Written by Michael J. Kruger |
Friday, December 22, 2023
It seems likely, then, that Mary gave birth to Jesus while they were staying at the home of Joseph’s relatives in Bethlehem. But the room in which they stayed—likely a tight guest room or hastily added chamber—couldn’t accommodate a birth. So, Mary had to give birth in the larger family room and lay Jesus in the nearby manger.

Bah, humbug.
That’s probably one of the most well-known lines in literary (and now, cinematic) history. Everybody immediately recognizes the curmudgeonly voice of Ebeneezer Scrooge as he pours cold water all over our Christmas spirit.
And his point is still made today by some, albeit in different words.  It’s that the Christmas story just isn’t true. It’s rubbish. It’s made up. It’s all in our heads.
While now is not the time for a full-scale defense of the historicity of the Christmas story, Scrooge’s skepticism does prompt us to wonder whether we’ve gotten the story right. Are we telling the story that really was, or are we just telling the story that we want to tell?  Are we just telling the story in our heads?
It might be useful, then, to reflect on a few common misconceptions about the Christmas story. The best way to validate the Christmas story to the Ebeneezer Scrooge’s out there is to make sure we’ve got it right ourselves. Here are five of them.
1. There Was a Star the Night Jesus Was Born
It’s difficult to find a nativity scene (or Christmas play) without a star over the manger. Indeed, this might be the quintessential symbol of the birth of Jesus.
The problem is there’s no indication the star hovered over the manger on the night Jesus was born. On the contrary, when the angels announced the birth of Jesus to the shepherds watching their flocks by night (Luke 2:8–11), they weren’t told to look for a star. They were told to look for something else: “And this will be a sign for you: you will find a baby wrapped in swaddling cloths and lying in a manger” (Luke 2:12).
The star was given not to the shepherds but to the Magi (Matt. 2:2), who appear to be visiting Jesus at a later time period. How much later is unclear, but the fact that Herod commands all the babies in the region younger than 2 years old to be killed suggests Jesus may have been in Bethlehem for some time.
2. There Were Three Wise Men
Speaking of the wise men, in both art and in song (“We Three Kings”) we get the undeniable impression there were three of them (also called “Magi”). The problem, however, is that this number is found nowhere in the biblical accounts.
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Written by Jason K. Allen |
Tuesday, April 16, 2024
We are called to be advocates, not just affirmers. We are called to be articulators, not just adherents. Compromise usually begins with silence. It ends with disavowal. And we must have an ear for the silence. Yes, each of us will have different ministry passions or commitments. But we must keep before us an ever-present awareness that these issues are being threatened by the day, in our families and in our churches, and we must be those who are willing to confidently and cheerfully speak and advocate to these great truths, especially as codified in the Danvers and Nashville Statements. Silence often is deafening.

My first encounter with the Danvers Statement and CBMW was in the late 1990s. I was a young man in college, and I was at my church, a rather large Southern Baptist church, and I was talking to a staff member in his office, and I saw on his bookshelf a big, thick, blue book that said Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood. There were two names on it: Wayne Grudem and John Piper. I had heard the latter name, not the former. But I had never heard of the topics to which that book was addressing. And I asked the staff member, “What is this book about?” And he said, “Well, it’s about complementarianism,” and I responded, “What in the world is that?” And he began to unpack it just a little bit to me that summer afternoon, and I stood there really mystified by the whole reality. I grew up in a conservative home and a conservative church, and I knew that generally, men were supposed to lead in the home, and in the church, and that women were not to preach, but little more than that.
As a college student in the late 1990s, the whole topic struck me as an awkward anachronism, a doctrinal hot potato, an angular, often inconvenient truth to which we were to hold. But I sensed then that men and ministers both would speak of these things only when necessary, and then do so only uncomfortably. And when it was necessary to speak to them, it would usually be with some glib, throwaway line along the lines that, “When we got married, I told my wife I would make all the major decisions, but in 30 years of marriage, there has never been a major decision!” That was my encounter and my understanding of complementarianism in the late 1990s.
Then you move into the early 2000s, and a huge surge of awareness — thanks to CBMW primarily — took place. The TNIV pushback even had leading voices arguing for a return to the phrase and the concept of “biblical patriarchy,” a call to recover that term. That concept and the room seemed set. And it seemed as though this renewal of Reformed theology, the New Calvinism, that complementarianism was really part and parcel of that movement. Yet over the past five to ten years, it seems to me that we have had a swing of momentum: self-inflicted wounds; moral failings by leaders; crudeness and rudeness on social media and other places; militant egalitarianism that is always on the hunt for a complementarian to shoot down. All of this and more presents those of us who are complementarians with significant challenges.
Then we come to my own denomination — speaking of challenges — the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). In recent years, the issue has become fever pitch. It really burst just a few years ago when Beth Moore tweeted in the lead-up to Mother’s Day that she would be preaching. And that set off a conflagration. Then, of course, more recently, Rick Warren announced an exegetical breakthrough, not just permitting women to preach and to lead in the church, but necessitating they do so.
Before us now is the Law Amendment that many of you have heard about, and read about — an admittedly blunt instrument, but seemingly a necessary one. And some of those opposed to it are making the argument that sounds something like this: “This is a red herring in our convention, because only a handful of churches are in danger of being afoul of the BF&M 2000. But if we adopt it, we will alienate an intolerably high number of churches that would then be outside of the BF&M 2000.” Well, which is it? We are a free church denomination, and we understand that swapping inconsistent nomenclature is part of that cooperation. We seek to find reasons to work together, not to come apart. But our response should be to educate, not to excuse, to reaffirm and rearticulate, not to shrug off, not to say things like, “On the one hand, these issues are rooted in the created order, but as long as we do not violate it too often, then it is no big deal.”
Four Observations on the Lay of the Land
In what follows, I will make four observations as I see the lay of the land, and then bring six words of challenge to card-carrying complementarians.

America Is Spiraling into Greater Darkness than Any of Us Fully Realize

I was in the United Kingdom recently for our acquisition of a Spurgeon collection at MBTS. I was in the London area in a car with a minister from there. We were at a red light, and to the left of the light was a large building with a sign. On the sign was a man — clearly a man with large muscles and a beard, exuding masculinity in every way by the muscles and the facial hair — wearing lingerie. The minister said to me, “You know, Jason, America has exported that to us.” It struck me at that moment not only was he right, but he was tragically so, because until very recently we were on the receiving end of such exports: Europe sent us their nonsense. Now we are sending ours to them. We used to be the arsenal of democracy. We used to export virtue. Now we are the arsenal of hedonism, exporting perversion.

The Greatest Threat to Complementarianism Is Not That We Fail to Persuade the Culture, but That We Fail to Persuade Our Own Families and Churches

In the lead-up to America’s interest in World War II, FDR famously observed that to be the President in these times required that the President be the Educator in Chief. And for us in the room who love our sons, daughters, spouses, congregations, and extended family, my great concern is not so much that the culture will not hear and heed, but that our own loved ones and our own churches are not hearing from us, and thus not heeding accordingly the clear teachings of Scripture.

There Is No Mushy Middle

Stop trying to find the mushy middle. If you want to see people looking for it, you do not have to attend a feminist conference these days. You just have to attend ETS. But there is, in the final analysis, no mushy middle. That phrase first hit me over a decade ago when I had just moved to Kansas City.
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Though we know tragedies like these come to other parts of the world, it does not change the fact that fear and pain still come to our door in one way or another as products of suffering. We’ll suffer in this life, whether from a more notable event like a natural disaster that levels your home, the loss of precious life at the hands of a newsworthy accident, or something less dramatic and more common like the pain of severed relationships.
And here’s the kicker that keeps plaguing my mind in recent days: it would seem that no level of preparedness can be taken against suffering except to know suffering will come. It seems like all that one can do is lower the blow suffering delivers to victims.
With that being said, I want you to know that I think being prepared is wise. Finding ways to prepare yourself for moments in life can be a matter of life or death in several situations. As the strong winds approached my house on December 11, I was thankful for the times I practiced tornado drills with my five kids who are all under eight years old. The winds from the tornado crumpled the trampoline in our backyard like you and I might crumple a ball of twisty ties.
But even as we see the benefits of being prepared, we need to also see its futility. We could start collecting packages of water and emergency rations in the event of food supply shortages, but what do we do when the rations run out? We could buy every solar panel on earth for sustainable energy, but what do we do when the panels stop working? We could build a safe house, but what do we do when people find out about it?
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