In Defense of Patriarchy
Satan’s false flag operation is fueling misgivings about Biblical teaching concerning gender differences, fatherhood and motherhood, roles in marriage and male leadership in the church. (The church’s government notably has as its head a man, the man Christ Jesus, who set it up, who shed his blood for sinners in love and appoints men to shepherd the flock he loves.) Satan’s operation is a deceitful emotional appeal that can be summarized by a short and familiar formula: “God is evil, isn’t he?” But the truth is the opposite.
Last week I noticed that Ryan Gosling was nominated for an Oscar for playing Ken alongside Margot Robbie’s Barbie in last summer’s hit by the same name. Robbie, incidentally, was not so nominated. I won’t watch the film, but I recall reading that the plot features a wayward Ken promoting patriarchy, and that Barbie—won’t this help us all sleep better—rescues the world from patriarchy. It is likely that I am not the only one to detect a total public relations failure when the man gets the trophy after all.
This in turn reminded me of something I read around the time the movie came out: that the Archbishop of York of the Church of England was also worried about patriarchy, and that its troubling existence makes some understandably uncomfortable with a certain prayer that begins with the words “Our Father.”[i]
And the bishop is hardly alone. Many professing Christians sound just like Barbie and the bishop, and tell me that the church has missed something—a two-thousand-year-old fifth column called patriarchy must be rooted out of Christianity for Christianity to survive in our enlightened age.[ii] Without pulling this invasive weed, they tell me, we are doomed.
What do we make of this assessment? Is this really a noxious weed? What is patriarchy?
What is True: Decades of Bad News Concerning Bad Men
In 2002 the Boston Globe published a series of stories revealing a pattern of criminal sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston. The hypocrisy caused a crisis of confidence that spread in the church worldwide, and continues to the present day—the fathers were not what they claimed to be.
American evangelicalism has not fared much better. Vision Forum promised the restoration of the Christian family through “The Tenets of Biblical Patriarchy;” instead its president confessed to inappropriate sexual conduct. Mr. “I Kissed Dating Goodbye” left his wife and left the faith. Leaders in the Southern Baptist Convention faced serious allegations. To our shame the church has often looked more like Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein than Job or Joseph.
My own tribe—evangelical Presbyterianism—has its own cases of the same sordid substance. This is the hypocrisy of which Jesus said: “Woe to you!” This is also the way of sinful flesh; there is nothing new under the sun, and what has been will be. Sexual desire, apart from the controlling influence of the Holy Spirit, produces all manner of wicked fruit. The lust of the flesh is destructive and evil.
But some suggest that these failures are not fundamentally rooted in individual fallen human nature but rather social structures that unequally place men in positions of influence, leading to the imbalance and abuse of power. If we solve the imbalance, so the logic goes, we will eliminate the abuse. Utopia requires the elimination of patriarchy.
What is Patriarchy?
Patriarchy simply means father-rule. The word clearly indicates an apportioning of authority. It is an uncomplicated word, used by the church for millennia. Today’s use of the word, however, appears to be confused by two things: (i) people who use it to describe unbiblical schemes (we will call this not-patriarchy) or (ii) people who think patriarchy itself is actually bad.
About not-patriarchy: The promises of I Kissed Dating Goodbye or Vision Forum or Bill Gothard should never have appealed to Christians, ever. These schemes went beyond the Law of God, lacked Gospel basics, and understated dependence on the Holy Spirit. It is no surprise that adherents later kiss Christianity goodbye. All forms of legalistic, harsh, and sinful leadership are not fatherhood but delinquency. We need to learn to recognize and reject counterfeit patriarchy.[iii]
The second concern is the unequivocal rejection of the whole thing: Patriarchy is simply very bad. Countless journalists, opinion writers and professors, the bishop and Barbie (and a growing chorus of evangelical-egalitarian influencers) are in agreement: Very, very bad.
I hear this sentiment in the Presbyterian denominations in which I travel: “Beware patriarchy,” which then is inexplicably defined as “men being unkind to women.” This particular definition often makes its appearance during discussions of abuse or sexual sin; for some this is apparently indistinguishable from patriarchy. If we were playing Clue, it was patriarchy in the church that did it. Case closed.
The net effect? Listen up, everybody: Patriarchy is a big problem. Father-rule is bad. The father is bad.
The Dangers That Follow the Loss of Patriarchy
So why even try to rescue a sullied word? Doesn’t language change? I would submit that acquiescence to the popular equation patriarchy–is-evil will result in the loss of our nation, the Christian home, the church and the Gospel. How, you ask, could this little word be so important?
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Public Witness Post-Woke
Now “public witness” means using the right words when most favorable and discarding them when they become too unpopular (or talked about by the wrong people). Public witness is no longer about being martyred but being welcomed in the most prestigious institutions. Which, to be frank, is all well and good, though it’s been said that we aren’t supposed to want power and influence.
At this point in time, it’s hard to imagine a Christian leader intentionally forcing “wokeness” (as in “woke church”). However, it’s not for the reasons you think. Apparently, the word “woke” was a completely redeemable word as of 4 years ago. We could use it like Stretch Armstrong, pulling it this way and that. It fell within the boundaries of linguistic colonization (or should I say contextualization) to take the philosopher’s concepts and repurpose them within the church (like Paul on Mars Hill in Acts 17). We’re supposed to “plunder the Egyptians,” taking worldly concepts and submitting them to Christ. Why? Because it showed that we heard, cared, and wanted to answer the concerns of the world. We want to meet the needs of the world. Therefore, we were to wokify the church. This was very much in vogue in 2018.
“Woke” Hits its Expiration Date
But now, after all the hubbub about wokeness, the word is seemingly past its expiration date for evangelical thought leaders. Apparently, there is more to that word than meets the eye and it is no longer redeemable. What changed? Did those who coined “woke” hide their intentions? Not particularly. The etymology of “woke” was created and utilized by the same crowd that denounces the patriarchy, believes men and women are interchangeable, and believes capitalism is racist. So now that the word woke is alive like Frankenstein’s monster, there has been a retreat from its use. Not to mention, any critics of woke ideology are immediately written off as unserious thinkers who have been watching too much right-wing media.
Four years ago, using woke was all the rage. Now, taking woke to task by naming and describing what woke means is uncouth because merely by using the word woke you show how unsophisticated you are. Are you beginning to see the game?
Take a worldly ideology, repackage it for the church, use it until it blows up, and then make fun of the simpletons (or just don’t listen to them) who criticize the word and ideology it represents.
No Longer a “Useful Analytical Tool”
The same is true for critical race theory. Only a few years ago you were permitted to listen and learn from CRT. It was a useful tool of analysis. It may not have the right solutions but it has a good diagnosis.
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Breaking Bread with Calvin and His “Institutes”
Written by Patrick J. O’Banion |
Tuesday, August 2, 2022
Works like Calvin’s masterpiece don’t belong to a small subset of trained pastors and theologians, much less to the secular academy. They belong to the church. And reading them ties the church of this century to all of those that have come before.In his recent book Breaking Bread with the Dead [read TGC’s review], Alan Jacobs offers advice for achieving a “more tranquil mind”—a thing devoutly to be wished. At the heart of the book is the following insight: the more substantially we’re in touch with the past, the more effectively we’ll avoid being “trapped” in the “social structure and life patterns” all around us (14).
Like C. S. Lewis, who famously urged us to “keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds” by reading old books, Jacobs argues that “you can’t understand the place and time you’re in by immersion” unless you regularly step away from it (23). For Christians, this means attentively reading (and rereading) the great works of the church’s history.
But, let’s face it, reading Augustine’s City of God, Aquinas’s Summa Theologica, Dante’s Divine Comedy, or Milton’s Paradise Lost can be hard work. Helpful resources exist for potential readers, of course. You’re more likely to hang in there with the great, big books if those who have gone before us can reduce the friction (as it were) by telling you what to expect.
In that spirit, I’d like to point out some landmarks from a recent reading of John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion (1559), one of those great works of the Christian past and a daunting tome to encounter. Think of the following as lessons learned—things I wish someone had told me before I took the plunge.
1. Calvin had a vast knowledge of Scripture.
Calvin often used the Institutes to address issues that didn’t fit into his sermons or commentaries. Scholars suggest interacting with all three genres—Institutes, commentaries, and sermons—to get the full picture. No doubt they’re correct, but Calvin’s interaction with the Bible bleeds over from his exegetical labors into the Institutes. Watch for his wide and deep knowledge of Scripture. Seeing it operate in a work of this scale is marvelous to behold.
2. Calvin engaged church history deeply.
Calvin understood that being a Christian meant being connected to all Christians who had gone before. In addition to theologians of his own day, Calvin read (widely) among the church fathers and (not quite as widely) among the medievals.
This allowed him to bring the debates of the past into conversation with the controversies of the present and, by considering how the church and her theologians had previously engaged those issues, to move his readers through confusion toward conclusions.
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There is a Right Way and a Wrong Way to do Biblical Word Studies
Written by S. M. Baugh |
Saturday, May 28, 2022
I will try to give you some helpful ideas on proper word study method in this series. But the project is mainly about meanings of words and phrases in the Greek NT that may not be evident in today’s popular translations.Word studies dominate the resources available for Christians. Some are good and some, well, not so good. With all the word pictures, Strong’s numbers, footnotes in translations, study Bibles and more, you would think that there’s nothing more that can be said about word studies in the Bible. I’m going to put a little oar in this massive lake anyway. The lake will be reduced in size a bit by only considering New Testament (NT) and Greek examples since this is my field.
As introduction to the project, let me qualify that “word” studies is shorthand for the study of the meanings of both individual words and phrases. A “phrase” in this context refers to a series of two or more words that do not have independent meaning but mean something as a whole. Let me illustrate with these English examples. The highlighted phrases in these sentences, have composite meanings that are more than the sum of their parts: “Don’t believe him, he’s out to lunch,” “She gave up the ghost,” “They were sent up the river for their crimes.” Substitution of synonyms in these phrases turns them into nonsense: “out to dinner,” “gave up the ghoul,” or “sent up the waterway.”
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