Toby J. Sumpter's Blog, page 16

Building in the Ruins

We live in the ruins of Western Civilization, and while we are grateful for the good things that remain (and there are some), many of our current leaders are committed to destroying it all. And there is a concerted effort to do that through various governmental actions. From environmental fascism that creates famines and forest fires to welfare and immigration policies and the recent COVID tyranny, not to mention the glut of woke entertainment, designed to disrupt and destroy the Christian morals of our society: we must not be naïve or blind to the plays being run on us. And there are many practical decisions and actions that obedience to God requires that we make day to day that can impact those attempts: how you educate your children, who you marry, whether you keep your marriage vows, the entertainment you choose, as well as who you work for and the businesses you support. 

At the same time, Jesus, intending for the gospel to go to all the nations, to disciple them all to obey Him in all things, gave us the Word and the sacraments. He told us to preach and to baptize and to share this meal. This isn’t all that Christians do for the good of the world, but it is at the center of what we do for the blessing of the world. And what is the central message of the Word and Sacraments? The death and resurrection of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of sins. You see, for those who hate God and His Christ, they intentionally stoke animosity and tension between men and women, between rich and poor, between black and white – why? Because they want to create their own forms of salvation: salvation by welfare, salvation by multiculturalism, salvation by the state, salvation by therapy and medication, whatever. And this is why they hate the Cross of Christ and all of its cultural fruit: Because if we can have our sins forgiven and begin to rebuild families and communities on that solid rock, then we don’t need them. We don’t need their false gospels. And they hate that. 

So this is the invitation to come to Christ, to come and believe that He is Lord of Heaven and earth, that by His blood, your sins are forgiven and therefore, you can forgive those who have sinned against you and rebuild families and communities as freemen under God’s blessing. Fight statist tyranny and come and welcome to Jesus Christ. 

Photo by Ray Harrington on Unsplash

Hans & Faith

“Likewise, ye wives, be in subjection to your own husbands; that, if any obey not the word, they also may without the word be won by the conversation of the wives; while they behold your chaste conversation coupled with fear” (1 Pet. 3:1-2).

There’s plenty in this text to offend everyone, and if we zoom out just a little, we can find even more. But there’s something incredibly glorious here: this is God’s way of changing the world. God has determined to change the world through obedient death and resurrection. 

If we zoom out, we see that just prior to these verses, Scripture exhorts slaves to be subject to their masters, not only to the good and gentle, but also to the crooked and unjust, including suffering unjust beatings patiently. And Scripture says that this is what we are called to: imitating Christ who suffered for us, leaving us an example, who did not return cursing for cursing, but committed Himself to God who judges justly, bearing our sins in His body on the tree, by whose stripes we are healed and reconciled to God (1 Pet. 2:21-25). 

And then Scripture says, “Likewise, wives…” and all our modern sensibilities erupt with alarms and sirens. Is the Bible describing wives as slaves? Is the Bible condoning wives suffering under abusive husbands? And our answer has to be, yes, the Bible is pointing to some similarities between those situations, but no, the whole point is to give slaves and wives tactics of resistance. Peter is not saying it is OK for slaves to suffer unjustly or for wives to have husbands who are disobedient to the word. Fundamentally, the “likewise,” is like Christ, who endured injustice in obedience to God in order to destroy the power of sin, which is the power of all oppression and injustice and tyranny.  

Now, this might seem like a rather pessimistic note for happy occasion like this, but we know that we are in a great war. This has been the case since our first parents sinned: there has been enmity and animosity between the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent since the beginning, all the way down to Christ and down to the present. By God’s grace, Christianity permeated the West for many centuries, and the seed of the serpent hates that and has arrayed all his forces against our heritage. This means that anymore, marriage is an act of war. For a masculine, god-fearing man and a feminine, god-fearing woman to stand in a Christian church and exchange vows to the death before God and witnesses, seeking the blessing of children and grandchildren who will do the same, this is to join the fray.

Our enemies hate men and women, male and female because it proclaims the image and glory of God, and they hate marriage because it proclaims the glory of Christ our Savior and His Bride the Church. They hate all fruitfulness and the gift of children because it proclaims the glory of the Spirit, God’s creation and His new creation in which we have been born again. And this means that our enemy is prowling both outside of all God’s people and inside, looking for a place to attack and devour. 

On the one hand, you may be attacked on the outside, by those who hate Christ: you may be insulted, canceled, fired, lied about, maybe even harmed because of Christ, and so the exhortation is to fight that injustice by being obedient to God. Imitate Christ by obeying God, looking to Him who judges justly to vindicate you, to show you the way of escape. And on the other hand, you may be attacked on the inside: your own flesh may rise up from time to time, and you will sin against God and one another, being disobedient to the Word. And here are your marching orders. In that moment, do not return evil for evil, disobedience for disobedience. In that moment, resist evil by doing good, by being obedient, by confessing sin and forgiving one another. 

Obedience is not passive. Obedience is not apathetic. Obedience is not lying down and taking it. Obedience is active, militant, and aggressive. Sometimes obedience does mean suffering for a little while waiting for God’s deliverance. Sometimes obedience means firm and loving confrontation. Sometimes obedience means cheerfully covering sin in love. Sometimes Paul escaped down a wall in a basket, and sometimes Paul allowed himself to be arrested. Sometimes Jesus, walked away from a mob untouched, and one time He was arrested. By faithful obedience Gideon led armies to defeat God’s enemies, and by faithful obedience, Stephen was stoned to death. The key is to be obedient to Jesus. Obedience is the cross we are assigned to, and if we take up that cross, we may be completely confident that God who judges justly will raise us up and vindicate us and make the world a better place.

So my charge to you, Hans, is to love your wife like this, like Christ who loved His bride well and laid is life down for her. This doesn’t mean doing whatever she wants; it means doing whatever she needs to become holy and pure. A few verses down there is another “likewise” for husbands, to imitate Christ, and it specifically instructs you to dwell with your wife in an understanding way. Men like to think that they already understand most things or we can figure them out on our own. But here is one place where God says plainly that you don’t and so you must study your wife carefully. Do no despise her weakness, but rather honor it, and look up to her, honor her as a co-heir of the grace of life. She is your queen, and as you bow to her, God will establish you as her lord and king. 

Faith, my charge to you is to submit yourself to your own husband as to the Lord, and do this with all loveliness. In our text it says that your goal ought to be to win your husband to greater and greater obedience without a word. This doesn’t mean you don’t speak to him about anything, but it does mean that you must first seek the attention of the Lord. When you adorn yourself and your life and your home with grace and peace, and your heart is gentle and quiet before the Lord, even when you might be concerned about something, this is precious in the sight of the Lord. And the One who always judges justly, He will rise up for you, and He will put things right in ways that are far better than if you had simply tried to do it all by yourself. 

Obedience is what changes the world. And Christ is the only perfectly obedient one. But by His obedience, He has opened the way so that by faith, we may follow Him. Obedience is always a kind of death, but we are following the One who knows the way out of the grave. And this is how God changes the world. This is how God is making everything new. 

In the Name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, Amen. 

Photo by David Vilches on Unsplash

You Must Forgive

Jesus taught very plainly that we are to forgive anyone who asks at any time, and we should forgive the way we want God to forgive us. Which means that we should be quick to forgive, easy to appease. If God should mark our iniquities, who could stand? And if God wanted to make a list of all our offenses, even just the ones we’ve forgotten about or failed to ask His forgiveness for, who could stand? No one here. So if God is the kind of God who receives our paltry apologies and often superficial confessions, and washes us completely clean of all our transgressions, how much more must we forgive and overlook and quickly absolve others of anything they have said or done to us? Jesus said that the measure you use to judge others will be measured back to you. How do you want to be measured?

This meal is God’s standing sign to you of the forgiveness of your sins. His forgiveness is declared to you every week at the beginning of the worship service, and the gospel of forgiveness is regularly preached in the sermon. But here, those Words are put into action. God displays His forgiveness by inviting you to dinner. This is what forgiveness means. It means you can eat together. It means you have fellowship. So this meal is God’s pledge and proof of your forgiveness. How do you know you’re forgiven? You’re invited here to eat with God. 

But this meal is also God’s insistence that you forgive as you have been forgiven. If God has forgiven all of your sin and invited you here, how can you hold something against someone else, whom God has also invited here to this table? This is what it means to be in fellowship. It means you can eat the Lord’s Supper together. It means you are in fellowship with the Father, because of the blood of Jesus. Are you harboring any grudges? Are you holding anything against anyone? In the name of Jesus, you must let it go now. You must forgive. 

So come and welcome to Jesus Christ. 

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A Pastoral Word About Homeschooling

Introduction: My Skin in the Game
Today I want to make a few comments, observations, and give some encouragement on the topic of Christian homeschooling. First off, I want to honor the courage, the sacrifice, the love, and the faithfulness of millions of families who for several decades now have said to the statist regime, “not with my kids, you don’t.” My parents were some of those in the early 1980s when it was still considered very strange and rare. I was homeschooled through sixth grade, and most of my siblings were homeschooled all the way through high school. I consider my parents and many others like them heroes of the modern West, trusting and obeying God, frequently with very little resources, but giving God their widow mites and watching Him honor and multiply those sacrifices. We are in the position we are now, though beleaguered on many fronts, still putting up a fight, because there has been a generation that said, “no.” 

Related, while we enrolled our sons in Logos School here in Moscow from preschool, we homeschooled our daughters for several years in elementary school, and helped start a thriving homeschool coop called White Horse Hall that continues to serve our community many years later. I also helped start and taught for a small boys school for five years, which served a cadre of homeschooling families whose boys were going into the middle school and high school years. All of this to say, I’ve been involved in homeschooling since my own childhood, have conducted my own homeschooling in my own home, and I have helped organize and build homeschool-serving structures for the blessing and benefit of homeschool families over many years. While my family has been fully invested in Logos School now for a number of years, my observations and encouragements here should not be taken as the comments of an outsider, but as a pastoral word based on many years of involvement. 

Men in Leadership 
The first thing I want to point out is that the homeschool world is largely led by women. This is somewhat by necessity: moms are the primary teachers and administrators of most homeschools, with some exceptions. While many faithful fathers do give some oversight and direction to the homeschool program in their households, and some even teach some of the courses, many fathers are understandably tied up with their normal vocational work. And thus even in relatively happy and stable and thriving homes, the dominant tone can be set by the sensibilities of women. Of course, children are required by God to honor and obey their mothers, and in Proverbs, wisdom is a mighty woman. But without careful, thoughtful action, this can become lopsided. I do not mind hastening to add that some traditional, brick and mortar Christian schools are also functional hen houses, and many faithful homeschool families are far more balanced than many Christian schools. 

The point here is to simply be aware of this possibility or tendency and to prayerfully consider ways to mitigate it. And sometimes this develops because of the high degree of competency of many Christian women. Many homeschool moms are incredibly smart, well-educated, and organized leaders. But the more competent a woman is, the more competent the men around her need to be, her husband in particular. Let me be clear: good men are not threatened by highly competent women; good men respect them and honor them and deploy them. And at the same time, because God made the world in a certain way, we have to be on the look out for our various blind spots and weaknesses. The Bible clearly teaches that fathers are uniquely responsible for overseeing the Christian education of their children: “Fathers, do not provoke your children to wrath, but bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord” (Eph. 6:4). This means that Christian education is to be ultimately overseen by men/fathers. And yes, this means that single mothers must still do the best they can as the heads of their households, seeking out the resources of their covenant community. 

Boys & Moms
Related to the above, I believe there is a particular challenge for homeschooling boys, especially as they reach adolescence. In general, as boys reach the pert stage of Junior High they will either increasingly buck or challenge the authority of the women over them (which is one kind of problem) or else they won’t (which is another kind of problem). Again, boys must learn to honor and obey their mothers, and if they are in coop class or traditional school, this includes any female teachers. But there is a natural impulse to leadership in boys growing into men, a natural impulse that is often filled with fleshly pride that must be disciplined. But the trick is to discipline the fleshly pride part and not the impulse to lead. On the one hand, traditional schools often castrate the junior high boys through certain forms of institutionalism (which is often only mitigated by good coaches and athletic programs). But middle school boys that receive most of their instruction from their mom are often tempted to feel strangely resentful, and mothers of boys in this stage can become exasperated. There is often a mix of sin and natural impulse all tangled up together. And wise fathers are responsible for untangling it. Sometimes this can be accomplished by hiring a male tutor, banding together with other homeschool families to hire a male teacher for some classes, or enrolling in a more traditional classical Christian school full-time or part-time. 

And where there is no tension at all between boys and mom, you should be even more concerned. Complete comfort spending all day with a woman (even a great woman) is challenging for men. And I can hear the objections coming: but what about a wife, what about sisters or daughters? Please don’t misunderstand. I’m not saying that a man doesn’t like being around his wife or mom or sisters or daughters (we do!), but we were made by God to go out, to work, and to return. And my point is that men are oriented to a mission, a problem, a project, and to leadership, and we are not oriented to relationships. We have and appreciate relationships, and we are required by God to give particular attention to a certain number of familial relationships, but we are generally not oriented to those relationships, like women are. And this is where the tangles and tensions can manifest themselves: boys are beginning to think about (or at least feel drawn to) the mission, the project, the goal of leadership, and moms are often more oriented to the relationship. All by itself, there is nothing wrong with these tendencies, but they can tend to begin colliding into one another and then turn into sin or be misunderstood by the other and cause hurt or confusion. If our land lacks strong, assertive, virtuous men, we must give particular thought to raising our boys.

The Principle of Concentration (and the Wrong Kind of Individuality)
One last observation: one of the great strengths of homeschooling is the general tendency for homeschool families and kids to have a high degree of individuality. And thus, the flipside of this coin is that one of the great weaknesses of homeschool families and kids is to have a high degree of individuality. Sometimes this is framed as a point of pride: “we aren’t like those traditional, brick and mortar schools: we don’t treat our kids like cogs in a machine.” And sometimes the traditional school folks return the arrogance by thinking of all homeschool families as raising feral children who don’t believe in grades and make all their own burlap jumpers. So let us first of all acknowledge that there are some examples we can all point to of each tendency and let us also admit that all such arrogance and pride is sinful, running in both directions, and that pride must be repented of and utterly repudiated. We really do need to emphasize the fact that we are individual households with particular assignments and responsibilities before God, and we have been called into a covenant community in which we need the accountability and camaraderie of one another. 

This has been particularly underlined over the last few years following the COVID panic and ensuing tyranny. Suddenly it became clear that we need communities. We need to build cities of refuge from these storms. We need church communities that will not be intimidated by tinpot dictators. We need business connections, supply chain connections, an alternative economy that can run independent of the DEI and woke technocracy and statism. And here, I’d simply encourage those more inclined to homeschooling to think about all of this together. Without succumbing to a dire-prepper mentality, it does seem that God is calling us to prepare for rougher waters for the next bit. This means we need all hands on deck for building houses on solid rocks that will withstand the storms coming. This means productive households, resilient and anti-fragile businesses and communities, and structures and programs of Christian education that continue to fill up our ranks with reinforcements with the next generation. And the point here is that your family and household are not enough all by themselves. A certain kind of rugged, libertarian individualism is what got us into this mess. Tyrants love scattered individuals — they can herd or eliminate them one by one, but a true conservative resurgence will be built through many responsible households knit tightly together in covenant communities – little platoons, as Edmund Burke called them.

One of the principles of war is concentration. A long, thin line of soldiers is not as potent as a thick concentration of soldiers pushing at one particular place at the same time. Related, is the fact that concentration creates more momentum that helps keep morale high and the mission central. When you’re all on your own (or feel like that) it’s easier to lose heart and forget what you’re doing. Since the task of raising covenant kids is central to our resistance, crafting weapons and reinforcements for the fight (Ps. 127), Christians need to think of the project of Christian education as something that needs to be done in community. We need community because we need encouragement. We are tempted to get tired, discouraged, and lose perspective. We need community because we need accountability. If traditional schools sometimes err in the direction of over-engineering, institutionalism, and bureaucracy, homeschools sometimes err in the direction of laziness, sentimentalism, and the wrong kind of individualism. We need community because it is not good for man to be alone, because two are better than one, because we are a body in Christ, because there is something particularly fruitful and potent about wise divisions of labor.

Conclusion
One of the most remarkable things we have noticed as our children have come up through Logos School is the blessing of concentration. We have been grateful for the men that serve on the board and administration who are mindful of these tendencies and working overtime to compensate for them and establish policies that guard and discipline them. The many opportunities for sports, music, theater, choir have put many faithful men and women in our children’s lives to shape them in ways that we never could. When many families are pulling in the same direction, with teachers, administration, and a board also pulling in the same general direction, the impact is potent. This doesn’t mean you think every last detail or decision is perfect or ideal, but there is something very helpful about working together on this project. All things being equal, faithful homeschooling is like guerilla warfare, training and deploying insurgents against the enemy, by ones and twos, that often inflict strategic damage all along the line, but the more Christian education is done in community (strong coops and classical Christian schools) the more it is like a military force, training brigades of soldiers, full of highly competent individual soldiers who have also been prepared to work together, concentrating forces, building institutions, businesses, and cities. 

One last thought: I fully understand that finances are often an enormous factor in educational options and decision making. And I would just say, on the one hand, there is nothing more important for parents than to provide a godly education for their children and thus, there is no sacrifice that any parent ever makes for a godly education that they will look back on and regret. On the other hand, I know that some classical Christian schools have simply given in to market forces and their tuition is set at levels most middle class families could never dream to afford, and in such situations, Christian families committed to working together must find alternatives or start their own. This is why I’m so grateful that Logos decided many years ago to work to make tuition affordable for ordinary working families and to never turn an otherwise qualified family away for merely financial reasons.

Photo by Belinda Fewings on Unsplash

The Moral Goodness of Wealth

Introduction
Turns out so much of the recent modern west has been pumped full of lies. Turns out it’s good to be a man, it’s good to be a woman, faithful marriage is good, children are good, families are good, hard work is good, and because all of those things are good, wealth is also good. Just because you can misuse something does not mean its right use is immoral or objectionable. Just because disasters sometimes strike, sickness or wars or betrayals happen, doesn’t mean that wealth does not remain essentially good, virtuous, and a healthy goal to strive for. 

The love of money is the root of all kinds of evil, but the love of giving money, the love of serving others with wealth and possessions is virtuous. The love of employing others so that they can provide for their families and give to and invest generously in other worthy causes – that is good and glorious. A wise man leaves an inheritance to his children’s children (Prov. 13:22). It is not a mere unfortunate necessity in a fallen world. It is a glorious calling to serve others by work hard, to serve others by making money, and to serve others by using that wealth for good. The love of that kind of productivity and fruitfulness is the root of all kinds of goodness. 

Wisdom is Wealth
“For the merchandise of it is better than the merchandise of silver, and the gain thereof than fine gold” (Prov. 3:14). “Receive my instruction, and not silver; and knowledge rather than choice gold” (Prov. 8:10). “My fruit isbetter than gold, yea, than fine gold; and my revenue than choice silver” (Prov. 8:19). 

Clearly wisdom and knowledge and instruction are better than mere gold or choice silver. Given the choice, we should pick knowledge, wisdom, and honoring our parents over money and houses and cars every day of the week. But what happens when you get that wisdom, when you receive the instruction of your parents? “Length of days is in her right hand; and in her left hand riches and honor” (Prov. 3:16). “Riches and honor are with me; yea, durable riches and righteousness” (Prov. 8:18). “The crown of the wise is their riches: but the foolishness of fools is folly” (Prov. 14:24). “House and riches are the inheritance of fathers: and a prudent wife is from the LORD” (Prov. 19:14). 

Too often we overly spiritualize Solomon and the Proverbs. We think to ourselves that wisdom is like wealth, knowledge is like gold and silver, but, we think it isn’t really. Except that it really is. As George Gilder has been trying to convince us for decades now: wealth really is knowledge. Wealth is fundamentally surprising and helpful information. Knowing how things work, knowing how certain things can be harnessed to work for us and others, knowing how to get those goods and services to market, that is the essence of wealth. And that project, that mission is central to the Dominion Mandate and good works. Christians have been saved by grace, through faith, for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them (Eph. 2:8-10).

Zealous For Good Works
It is not merely that we should be OK with wealth. No, the Bible teaches that there is a kind of zeal we are required to have for good works, wisdom, and therefore, wealth. “Who gave himself for us, that he might redeem us from all iniquity, and purify unto himself a peculiar people, zealous of good works. These things speak, and exhort, and rebuke with all authority. Let no man despise thee” (Tit. 2:14-15). The gospel of grace, rightly understood, makes a peculiar people, known for their zeal for good works. And Christian ministers are required to insist on this with their people. The Christian church is to be known as a gathering of joyful people who work hard, with excellence because of they have been forgiven. 

But too often we think of “good works” as random boy scout acts of kindness. But the Bible says otherwise: “That being justified by his grace, we should be made heirs according to the hope of eternal life. This is a faithful saying, and these things I will that thou affirm constantly, that they which have believed in God might be careful to maintain good works. These things are good and profitable unto men” (Tit. 3:7-8). And the phrase to underline here is “careful to maintain.” Christians are to be people who are thoughtful about doing good work all the time. What is a blessing and profitable to human society? People given to good work. This is not talking about the occasional Good Samaritan emergency. We most certainly must be ready to drop everything and give and serve generously when there has been an emergency, a natural disaster, etc. But you can’t be “careful to maintain” those good works unless you run a fire department, a hospital, or the national guard or something similar. 

Most people prepare for those unexpected emergencies and needs by being careful to maintain their ordinary good work: computer programing, pouring concrete, teaching, writing, cleaning, and so on. The point is that the good work that Christians must be “careful to maintain” is their vocation, their calling, the work they do most days to serve others and provide for themselves and their families. And let us just underline this point. It is already a good and glorious work to get up, go to work, work hard with excellence and honesty, and go home with your paycheck every two weeks. Let us take a moment and honor that good work. That good work is virtuous, generous, and praiseworthy. God is pleased with it. There need be nothing selfish, nothing greedy, nothing lamentable about it. Good, honest work is good for the world. 

Conclusion
But let us press this point even further: if good, honest work is a moral good, there is therefore nothing inherently greedy or selfish about getting paid for that good work. Getting paid for the good work that you do is how you are “careful to maintain” that good work. You can’t keep going to work if you don’t eat, if you don’t sleep well, if you don’t have a house to live in, and long term, you will not be able to maintain good work in general if most folks don’t marry and have children. Being fruitful and multiplying and filling the earth with good things requires lots of money, lots of resources, lots of wealth. As Pastor Doug Wilson likes to say to young men who are thinking about courtship and marriage: women are expensive. This is good and glorious and virtuous. And all of this requires wisdom.

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In the Defense of the Primacy of the Intellect

Introduction
I want to talk about the primacy of the intellect today – it’s necessity and inevitability, but first I’d like to set that up with an observation I saw recently of the new film Sound of Freedom from Angel Studios. 

I have not seen it yet, but it looks good and given the hate coming hard from the Left, it makes me want to see it even more. And right on schedule several of the more sophisticated Christian artistes have bustled up their intellectual skirts and sallied up to the microphone to share their very deep thoughts on this very, er, troubling phenomenon. As the Babylon Bee headline put it: “Hollywood Confused by New Movie that Depicts Child Sex Trafficking as Bad.” Apparently, some of the evangelical elites are also confused. 

Chick Tracts for Relativism
For example, one Jeffrey Overstreet had a few thoughts about it on Twitter, complaining about the (very real) problem of bad Christian movies, closing with a screenshot, defending his complaints with a quotation from “the great Rowan Williams.”

“And this needs saying as well: art, whether Christian or not, can’t properly begin with a message and then seek for a vehicle. Its roots lie, rather, in the single story or metaphor or configuration or shape which requires attention and development from the artist. In the process of that development, we find meaning we had not suspected; but if we try to begin with the meanings, they will shrink to the scale of what we already understand: whereas the creative activity opens up what we did not understand and perhaps will not fully understand even when the actual work of creation is done. That is why the artist is never the sole or even the best judge of the work, which rightly and properly escapes into the interpretive field of its public… …I wonder, incidentally, if this is not something we ought to be seeing in the process of the composition of the Gospels: not a story repeated, nor a story invented to make a point, as the more mechanically minded critics might argue, but a set of narratives constantly being retold, and altered in the retelling because of what the very process of telling opens up, shows or makes possible.” – Rowan Williams, “Making it Strange: Theology in Other(s’) Words,” Sounding the Depths: Theology Through the Arts.

Now, let us first give honor where honor is due: have you seen that guy’s eyebrows? Speaking of great art, there is definitely some story or metaphor or configuration or shape that requires attention and development there. But to the point, what Williams has written is nonsense. While he begins by saying something that might be reasonable, by the time he applies it to the gospels, we know we’re dealing with a former Anglican Archbishop, which is to say, somebody that shouldn’t be trusted. 

No, sir, the gospels were not told and retold and altered in some kind of mystical Hegelian blender of meaning. In the same way that you can’t mix up dirt in a bowl for a bazillian years and eventually get Rowan Williams. Only intelligence can create, and our work of “sub-creation,” as Tolkien once called it, begins by seeing what is already truly there. Certainly, good art doesn’t manhandle media into a message, like clowns twisting balloons into poodles. That really is schlock, and, let us be clear, there is plenty of so-called Christian schlock to go around. Twisting every bit of God’s world into a chick tract isn’t good art. But by the same token, pretending that art is something that just mystically develops is its own chick tract, pretending that God hasn’t spoken clearly in creation and history and in His Word, and pretending that we cannot understand what is “clearly seen and known” is a chick tract for the false cults of mysticism and relativism. 

Frankly, it is dishonest to pretend that truth is something that develops. Whatever Mr. Georg Hegel’s original intentions, Hegelianism is the Mother of Relativism. And Relativism is the mother of tyranny. Relativism pretends to be all mystical and ambiguous and evolutionary, and then it leans its tolerant rainbow knee on your neck until you submit or die. So let us be done with this muddle-headed anti-intellectualism. It’s not really anti-intellectualism, since it is patently dishonest, like the stores that sell pre-ripped jeans for a hundred dollars, where you can buy “authenticity” in a mass produced t-shirt that says, “I’m a unique sucker” or something like that. 

As many have pointed out, the claim that “there are no absolutes” is an absolute claim. Which means the people claiming that are either stupid or lying. But this is what the former Archbishop with the glorious eyebrows is doing with art and the gospels, pretending that a true artist has no idea, no preconceived notions, no message at all until he falls into some project like those poor people who do those polar bear plunges midwinter – which, come to think of it, is mindless. But human beings are made in God’s image, and they are made with intelligence, rationality, and even when they claim that they are not thinking, they have just ordered that sequence of words in an effort to express, we assume, an intelligible truth claim. 

A Clear Statement
I’m not sure this exactly a retraction, but it might be close. I don’t recall ever thinking or arguing strongly against this point. But I think there has been a certain ambiguity or fuzziness in my own thinking on this matter for a long while that deserves a clear statement and ratification. And that is simply the truth that God created human beings with a hierarchy of faculties, placing the intellect at the helm. I believe in the primacy of the intellect. And having written those words, it almost seems silly to need to assert something so fundamental, so plain, so self-evident. Here I am formulating ideas with my mind, seeking to coherently and rationally explain and articulate it in words and language that I trust will be intelligible to others who will read and comprehend and consider the validity of the claim. If God did not create us with the gift of intelligence at the helm of our existence, I suppose I wouldn’t be writing about it or even thinking about. So there it is: I believe in the primacy of the intellect, and it is incumbent upon Christians to believe this. 

The best version of the objection to this statement would seem to be objections to various forms of rationalism or positivism, granting the human intellect, reason, and logic the highest authority period, rejecting all other ways of knowing as well as other legitimate authorities. But a distinctly Christian defense of the primacy of the intellect actually begins with the primacy of the Triune God over all, the primacy of His Word, the primacy of His creation, and there in the midst of that supreme authority of His general and special revelation, we find the fact that He has authoritatively created human beings with the capacity of rational thought, communication, and language. Of course, we do not mind (pun intended) hastening to add that God created us with bodies and senses and a created order that corresponds to those great and majestic gifts: sunsets to see, fields to smell, fruit to taste, the chit-chattering of birds to hear, and the feel of soft grass under out feet. Yes, and amen. 

Nothing about a Christian defense of the primacy of the intellect need disparage these other gifts. Neither is such a defense an argument that the intellect is better at everything. Not hardly. Hands and eyes and tongues are better at many things than the mind. And yet it is absurd to argue that various body parts or other faculties are thereby superior or equal to the mind. Likewise, we must not reduce the image of God to mere intellectual capacity, as though the unborn or the senile or the mentally retarded lack human dignity. But just as we insist that the husband is the head of his wife, without denigrating her value or gifts, or just as we insist that the husband is the head of the household, even while sometimes a husband is absent by sin or death, so too it is perfectly right and true to insist that the human mind is the head of the body, while taking various exceptions into account. 

Conclusion
Perhaps the central point to underline here is that the denial of the primacy of the intellect doesn’t actually result in the dethroning of the intellect, rather, it just turns the work of the intellect into something devious, something highly hypocritical. What exactly is arguing for this non-primacy of the intellect? Is it not someone’s intellect? Words, meaning, ideas, arguments are not the most important thing, he said, breathing heavily into the microphone, with words, attempting to express meaning and ideas in the form of a persuasive argument. If you really believed that you’d stop writing, talking, or generally appealing to ideas, thoughts, or arguments.

J. Gresham Machen wrote in 1925 that the “retrograde anti-intellectual movement called Modernism… degrades the intellect by excluding it from the sphere of religion.” What Modernism has tricked so many Christians into believing is that the intellect is only trustworthy when it comes to the sciences, to hard numbers and facts, but when it comes to truth, philosophy, religion, and ethics, these are matters that are much too difficult for the human mind. In a sort of false humility, and a devious sleight of hand, our handlers have made moral, philosophical, and even religious claims about what our minds may or may not do well. And many Christians have dutifully accepted these claims and surrendered. Like an enemy combatant explaining that our machine gun doesn’t work on this battlefield, many Christians naively believed it and threw their weapons down.

Machen lays the blame at the feet of Emmanuel Kant, who claimed that the world was divided into noumenal and phenomenal realms, with the intellect well-suited for phenomenal things but unable to analyze and decipher the noumenal-spiritual-ethical realm with any clarity, resulting in what Machen called a field of theology and biblical studies riddled with an “indolent impressionism.” From our insipid worship songs to our pep rally sermons and Sunday school lessons and our Christian movie tripe, we are awash in indolent impressionism, and very few believe in the power of truth. And no wonder we are so susceptible to lies. 

As my friend Douglas Wilson recently put it to me, when the human mind bows in the temple of the Lord, it is raised to its rightful place. Rationalists insist that the human mind need not bow before the Lord, and those foolish minds are darkened. But the abuse of a faculty does not render its rightful use futile or idolatrous. May God grant a great intellectual revival to His people. May they seek the truth, loving the Lord with all our mind, and may the truth set us free. 

Don’t Let the Devil In

Sinful anger often pretends to be righteous. Someone snubs you, criticizes you, lies about you, or harms you or someone you love, and the blood rushes to your head. And it feels justified. It feels righteous. But James 1:20 says, the wrath of man does not accomplish the righteousness of God. In Romans 12:19 it says that we must not get vengeance for ourselves but instead leave room for God to do justice: as it is written: vengeance is mine; I will repay, says the Lord. So sinful anger and wrath attempts to take the place of God: it attempts to deal out justice to those we think are wrong. But when you’re angry, you’re not thinking clearly, and you don’t really do justice. You just make everything worse. In the same place in Romans 12 it says do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good. When your wife or husband says something unkind, it isn’t justice to return their harsh comment with your own biting comment. That is being overcome by evil, and it doesn’t work the righteousness of God. 

Ephesians 4:26 says be angry and do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your wrath, neither give place to the devil. This means it is possible to be angry and not to sin, but it is very difficult. So God forbids taking any anger with you to bed; do not let the sun go down on it, or else the Devil will come into your house. If you go to bed angry at your husband, your wife, your parents, your kids, your roommate, your boss, your co-worker, your ex, you’re leaving your front door wide open for the Devil to come in. Many marriages and families have so much trouble because they leave the front door open for the Devil to come in every night. The way to lock the front door and keep the devil out is by getting rid of your wrath, by giving it to God and trusting Him to get justice for you, and then confessing your sinful anger to anyone you have sinned against and asking them to forgive you by the end of every day, at the very latest. 

Photo by Beth Macdonald on Unsplash

A Brief Calvinist FAQ

What is “Calvinism”?

Calvinism is a shorthand name for the Biblical teaching that God is Lord and sovereign over every detail in all of human existence, named after a theologian who taught this, John Calvin.

Does Calvinism teach that God has already chosen who will be saved and who will be damned?

Yes, the Bible teaches that God has foreordained whatsoever comes to pass, from the hairs on our head, to the sparrows in the sky, and the loving election of a vast multitude to be conformed to the image of Jesus Christ forever. This is sometimes called Unconditional Election: apart from anything we have done, God freely chose His own. 

Doesn’t Calvinism teach that people are puppets and have no free-will or personal responsibility?

No, Calvinism teaches what the Bible teaches, which is that God is sovereign and men are free creatures who are responsible for their own choices. “The preparations of the heart in man, and the answer of the tongue, is from the LORD” (Prov. 16:1).

How can God be sovereign and predestine all things and people be free and responsible at the same time?

First, we are Christians which means we must submit to God’s Word even when we can’t do the math. Certainly, there is mystery here, as with other biblical doctrines like the Trinity. 

Second, if you already believe that God created everything from nothing and that God knew everything that would happen if He did, then you already believe that God chose every detail that would ever happen, when He said, ‘Let there be light.’ Creationists who believe in God’s omniscience are Calvinists.

Third, we should not think of God as a very large version of us, as though His will bumps into our wills and choices. He is completely Other, transcendent, on a completely different plain or dimension. His sovereignty is more like the authority of an author, an artist, a composer, and our freedom and responsibility are established by Him. 

But didn’t Martin Luther write a book called “Bondage of the Will?”

Yes, he did, and he is certainly correct that our will and desires are morally bound or enslaved to our nature. The Bible teaches that men are naturally dead in their sins and need to be made alive. This is what is sometimes called Total Depravity or Complete Inability. We cannot even lift a finger to save ourselves. 

Why does the Bible command men to repent? If they can’t really repent, why does God command them to?

The gospel offer of forgiveness and the command to repent in Christ crucified, buried, and raised, is the means by which God makes men alive. The command to repent is the same as the message Ezekiel preached to the dry bones; it is what God has determined to use. When God said ‘Let there be light,’ there was no ability for the darkness to turn itself into light, or when Jesus called Lazarus from the tomb, he had no ability to obey, but the command is the means God used. This principle is sometimes called Irresistible or Efficacious Grace. 

But why does God judge other men for not repenting if they have not been foreordained for salvation?

The Bible gives two answers to this question: the first answer is because those men love their sin and do not want to repent and so God leaves some of them in their sin, and the second answer is for His own glory – He is God and we are not. 

Where does the Bible teach this?

In Romans 9 it says, “Wherefore hath he mercy on whom he will have mercy, and whom he will he hardeneth. Thou wilt say then unto me, Why doth he yet find fault? For who hath resisted his will? Nay but, O man, who art thou that repliest against God? Shall the thing formed say to him that formed it, Why hast thou made me thus?” (Rom. 9:18-20).

But does this mean that God is the author of evil?

The Bible teaches that God cannot do evil Himself because He is entirely holy and good, and in that sense He is not the author of evil, but He did create a world in which evil was allowed to come into existence, and He is exhaustively sovereign over every detail of that.

Where do we see God’s sovereignty over evil?

In Genesis, what Joseph’s brothers meant for evil, God meant for good. In Job, God permitted Satan to attack him, and in the prophets, we read that if darkness, wars, famines, or calamities strike, God has done it. But the central sign is the fact that the Jewish and Roman leaders committed the greatest evil in human history by crucifying the Lord of Glory, and the Bible says they only did what God had foreordained would happen (Acts 4:27-28).

Doesn’t the Bible teach that Christ died to save the whole world?

Yes, but not everyone believes. So you are left with concluding that Christ tried to save the whole world but failed, or else his death was sufficient to save the world but according to God’s plan accomplished the salvation of an enormous multitude, the vast majority of the world. This doctrine is sometimes called Limited or Definite Atonement. All those for whom Christ died will surely be saved because they were purchased by the blood of the Lamb.

Does Calvinism teach “once saved, always saved” or that it is impossible to lose your salvation?

The Bible teaches that some people can come into close covenantal contact with Christ and yet still not be truly born again. They are so close to Christ that when they fall away it can be said that they are being cut off from Christ, that they are trampling the blood of the covenant, and they are shipwrecking their faith. But the Bible also teaches that all who truly come into a saving relationship with Christ can never fully fall away. This is not because we cannot lose our salvation but because Christ cannot lose any of His own. It says in Philippians that He who began a good work in us will complete it. This doctrine is often called the Perseverance or Preservation of the Saints. 

Does Calvinism make people arrogant and judgmental, since they think that some people are not chosen by God for salvation?

While some men may certainly be sinfully arrogant and judgmental, the Bible teaches that since election to salvation is entirely of God’s grace, through faith, and faith is the gift of God, no man can boast about any part of his salvation. All men deserve judgment, wrath, and Hell, but God has determined to save a vast company that no man can number. These doctrines, understood rightly, ought to make men fall down in profound relief, humility, and grateful praise. 

Photo by Manuel Nägeli on Unsplash

Ben & Ellie

George Gilder has said that one of the greatest modern superstitions is materialism. Materialism believes that matter is all that exists. Atoms, molecules, chemicals, and bodies are all that there is, and so everything is explained by collisions and displacement, like billiard balls on a pool table. 

But Madonna was wrong, we do not live in a merely material world. We live in God’s world. We live in a world first of all with a Creator who is entirely other, transcendent, and outside of our space-time continuum. God is spirit, not material in His essence, and He created this universe freely and for His own glory. So there is already another kind of existence, the existence of the Creator God. But His transcendent spiritual reality has been infused in this world, particularly at its pinnacle in the creation of man in God’s own image, having a spirit and soul united to a material body. But we also know that God created spiritual beings, angels, and we know that some of those good spiritual beings have defected from their maker, becoming evil spirits and demons. The Bible also describes some animals as having spirits, and some angelic beings are described like great animals or monsters. Beyond that, the world is full of various mysteries that cannot be fully explained by mere material forces. From the burning bush to talking donkeys, from men carried into heaven in fiery chariots to the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, we live in a world that is material and spiritual. And this has profound implications for marriage. 

When a man and a woman come together, it is not merely two bodies that are coming together, but two souls, two spirits, and with them, two families, a complex web of material and spiritual realities, to form a new thing, one flesh, one new family and household. This is why the Bible teaches that sexual sin is so harmful and why divorce is so violent. But materialism insists that we are just bodies, and so why can’t two bodies interact in one way at one time and then do something different with other bodies at other times? The answer is that we are not mere bodies; we are not mere material. 

Closely related to all of this is the fact that our bodies are not infinitely malleable. Part of the materialistic lie is that if you are merely material, then you can modify your body however you like and become whatever you desire. But the bodies that God has created us with reflect who we truly are. Our spirits, our souls, are in mysterious ways related to our bodies. We are not gender neutral spirits that get put into gendered bodies and therefore, perhaps sometimes get put into the wrong gendered body. We are spirits that are manifested by our bodies. We are male and female in God’s image inside and out, spirit and body.

The biblical name for this spiritual-material difference is glory. God has assigned different glories to men and women, male and female. The Bible teaches that the glory of men is their strength and courage, and the glory of women is their beauty and domesticity. Men build and fight; women adorn and make homes. Men are oriented to the world; women are oriented to their families. And when one man and one woman take vows before God and witnesses and become one flesh, those glories, those respective strengths come together and shine and combine and multiply with potency. 

And the Bible says that when this happens it reflects the mystery of Christ and the church, which if you think about it for a moment is really mind-boggling. How in the world could the marriage of two humans reflect that cosmic glory? Christ, who is the God-man, the Eternal Word made flesh and the Christian Church – how is it not sacrilegious to compare our human marriages to that mystical union? Well, part of the answer is that our human marriage is far more glorious than we thought. Something far more cosmic and momentous is going on. 

Ben, my charge to you is to love your wife like Christ loved the church, giving yourself up for her. While you cannot take away Ellie’s sins by your sacrifices, you are nevertheless called to love her in imitation of that kind of love. This means that the foundational way you lead your wife is through staying in fellowship with God and one another. Christian fellowship in a fallen world is only possible through confession of sin and forgiveness. In our world’s materialistic superstition, they are constantly trying new treatments for sin: money, medicine, sexual technique, personality tests, you name it. But Christ was crucified for our sins. We have fellowship with God and one another because the blood of Jesus Christ cleanses us, and His blood cleanses us when we confess our sins to God and one another. Ben, you are undertaking responsibility for Ellie in all respects today, but make this the center of your love. Stay in fellowship.

Ellie, my charge to you is to submit to your husband the way the church submits to Christ in everything. It really does say everything, and this really is the way you exert the most potent influence on your husband. Peter tells wives who have husbands who don’t obey the Word to seek to win them over without a word, by their beauty, a gentle and quiet spirit, radiating from the inside out. This isn’t a manipulative powerplay on the one hand, nor is it apathetic acquiescence on the other. It is true feminine glory. And when a woman shines with gentleness and joy, it cannot help but shine on her man. Our materialistic world says that you can’t get anything done that way, but the Christian Church looks back over two thousand years and says, wanna make a bet? We do not denigrate the material. It is good, and it will all be made new. But there is more than just material, and a woman who fears the Lord is a potent force of grace.

In the Name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen. 

Photo by Yohann LIBOT on Unsplash

The Gilder Argy-Bargy

Introduction
And now we come to the great George Gilder argy-bargy. And I have to admit, I did not see this one coming. I was prepared for the Christian Nationalism skull session that is proceeding apace. In past years, I have budgeted mental space for other controversies calling us racists, pedophiles, misogynists, and various barnyard animals, but what I didn’t have on my 2023 bingo card was the charge that the ministries of Moscow are going… liberal? And why? Because Canon Press is republishing the work of one of the great 20th century full-throated attacks on feminism, Men and Marriage by George Gilder. Just wait till everyone finds out that there’s a biographical documentary coming out as well from Canon, celebrating the life and work of… you guessed it, George Gilder. 

As part of the roll-out of Men and Marriage, several quotations from early in the book have been highlighted in promotional ads and some concerned folks started sharing screenshots with highlights, to which I replied in one tweet “no lies detected.” But as the commotion heated up, Mr. Gilder and our ministries began getting tagged with such indecorous terms as “boomer” and accusing us of giving into the “longhouse” – a term coined to describe a sort of systemic leftism, and in particular, a militant feminism that has mocked, belittled, and often attempted to stamp out masculinity in modern culture. While I have mixed feelings about the pejorative use of boomer, I think I agree entirely with the problems of the longhouse. But from there, the taunts and mockery proceeded apace. Thus, in response to the heckling, I simply tweeted that I thought the “shrieks” and “freak-out” over the Gilder quotes and book was hilarious. And well, it is. 

Some people thought my characterization of “shrieks” and “freak-out” was over the top or hyperbolic, but I don’t think so. One fellow on the internets said this is early “Russ Moore, etc,” saying he’s been warning about FLF/Canon, etc. for at least a year. Others have likened the publishing of this Gilder book to the LCMS “pedochism” scandal (their recent catechism and commentary introducing many woke/LGBT talking points), with the concern that we have begun the “groomer pattern.” And another commentator was trying to argue that I wasn’t qualified to be a pastor if I couldn’t see all the problems in Gilder, which included (apparently) Trinitarian heresy. So yeah, I’m pretty sure “shrieks” and “freak out” was not too strong.

Of course there were plenty of normal, ordinary people who simply had questions. And let me be clear: having questions or even initially wondering what Gilder could possibly mean by women being “sexually superior” to men is not a “freak out” or “shrieking.” But those with reasonable questions refrained from saying things like “this is gayer than AIDS,” which incidentally showed up somewhere in my replies. Asking questions, wanting to understand, or even thinking you disagree with the sentiment and hauling out arguments to defend said disagreement is not freaking out or shrieking either. I’m not sure if people have heard yet, but we are totally down with cheerful arguments, even sharp, incisive blows to the rhetorical jugular. We do that sort of thing around here. Punching welcome, just try to keep it above the belt, as they say. But to throw a rhetorical, intellectual punch, you have to, well, do more than shoot off rockets of panic, call names, or tell everyone that this is boomer longhouse heresy. 

Sexually Superior?
So what exactly does Gilder mean by claiming that women are sexually superior to men, and how exactly is that “the prime fact of life?” Well, naturally, I would go to Genesis 2. When God created the first woman and brought her to the first man, he said, “this is now bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh,” which is not only the first poem in recorded human history (and a love poem at that), it is also a Hebrew superlative. If you can reach back into your grammar past, you might remember that “better” and “best” are comparative and superlative forms of “good,” respectively. We also use the “-er” suffix and “-est” suffix, as in prettier or prettiest to make comparative or superlative forms in English. The most well-known superlative in the Hebrew Bible is Holy of Holies or as it is sometimes also rightly translated, “Most Holy Place.” The Song of Songs is also a Hebrew superlative, meaning “the best song” or “the most beautiful song.” When Adam sees his wife coming to him, he exclaims that this creature is like him, only better, or we could easily translate it, superior. Adam is saying that this new creature is Man 2.0, the upgraded version. 

Adam further signifies that pronouncement by naming her “woman,” which is closely related to the word for “fire.” Whether Adam already knew the word for fire or whether he later named fire after his wife, men have been calling their wives “hot” and singing songs about their baby lighting their fire ever since. In fact, in the very same place, though our English translations do not reflect this, Adam gives himself a new name. Up until this point in Genesis 1-2, the Hebrew word for man is “adam” in every single instance, and it is translated either “man” or the proper name “Adam,” because he was taken out of the “adamah” (ground). But here in the naming of his wife, he says, “she shall be called woman [“eeshah”] because she was taken out of [“eesh”]. He is saying that his wife’s name is “glory-fire” because she was taken out of him, but her glory is so bright, so dazzling, it has lit him up. She has caused his face to shine. Or as one of your modern prophets has put it, “baby, you light up my world like nobody else.” And Paul picks up on all of this in 1 Cor. 11, insisting that the woman is the glory of man. 

Now, some folks simply objected to the notion of “superiority,” but I don’t know how else to read this text and the notion of “glory.” The Bible teaches that women are superior to men in at least some respects, and it teaches that men are superior to women in some respects. In 1 Cor. 11, it says that the man was not created for the woman, but rather, the woman was created for the man. And it also says that the man comes from the woman, speaking especially of Jesus born of a woman, but also of all other men after Adam who are born of their mother. And so Paul insists on different glories, different superiorities, and yet a glorious mutual dependence and equality, ordered in various hierarchies in marriage, family, church, tribe, etc. 

So then, in what ways are women superior to men? George Gilder has the gall to claim that woman are sexually superior. And what he has in mind here begins with her physical beauty, which gives her the initial upper hand sexually, since she is the one generally being pursued by men, who generally have far stronger sex drives, especially young men. The physical beauty of the woman the Bible also calls her glory, signified by her longer hair (1 Cor. 11). But she is also sexually superior in her power of childbearing, beginning with sexual union and conception but extending out through pregnancy and motherhood. One wise man has said that a woman’s sexual cycle begins with foreplay and climaxes when her children graduate college. This too is a woman’s glory: she will be saved in childbearing if she continues in faith and charity and holiness with sobriety (1 Tim. 2:15). Of course, apparently, to briefly allude to another controversy I saw skimming across my feeds over the last few days, we are not allowed to talk about anyone “saving” anyone except Jesus Christ. Men must not “save” women in any way, even though Ephesians 5 explicitly says that men are supposed to imitate Christ in His saving of His bride. And heavens forsooth, there be any sense in which a woman might “save” a man. I mean, that’s practically, “goddess worship.” Jeepers. 

Generalizations & Wisdom
Wait, what? Well, our friend, Aaron Renn, who has done some profoundly good work in recent years on the problems in effeminate evangelicalism and ministering particularly to men, shared another quote from Men and Marriage on the same topic of women’s superiority, specifically, “Her faculty of greater natural restraint and selectivity makes the woman the sexual judge and executive, finally appraising the offerings of men, favoring one and rejecting another, and telling them what they must do to be saved or chosen.”

And Renn noted that this is a “whopper from George Gilder. She’s the source of salvation, she’s the one that makes you truly “chosen.” She selects which “offerings” are acceptable to her. This is goddess worship.” Now I’m happy to grant someone might take these statements and run in the opposite direction that Gilder meant them. But on the surface, a charitable reading offers several profoundly true points. Women are naturally more restrained sexually. This is a biological, sociological fact. The occasional “cougar” acknowledged, it is men who generally seek a woman, and it is the woman who either agrees to a man’s offer or declines. In that sense, she is the sexual judge and executive, favoring one and rejecting another. There is no hint here that Gilder means “saved or chosen” in some kind of crass literal way. But it’s an entirely legitimate expression given the way God made the world. It is not good for men to be alone, and if ordinarily it comes as a great gift to a man to find a woman who agrees to his proposal, then he does rejoice as one who has been chosen, who has been in that sense, “saved” from his solitude. Gilder does not mean that women save men salvifically, any more than a man can save his wife salvifically in his love for her, any more than childbearing literally “saves” a woman, any more than either party should rest their inherent value or dignity in any sort of desperation for a spouse. 

This need not leave a man cowering before a woman either. A good woman has no attraction for such a man. The kind of man who is likely to win a good woman is a man who is strong, assertive, courageous, hard-working, productive, good humored, and virtuous. While a woman may be rightly said to be sexually superior in these aforementioned ways, a good man is superior in his physical strength, courage, and ability to focus on particular goals. As with all generalizations, there are exceptions, and as with truth, there are often other truths that must not be forgotten. But finite creatures cannot state all of the truths all of the time. Gilder is describing some profoundly true generalizations, but there are other true things that should be kept in mind.  

Conclusion: Sin & Responsibility
Gilder’s opening chapter begins: “The crucial process of civilization is the subordination of male sexual impulses and biology to the long-term horizons of female sexuality.” And he continues, “Men lust, but they know not what for; they wander, and lose track of the goal; they fight and compete, but they forget the prize; they spread seed, but spurn the seasons of growth; they chase power and glory, but miss the meaning of life. In creating civilization, women transform male lust into love; channel male wanderlust unto jobs, homes, and families; link men to specific children; rear children into citizens; change hunters into fathers; divert male will to power into a drive to create. Women conceive the future men tend to flee; they feed that children that men ignore.”

What Gilder is summarizing here is manifest. These are the natural inclinations of men and women. While I think some of these inclinations reflect our natural goodness before the fall (women would have still been home-oriented, child-oriented and this would have still been a great help to a man to know what his strength was for), the Fall has twisted these tendencies, leaving men far more aimless, insecure, and rootless. Again, it is not good for man to be alone. Just reference contemporary crime and violence rates. And while women certainly can turn on their own natures, killing their own children and becoming predators, even in highly broken cultures, women still tend to bear and raise children and men tend to wander, abandon, turn violent, and flee. Despite the growing epidemic of women using pornography, this is the downstream effects of the shorter-term masculine sexuality twisted and metastasized. This is why I have often described porn as inherently gay. It is driven by the sexual impulses of men: men paying, cajoling, threatening women to act like men sexually. And this doesn’t absolve the women of all their greed, lust, immodesty, and bitterness in the same industry or elsewhere. 

Civilization is built on the longer-term sexuality of women, and it is likewise built on the gracious dominance of men in most other areas. While the Bible clearly teaches the headship of men in marriage, and the submission of a wife to her husband in everything, the one place where the Bible explicitly gives a wife authority over her husband is over his body in the marriage bed (1 Cor. 7:4). In the same place, it says that the man has authority over his wife’s body, and this point really is crucial to understanding Gilder’s overall point. 

Christian authority doesn’t displace responsibility, it establishes responsibility and therefore other forms of authority. We learn this fundamentally in the doctrines of grace where the Bible insists that God is sovereign over every last detail of history, and it is this authority that establishes the responsibility of human choices and secondary causes. The authority of a Christian husband establishes and reinforces the authority and responsibilities of his wife. The authority of pastors and elders does not displace the responsibility of congregants; exercised rightly, pastoral authority builds up the duties of the congregants, lifting them to greater authority in their various spheres. 

Darwinism and every form of materialism assumes a world in which every form of power or authority displaces every other form, like billiard balls on a pool table, knocking into one another. If you read the rest of Gilder’s corpus, you will find that this is a central and dominant theme in all of his work. Gilder calls materialism the central superstition of the modern world. But Madonna was wrong, we don’t live in a merely material world. Now it’s true that you cannot have two people attempting to share the exact same responsibilities; that creates a two-head monster. Hierarchy is good, and knowing who answers to who helps everyone. But this does not mean that authority cannot overlap. It can and it does. A civil magistrate must submit to faithful pastoral authority in ecclesial matters, and a minister must submit to faithful civil authority in civil matters. Describing the superiority and necessity of a woman in some regards, need not displace a man’s superiority and necessity in many other ways. And by the same token, this does not displace true individual guilt. Assigning superiority to a woman’s general sexual instincts does not absolve her of all the ways she tends to sin sexually. Nor does it blame men for all sexual sin.