Authority

In her article cited in an earlier post, Anne Graham Lotz is pandering to some of the more ungodly prejudices of our culture by attacking the church for not being biblical on the meaning and purpose of sexuality. What she really means, though, is not that the Church isn't biblical, but that it's not enlightened or progressive--it's not, as they say, "evolved."

Before the watching world, Ms. Lotz argues that those who maintain distinctions between the sexes (other than those irrepressible biological and physiological ones) are bound for extinction as her new age of feminist gender equity finally dawns among the slowpoke people of God.

One looks in vain for any recognition on Ms. Lotz's part that she's thrown the entire history of the Christian Church's doctrine of sexuality in the dumpster. Likely she'd deny this, pointing to her strong stand against sodomy or divorce as proof that, where the rubber meets the road, she's rock solid on sexuality.

Yet the order of God's creation prior to the Fall is as clear concerning the sinfulness of women exercising authority over men as it is concerning the sinfulness of men having sex with men, or as it is concerning divorce. The authoritative primacy of man over woman, the heterosexual limits of physical intimacy, and the evil of divorce are each equally and undeniably established by our Creator in the Garden of Eden, and the rest of Scripture only reinforces God's Edenic order.

Asked whether divorce is right or wrong, Jesus responded by going back to Eden, prior to the Fall, making it clear that God's order from the beginning was heterosexual, monogamous, and lifelong:

(Jesus) answered and said, "Have you not read that He who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, 'for this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh'? So they are no longer two, but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let no man separate." (Matthew 19:4-6)

Asked whether it was proper for women to exercise authority over men, the Apostle Paul responded by going back to Eden, prior to the Fall, making it clear that God's order from the beginning was neither matriarchal nor egalitarian, but patriarchal:

But I do not allow a woman to teach or exercise authority over a man, but to remain quiet. For it was Adam who was first created, and then Eve. (1 Timothy 2:12, 13)

Do Ms. Lotz and other evangelical feminists really think they can pick and choose between the details of the sexual order God established in Eden which is reinforced repeatedly in the sacred words of Scripture?

"Let's see, I'll have some heterosexuality and monogamy, please. But no patriarchy today, thank you."

Well, any simpleton can see what's happened, and therefore what's coming.

What's happened? Well, for many years, now, evangelicals have lived in an increasingly egalitarian and feminist culture, and that culture has won us over--all that's left is the mop-up operation. Few of us would be willing to preach or listen to the sermons of past centuries our fathers in the faith preached concerning male authority or female deference and submission. And structurally, our practice bears no resemblance to the church's historical practice.

Denominationally, some of us are still forced to toe the line: we don't yet ordain women to the pastorate or eldership, but we've taken every other step we can. We have women leading our corporate worship, administering the Lord's Supper, preaching in our pulpits, teaching mixed-sex adult Sunday school classes, leading mixed-sex small groups, serving as commissioned deacons, serving on our national theological study committees, preaching at our conferences, serving as regional directors in our parachurch and mission organizations... Need I go on?

Yes, we have our Pharisaical righteousness in each place we're fiddling around the edge. Women preaching in our pulpits are the exception--not the rule--and they do so under the authority and review of the elders board. Our women deacons are not ordained--they're only commissioned. We've limited the Sunday school classes led by women to one quarter of our offerings each term. Women lead our call to worship and prayer of confession, but never our pastoral prayer. Women administer the Lord's Supper, but our senior pastor is a man and he's the one who hands the trays to the women before they go out into the congregation. The woman on the study committee has special expertise in the subject under review, and she's not a full voting member. Our conference isn't a church meeting, our speakers aren't really preaching, and we don't have any authority over those who attend. Our organization is parachurch--not church--so we have no need to submit to Scripture's prohibition of women exercising authority over men.

At this point, some readers are likely hung up on one or more of the particulars I've cited and are asking themselves, "Is it really wrong to have women deacons?" "Why shouldn't women lead in prayer during corporate worship?" "If women shouldn't be regional directors of mission agencies, should they be running for president?" Or, "If it's wrong for women to preach in morning worship, is it also wrong for them to serve as professors in Christian colleges and seminaries?"

Although these are important questions, such examples are only meant to be representative of the sea-change the evangelical church has embraced. We will differ over which of the above practices are within the proper boundaries of Scripture, but we must not differ in acknowledging that, taken as a whole, these practices are not a reformation returning us to the doctrine of Scripture, but rather a revolution leading us away from Scripture...

…Abraham will surely become a great and mighty nation, and in him all the nations of the earth will be blessed… For I have chosen him, so that he may command his children and his household after him to keep the way of the LORD by doing righteousness and justice, so that the LORD may bring upon Abraham what He has spoken about him. (Genesis 18:18,19)

(Tim) When the Lord entered into a covenant with Abraham, He was pleased for that covenant’s fulfillment to be dependent upon Abraham “command(ing) his children and his household… to keep the way of the Lord….” Still today, it pleases God to use means to accomplish his will, and he has declared the Church should be built up, instructed, and guarded by men—not angels. Where those men are missing or their work is soft and effeminate, the Church has suffered the removal of her vital manhood; she has been emasculated. (n. 1)

When we speak of the emasculation of the church, though, we are not saying she has been robbed of her Bridegroom nor that her adoptive Father has cast her out of his household. Christ is “faithful over God’s house as a son” (Hebrews 3:6 RSV), (n. 2)  and we have his promise that the gates of hell shall not prevail against her. So then, the Church can never be emasculated in any definitive sense, even though her officers may be characterized by a womanly softness and sentimentality.

Such, though, is the church of our time. About twenty years ago I heard Elisabeth Elliot Gren say, “The problem with the church today is that it’s filled with emasculated men who don’t know how to say ‘no’ to a woman.” At the time, I was floored by Elliot’s audacity, but now I realize she was guilty of understatement. Christian men today have a problem saying “no” to almost anyone—not just women. Preachers, elders, and Sunday school teachers place an overwhelming emphasis on the positive and have an almost insurmountable aversion to the negative.

In the mid-eighties, my father was asked to represent the pro-life side at a campus-wide dialogue on abortion held at the Stupe, Wheaton College’s student union. He began his presentation with the statement, “I am not here to represent the pro-life, but the anti-abortion side of this issue..."

(Tim) Few things have been responsible for more souls rejecting Church of the Good Shepherd than our fencing of the Lord's Table according to the requirement of the Presbyterian Church in America's Book of Church Order, that those who come to eat and drink must have placed themselves under the authority of the elders of our church or be a member of some other Bible-believing, evangelical church.

Typically, we surround those words with some explanation of the words' meaning and intent, focusing particularly on the fact that we cannot claim faith in Jesus Christ while rejecting the authority of Christ's Church and her officers which He Himself has commanded us to honor and obey. Whew, do the sparks fly!

Travelling around the country, I've been discouraged to observe how few PCA pastors submit to this Book of Church Order requirement. It's such a good and necessary rule, perfectly suited to drive a dagger into the heart of the cheap grace and hatred of authority at the heart of the reformed church today. So why aren't shepherds faithful to fence the Lord's Table in any other than a pro forma way?

Well, surely the rule has escaped the notice of some. Not every PCA pastor spends his life looking through the Book of Church Order for more rules to obey. Such a life takes a special kind of guy.

And yet, there are many of us who know about this rule and still don't obey it. Why not?

Well, as I said at the beginning, few things have been responsible for more souls rejecting Church of the Good Shepherd than our fencing of the Lord's Table according to this requirement. In other words, most of us don't do it because we don't want to discipline the flock to love and obey the Church and her officers. In a day when Rob Bell is hissing hatred of authority to everyone who will listen, it takes faith and faithfulness to teach, let alone require, submission to authority.

A few years ago, I was part of a lengthy e-mail discussion within our presbytery over whether or not this requirement was biblical. And as the discussion proceeded, the issue went beyond how the Lord's Table should be fenced, to the discussion of church membership itself--is it even biblical?

This afternoon, I was reading Calvin's sermon on 1Timothy 1:1,2 and came across a section that makes our duty clear in this regard. If pastors and elders read this and still allow men and women to come to our Lord's Table while rejecting the Church, her officers and authority...

(Tim) This is a transcription of a sermon given March 19, 1999, to the Lancaster Conference of the Mennonite Church. At the time, in addition to my call as pastor of Church of the Good Shepherd here in Bloomington, Indiana, I also was serving as Executive Director of the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood (CBMW). The occasion was a debate held to consider whether or not to begin to credential women for pastoral positions in Lancaster Conference churches. The other side of the debate was represented by the late Dr. David Scholer, Professor of New Testament at Fuller Theological Seminary.

This is posted today, the day before Mothers Day, as an encouragement to all the godly mothers among us, daughters of Sarah who have cultivated a gentle and quiet, a submissive, spirit.

We love you and give thanks to our Heavenly Father for your faith and obedience.

* * *

PATRIARCHY: THE CLEAR AND CONSISTENT TEACHING OF SCRIPTURE

Lancaster Mennonite Conference
March 19, 1999
Rev. Tim Bayly

A Personal Note:
It is good to be with you. Let me please begin with a personal note...

(Tim--Partly in an effort to take into account some of the comments, I've changed this post substantially this Saturday evening. If you'd read it before, you might want to read it again.)

For years it's been clear the egalitarian feminist attack upon reformed ecclesiastical communions has not been content to limit itself to the Christian Reformed and Evangelical Presbyterian Churches, but is increasingly focused on our own Presbyterian Church in America. This became obvious to me while serving on our General Assembly's Ad Interim Study Committee on Women in the Military. The arguments I heard then concerning the meaning and purpose of sexuality were absolutely abysmal--particularly those emanating from sophisticated teaching elders who saw themselves as God's gift to the PCA provided to aid their country bumpkin colleagues at rural, small town, and southern churches in learning how to contextualize the Gospel within this postmodern world.

As I listened to them carefully, it was evident the sound bites they employed in denying the truth or application of God's order of sexuality everywhere but inside the elders meeting and pulpit Sunday morning perfectly reflected arguments I'd heard in prior years at presbytery and general assembly levels in the mainline Presbyterian Church (USA). You know: slavery, cultural context, wife abuse, barefoot and pregnant, you can't turn back the clock, people will laugh at us--that sort of thing.

Then, of course the conservatives had their own reasons for not standing in the gap, opposing the feminist heresy. There was that old battle axe of Southern Presbyterianism, the spirituality of the Church, that conveniently kept many from feeling any responsibility to oppose our civil magistrate sending off our mothers and sisters and daughters to die for us on the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq. And there was also the federal vision to deal with--that issue alone took so much time and energy there was little zeal left for contending for God's order of sexuality.

(Tim: This post contributed by Joshua Congrove) In our age of cloying, effeminate discourse, it's a rare thing to find a man valiantly defending a cause with the sword of rhetoric, let alone doing so for the sake of a godly cause. It was not always so.

A while ago while reading through the letters of Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, I found this little gem. It's not a long, theological discourse with the depths of insight of his Confessions or City of God, nor have scholars taken much note of it. Still, it's a sterling example of the kind of pastoral faithfulness that marked the long episcopate of Augustine, as well as the kind of manly defense of God's sheep so lacking, today...

(Tim) We're now up to 85 or so comments under the post Because of the Angels, and those comments contain the only helpful discussion of headcoverings, and the visual cue they present within the corporate worship of the People of God of the submission of women, generally, to the authority of men, generally (Calvin's way of expressing it), that I've heard or read. So despite the length and (sometimes) heat of the discussion, I encourage everyone to go and read the comments.

Still, I must admit I've been wholly unsuccessful in getting anyone to read Calvin's doctrine of headcoverings, despite repeated attempts. So now, here is a compilation of Calvin's doctrine considerably shortened from what was put into the prior post. I do hope you'll all take the time to read this condensed version. There's really no substitude for Calvin's explanation of Scripture in any place, let alone one of the most controverted texts and themes in all of Scripture....

(Tim: this is second in a series, with the first, here) It's in vogue for preachers to cop a posture of humility, today, but it’s almost always a counterfeit humility. While claiming to be speaking for God, they deny the very authority of God and His Word that forms the only foundation they can stand on when they say, “Thus says the Lord.”

Jonathan Edwards, the best-known preacher of the Great Awakening in Colonial America, points to the difference between true and false humility:

A truly humble man is inflexible in nothing but in the cause of his Lord and Master, which is the cause of truth and virtue. In this he is inflexible, because God and conscience require it. But in things of lesser moment, and which do not involve his principles as a follower of Christ, and in things that only concern his own private interests, he is apt to yield to others.

There are various imitations of (humility) that fall short of the reality. Some put on an affected humility. Others have a natural low-spiritedness, and are wanting in manliness of character. …In others, there is a counterfeit kind of humility, wrought by the delusions of Satan: and all of these may be mistaken for true humility. [1]

Edwards strikes an interesting note...

For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but wanting to have their ears tickled, they will accumulate for themselves teachers in accordance to their own desires... - 2 Timothy 4:3

(Tim: this is fourth in a series, with the first here, second here, and third here.) Today, no issue illustrates the abandonment of the content and method of Apostolic preaching as clearly as sexuality. Few pastors, liberal or conservative, are faithful witnesses to this Biblical doctrine, leaving the pulpit impotent in the face of our effeminate age's direct opposition to God the Father and all good fatherhood pointing to His Image.

Liberal pastors are more obvious about it. Take, for instance, the Apostle Paul’s declaration concerning the connection between sexuality and authority:

But I do not allow a woman to teach or exercise authority over a man, but to remain quiet. For it was Adam who was first created, and then Eve. (1Timothy 2:12,13)

Seems obvious enough, doesn’t it? The teaching of the Apostles was that the order in which God created Adam and Eve, man and woman, was to be honored in our lives by woman not teaching or exercising authority over man.

But in the past fifty years, a great rebellion has flowed through the church. More liberal pastors have the honesty to say, with Fuller Seminary's Paul Jewett, that the Apostle Paul said it and he was wrong. [1] More conservative pastors claiming a high view of Scripture aren’t as brash or honest in their rebellion.

Rather than saying the Apostle Paul was wrong, they say they want to talk about what women can do--not what they can't do--and that the Apostle Paul has been misunderstood...

(Tim) Over on ClearNote Ladies Blog, our daughter, Michal Louise Crum, did a post titled, Do Women Need Less Education Than Men? If Samuel Johnson was right in his observation that you know you've hit your mark when you get a response, Michal hit the bull's eye.

At the center of her post were three questions she recommended to her readers in connection with the decision whether or not to go to college:

1. What is the purpose? What is this education preparing me for?
2. What are my motives? Am I pursuing education for the sake of education itself, a profession, money, status, the glory of God?
3. How much will it cost? Is it a wise investment of time, money, and energy? If God leads me in a different direction two years down the road, will the debt incurred prevent me from obeying God’s call?

Pretty calm, huh? It's hard to imagine these questions eliciting screeches and howls--from women who claim the Name of Christ no less. But elicit they did. May I say how much I admire the women of our congregation? If you read the comments under Michal's post, you'll better understand why. For one thing, what grace under fire!

So what about ye olde college education?

I've read all the screeches and howls, and this is by far my favorite...

(Tim, w/thanks to Kevin) Roman Catholic leader, Benedict XVI, recently responded to those critical of Roman Catholics for not having woman officers. He makes several simple statements you'd wait years to hear on the floor of most Reformed denominational meetings. When it comes to the foundational issue, though, he misses the ball.

The church doesn't have women officers, not because our Lord chose men as His Apostles, but because...

(Tim) Our President and his Attorney General have finally decided openly to oppose the Defense of Marriage Act passed by Congress. Congress says its constitutional but the President says it isn't. The New York Times reports the President has determined that...

Sure I am, if it were well understood how much of the pastoral authority and work consisteth in church guidance, it would be also discerned, that to be against discipline, is near to being against the ministry; and to be against the ministry is near to being absolutely against the Church; and to be against the Church, is near to being absolutely against Christ. Blame not the harshness of the inference, till you can avoid it, and free yourselves from the charge of it before the Lord. - Richard Baxter, The Reformed Pastor, (Banner of Truth, Carlisle PA: 1974) p. 111.

When a man rejects the exhortations and admonitions of his elders over a period of years, the time will come when he will turn his back on Christ's Church. If he refuses to repent and continues to give himself to sin, his sin will bear fruit and he will be separated from the Body of Christ. He may find another church that will allow him to hide in his sin; that church may marry and baptize and bury him and his family as churches have done across the centuries; but his repudiation of the discipline of Christ's Bride is his repudiation of Jesus Christ. The binding of earth and Heaven is no game of Angry Birds or Where's Waldo...

The substance of this post is the text of a recent e-mail discussion I was copied on between two friends of Baylyblog--one a prof and the other an attorney employed as a civil magistrate. Note particularly this statement in the first half of the discussion: "our biggest worry is of a corrupt government whose police violate our civil rights."

There's no doubt this should be the greatest concern of believers, today.

Christians consistently have failed to recognize that every accretion of power and authority to the civil magistrate comes at the expense of the authority and freedom of the mediating institutions of the Church and family, not simply the freedom of the individual. Typically, political conservatives worry only about individual liberty, but the freedom to obey Scripture and exercise authority in the Christian home and Church is under sustained attack, also, and is every bit as serious a usurpation of authority as our loss of individual freedom.

God has ordained authority in the households of the home and Church, and the denial of freedom to those institutions to govern themselves according to Scripture is growing year by year and is a central part of the decline of the West we have experienced. Yet sadly, there has been almost no warning given by our church and home fathers.

The State is our Savior-Protector/Provider and the more dependent the State renders her citizens, the more those citizens will place their faith in the god of the state rather than their own personal gods. And so we arrive at the place where America's most popular gods, whether Mormon, Roman Catholic, or Protestant, pose no particular threat to the state's bipartisan and unilateral commitment to destroy any person or institution blocking the path to her glorious dominion...

Well-known feminist Carolyn Custis James will be in Fort Collins preaching to the women and men of Campus Crusade for Christ International this coming week. The occasion is Cru's National Staff Conference and this is one more indication of the necessity of Christians doing the hard work of removing Cru from their church and individual mission giving.

Egalitarian feminism is another Gospel. Let Ms. magazine and Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary and nonChristians for Biblical Equality and the National Organization of Women support Custis James, her husband Frank, and Cru. It's wrong for believers to use the tithes and offerings of the People of God to support those who turn the Scripture on its head, making a big show of their respect for God and His Word while promoting rebellion against them. (TB)

Here's the manuscript for the sermon I preached the Lord's Day following 9/11 ten years ago, and then again yesterday on its tenth anniversary. I should add that the manuscript usually serves only as my loose outline for the preaching of God's Word.

Joseph Maracchli was the subject of an intense right-to-life battle in Canada last spring. Sadly, a couple months ago he died at his parents’ home in Windsor, Ontario. He was 20 months old. Andrew Henry wrote about Joseph on Baylyblog back in March. You may review the details here.

The number of similar cases will explode in coming months and years and there are important lesssons Christian fathers and mothers should learn. God has given parents the natural affection and compassion for their own children that no doctor can truly have no matter how highly trained or respected he may be.

This is not to say that parents are incapable of being neglectful of their children, but it's the exception rather than the rule. God’s good gift to children is parents who are loving and tender toward them.

The ever-increasing power and authority of government in our lives can only produce bad fruit, and the belief that a well-paid and benevolent bureaucracy can make better decisions than parents is wicked...

(TB: Under another post, a Christian sister we've come to respect has asked a series of questions I make a stab at answering below. For the context of her questions please look at comment number thirteen under the above post. First her comment in full, followed by my responses quoting part of each numbered item in what she wrote.)

I mean this as an honest comment/question, not a baiting or critical one. 

First, I was taught to believe that a wife must submit to her husband and a husband must love his wife as Christ loves the Church. A wife is not a doormat, nor is a husband is a tyrant. Furthermore, a couple will work out a balance of this principle in their marriage that is Biblical and fits their personalities and won't look the same for every couple. I assume you would generally agree with that.

Reading of the ESV translation committee's new concern that the word "slave" (translation of the Greek doulos) has "irredeemably negative associations and connotations," I wondered how my preferred translation, the New American Standard Bible, handled the same word (and the prefixed version, sundoulos, which generally they translate by adding "fellow," as in "fellow slave."). The NASB mostly renders it "slave," but at a number of places, it has "bond-servant,"—a fact which stood out to me when I began preaching through the book of James last year. James 1:1: "James, a bond-servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ,...".

Here's the frequency of each of the NASB's various translations of doulos...

This quote is from the Reformed World article I've posted here on Baylyblog which gives the history of the ordination of woman officers within Reformed denominations around the world.

The article's author is absolutely certain woman officers in the church is a good thing, but she realizes many still consider it a weakness that women don't have the natural weight of authority a man has. Her solution?

A Reformed congregation for whom the priesthood of all believers is an article of faith should not consider it a disqualification that a woman pastor is not and has no desire to be the traditional authoritarian stereotype, but rather as an opportunity held out to it.

To which an older Presbyterian pastor with many years of pastoral ministry behind him responded to me privately...

Under son Joseph's post, "Humble is as stupid does...," "Anne" asks the question:

Can you provide Scripture that says authority and submission, 'conquering' and 'surrendering', are to be carried out in the bedroom? Because neither Song of Songs nor 1Corinthians 7, not even Ephesians 5 in its entirety suggests such a thing.

P.S: Failure to respond will be taken as a failure to provide appropriate scripture.

To which I respond:

Dear Anne,

Concerning physical marital intimacy, function follows form...

Carl Trueman is a complementarian. Really.

He recently assured us of this, despite previously suggesting on his blog that disagreement over the Biblically-ordained roles of men and women is no basis for separation in ministry and despite holding the opinion that many complementarians embrace complementarianism "less because of the Bible and more because they apparently watched Conan the Barbarian a few too many times in their early teenage years."

Unfortunately, he's accurate in claiming to be complementarian. Professor Trueman is straight down the middle of that broad and squishy theological avenue.