Written by Jeffrey T. Riddle |
Saturday, November 12, 2022
At one point he makes reference to the inherent binary convictions of traditional Christianity when he writes, “Christianity make a clear distinction between those who follow Christ and those who fail to believe” (134). Key to his argument is the idea that even those who reject traditional borders, paradoxically invent new ones to replace them. This recalls Paul’s insight that even pagan Gentiles “which have not the law, do by nature the things contained in the law…

Frank Furedi, Why Borders Matter: Why Humanity Must Relearn the Art of Drawing Boundaries (London and New York: Routledge 2021): 193 pp.
The mere title of this book might lead one to think it is about immigration, a topic much in the news these days. In fact, however, though applicable to immigration, this book is about much more than that. It is about borders or boundaries as a salubrious sociological phenomenon meant to establish order and promote flourishing in human individuals and societies. Borders are important not only in distinguishing one nation from another, but in demarcating boundaries in numerous other crucial areas of life, including the differences between the public and private spheres, adults and children, males and females, and even humans and animals. The author, an Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Kent in the UK, brings the requisite expertise required to examine this topic with authority. This work challenges the contemporary promotion of a “borderless spirit” as ideal.
Review of Content
We begin with a summary of the book’s content. In the opening chapter (Introduction) the author suggests there is a contemporary “paradox of borders,” epitomized in those who reject border walls, on one hand, while decrying “cultural appropriation,” on the other. Contrary to the spirit of the age, Furedi suggests that the creation of boundaries is vital. He notes, “The marking out of space and the tendency to draw lines constitutes humanity’s need for signposts and guidance” (5). This is true not just of physical but also of symbolic boundaries, including moral ones. “When symbolic borders lose their meaning, a cultural crisis ensues” (7). According to Furedi, “Western society’s estrangement from borders is not an enlightened step forward—rather it expresses a self-destructive sensibility of estrangement from the conventional sign posts that guide everyday life” (12).
Chapter two addresses challenges represented by the modern value of “non-judgementalism,” presented “as an enlightened and liberal attitude towards the world” (19). Furedi defends “the act of judgement,” however, as “a deed through which people can establish connections and develop a shared understanding of one another’s outlook” (20). The condemnation of moral judgment has led to moral indifference.
Chapter three examines “openness” as a predominate modern value: “In popular culture, openness supposedly rejects preconceived notions, refuses to possess durable commitments and ideas, and does not abide by fixed points and permanent boundaries” (31). The convergence of openness with non-judgementalism has resulted in “a mood of moral malaise” (33). Oddly enough, advocates of these values often express “bitter hostility” that is “visceral and characteristically militant” to any who see value in “closed communities” based on “ties of kinship, family, friendship, religion, and community membership” (36-37).
Chapter four further addresses how these values have challenged notions of national sovereignty, democracy, and citizenship. It questions “the project of delegitimizing territorial borders” (49). According to Furedi, belonging to a particular people inhabiting a bounded place constitutes “an important source of solidarity” and provides “moral significance for members of a national community” (53).  There can be no democracy without a demos. Advocates for the new values, however, promote “global citizenship” preferring “a heterogeneous space to a homogeneous one” (65).
Chapter five addresses the erosion of boundaries between the public and private spheres. “Personal and emotional openness are regarded as cultural ideals and promoted through media and popular culture” (73). The “classical virtue of stoicism” has been replaced by public and unrestrained “emotionalism” (74). He cites as an example “the relentless drive to ‘normalize,’ routinise, and demystify the domain of sex” (76). “Pornography,” for example, “has become a culturally, even socially, validated fetish” (76). The old value of reticence is dismissed as prudishness. In contrast, Furedi suggests, “The protection of the private realm is essential for the conduct of a healthy public life” (85). He concludes:
Once the space for secrecy is lost, the individual’s capacity to question, doubt, and act in accordance with their inclinations is undermined. In this area as in others, the        flourishing of freedom is inseparable from the maintenance of limits and boundaries (88).
Chapter six addresses how the erosion of the public and private distinction has had unsettling effects in public life. This has included the development of “identity politics” and charges of “micro-agression” (100).
Chapter seven addresses how the “boundaryless spirit of our time” has created confusion for “intergenerational relations” (112). In the post-traditional world, the self is made rather than “passively inherited” (113). One result has been “a diminished sense of adult responsibility” and the “phenomenon of infantilization” (115), leading to the erosion of parental authority, the tendency to treat children as adults, and of adults to act like children. A side effect has been failure to socialize children and confusion as to what values to transmit to them.
Chapter eight addresses current hostility against the practice of binary thinking, and its dismissal as “morally wrong” (130). “Binary thinking is sometimes presented as a psychological deficit—a symptom of anxiety, and a marker for intolerance of ambiguity and complexity” (132). According to Furedi, however, binary thinking is not simply a “cultural tool” but a fundamental feature of the practice of human conceptualization” (136). He notes, in particular, how “anti-binary activists” have attacked the basic human distinction between men and women. They have attempted “de-authorising not just gender but also the difference of biological sex” with “the character of a religious duty” (142).
Chapter nine suggests that the rejection of conventional boundaries has, in fact, ironically resulted in “new ways of drawing lines in everyday life” (151). This includes emphasis on “personal boundaries,” the “Me too” movement, and the desire for “safe spaces.”
The book ends with a conclusion noting again that, “Hostility towards conventional boundaries and borders coexist with the demands for new borders” (165). Furedi notes that some are even challenging the boundaries between humans and animals. Human morality is dismissed by some as “an anthropocentric conceit” (165). He concludes that “the decisive influence” is the West’s unwillingness to affirm clear borders in all areas, resulting in “a lack of clarity about the moral values that underpin the self” (173).
Final Analysis
This is a work of sociology and not theology, and yet it contains many helpful insights for the church today. Furedi offers a compelling description and analysis of the contemporary Zeitgeist and its rebellion against traditional boundaries or borders, with respect not only to nations (cf. Acts 17:26) but also with respect to the fundamental differences between men and women, adults and children. At one point he makes reference to the inherent binary convictions of traditional Christianity when he writes, “Christianity make a clear distinction between those who follow Christ and those who fail to believe” (134). Key to his argument is the idea that even those who reject traditional borders, paradoxically invent new ones to replace them. This recalls Paul’s insight that even pagan Gentiles “which have not the law, do by nature the things contained in the law… Which shew the work of the law written in their hearts….” (Rom 2:14-15). This book challenges the Christian reader to consider not only how to understand and resist the spirit of the age as it works upon us, but also how to extend a winsome alternative in Biblical Christianity to a confused world.
Jeffrey T. Riddle is Pastor of Christ Reformed Baptist Church in Louisa, Virginia.
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The Holy Spirit does two things: inspires the writing of Scripture and indwells the people of God. As a corollary of both, he carries the divine writings into the hands of his people and guides them, as a people, in their interpretation. Scripture and Church, therefore, stand in harmony. 

Early on in John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion (in its completed 1559 edition), he discusses the authority of Scripture. After describing humanity’s natural sense of divinity (sensus divinitatis), Calvin turns to the necessity of the Word of God for saving revelation due to humanity’s clouded judgment. In order to establish Scripture’s authority, he first attempts to rebut the claim of the Roman Church that the authority of the Bible depends upon “the consent of the church.”[1] In seeking to secure the tyrannical claim that “the church has authority in all things,” his opponents trust more in the judgment of men than in the truth of God.[2]
Scripture, for Calvin, bears witness to its own authority. Since its source is divine, it exhibits the marks of divinity. Indeed, Scripture, he claims, is “self-authenticated” (autopiston).[3] “It is not right,” therefore, “to subject it to proof and reasoning,” or, more basically, to any judgment of men.[4] To ask for external verification for the truth and validity of the Bible is like asking, “Whence will we learn to distinguish light from darkness, white from black, sweet from bitter?”[5] As Calvin puts it plainly, “Scripture exhibits fully as clear evidence of its own truth as white and black things do of their color, or sweet and bitter things do of their taste.”[6] Insofar as Scripture is concerned—putting to the side for a moment the question of individual apprehension—its authority is unquestionable. It is an obvious fact. Just as one could not describe the color black—“…it just is!”—so he cannot attempt to “prove” Scripture’s veracity.
What are we to make of disagreements among men concerning the truth (or lack thereof) of Holy Scripture? The answer lies in the internal testimony of the Spirit. According to Calvin, “the same Spirit . . . who has spoken through the mouths of the prophets must penetrate into our hearts to persuade us that they faithfully proclaimed what had been divinely commanded.”[7] In other words, the authority of Scripture, since it is self-validated, cannot depend upon human judgments for its vindication. “We ought to seek our conviction,” rather, “in a higher place than human reasons, judgments, or conjectures, that is, in the secret testimony of the Spirit.”[8] Thus, those who do not acknowledge what is plainly true about the authority of Scripture have simply not received the illumination of the Holy Spirit. But on the other hand, “those whom the Holy Spirit has inwardly taught truly rest upon Scripture.”[9] The reception of the Spirit’s internal witness is the dividing line between those who recognize Scripture’s authority and those who do not.
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The church stands under the authority of the sufficient and perspicuous Scriptures, and if a church starts to disobey these Scriptures, it must be rebuked, and if it persists, it must be rejected. May God give us the courage to stand up for the truth, the humility to recognize our failings, and the resolve to correct them in a spirit of repentance.

Introduction
The error of women’s ordination has stalked, cursed, and haunted Anglicanism for nearly half a century and no matter where we go or what efforts we make to correct our wrongs, we cannot seem to fully rid ourselves of it. For many conservative Anglicans, women’s ordination is like the relative you cannot stand but have to put up with because no matter what they will be coming to every family gathering. However, I believe that if we follow Scripture faithfully and assent to the Anglican Formularies, then women’s ordination cannot be tolerated; it must instead be rebuked, and every effort must be made to eradicate it from the church before it is too late.
1. The Church Is Bound to Scripture
In the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion, Article XX says that “it is not lawful for the Church to ordain anything that is contrary to God’s Word written.” The use of the word “ordain” here seems rather providential, as it was the Anglican Communion’s decision to “ordain” woman as Priests and Bishops, despite the fact that Scripture forbids such a thing, that helped bring about its demise. There is no need to explain at length how Scripture prohibits women from ordained Church leadership, simply quoting a few passages will suffice:
Man did not come from woman, but woman from man; neither was man created for woman, but woman for man. It is for this reason that a woman ought to have authority over her own head, because of the angels. (1 Cor 11:8‒10)
As in all the churches of the saints, the women should keep silent in the churches. For they are not permitted to speak, but should be in submission, as the Law also says. If there is anything they desire to learn, let them ask their husbands at home. For it is shameful for a woman to speak in church. (1 Cor 14:33‒35)
Let a woman learn quietly with all submissiveness.  I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man; rather, she is to remain quiet. For Adam was formed first, then Eve; and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor. (1 Tim 2:11‒14)
The saying is trustworthy: If anyone aspires to the office of overseer, he desires a noble task. Therefore an overseer must be above reproach, the husband of one wife. (1 Tim 3:1‒2)
Of course, egalitarian Biblical scholars will try to overturn these passages by appealing to others that are all vague and have nothing to do with the issue at hand. Article XX condemns this very method, saying “neither may [the church] so expound one place of Scripture, that it be repugnant to another.” When egalitarian scholars bring up Aquila and Priscilla’s explaining of the “way of God more accurately” to Apollos (Acts 18:26) or the possibility that St Paul might have called a Junia an “apostle”[1] (Rom 16:7), in order to undermine the clear and explicit teachings of these passages above, they are making some parts of Scripture repugnant to others.
Moreover, the claim that these passages are so mysterious that they cannot be understood without the esoteric and sometimes even Gnostic[2] insights of Biblical scholars also undermines the qualities of sufficiency and perspicuity which the Formularies attribute to Scripture:
In holy Scripture is fully contained what we ought to do, and what to eschew… We may learn also in these Books to know God’s will and pleasure, as much as (for this present time) is convenient for us to know… Although many things in the Scripture be spoken in obscure mysteries, yet there is nothing spoken under dark mysteries in one place, but the self-same thing in other places, is spoken more familiarly and plainly, to the capacity both of learned and unlearned. (A Fruitful Exhortation to the reading and knowledge of holy Scripture)
The passages quoted above (1 Cor 11:8‒10, 14:33‒35; 1 Tim 2:11‒14; 3:1‒2) are without question the ones that speak to women in church leadership the most clearly and directly. Therefore, to undermine their meaning being sufficiently known from a plain sense reading, or to use obscure passages to make those clear passages unclear, is to go against the hermeneutic given to us by the Anglican Formularies. Following this Anglican hermeneutic, we must conclude that Scripture forbids women to preach and teach the word in church or to have authority over a congregation. Since these duties are essential parts of a Priest’s vocation, we must as Anglicans who assent to Article XX deem it unlawful for churches to ordain women to the Priesthood.
It must also be said that there is no sense in which the Anglican Formularies themselves could be understood to have an egalitarian reading of Scripture. It is true that the Formularies nowhere explicitly forbid women from being ordained, but this is simply because the idea of that happening was unthinkable to their writers. However, the Ordinal assumes that a “man” is the one being ordained and patriarchal gender roles are taught throughout the Formularies. The BCP’s Solemnization of Matrimony directs the bride to vow to “obey, serve, and honour” her husband, and the Homily of the State of Matrimony says “wives must obey their husband and perform subjection… God hath commanded that ye should acknowledge the authority of the husband and refer to him the honour of obedience.” The Homily goes on to say that a woman must cover her head in church to signify that “she is under obedience of her husband, and to declare her subjection.” It thus seems very implausible that the writers of the Formularies would be happy to know that in the future women would be ordained as Priests and Bishops within the Church some of them died to defend. Some Anglican Divines did, however, speak against the possibility of such a thing happening. The great Anglican Divine, Richard Hooker, made the throwaway comment that “to make women teachers in the house of God were a gross absurdity,”[3] and the Bishop and Martyr John Hooper said “the preaching of the word is not the office of a woman, no more is the ministration of the sacraments.”[4]
While it is clear that the Formularies rule out the possibility of allowing women to become church leaders, one could of course argue (and some have argued) that since they never spoke directly to the issue it must not be an important one. This is to ascribe the quality of sufficiency to something that is not Scripture. The writers of the Formularies were not blessed with the ability to foresee the future, and the Formularies were not inspired to sufficiently touch on all matters of later importance. However, the Ordinal tells us that the Priesthood is so “weighty an office” and so “great a treasure” that an “horrible punishment will ensue” if it is misused (cf. James 3:1) This is because, being “Messengers, Watchmen, and Stewards of the Lord,” a Priest’s office is “appointed for the Salvation of mankind,” and therefore to distort it is a serious offense.
Returning to Scripture, after St Paul tells us that women cannot speak in church (1 Cor 14:34), he says that “what I am writing to you is the Lord’s command” and that it is given so that “everything should be done in a fitting and orderly way” (1 Cor 14:37‒39). Because the church is called to worship God “in Spirit and truth” (John 4:23), God takes our worship very seriously, and He demands that our worship be conducted in an orderly fashion. This is why Nadab and Abihu’s offering of “strange fire” to the Lord led to Him incinerating them (Lev 10:1‒2). It is precisely because of how God has ordered the sexes (rather than cultural concerns) that women cannot teach in church (1 Tim 2:13; cf. 1 Cor 11:8‒9), and so the ordination of women to a position of authority God forbids them from having is to have worship be led in a disordered way. If God was enraged by the offering of strange fire, or the fact that it was not the Levites who carried the Ark of the Covenant (1 Chron 15:2, 12‒13), He will surely be enraged when people He has forbidden from leadership lead the congregation in offering to Him the remembrance of Christ’s sacrifice in the Eucharist. We must then ask what this means for churches that ordain women, and whether it makes them run the risk of losing their lampstands (Rev 2:5), to answer that question we need to turn to the Homily Concerning the Coming Down of the Holy Ghost.
2. The Marks of a True and False Church
The Homily identifies three marks that define “the true church,” which are “pure and sound doctrine, the Sacraments ministered according to Christ’s holy institution, and the right use of Ecclesiastical discipline.” The error of women’s ordination concerns all three of those marks. To say a woman can be a Priest is to make a doctrinal statement about not just spiritual leadership and the Priesthood, but also the church itself, and the very nature of gender and humanity. To ordain women to preside over and lead Holy Communion, directly affects the administration of the Sacraments. And finally, to allow women to violate God’s commandment that women shall not “teach or have authority over a man” (1 Tim 2:12) is to fail to exercise proper discipline, and to in fact encourage this sin on an institutional level is to fall under God’s condemnation, as we see happen in Isaiah 3:10‒14. Right away then, the Homily’s vision of a true church does not seem to perfectly resemble the churches who ordain women.
The only example the Homily provides of a false church is Rome, which it says is “so far wide from the nature of the true Church, that nothing can be more.” The reason why Rome is labelled as a false church is—it is claimed—because they have not followed the Scriptures in their doctrines, administration of the Sacraments, or discipline, but have “so intermingled their own traditions and inventions, by chopping and changing, by adding and plucking away, that now they may seem to be converted into a new guise.” And what is women’s ordination but the introduction of a man-made—or rather, a feminist-made—tradition and invention into the church? What is it but the chopping and changing of the passages we looked at above? The Homily claims that if a church follows “their own decrees before the express word of God… they are not of Christ,” and what is the ordination of women but the disobeying of God’s explicit commandments in order to follow the decrees of feminism?
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