No matter how bad it is for any of us, it simply isn’t true that there is no place for shame in a society, whether dystopic or Christian or any other kind. Though I don’t wish or pray for the experience for anyone, searching through the rubble for something good, I find I am grateful that my children have been able to see wicked people—who were also good to them—fall. My own children—all of them–will sin in their lives. They need to see how injurious it is to do the wrong thing. How it ruins people’s lives. How selfish it is.

In the course of 2022, which is mercifully wending its way to its demise, two people who my older children have looked up to in the latter parts of their teenage years became publicly discredited. In the first case, many months ago, the shaming that took place and subsequently made its way to the internet, at least at the time, appeared to be appropriate for the offense. The second’s Twitter litigation is mostly wrapped up, with no consensus reached on whether public shame was a necessary or useful development.
Viewing both of these occasions as a parent, it is not too much to say that I took it harder than my children, who are yet bright with optimism about the future and human potential. It was with trepidation that I talked to them both. They were shocked but, to my surprise, by no means unmoored. Pondering what might be the reason for this strange thing, it occurred to me that, though they can’t empathize with a person suffering public shame in the same way that a middle-aged person such as I might be able to (the young know nothing of suffering), yet my children have been given a good and useful gift. Being raised in a place that is best likened to a hospital for wicked people, they know in a heart kind of way that people are, in fact, wicked. They themselves are wicked—I can say without reservation for they are my children—but they are by no means unique. So is everyone else. All of us have together fallen short of the glory of God.
No parent ever makes this particular request, but when my children were very young, on more than one occasion, they were given the strange and difficult gift of seeing up close how wicked people can be. My desire to shield them from seeing human iniquity was not granted to me by God. At the time, I was most put out that the sins of the church came before their young eyes, and filled their delicate ears which, as a dear friend said about her child, “are always on.”
And yet, in consequence of early visions of human treachery, they (my two oldest children) are now able to see that God does not lose control of his church, however badly people behave themselves. Those early lessons properly oriented their expectations not only for their peers but for people who have authority over them, people to whom they owe honor. And so, in these two instances of people they know disappointing literally everyone, it seems they have been able to hang on with gratitude to the ways these two failures nevertheless treated them with love and humanity.
And yet, it should be—indeed must be said—both of these people were failures. For the community to see and acknowledge the failure means the certain shame and humiliation of the offender. And so I am brought once again to consider the place of shame in our social and cultural malaise. Brené Brown, the person whose writing kicked off my curiosity for the subject, posits that shame has no place in a good society. Men, for example, who have abused their wives should suffer no public shame, as some law in Texas apparently decrees. Why? Because, says Brown, a shamed person will not go home having learned a valuable lesson.
Read More
Related Posts:

I realize that this compromise solution will not satisfy those who honestly believe that the Bible teaches that women should be ordained to the office of deacon, nor will it satisfy those who believe that keeping existing female deacons in their office is a scandal, but it is simply impossible to propose a solution to this issue that will satisfy everyone in the ARP, and I honestly believe that this one would satisfy more people on both sides of the issue than maintaining the increasingly contentious status quo.

I’ll admit that I was disappointed by the study. It was my hope that after the painstaking exegetical work that was done by First Presbytery and Dr. Bob Cara, the Committee would also seek to wrestle with what the Bible teaches about the office of Deacon and who may hold it. Even if they didn’t agree with the conclusions that First Presbytery had come to, I hoped that they would show via exegesis and argument why women as well as men should be allowed to hold the office of deacon. Sadly, the report contained no exegetical work but argued rather that the status quo (“The Session of each congregation shall determine whether women can serve as deacons in their own particular congregation ARP FOG 5.4) should be continued primarily because:
I) Two other NAPARC churches have female deacons (the RPCNA and the ERQ) and members of other NAPARC churches have unsuccessfully attempted to introduce female deacons to their own denominations. Therefore, since NAPARC allows for a difference of opinion on this subject, we are merely mirroring the overall NAPARC position (Sections 1 & 5 of the Committee Report)II) The office of deacon, as it is currently explained in the ARP Form of Government is not one of authority and does not require the obedience of church members. (Sections 3 & 4 of the Committee Report)III) There are differences of opinion on this subject in the ARP and presumably a change might damage the current balance and cause churches that have female deacons to withdraw. (Section 5 of the Committee Report)IV) There have been orthodox Reformed theologians who have held to the position that women can be deacons (Section 7 of the report)
My thoughts in response are that:
1) We are a denomination that specifically states that our government is to be founded upon the teaching of scripture in the Old and New Testaments (FOG 2.2) not the practice of other denominations, the beliefs of individuals, nor even a desire to avoid conflict. Therefore, we need to face the fact that whatever the actual practice of the New Testament church was regarding deacons, it was not the current practice of the ARP. While an argument might be made that the New Testament church had female deacons, there is no evidence to suggest that some congregations had deaconesses and others explicitly denied them. If Phoebe was an ordained deaconess in Cenchrea (Romans 16:1) rather than simply a servant of the church, then she did not cease to be a deaconess when she reached Rome because some or all the congregations in that city held a different opinion regarding who should be ordained to that office. What the committee needed to do was to examine the scriptures and come to a conclusion over whether women should or should not be ordained to the office of deacon rather than concluding that we need to reaffirm a position that I don’t believe any of us believe is the one taught in Scripture. Additionally, since we believe that it is the Holy Spirit who gifts and calls people for office in the church, do we really believe that the Holy Spirit does so according to geographic location calling and gifting some women in one location but declining to call and gift them if they are in another? Additionally, I would argue our current position isn’t even Presbyterian as Presbyterians have always held that church office is universal rather than merely congregational.
2) The Committee report also does not address the fact that the ARP did not ordain women to the office of deacon from its inception until 1971. This was a major change in historic ARP polity that came as part of the revisions to the Form of Government brought by the Committee to Revise the Constitution. While most of the other revisions passed with little debate the revision to allow congregations to elect women to diaconate was highly contentious and Ware and Gettys note in their History of the Associate Reformed Presbyterians, “The proposed constitution passed the overture votes easily except for chapter VII. That chapter allowed for the election of “persons” to the office of deacon… The vote in overture on this chapter was 154 to 73. Two-thirds majority was required and this chapter passed, but by only five votes.” They go on to note that resistance to this radical change in ARP polity continued and Mississippi Valley Presbytery created its own committee to study the issue and then sent a memorial to the 1973 Synod asking that the chapter be changed back to its original position restricting the office to only males. However, the synod denied this memorial. (The Second Century, A History of the Associate Reformed Presbyterians 1882-1982, p.387-388)
Read More
Related Posts:

Written by Aaron M. Renn |
Friday, October 25, 2024
Evangelicalism’s culture is not even contiguous with that of mainline Protestantism, much less classical Protestantism. It is very populist and dominated by charismatic pitchman type pastors. It tends to emphasize a therapeutic gospel over a strict ethic. In fact, any type of moral or behavioral code followed too seriously is likely to draw a caution for being legalistic. It’s very aligned with American consumer culture, and American culture generally. And of course it is anti-intellectual, something well-documented in such work as Mark Noll’s The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind.

Reading James Davison Hunter’s Democracy and Solidarity rekindled a feeling that I’ve had many times before in reading books like this. Every time I read a book that describes the religious history of America that talks about the nature of Protestantism in the country, it strikes me that the Protestantism of the American past is alien to today’s evangelicalism. They are different enough to raise the question as to whether or not American evangelicalism is actually Protestant in important ways.
Hunter writes in his book:
For most Americans—whether deist or Calvinist, rationalist and intellectual or revivalist and popular, high church establishmentarian or sectarian—there was a God more or less active in the universe and in human affairs. Indeed, this God was, for most, Christian and, even more, Protestant. Though hegemonic and certainly oppressive to those who dissented, this belief nevertheless provided a language and an ontology that framed understandings of both public and private life. And yet this was also a culture, following Weber and so many others, that was inner-worldly in its orientation and ascetic in its general ethical disposition, an ethic that shunned extravagance, opulence, and self-indulgence and prized hard work, discipline, and utility. In ethics it was individualistic, to be sure, but informed by biblical and republican traditions that tempered individual interest and moved it toward the public interest and common goods. [emphasis added]
It’s certainly hard to argue that contemporary American culture generally, or evangelicalism in particular, are ascetic and oriented towards a traditional disciplined WASP ethic. Undoubtedly, they are if not opulent, consumerist in orientation. I’d be lying if I said I were any different.
You see this change in ethical outlook on life in basically any book on the topic. It’s a move away from the old Calvinist outlook and behaviors and towards modern American post-bourgeois consumerism.
In his famous The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber describes how Calvinism’s concept of calling and election – which he distinguishes from that of Lutheranism – led to furious activity to attempt to objectively demonstrate that one was among the elect.
The religious believer can make himself sure of his state of grace either in that he feels himself to be the vessel of the Holy Spirit or the tool of the divine will. In the former case his religious life tends to mysticism and emotionalism, in the latter to ascetic action; Luther stood close to the former type, Calvinism belonged definitely to the latter. The Calvinist also wanted to be saved sola fide. But since Calvin viewed all pure feelings and emotions, no matter how exalted they might seem to be, with suspicion, faith had to be proved by its objective results in order to provide a firm foundation for the certitudo salutis….Thus, however useless good works might be as a means of attaining salvation, for even the elect remain beings of the flesh, and everything they do falls infinitely short of divine standards, nevertheless, they are indispensable as a sign of election. They are the technical means, not of purchasing salvation, but of getting rid of the fear of damnation.
He describes how this manifested itself in various ways, such as in the Puritan ethics of Richard Baxter:
Waste of time is thus the first and in principle the deadliest of sins. The span of human life is infinitely short and precious to make sure of one’s own election. Loss of time through sociability, idle talk, luxury, even more sleep than is necessary for health, six to at most eight hours, is worthy of absolute moral condemnation. It does not yet hold, with [Benjamin] Franklin, that time is money, but the proposition is true in a certain spiritual sense. It is infinitely valuable because every hour lost is lost to labour for the glory of God. Thus inactive contemplation is also valueless, or even directly reprehensible if it is at the expense of one’s daily work. For it is less pleasing to God than the active performance of His will in a calling. Besides, Sunday is provided for that, and, according to Baxter, it is always those who are not diligent in their callings who have no time for God when the occasion demands it.
The mention of Benjamin Franklin shows that this was one form in which these values were transmitted to American culture. Again, far from contemporary America, which puts a high premium on leisure and consumption over asceticism and production.
Weber’s book is actually short and readable, so is very much worth picking up.
We see the same in French writer Emmanuel Todd’s provocative book The Defeat of the West, which I wrote about earlier this year. Todd sees Protestantism as the foundation of the modern West, and describes it similarly to Weber:
Let us conclude our review of the main characteristics of Protestantism. It is an ethic of work: we are not on earth to have fun, but to work and save. Here we are at the antipodes of the consumer society. Protestantism has also long been synonymous with sexual puritanism.
He sees the collapse of Protestantism as the core factor in the decline of the West, one which lies underneath many of today’s social pathologies.
The original religious matrix was slowly built between the end of the Roman Empire and the central Middle Ages, and then ultimately thickened by the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Counter-Reformation.
Read More

Related Posts:

.kb-row-layout-id223392_4ab238-bd > .kt-row-column-wrap{align-content:start;}:where(.kb-row-layout-id223392_4ab238-bd > .kt-row-column-wrap) > .wp-block-kadence-column{justify-content:start;}.kb-row-layout-id223392_4ab238-bd > .kt-row-column-wrap{column-gap:var(–global-kb-gap-md, 2rem);row-gap:var(–global-kb-gap-md, 2rem);padding-top:var(–global-kb-spacing-sm, 1.5rem);padding-bottom:var(–global-kb-spacing-sm, 1.5rem);grid-template-columns:minmax(0, 1fr);}.kb-row-layout-id223392_4ab238-bd{background-color:#dddddd;}.kb-row-layout-id223392_4ab238-bd > .kt-row-layout-overlay{opacity:0.30;}@media all and (max-width: 1024px){.kb-row-layout-id223392_4ab238-bd > .kt-row-column-wrap{grid-template-columns:minmax(0, 1fr);}}@media all and (max-width: 767px){.kb-row-layout-id223392_4ab238-bd > .kt-row-column-wrap{grid-template-columns:minmax(0, 1fr);}}
.kadence-column223392_96a96c-18 > .kt-inside-inner-col,.kadence-column223392_96a96c-18 > .kt-inside-inner-col:before{border-top-left-radius:0px;border-top-right-radius:0px;border-bottom-right-radius:0px;border-bottom-left-radius:0px;}.kadence-column223392_96a96c-18 > .kt-inside-inner-col{column-gap:var(–global-kb-gap-sm, 1rem);}.kadence-column223392_96a96c-18 > .kt-inside-inner-col{flex-direction:column;}.kadence-column223392_96a96c-18 > .kt-inside-inner-col > .aligncenter{width:100%;}.kadence-column223392_96a96c-18 > .kt-inside-inner-col:before{opacity:0.3;}.kadence-column223392_96a96c-18{position:relative;}@media all and (max-width: 1024px){.kadence-column223392_96a96c-18 > .kt-inside-inner-col{flex-direction:column;}}@media all and (max-width: 767px){.kadence-column223392_96a96c-18 > .kt-inside-inner-col{flex-direction:column;}}

Subscribe to Free “Top 10 Stories” Email
Get the top 10 stories from The Aquila Report in your inbox every Tuesday morning.