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The World We Made: Coming soon...

UPDATE: There’s been lots of interest in this podcast, with about 2000 listens from 30 countries and counting! If you haven’t subscribed yet, we’ve added a few links to make it easier for those of you who aren’t on iTunes, which is most of you. (Welcome non-Apple fanboys.) Don't miss an episode. Scroll down and subscribe now.

"These are the confessions of American Christians recovering from American Christianity. This is the world we made."

Warhorn Media is pleased to announce a new podcast hosted by Jake Mentzel and Nathan Alberson and featuring Tim Bayly. The World We Made is designed to help ordinary American Christians think through the difficult issues we face in our culture today. Season 1 is about homosexuality.

Over the course of the first season, we talk with Tim about how we went from having anti-sodomy laws in all 50 states (just 50 years ago) to where we are today. What are the changes Tim has seen in his lifetime? What exactly do they mean? What part did the culture play and what part did the church play? How are regular Bible-believing Christians supposed to respond? What has Tim learned as a pastor to help equip us for the challenge of ministering to men and women tempted by homosexuality?

These are the questions we'll be unpacking over the course of eight 20-minute episodes. We'll start out slow and easy, and things will pick up steam as we get closer and closer to the end. You won't want to miss it, so check out the trailer (above), and go ahead and subscribe now in iTunes or Android (or wherever you listen to your podcasts—Google Play Music, Stitcher, TuneInRSS feed) so you're ready when the first episode drops (July 17). 

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Daddy Tried audiobook now available...

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Warhorn Media is pleased to announce that Tim Bayly's Daddy Tried is now available as an audiobook. If you haven't had a chance to read it for yourself, swing over to Audible.com or Amazon.com, download a copy, and have Tim read it for you.

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We're also pleased to offer a free download of the Chapter 1 audio to Baylyblog readers.

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Responses (3): It all depends on whose ox is gored...

(This is the third in a series responding to critics of my post pointing out Denny Burk is wrong and the Atlantic got it right in their reporting that Southern Baptists' Christian Standard Bible is gender-neutered.)

Honestly, you can't make this stuff up!

Seven years ago, back before the Holman Christian Standard Bible was neutered and "Holman" was taken out of its name, Denny Burk saw things more clearly. Follow this.

Back in 2010, Denny's preaching pastor at Kenwood Baptist Church in Louisville, Jim Hamilton, wrote a blog post explaining that he had been asked to contribute an article to a new dictionary and the publisher had sent him these rules his article was to conform to:

[Your] articles should avoid referring to “man” (likewise “mankind,” “men,” “he,” “his” and so on) generically. Language often regarded as patriarchal should be modified to avoid giving wrong impressions. Similarly, translations of biblical and other texts, when made by the contributor, should be no more gender specific than the originals are judged to be. Citations of standard translations of the Bible should not be altered, of course, but where contributors create their own translations of the biblical text, they may find strategies for effectively and responsibly avoiding gender-specific translations by consulting the New Revised Standard Version.

"Who pays the piper calls the tune," the old saying goes, so Jim Hamilton was going to avoid the male inclusive if he wanted his publisher to pay him. And if he was going to do any of his own Bible translating for the article, he needed to delete the Bible's male inclusives "adam" and "adelphoi." 1 

This got Pastor Hamilton thinking and he asked this question... 


Responses (2): but "brothers" often means "brothers and sisters"...

Here is another argument against my post pointing out Denny Burk is wrong and the Atlantic got it right in their reporting that the Christian Standard Bible is gender-neutered in hundreds of places.

A reader writes:

[The translators] are simply trying to communicate the Scriptures in a clear way. Adelphoi does often mean brothers and sisters, so it's not wrong... There is an example in Euripides, Electra, line 536, where adelphos refers to both brother and sister...

...lexicography and semantics can be tricky... When Paul refers to the churches by adelphoi, he clearly has the whole congregation in mind. ...This is common in the ancient languages, where the masculine is the so-called "standard" linguistic gender.

...we are wrong when we assume that grammatical gender and biological gender are always the same thing

The one thing obvious is this man hasn't read the very post he is criticizing...


Responses (1): quoting Revelation's warning was over the top...

One man writes:

I am wary of suggesting (much less actually stating) what [Bayly] did at the end of the article, equating what was done to editing and changing the word of God in presumably a damnable fashion. This particular paragraph is what I have in mind:

"Denny Burk should warn the translators and publishers of his denomination's Christian Standard Bible that their removal of hundreds and hundreds of words with a male meaning component from Scripture places their souls in jeopardy of having their part in the tree of life and the holy city removed by God."

Say that is badly translated? Certainly. Call on them to change it in future editions? Sure. Say that the translators/editors are in danger of the fires of hell because of it? Why go to that extent?

Why go to that extent?

Because this is the explicit warning of the Holy Spirit. In the Word of God, He Himself warns us that those who do this very thing are in danger of not inheriting the Kingdom of Heaven. If this warning doesn't apply to the removal of...


Christian Standard Bible: the Atlantic got it right...

The current president of the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood is indignant over an Atlantic Monthly piece pointing out that his denomination's Christian Standard Bible has gone "gender-neutral."1

Denny Burk says it's not true.

Sadly, it is. 2

We could get lost in a discussion of a host of Hebrew and Greek words in the Old and New Testaments, but two words will suffice: one is the Hebrew word...


Report of PCA Study Committee on Women in the Church (10): what the Committee should have said...

(This is the tenth and final post in a series critiquing the Report of the Presbyterian Church in America's Study Committee on Women Serving in the Ministry of the Church: first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventheighth, ninth, and tenth.)

For this purpose (God) has set elders over His church, to force the re­fractory to order; and they are not to allow sin to be freely indulged in and to rage with impunity. ...there is no reason why they should allow the church to fall in ruins because of their sloth; there is no cause why they should sit back and connive at the wicked­ness of those who try to turn everything upside down. - John Calvin 1

It's time to bring this series to an end, but one last job remains on my to-do list.

Criticism is only as good as the vision that inspires it, so let me tell you my vision. Of course, it’s not my vision. It’s the vision shared among Biblically Reformed men who have read Scripture and church history and want to die having, by God’s grace, added to the capital our faithful fathers in the faith bequeathed to us. We want to die leaving the church better than we found it. Only by God’s grace, I am zealous to add.

We want to be faithful to fight the battles of today, pushing back against the heterodoxies, heresies, and wickedness we have discovered in our own hearts placed there by the Spirit of our Age. We refuse to spend our lives carving monuments to dead men and erecting museums filled with...


Report of PCA Study Committee on Women in the Church (9): Joey Pipa at the lowest pitch of expression...

Back in the study, I asked Solzhenitsyn about his relations with the West... "[Y]es, it is true, when I fought the dragon of Communist power I fought it at the highest pitch of expression. The people in the West were not accustomed to this tone of voice. In the West, one must have a balanced, calm, soft voice; one ought to make sure to doubt oneself, to suggest that one may, of course, be completely wrong. But I didn't have the time to busy myself with this. This was not my main goal.” (Solzhenitsyn, quoted in the New Yorker, February 14, 1994, p.74.)

It saddened me to read Joey Pipa's response to the Report of the PCA Study Committee on Women in the Church. As president of a South Carolina seminary offering a more conservative option to the PCA’s Covenant Seminary, I’d been hopeful his response, when published, would sound an alarm within the church against the Committee's 60,000 words conniving at the feminist heresy.

Apparently others hoped the same because Dr. Pipa begins by telling his readers that "many friends and former students" asked him to respond to the Report.

What a disappointment they all must have felt watching as Dr. Pipa preciously declines to engage the enemy. Reading his very short response—1,500 words is about one-third of a sermon—you get the feeling you’re watching...


Report of PCA Study Committee on Women in the Church (8): hiding out in a cave...

(This is eighth in a series of ten posts critiquing the Report of the Presbyterian Church in America's Study Committee on Women Serving in the Ministry of the Church: first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventheighth, ninth, and tenth.)

The primary need is the encouragement and respect of the church’s male leadership who can either nourish or break the heart of a woman who is trying to serve God. ...There is additional benefit to churches finding ways to deploy gifted women teachers in their midst. ...When churches recognize a gifted woman’s teaching ministry and incorporate it into the church’s ministry, the expansion of that ministry is an expansion of that church.

- Report of PCA Study Committee on Women in the Church 1

[June 3, 2017: this post has been edited to turn its focus away from one individual.]

Does the Report acknowledge any Scriptural limitations on women teaching and exercising authority over men?

Yes it does, and for most that will be the end of it. As one southern pastor of my acquaintance effused in a fawning tweet, "how very grateful we all are for the wonderful work this wise and faithful Committee has presented to the church!"2

Stopping right there is what the Assembly will do: "Look, they said there are some things only men should do. Isn't that enough? What does it take to satisfy you? Must every last woman be married, barefoot, and pregnant?"

For a long time now, the pastors who posture themselves as conservatives during PCA general assemblies have specialized in avoiding the battle by giving private assurances of their manliness and Biblical convictions while publicly issuing...


Report of PCA Study Committee on Women in the Church (7): silence is obsolete...

(This is seventh in a series of ten posts critiquing the Report of the Presbyterian Church in America's Study Committee on Women Serving in the Ministry of the Church: first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventheighth, ninth, and tenth.)

The women are to keep silent in the churches; for they are not permitted to speak, but are to subject themselves, just as the Law also says. (1 Corinthians 14:34)

In a long section titled "The Roles of Women During the Apostolic Era," the PCA's General Assembly Study Committee on Women's Roles in the Church goes on at great length about what this and that New Testament passage does and doesn't mean. They quote lots of scholars saying one thing and another about the meaning of this and that Greek word. Some of it is unobjectionable, beyond the fact that the reader is left exhausted; and maybe that's the point?

Finally, though, the Committee is forced to conclude something or other about the texts' application to congregations within their own religious non-profit association. Given the spread of their legs from the concrete and timber dock of Jackson, Mississippi to the sleek yacht with a gaping hole in her hull up there in New York City, it's hard for them not to embarrass themselves by...


Report of PCA Study Committee on Women in the Church (6): no minority report...

(This is sixth in a series of ten posts critiquing the Report of the Presbyterian Church in America's Study Committee on Women Serving in the Ministry of the Church: first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventheighth, ninth, and tenth.)

Now Herod and Pilate became friends with one another that very day... (Luke 23:12)

The first thing Presbyterian officers will note about this Report is that it is a consensus report. All Committee members signed off on it, agreeing with the Report as written:

We debated all the matters put to us by the General Assembly and were, by the grace of God, able to arrive at an overwhelming consensus. 1

A consensus isn't a mere majority. Merriam Webster lists "unanimity" as a synonym, yet the Committee feels the need to assure the Assembly their consensus is "overwhelming."

Why speak of an "overwhelming consensus?"

In an earlier post I warned against this Committee's exaggerated...


Report of PCA Study Committee on Women in the Church (5): the ministry role of washing saints' feet...

...if she has washed the saints' feet (1Timothy 5:10)

(This is the fifth in a series of ten posts critiquing the Report of the Presbyterian Church in America's Study Committee on Women Serving in the Ministry of the Church: first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventheighth, ninth, and tenth.)

Talking about this Report with my wife Mary Lee, I picked up my laptop and did a search for "wash" or "feet."

Nothing, and the absence of these words is damning. But first, a few sentences about a word the Committee loves...


Report of PCA Study Committee on Women in the Church (3): texts left on the scrap heap...

(This is the third in a series of ten posts critiquing the Report of the Presbyterian Church in America's Study Committee on Women Serving in the Ministry of the Church: first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventheighthninth, and tenth.)

The Committee's Report comes in at 63 pages and 32,000 words. Before they're done, the Committee has tipped their hat to many of the exegetical inventions and talking points used by feminists these past fifty years to justify their rebellion. Bad as it is to read the Committee paying their respects to feminist revisionist arguments about this and that passage of Scripture, it's even worse to note the Scripture texts the Committee excludes from our consideration.

This, for instance...


Report of PCA Study Committee on Women in the Church (2): they are "joyfully committed"...

(This is the second post in a series of ten posts critiquing the Report of the Presbyterian Church in America's Study Committee on Women Serving in the Ministry of the Church: first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventheighth, ninth, and tenth.)

On to our examination of the Report itself. We'll use screen shots so we can refer to line numbers.

In the first sentence of the Report (Line 10), readers are assured each of the Committee members are "joyfully committed" to "the Bible's teaching on the complementarity of men and women."

First, that word "complementarity." "Complementarian" is a shibboleth, a word used to communicate the man entering the camp is not the enemy. Among most Evangelicals, saying you're a "complementarian" makes you OK whether or not you can spell it.

Trust is important in our age when sex is such a bloody battlefield.

Many pastors and elders opposed this study committee because they were concerned it would lead to capitulation to the forces of feminism. Then, when the Committee's members were announced, they were even more concerned watching Tim Keller's wife, Kathy, seated as a voting member.

In direct violation of Scripture and the PCA's Constitution, Tim Keller has long had women officers in his church, so the appointment of his wife to the Committee was a clear statement...


Report of PCA Study Committee on Women in the Church (1): Kathy Keller "Voting Member"...

(This is the first in a series of ten posts critiquing the Report of the Presbyterian Church in America's Study Committee on Women Serving in the Ministry of the Church: first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventheighth, ninth, and tenth.)

Preparatory to their 2017 General Assembly to be held in June, the Presbyterian Church in America has released the Report of their study committee on "women serving in the ministry of the church." This is the first in a series examining this committee's work.

When I served on a similar PCA General Assembly study committee on women in the military a few years ago, no woman was appointed to our committee. Study committees of the PCA General Assembly examine the interpretation of Scripture on theological matters where there is a need for the church to come to an authoritative judgment. Thus these study committees have been composed of pastors and elders—officers called to adjudicate conflict and make authoritative judgments. For this reason, many found it disheartening that Pastor Tim Keller's wife, Kathy, was placed on this study committee and that she agreed to serve.

It has long been normal practice for women to be present and participate in elders meetings at Tim Keller's Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City. Mrs. Keller's appointment to this General Assembly study Committee is in line with the egalitarian practices Redeemer has long been practicing in her own fellowship, and advocating within her denomination.

But whereas the women attending Redeemer's elder meetings have been...


I think you want a wife...

(2008) I received a poem by e-mail this past week and asked its author if she would allow me to post it. The poem is a wonderfully conceived summary of the two paths women choose today. One ends in death, the other in life.

These past few days our home has been graced by my mother-in-law, Margaret West Taylor, who's visiting for the week. As I think about her sacrificial life, I also look around at other women of my own family and church and praise God for their godliness! It's hard to conceive of the full spectrum of leadership these women exert among the sons, brothers, pastors, elders, deacons, and husbands—let alone children and other women—as we watch them lose their lives.

Now then, the poem...


Tim Keller's legacy...

I am one of those women who have worked under Tim Keller’s leadership at Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City. [Tim] hired me to envision and develop an entire ministry to equip and mobilize men and women in Redeemer’s congregation to work with gospel-centered vision and integrity out in the world. We partnered in the establishment of the Center for Faith & Work, which may have done as much as any church in decades to honor Abraham Kuyper’s vision of humble, respectful engagement in a world of many faith perspectives.

- Katherine Leary Alsdorf, "Tim Keller hired women in leadership: Katherine Leary Alsdorf responds to the Princeton Kuyper Prize controversy" in A Journey Through NYC Religions.

Far above all other blog posts I've done through the years, the things I've written criticizing Tim Keller have cost me the most in terms of being viewed as an outlier among Reformed Evangelicals. "Who on earth would want to criticize Tim Keller," people ask; "he's the best we have!"

Maybe he's the best of my generation, but sorry to say, that's not saying much. Based upon the past generations of leaders I've known personally, as well as my reading of fathers in the faith who preceded us across the centuries, it's my judgement those of us leading the church today are moral, theological, and spiritual midgets. Children. Infants.

A little less than a century ago, J. Gresham Machen observed that America...


A tribute to my mother-in-law, Margaret Louise Taylor, on her one-hundredth birthday...

Note: Three days ago was the one-hundredth birthday of my dear mother-in-law, Margaret Louise Taylor. This past weekend, Mary Lee and I gathered with Mary Lee's nine siblings and their spouses, as well as Mom's brother-in-law and his wife, Lyman and J. Mae Taylor, to celebrate this wonderful occasion.1 

It would be hard to overstate the blessing Mom Taylor has been to all of us for many decades, now. Twenty years ago, thinking about Mom Taylor and my own mother, Mary Louise Bayly (who at the time was still living), I wrote this article as a tribute to them both. Now is a good opportunity to reproduce it as a hundredth birthday tribute to Mom. I hope it serves as a good reminder to readers of the true nature of biblical femininity, womanhood, and motherhood. Of truly sacrificial Christian faith.

* * *

Mom Taylor studied for her degree in Home Economics during the late '30s and early '40s, graduating summa cum laude from Oregon State University. After marrying her childhood sweetheart, Ken Taylor, she gave birth to ten children in fourteen years.

Engaged for most of the years when the family was young as editorial director of a religious publishing house, her husband, Ken, brought home low wages, so frugality was a necessity and the degree served this young mother and her family very well...


Neil Gorsuch worships someone at a pagan church in Boulder...

Boulder has better churches than St. John's Episcopal Church attended by President Trump's Supreme Court nominee, Neil Gorsuch. Their rector is a priestess and the congregation is committed to embracing sodomites and lesbians as full members with sacramental privileges.

On abortion, CNN reports:

"Despite Trump's pledge to pick a 'pro-life' justice, Leonard Leo, who advised the president on Supreme Court nominees, said the issue was never explicitly raised during their discussions. 'Judge Gorsuch wasn't asked about it, and he's not going to make a commitment on it,' said Leo, who has taken a leave from his job heading the Federalist Society while he shepherds Gorsuch's nomination through the Senate."

This is the man who made it worthwhile to vote for Donald Trump? Seriously?

Were Vice-President Mike Pence and the Federalist Society unable to find and recommend any nominee whose work is inspired by his orthodox Christian faith?

PS: Please click through for some criticisms of this post and my responses...


Feminists are the weakest women...

In celebration of International Women's Day yesterday, March 8, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's wife Sophie posted a pic on FB of her holding hands with her husband and the accompanying text, "celebrate the boys and men in our lives who encourage us to be who we truly are." She went on to ask followers to post pics of their own "male ally."

Feminists responded:

This is utterly ridiculous. Shameful really. I think I'll be taking photos with my daughters, female friends and colleagues instead.

So everyone reading this blog knows God Himself says women are the "weaker vessel," right? If not, read 1Peter 3:7 remembering all Scripture is "God-breathed." Don't tire of reminding yourself and your loved ones it's not merely the concepts behind Scripture's words that are inspired, but Scripture's words themselves. The doctrine of inspiration nailed down by our Lord through His teaching ministry is called the "plenary verbal inspiration" of Scripture. Every last word is inspired, including "weaker."

Now, we can argue all day about what God meant when he inspired the Apostle Peter to declare this truth, but in commemoration of yesterday's International Women's Day, let's explore the weakness and strength men see when we observe the weaker sex...