Don’t mistake Butterfield’s confidence for pride. Her heart throughout the book proclaims this message (my paraphrase): “God the sovereign creator brilliantly and beautifully designed men and women. We should obey what he tells us. We should live according to his design. We shouldn’t believe lies.” That assertiveness may strike some people as arrogant since it goes against the grain of worldly thinking, but worldly thinking goes against the grain of reality. Christians should not be embarrassed of anything that is true, especially anything that God has revealed in Scripture: “This book is for Christians not embarrassed by the Bible and its teaching on women’s roles and callings. An unbreakable biblical logic connects God’s design for men and women, God’s standards for sexual behavior, and the Bible’s teaching on sex roles in the family, church, and world” (p. xx).

Rosaria Butterfield used to be a lesbian activist who lived with a woman partner while serving as a tenured professor of English and women’s studies at Syracuse University in New York. Now she is a Christian who is married to a Presbyterian pastor and who invests her time as a homeschool mom and grandmother and as a hospitable neighbor in North Carolina. (When she wrote this book, her four adopted children spanned ages sixteen to thirty-four.) The title of her new book specifies what she is warning against: Five Lies of Our Anti-Christian Age (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2023).
Butterfield’s Thesis
Here is one way to summarize Butterfield’s thesis: Don’t believe our culture’s lies about God’s design for men and women. She presents five lies and explains, “What all these lies have in common is they don’t think that God had a plan and purpose when he created men and women” (p. 290). At the root of the lies is what she calls “our nation’s reigning idol, a formidable monolith represented by the letters LGBTQ and the symbol +” (p. xxi; cf. p. 91).
Lie #1: Homosexuality Is Normal
The lie: The way you feel defines who you are. For example, if you are a female who feels sexually attracted only to women, then you are a lesbian. You have a homosexual orientation that is immutable. That is your core truth. That is your identity. And it is an identity that is good and normal.
According to “gay Christians,” a person’s homosexual orientation is morally neutral—like being blind or deaf. It’s not a sin that you should repent of. The church should not just welcome but empathetically approve of “sexual minorities.” When people sin in heterosexual and homosexual ways, the nature of the sexual sin is equally fallen.
The truth: Our sinful feelings do not determine our core identity. Those with homosexual desires are responsible to mortify their sinful desires. “The normalization of homosexuality is the central controlling narrative of our anti-Christian age” (p. 33). “Sexual orientation, a secular concept, began in the nineteenth century. You will not find the concept of sexual orientation in the Bible” (p. 67). “It all comes down to this: Do you trust your feelings, or do you trust the word of God?” (p. 98). We should have sympathy for those enslaved to sexual sin, but we should not empathize with the sin itself.
The identity narrative makes sense in our culture because people have swallowed the lie of intersectionality—the idea that the world consists of power struggles between oppressors (e.g., white, male, heterosexual, Christian, fit, free) and the oppressed (e.g., person of color, female, LGBTQ+, non-Christian, overweight, incarcerated). “Today, failing to affirm LGBTQ+ rights is considered an act of harm. … Today, even in the church, it seems, accepting someone without approving her is to reject her” (p. 59). Harm is now psychological, not material. The way to accrue social status is to claim an intersection of victim statuses. This creates a community that is “fractured, victim-minded, angry, and inconsolable”; it is “identity politics on steroids” and devoid of “a biblical category of sin” (p. 61). “The victimized identities that emerge from intersectionality are perpetually immature and in constant need of therapy and affirmation” (p. 62).
When people sin in heterosexual and homosexual ways, the nature of the sexual sin is not equally fallen: “The heterosexual pattern is natural even if a particular practice is sinful, as in adultery. If a man and a woman are committing fornication but they come to Christ and repent of their sin, they could someday get married and live in God’s obedience and blessing. But if a man and a man in a homosexual relationship come to Christ, they would need to break up in order to live in obedience and blessing. … Homosexual sin is a violation against both God’s pattern of creation and the moral law of God, while heterosexual sin violates the moral law of God exclusively” (p. 304). The hermeneutic that justifies women pastors is the same hermeneutic that justifies LGBTQ+. “Egalitarianism is the highway to LGBTQ+ church leadership” (p. 75).
Lie #2: Being a Spiritual Person Is Kinder Than Being a Biblical Christian
The lie: A spiritual person finds true spirituality inside himself or herself. Everything shares in a single divine power. Distinctions and hierarchies are abusive and violent.
The truth: There are two realities—God and not-God (i.e., the Creator and creation). And there are two kinds of people—those who love the triune God and those who defy him. It is not kind to be a person who misleads others to defy the Creator by living contrary to reality.
Lie #3: Feminism Is Good for the World and the Church
The lie: The traditional biblical view about God’s design for men and women is wrong. Male headship is a result of the fall. The Bible does not require a wife to submit to her husband, nor does the Bible forbid women from serving as pastors or elders. The traditional view results in sexual abuse. Any male-female sexual relationship that rejects sameness (i.e., interchangeability) and calls a wife to submit to her husband is foundational to rape culture.
The truth: The traditional biblical view about God’s design for men and women is true, good, and beautiful.

“A godly woman who is the wife of a godly man is receptive, teachable, and life-giving, her beauty increasing with her age because her Christian character is being more and more sanctified. … At its most basic distinction, God created men for strength, women for nurturance, and both for the other, her submission yielding to his headship creating the harmony of mutual work and worship of God. The simplicity, beauty, and perfection of the creation ordinance may be marred by sin but not by the designer’s perfect plan” (p. 158).
“A helpmate is not a doormat. She is smart and strong and knows how to think and advise her husband when called upon. While she may also have a job or career that contributes to the household, being a helpmate means that the husband’s vocation comes first” (p. 172).
“A godly woman is not called to universal submission. She is called to submit to her husband, elders, and civil authorities” (p. 161).
“A Christian’s best defense against abuse of all authority is membership in a biblically faithful church” (p. 162).
“When feminism is the interpretative tool for reading Scripture, the powerful, supernatural word of God shrinks into an easily manipulated tool of sociology, revealing power plays and oppressors and offering no hope beyond its creation of new possibilities and new words to express one’s never-ending hurt” (p. 177).
“Feminism’s war against patriarchy isn’t its only problem. By denying the centrality of the creation ordinance in defining woman and her glory, feminism insults women. Worse still, feminism can’t offer the protections against violence that it promises. In fact, feminism has become a place of such confusion that it cannot define what a woman is without offending the LGBTQ+ movement—especially the T part (transgenderism)” (p. 189).

Lie #4: Transgenderism Is Normal
The lie: Your sex is gender-fluid. The biological sex you are born as does not necessarily correspond to your gender. It is normal for a person recognized as a male at birth to later realize that he is actually a woman trapped in a man’s body. How you feel is the real you. There are more than just two sexes (the traditional gender binary is wrong), and there are even more genders. If your child is transitioning, you must comply or else you will be guilty of that child’s suicide: “Would you rather have a dead daughter or a living son?”
The truth: God created mankind as either male or female. There are only two sexes—male and female. God designed males to be masculine, and God designed females to be feminine. It is sinful for a man to be effeminate or for a woman to be masculine.
Tragically, transgenderism has become “the cool and cutting-edge expression of individuality” (p. 198). The question “Would you rather have a dead daughter or a living son?” is manipulative. The solution to a sinful desire—in this case, the sin of envy—is to put that sinful desire to death. The solution is not to enable your child’s sinful desires by pumping the body with hormones that do irreparable damage and by mutilating healthy body parts (“to lance off breasts and purge ovaries in the name of emancipation” [p. 199]).​​ “Love holds people to the impartial, objective, and safe standard of God’s truth, not the malleability of sinful desires and the posturing of sinful people” (p. 204).
Lie #5: Modesty Is an Outdated Burden That Serves Male Dominance and Holds Women Back
The lie: It is oppressive to call women to dress and act differently than men. If a woman dresses provocatively and entices a man to sinfully lust after her, then that is not the concern of the woman at all; it is solely the man’s problem. If a woman wants to exhibit her body or to express herself loudly and freely in an “unladylike” way, then male oppression shouldn’t hold her back.
The truth: “A godly woman is a modest woman” (p. 267). Butterfield approvingly quotes how Martha Peace and Kent Keller define modesty and immodesty:

modesty: “an inner attitude of the heart motivated by a love for God that seeks His glory through purity and humility; it often reveals itself in words, actions, expressions, and clothes”
immodesty: “an attitude of the heart that expresses itself with inappropriate words, actions, expressions and/or clothes that are flirtatious, manipulative, revealing, or suggestive of sensuality or pride”

Butterfield asserts, “No Christian woman wants to be seen in the eyes of God as a ‘provoking object.’ Women, don’t minimize the seriousness to your own soul if Satan uses you as a tool for any reason” (p. 278).
Read More
Related Posts:

If we tell ourselves we are not revivalists, then we won’t be self-aware enough to critique our own revivalism. In fact, each subsequent generation tends to adopt some of the ‘new measures’ that were controversial in a previous generation, as if they are an ordinary part of everyday ministry. 

People sometimes tell a story that begins with the truly spiritual and often Calvinistic ‘revivals’ of the Great Awakening and Evangelical Revival in the eighteenth century, to the increasingly emotionally manipulative, tightly-managed and often Arminian revivalism of the nineteenth century, which gave way to both the industrialised mass evangelism and the full-blown experientialism of Pentecostalism in the twentieth century. This story, and its distinction between (true) Revival and (counterfeit) revivalism, is one you are likely to be taught it in church history lectures, read in books and hear in discussions of mission and evangelism. 
However, I don’t think the distinction is a clear or effective one.
I believe it is much better to use the term ‘revival’ to describe an outcome: the phenomenon of massive growth in spiritual seriousness and evangelistic fruitfulness, whether it appears to be almost entirely spontaneous or not.[1] ‘Revivalism’ (and ‘revivalist’, ‘revivalistic’ and so on) should describe activities, ideas, people and organisations that aim at Revival, whether or not Revival takes place, whether or not the ideas or activities are considered biblically legitimate or not. That is, rather than speaking of Revival vs Revivalism, I think it is more helpful to speak of Biblical Revivalism vs Unbiblical Revivalism.[2]
Most Revivals Are Revivalistic
If you pay close enough attention, you will notice methods and techniques that played a part in even the most remarkable, miraculous and theologically Calvinistic of revivals. For example, the publication of sermons and accounts of revivals were common at the time of the Evangelical Revival. These served as a model to other ministers and sowed seeds of expectation in congregation members. Mark Noll describes various skills which contributed to the Evangelical Revival and Great Awakening:
They were, however, unusually gifted men: one of the greatest public orators of the century (Whitefield), one of the most effective organisers for one of the longest period of effectiveness (John Wesley), one of the pioneers in the management of publicity (William Seward), one of the most compelling popular troubadours (Charles Wesley), one of the most powerful thinkers (Edwards), several of the critical forerunners of printed mass communication (John Lewis, Thomas Prince, William McCulloch), and then scores of others who in their local spheres were sometimes even more memorable as preachers, networkers, hymnwriters, theologians and communicators.[3]
More, circumstances that aren’t deliberately engineered and practices that aren’t adopted with the intention of triggering a revival also usually play a part in revivals too. If we are to be critical of so-called revivals engineered by human effort, we should also show enough discernment to realise that less self-conscious forces can also bring about something which looks like revival. Just because it wasn’t deliberately planned doesn’t mean it is therefore of God!
To insist that a true revival must be almost entirely spontaneous and surprising is neither biblical nor historical.
Read More
Related Posts:

It is in the congregation of the holy, those set apart by God to be our keepers and brothers and sisters. If we hope to be fat and flourishing in the spiritual things of the Lord than we cannot neglect His presence, or His people. We are stronger together, and strongest when we are together in His House being fed by His table and bounty.

I was recently listening to a sermon by Joel Beeke where he was talking about the burning desire within the heart of the believer for the righteousness of Jesus Christ. His text was Psalm 71:16 and he was speaking concerning the way in which David in the depths of his troubles with Absalom sought the promise and goodness of God as he struggled with the rebellion of his own son. It is a psalm penned in old age and as the Lord’s king begins to recount the many times in life God was faithful to His trust David is comforted despite his current difficulties to know that regardless of what was happening in the world around him there was always safety in Jehovah’s dwelling place. So many times in the Bible is that same image used to describe the peace the believer knows in the grace and mercy of God that it is probably worthwhile for us to pay attention to it. In today’s prayer and worship help we are going to think through a particular way that the comfort that David knew, and still knows in the Heavens, is available to us as we deal with trials and tribulations in our own day-to-day.
Resting in Christ is a regular returning to the place of safety where we are found under the caring wings of our Savior. David in the psalm noted above says, “Be thou my strong habitation, whereunto I may continually resort: thou hast given commandment to me; for thou art my rock and my fortress.”. Something worth taking from the way the Psalmist writes those words is the fact that he recognizes that it is not Jesus who moves away and then David needs to find Him again, but the opposite is true. As he becomes untethered either by his own sin or by his lack of faith (think Peter sinking in the sea) David is brought to peace through the fact that he knows that Christ is always present for him to continually resort. God has told his servant where He is going to be and the great peace that we have is knowing that to be the case, having that commandment, or promise from the LORD that can never be shaken or lost. When we say or read the well-known verse in Philippians 4:6-7, “Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God; 7 and the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.” we are living out what David is experiencing in Psalm 71.
Read More
Related Posts: