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March 28 - April 2, 2018
unfortunate truth that it tends to be our imaginations which are captured by some other era, not our intellects, but while we’re in the midst of it we confuse the two.
there is a widespread yearning among conservative Christians for a cultural expression of femininity. This is a common enough feature of conservative circles that we can at least say that much.
Yes, the BBC Pride and Prejudice series just seems so wholesome and proper and upstanding that it may be hard to believe, but if you just take a moment to research the life of Lord Byron, a flagrantly immoral, bisexual, incestuous, and nonetheless greatly admired celebrity during Jane Austen’s life, or the goings-ons of the Prince Regent and his compadres during the time that she was writing her books, you would very soon discover that the Kardashians have nothing on these people. An attempt to recreate that society, especially based on the cockeyed notion that it was a godly society, would be
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Paul expects the Christians to live in such a way that there is a marked difference between their lifestyle and that of the surrounding unbelievers, but he certainly assumes that they would be in living distinctively in the midst of surrounding ungodliness. He doesn’t want us to run away from the world; he actually expects us to charge at the world. To change the world.
By himself, Adam was incapable of doing his job, incapable of either filling the earth or subduing it. So God created a helper suitable for the job. Woman was not an afterthought, or just someone for Adam to talk to, or someone who would make him sandwiches while he did all the filling and subduing of the earth. She was essential to the entire program. When God gave Eve to Adam, He was handing Adam an amplifier. Adam alone is just Adam. Adam with Eve . . . becomes the human race.
Christ doesn’t tell us that it’s bad to be at the front—after all, He’s giving us instructions on how to get there. The front of the line is where we’re supposed to be aiming—but the road to get there is a surprising one.
We don’t live in a culture where the men won’t let us speak and where we aren’t allowed any freedom. Quite the contrary. If we feel like doing something, we actually live in a time and a place where we can go ahead and do it. Other Christian women in other centuries have struggled to fulfill their roles because they were being legitimately oppressed by tyrannical and unbiblical cultural norms—but we aren’t struggling with that. If we fall for secular lies, that’s on us.
Why do we automatically assume that the woman at home with toddlers couldn’t possibly have valid, insightful, or profound opinions, or that, if she does by some miracle have them, she’s shamelessly wasting them by staying at home?
But a woman raising her children is not only shaping the next generation, she is also shaping little humans who are going to live forever. The souls she gave birth to are immortal. Immortal. And somehow, our culture looks at a woman who treats that as if it might be an important task and says, “It’s a shame she’s wasting herself. She could be doing something important—like filing paperwork for insurance claims.”
So are women statistically more employed now than they were in Friedan’s day? Documentably and resoundingly, yes. Are women less tied to their biological role? Documentably and resoundingly, yes. Has it brought us the happiness we were promised? Documentably and resoundingly, no.
If we, today, somehow managed to successfully recreate the 50s, we would also have unavoidably recreated the preconditions for the 60s. Those two decades are a package deal.
Getting bored and fussy about God’s blessings is not a small deal, and sometimes when we demand more from God, He gives it to us and we choke on it.
The women of the 50s genuinely needed to be liberated, that much is indisputable. The feminists believed that what women needed liberation from was their domesticity and motherhood, but after much diligent work in that direction, it appears to be a dead end. Women are still unhappy, and Friedan’s proposed solution has turned out to be a dud. Women need liberating now more than ever.
Trajectory matters, and the trajectory of the feminist movement has been opposed to Christianity since day one. We need to get over the fact that sometimes we happen to agree with feminists on this or that issue. Just because we occasionally agree with the what does not mean we were ever agreed on the how or the why.
The feminist cause has been advanced for the last two centuries in large part through the diligent efforts of sincere but muddle-headed Christians who never bothered to ask how and why, and jumped on board anyway—and now they’re confused by all the consequences they never saw coming. They’ve been diligently playing basketball and never noticed that they were shooting on the wrong hoop—they still can’t figure out why the scoreboard doesn’t look better.
Design matters. The intent of the designer matters. And we women, as God’s creatures, are designed by him to fulfill a particular role. How many women are out there living frustrated, impossible lives because they’re trying to be a can opener when God actually made them a knife?
live in a world God designed, on purpose, and He had certain things in mind as He did so. We aren’t all exactly alike, no. And we can grow, mature, and change, sure. But we can’t grow past the fixed limits that He has built into our natures.
So the first thing we should note about the creation of Eve is that she was created specifically to assist Adam in his work, because he was insufficient for the task of conquering a world alone.
The 50s idealized notion of a woman who only exists to look pretty and make the house look pretty is just as much a revolt against the creation order as the radical feminist agenda is—it’s just a revolt against a different part. The Victorian ideal of a tender, swooning, delicate woman who is incapable of getting her lily white hands dirty is a rebellious ideal, forgetting what it was Eve was created for.
We live in a society which despises fruitfulness, tolerating it only when it is a sort of self-conscious decision—a baby added on as a little garnish on top of a successful career like the small flourish of kale on the side of your dinner plate. Not really necessary, just decorative, and definitely not the point of the meal.
The real trouble comes in when we read “helper” and mentally say, “inferior.” Once you’ve done that you’re on the wrong path completely.
Making the observation that one thing is fundamentally different from another is most emphatically not the same thing as insinuating that one is better than the other. For all of our culture’s blathering on about “diversity,” we actually aren’t very good at dealing with it.
Christ did not consider it robbery to humble himself and submit to an equal, and neither should we, because when we picture that submission we are picturing the most potent form of glory that there is. We are enacting the story that is at the very heart of all history, the most glorious story ever told.
When a woman submits, when she lays herself down, when she, like Christ, offers herself up to the death of humility, in submission to someone who is an equal, that is the field in which glory grows. In the words of Shelley, (although he meant it to be entirely godless), “If winter comes, can spring be far behind?” In Scripture, submission and glory always go together—and in that sequence.
Maybe we need to expand our vision of what it means to keep the home. Rather than seeing Titus 2 as evidence of Paul’s low view of women, perhaps we should see it as evidence of Paul’s high view of the importance of the home.
The goal of feminism has been to make women feel a deep loyalty, a militant, ultrapatriotism to their “tribe”—and that tribe is womankind.
Of course we should have a deep loyalty to our people—but our people are the husbands we promised to love until the grave takes us, and the little faces staring up at us, depending on us, loving us, needing us—not a nameless blob of humans who lack a Y chromosome and to whom we have never even been introduced.
When God says, “Here. I want you to work here,” and hands us a house and a family, it’s a shocking and embarrassing misunderstanding to think that He’s just essentially tethered us with a very short leash to the brown microfiber sofa. When we conjure up the very uninspiring vision of beige, orange-peel-textured walls, Rubbermaid bins, Cheetos, and Crock-Pots, and think that’s what we’re doomed to, that’s our own fault.
But instead of being content with the bare minimum, what if we were to try to pursue excellence? What if, instead of looking for every possible way to cut corners, we were to look for every possible way to get better at our tasks?
If God is good, and if He wants us to subdue this planet, and if He wants us to obey the Great Commission and conquer this world for Christ, and if He tells half the human race that they’re in charge of tending the home, it follows from this that the home is actually one of the most strategic and important tools by which the world will be won.
Populating the earth with a lot of little heathens is not the picture of obedient fruitfulness, and it would be a mistake to think that women were brought into the picture with the goal of simply producing a lot of generic humans. Having fifteen rebellious children is not a spiritual win. God desires a godly offspring, and that doesn’t happen by accident, and it doesn’t happen automatically.
Being a woman is in many ways like being in the field of applied mathematics—except that it’s applied theology, applied philosophy. We are the ones who take the metaphysical principles, the heady and complicated truths of our faith, and instead of saying it to the men in a sermon we show it to them. Our job is to make holiness beautiful, to make it taste. We draw people to the truth by showing them the beauty of life in Christ, and in real, actual, tangible ways. If theology is a river, women dig the canals that bring the water into every part of the garden. Righteous women preach the truth,
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Women are prohibited from preaching theology, but it’s never assumed that they shouldn’t know theology. And we don’t learn important truths so that we can keep the knowledge to ourselves, locked away in our brains for our own personal edification, but rather so that we can take that truth and then translate it into everything we do.
A woman who has gotten ahold of an incorrect belief is still dangerously persuasive; she still wields enormous influence, even if the man knows perfectly well better. It is absolutely vital that women be well versed in the faith, because if the women are not, I’m afraid the men are in trouble as well—even if all their theological ducks are, for the moment, in a row. So it is utterly vital that women be superbly educated—an ignorant woman may just be one of the most lethal dangers on the planet.
a more mainstream version of that is to suggest that a daughter needs to be given an education in case she never gets married or she loses her husband or something—“She needs to have something to fall back on if she needs to support herself.” I truly don’t think that even the most ardent feminist could be more insulting to homemaking than that.
Fundamentally, girls who can’t see how education will benefit them as homemakers are actually on the same page as the most hard-core of feminists, believing that a brain is a waste if you’re “only” going to be a wife and mother.
Our jobs are important because they are poetry. Because they shape loves and they shape loyalties, they teach and they convict. They’re important because they take glorious truths and make them incarnate, make them visible, and weave them into the souls of the people around us.
We have to be willing to embrace the fact that women are different from men. We are called to different things than the men, we’ve been created to do different tasks than the men, we’ve been gifted differently than the men—and if we embrace that truth we will find ourselves able to sing in harmony, able to glorify.
When the culture sneers at us for having so foolishly laid our seed in the dirt, when they pity us for having dropped that precious, withered, brown pellet instead of clutching it in our sweaty little palms, we need to turn and look at the blooms and thank God for His mercy that allowed us to let go.
But although we need to not be satisfied with small, we also need to not despise the small . . . because in the logic of the gospel it is the small things that turn out to be the greatest
So don’t be satisfied with small, but don’t despise the small things that are actually huge things. Learn to tell the difference.
