure for so long, many today might actually find a line in Packer’s article almost unbelievable, if not just simply backwater. Writing with his vintage clarity, Packer states,

The argument here is this: presbyters are set apart for a role of authoritative pastoral leadership. But this role is for manly men rather than womanly women, according to the creation pattern that redemption restores. Paternal pastoral oversight, which is of the essence of the presbyteral role, is not a task for which women are naturally fitted by their Maker.

“Manly men.” That’s hard to miss.

Some voices today even claim uncertainty about what men and women are, but thirty years ago Packer doesn’t just say men, but he even qualifies it with manly.

Christian Scripture is clear about male-only eldership, both in its propositions and story line, but Packer is extrapolating a deeper point. The pastoral office is not for males in general, but for qualified and duly appointed men — which Packer understands to entail their exhibiting masculine traits summarized by the adjective manly.

The office of elder is intended for manly men, and for good reasons — reasons that require unhurried reflection on the text of Scripture and unclouded attention to the natural world. Such unhurried reflection takes us deeper than biblical minimalism and arguments of silence are willing to go, and the unclouded attention is able to re-recognize what human history has always assumed, that manly means something.

Defending Packer and building upon his 1991 article, I’ll try to state the matter as straightforwardly as he would.

What Is the Responsibility of Elders?

“Elders teach and exercise authority in the local church,” writes Greg Gilbert. “That’s what they do; that’s why the office exists” (Can Women Be Pastors?, 23). Put another way, elders feed and lead — and the two are inseparable. The leading comes primarily through the feeding. This ensures that all oversight and care for the flock, including guarding the church’s doctrine and worship and mobilizing her for mission, is in constant submission to the word of God.

Paul requires that the elder “must hold firm to the trustworthy word as taught, so that he may be able to give instruction in sound doctrine and also to rebuke those who contradict it” (Titus 2:9; see also “able to teach,” 1 Timothy 2:3). Centered on the Bible, then, the elder builds (he instructs) and defends (he rebukes). He both pastors the flock to still waters and fends off wolf-like intrusions — by telling the church what God says.

This concept for elders didn’t pop out of nowhere, but its roots go back to the work of the Levites, the Old Testament priestly tribe, which travels back to Adam.

Adamic, Priestly Duty

In Numbers 3, when God issues the duties of the Levites, he tells Moses that they shall guard the people and their worship. One of the Hebrew words behind “guard” (shamar) in Numbers 3:7–10 is also used in Genesis 2:15 when God gives Adam, the man, his Edenic duties:

“The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep [shamar] it.”

The Levites related to the temple and congregation the way Adam was supposed to relate to the Edenic temple and Eve. This tells us both about their work, that it’s fundamentally masculine, and the expectation on Adam, which he failed to meet. Whereas Adam should have guarded Eden and Eve against that which contradicts God’s word, he failed to rebuke the serpent’s lies.

This is what Paul refers to in 1 Timothy 2 as his ground for why women should not teach or exercise authority over a man (that is, perform Adamic duties). Paul explains, “For Adam was formed first, then Eve; and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor” (1 Timothy 2:13).

Insufficiently Masculine

Paul’s guidance for the church in 1 Timothy comes from his own (inspired) unhurried reflection on Genesis 1–3. When he says that Adam was not deceived, but rather Eve was, that is not to acquit Adam, but most likely to indict him! Eve was deceived because Adam failed to guard the garden and his own wife as he ought.

Adam’s failure was, in a word, leadership. He didn’t do what God had placed him in the garden to do. He was insufficiently masculine, and his failure led to the upending of God’s creation design. Rather than Adam obeying God’s command and guarding Eve as they exercised dominion over lesser creatures, the lesser creature, the serpent, taught Eve heresy while Adam passively stood by, disobeying God. God had intended authority to flow from himself to Adam, from Adam to Eve, from Adam and Eve to lesser creatures, but Satan attacked by turning God’s order upside down.

Humankind has been lost ever since, manifesting the characteristic sins of men and women described in Genesis 3:16–19, and distorting God’s creation design and structure of authority. As Gilbert explains, “The woman will seek to dominate and master man, and man will twist his authority into an abusive domination of women” (32). That’s in the world, though. It’s not to be so in the church and Christian households.

The redemptive vision to which Paul calls the church means restoring God’s original design, not assimilating to the sinful distortion. And this vision is especially featured within the church’s leadership — with “manly men” serving in the office of elder.

Really Call It Manly?

Far from arbitrary, the office of elder is reserved for mature men for good reason. Manly men are best fit for the office because the work of building and defending, of instructing and rebuking, is quintessentially masculine.

To instruct, to build, to feed requires initiative, assertiveness, and steadfastness characteristic of masculinity. The equally important task of rebuking, of defending, of leading is just the same, often requiring sacrificial watchfulness and an unemotional assessment of values. The work is Adam-like and Levitical. It’s manly.

Therefore, for “women elders” to actually function, it must mean that either one has altered the biblical office to accommodate a feminine essence, or women are acting like men.

We don’t have the authority to do the former, and the latter is out of step with God’s design. Some women might seem able to do manly work, and in some painful situations they must, but it does not make for long-term health and thriving. God’s design calls us to something more beautiful — manly men and womanly women doing manly and womanly things, respectively. With the elders being manly men.

Complacency falls softly, even pleasantly, on a sleeping soul. It’s the secret to its appeal and power over us. The complacent crave comfort, quiet, ease — an inner life resembling a calm lake just after sunset. The birds have fled, the fish descended, the other animals have hidden themselves away for the night. Even the water stops to rest. Serene. Peaceful. Undisturbed.

Complacent people may still do a lot of things — just not what matters most, what requires more of us. Few of us, of course, think of ourselves as complacent. Life is “full” and “hard” and often overwhelming. But underneath there’s an eerie stillness — not the stillness of peace and security and joy, but of a spiritual stagnancy. Like a child in a car seat during rush hour, the harried rhythms of life slowly lull our souls to sleep.

The Bible stays closed for days at a time. Prayers are quicker and less frequent. We keep one eye on our email, our texts, our feed. Conversations linger near the surface and feel inconvenient. Excuses multiply for missing church. Needs around us go unnoticed. We go to sleep and wake up anxious and distracted, and we’re not sure why. The spiritual seas within us go from restless to sluggish to dormant.

Unless, of course, God lovingly sends a storm to awaken us:

Let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works. . . .

Provoking Good

The pastoral charge in Hebrews 10:24–25 can easily become so familiar that it’s no longer provocative. The storm it describes can begin to sound more and more like a gentle breeze.

Let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near.

The Greek for “stir up” means “to provoke” or “to agitate.” The same word is used just one other time in the New Testament, and it’s used (surprisingly) to describe the “sharp disagreement” that arose between Paul and Barnabas over John Mark (Acts 15:39). There’s a kind of sharpness in the imagery. Shake one another, unsettle one another, upset one another — with a holy interruption — until love spills over and good works spring to life.

“Shake one another, unsettle one another, upset one another until love spills over and good works spring to life.”

Why reach for such strong language to describe ordinary life together in the church? Because, like any good preacher, the writer of Hebrews knows how easy it is for any of us to settle into lives of little love and few good works. He knows how deeply and regularly we need brotherly storms to keep our souls alert and alive to God.

First Step in Good Stirring

How do we send these brotherly storms in love? The first step in stirring one another up may be so obvious we miss it. It comes in the next verse: “not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some. . . .” The first step in stirring up one another is simply to see one another face to face — to consistently gather in the same place with the explicit purpose of enjoying and obeying Jesus.

Many of us tasted the painful absence of this over the last couple of years during lockdowns and social distancing. We tried hard to bridge the gap with technology, but we all felt its inadequacy. One of the many good lessons God was teaching us amid all the confusion, tension, loss, and heartache was that we need to be stirred, we need more than Zoom calls and livestreams, we need to meet. God has given presence a soul-stirring power that texts and screens cannot replace.

And yet some, then and now, neglect the gift and necessity of presence. Why had some made a habit of avoiding the gathering? The excuses may have been many and varied, but they likely shared a common root: some unrepentant sin (next verse, Hebrews 10:26). They knew deep down that sin went to church to die, and so they found ways to stay away from church. Maybe it was secret sexual sin. Maybe it was bitterness over past hurt. Maybe it was envy over another’s marriage, or children, or home, or success. Maybe it was an idol of me-time. First, they had a bad morning and missed worship once. Then a couple times in a month. Then most of a summer. Over time, absence was no longer an anomaly, but the norm. A habit.

“The storms we all need only come when we each keep investing what it costs to meet.”

The storms we all need only come when we each keep investing what it costs to meet. Week after week, we need to be awakened. We need to be reminded that God exists. We need to be reminded that he really came in the flesh, died a sinless death in our place, and three days later broke out of the grave. We need to be reminded that all the burdens and responsibilities that feel so heavy and demanding are small and light next to our coming reward. We need to be reminded that sin will ruin us. We need to be shaken free from the sleepy spiritual fog that so easily sets in. In other words, we really need to meet.

Love Prepared for Us

When we stir one another up to love and good works, we join God in something he has been conceiving over centuries. We’re being used by God to enact a plan he outlined before the world was born. “We are his workmanship,” the apostle Paul writes, “created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them” (Ephesians 2:10). Any good work we do today is a good work that God himself has prepared for us.

“God chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him” (Ephesians 1:4). And he knew precisely what shapes and colors that holiness would take. He knew and planned the details of our love, our patience, our kindness, our generosity and hospitality. The good steps we take, with his help, are steps he placed in front of us. Before God poured the Pacific Ocean, he had planned ways for us to step in and sacrifice ourselves for others. Before God laid out the sunflower fields in Italy, he had planted needs that we would uncover and meet. Before he formed the Himalayas or carved out the Grand Canyon, he had prepared fruitful conversations for us to have, even this week.

And we get to help one another walk into those good works, works written out for us, specifically for us, before we knew what one was. In fact, our stirring others up into this Christ-like love is one of the many good works God prepared for us beforehand.

Consider One Another

Perhaps the most overlooked dimension of the command to stir one another up, however, is how personal it is: “Let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works.” Literally, “one another” is the object of the verb consider: “Let us consider one another . . .” Provoking one another well begins with studying one another well. It means paying close enough attention to know each other’s particular abilities and plans, temptations and fears, challenges and opportunities. These are the kinds of questions we might regularly ask as we consider one another:

What strengths or abilities has God given you?
What specific callings has he placed on your life?
What other needs has God put around you?
Who, in particular, has he called you to love? And who do you struggle to love?
What are areas you excel in where I could affirm grace in you?
What are areas you struggle in where I could come alongside and encourage you?
What fears keep you from taking good risks and making sacrifices in love?
How might God use me to help you carry out the good works he’s planned for you?

Often, just asking good questions is enough to spark the right kind of awareness, selflessness, creativity, and love. And asked consistently enough by people who love us and know us well, they can serve as something of a spiritual alarm clock, calling us out of cycles of sleepiness.

So, who stirs your heart out of the soothing calm of complacency? Whose friendship awakens the right kind of conviction, ambition, and joy? And who might need you to be that loving storm for them?

C.S. Lewis’s Pilgrim’s Regress is an allegory about the life of the mind — Lewis’s mind — as it wrestles with the soul’s desire for God. Filled with allusions to Lewis’s own intellectual development, the book is equal parts fascinating and impenetrable. Its full original title gives you a taste of what you’re in for: The Pilgrim’s Regress, or Pseudo-Bunyan’s Periplus: An Allegorical Apology for Christianity, Reason, and Romanticism. No wonder Lewis would later apologize for its “needless obscurity” in an afterword to the third edition (207).

Still, Pilgrim’s Regress is worth the work — especially if you can find the recent annotated edition, which supplies explanatory notes, including some written by Lewis himself. What you find is that Lewis’s pilgrimage reflects not merely the familiar desire to lose the burden of guilt, but also the desire to satisfy his soul’s thirst, his soul’s longing. Pulled between the competing demands of intellectual consistency and bodily passions, the pilgrim is led by a glimpse of eternity. It pulls him in and through the false offers of the world, often in spite of his own weaknesses.

The Stern North

Since The Pilgrim’s Regress is about Lewis’s own “return,” it has all the features of the early-twentieth-century academic class. Lewis’s pilgrim struggles with classic temptations like lust and pride, but they frequently take the form of ideologies. His allegorical foils include “Puritania” and “Victoriana,” as well as personifications of Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche. Lewis even makes space for his contemporary pilgrim intellectuals on their own journeys, both divine and devilish.

In one of the more arresting scenes, Lewis shows us the northernmost extremity of the journey. Described as the “sterner regions of the mind” (94), the northern territory is where “the tough-minded” go. Their great opponent is what they view as a childish sentimentality, the tendency to still hold to emotions, hopes, and dreams — all of which they believe are illusions. The northern men are intellectual, but harsh and cynical. They believe they have seen through all the deceptions.

But they are not the final mountain peak. No, the top of the mountain is something more: a figure called Savage. Dressed in a Viking helmet and quoting Nietzsche and Wagner, Savage is terrifying, “almost a giant.” He’s joined by a Norse sorceress and sings the philosophy of heroic violence in epic verse. Here are a few of his convictions, the first about ordinary simple men and the second about self-important intellectuals:

These are the dregs of man. . . . They are always thinking of happiness. They are scraping together and storing up and trying to build. Can they not see that the law of the world is against them? Where will any of them be a hundred years hence? (105)

The rot in the world is too deep and the leak in the world is too wide. They may patch and tinker as they please, they will not save it. Better give in. Better cut the wood with the grain. If I am to live in a world of destruction let me be its agent and not its patient. (106)

This northern Savage has rejected attempts at morality and even rationality, at least as traditionally understood. To him, everything is ultimately meaningless because it will crumble. All men will die. The only eternal thing is “the excellent deed.” A more common expression today might be “the will to power.”

Servants of Savage

Savage is giant, but there are many varieties of dwarves that work for him. These dwarves can “reappear in human children” and take on many variations, though they are ultimately animated by the common spirit of Savage.

Among these dwarves are the Marxomanni, Mussolimini, Swastici, and Gangomanni (105). Here Lewis is illustrating the social and political breakdown of the 1920s and ’30s by showing us violent Marxists, Fascist revolutionaries, and American gangsters. Each movement, whether highbrow or lowbrow, had given up on the ordinary rules of society, had given up on law and order, and had instead decided to impose its will through brute force. They are dwarves, but they regularly show up among the children of men. They are, all of them, servants of Savage.

“It’s quite remarkable that Lewis was able to see fascism for what it was: the dwarf-servant to savage nihilism.”

The Pilgrim’s Regress was originally written in 1933, the same year Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany. While the savagery and mania of Nazism can be taken for granted by modern writers, this was not true in the 1930s. Indeed, one of Lewis’s own heroes, G.K. Chesterton, was more than partially taken in by fascism. And while never a proponent of Nazism, Chesterton did frequently explain its attraction as an understandable response to modern social decay (The Sins of G.K. Chesterton, 183–84, 213–22). When considered from that context, it’s quite remarkable that Lewis was able to see fascism for what it was: the dwarf-servant to savage nihilism.

Three Pale Men

There’s another layer to Lewis’s tale, though. One of the more obscure parts, he singles it out as a “preposterous allegorical filigree” (215). Yet, when decoded, it speaks to our moment in a powerful way. This is the scene of the “three pale men.” These are men of the north. They conceive of themselves as fully rational and realistic. They have no interest in romantic ideals. Indeed, they are a sort of intellectual reaction against Romanticism (which was itself a reaction against the first round of the Enlightenment). They consider themselves extremely deep thinkers who have worked through all the other failed theories and movements. They represent a sort of “return” to older ways.

One of these pale men is Mr. Humanist, representing an embrace of Renaissance and Enlightenment thought, though stripped of all idealist and romantic elements. Another is Mr. Neo-Classical, a character obsessed with antiquity, but also without its mystical or religious elements. The third pale man is Mr. Neo-Angular, and Lewis’s notes describe him as “the more venomous type of Anglo-Catholic.” Neo-Angular insists on dogma and what he takes as “Catholicism.” This seems to mean the universal and undiluted faith, but Mr. Neo-Angular’s true defining characteristic is his opposition to experiential religion. He has no time for “subjective” motivations (98). He rejects the pilgrim’s affective “soul longing” as a form of escapism and “romantic trash” (99).

The pale men do not expect to find good in this world, so they turn their attention to a distant past and an ever-stoic lifestyle. In the case of Mr. Neo-Angular, affection is also reserved for the future, the eternal life in heaven. Until then, a strict sort of spiritual segregation is expected. This world is not home. The men are “very thin and pale” (94), and their food is described as perfectly cubic in shape and “free from any lingering flavour of the old romantic sauces” (95). As an allegory, they are the various paths the reactionary mindset can take, varieties of elitist intellectual retreats to philosophy or religion without any of the affections or social graces.

Reactionism’s Dead End

When these pale men hear about Savage, two of them are put off, but Mr. Neo-Angular is attracted. “I should like to meet this Savage,” he says. “He seems to be a very clear-headed man” (107). From Savage’s own point of view, Mr. Neo-Angular has the most potential. “He said that Angular might turn out an enemy worth fighting when he grew up” (106). What is Lewis telling us about the relationship between a wholly institutionalized and stoic “Catholicism” and the savage spirit that animated Marxism, Fascism, Nazism, and Gangsterism?

Lewis’s point is not a simple slippery slope. He is not saying that a harsh and rigid “high church” Christianity leads to fascism. Instead, he is saying that those represented by Mr. Neo-Angular are caught in the same reaction to modernity as is fascism. What they believe to be a sophisticated and mentally strong rejection of “romance” is simply another version of the nihilism hollowing out the broader society.

Mr. Neo-Angular “relegates” and “transfers” the mystical and affective elements wholly to the life to come (and perhaps within the particular bounds of a worship service), but this leaves the rest of life to follow the same harsh rules as the non-Christian follows. That Mr. Neo-Angular likes what he sees in Savage shows us that he also has a certain quest for the “heroic” that could lead to prioritizing the will, power, and even violence. Professing to reject all romance, or to limit it wholly to the spiritual realm, the deepest hunger of the soul nevertheless expresses itself, but through political domination and anti-social violence.

Led and Kept by Longing

Lewis’s core apologetic in The Pilgrim’s Regress is that a sort of romance is natural, good, and inescapable. In fact, it is the way that God draws all of us to himself. He wants his creatures to find satisfaction, fulfillment, and joy. These desires are not to be cast off and rejected but rather embraced as means by which we might find our eternal satisfaction: life with God himself.

Mr. Neo-Angular represents a sort of Christianity that claims to reject affections. It has no interest in emotions. It will “taste and see” when it gets to the life to come. But this is self-deception. Such forms of religion can never eliminate the human urge and its spiritual longing. To the extent that they refuse to be satisfied by God in this life, they will invariably be satisfied by something else in this life — and probably by dark and sinister things.

“The promise of the ‘heroic’ is an echo of the divine. But imitation gods are demons.”

Put in a positive conception, Lewis also explains why intellectual and “tough-minded” Christians can go in for extreme reactionary movements. The fascist movements in Portugal and Spain both clothed themselves in the garb of Catholicism. In our own day, Vladimir Putin makes overtures to the “trad” Christian base, with more than a little fanfare. This works because such people are longing for a natural satisfaction that has been obscured by secularizing ideas and movements, but they respond in a newly disordered way. The promise of the “heroic” is an echo of the divine. But imitation gods are demons.

This isn’t a warning only for Lewis’s opponents. Throughout his literary corpus, “the north” is typically a good place for Lewis. He favors Norse tales. His own brand of Anglicanism, while not quite fully Anglo-Catholic, was certainly more “high church” than anything else. In The Pilgrim’s Regress, these symbols that might otherwise symbolize Lewis himself are shown to have their own dangers and temptations — dangers that could lead to destruction.

And so too for readers of Lewis, for intellectual Christians who appreciate the classics, for traditional and “tough-minded” pilgrims — we also need to see the dangers that most threaten us. Our “return” must be along a path of truth. Our enlightenment must expose ourselves. And we must bare our hearts so that their true desires might be fulfilled by God forever.