“Quit Ye Like Men”: The Calling Men Have Quit

The exhortation “quit ye like men” in I Cor. 16:13 is a translation of andrizomai, meaning “act manly” or “act courageously.” It envisions Christian women no less than Christian men. It presupposes, however, that men (males) act in a distinctive way, possess certain virtues God requires of all his people. In the human sphere, strength in the Bible is associated with men (explicitly in this passage), while weakness is associated with women (1 Pet. 3:7; for a secular but perceptive analysis, see Steven Goldberg, Why Men Rule: A Theory of Male Dominance [Chicago and La Salle, 1993 ed.]); it is precisely for this reason that men are required to honor and protect women—it is the rationale for chivalry, a lamentably lost art. The weakness of women is a fact of Biblical revelation that not all the blinding assaults of modern secular feminists or the compromising machinations of “Christian feminists” (abetted by male wimps) can overturn. God made the sexes different—not one superior to the other, but nonetheless truly different. Distinctives of each of the sexes fit each for the task to which he is called by God.

Many Christian men are fond of balking and squawking about the rampant feminism in modern culture and church, and much of the balking and squawking is justified. It is only fair to note, however, that the supreme blame for this “gender” debacle eroding the foundations of our culture lands squarely at the feet of men—and especially Christian men. Christian men cannot on the one hand lament the surge of feminism and a feminized culture and on the other hand engage in practices or endorse polices that permit or further that increase. But engagement and endorsement of these polices by men have been quite pronounced over the last few years, and we reap today the bitter dregs of Christian men's dereliction.

Joe Six-Pack, Rambo in profession and Weenie in action, charges of the modern Western church, “It's all for a bunch of blankedly-blank women and children.” Frankly, he's right on target. As Ann Douglas noted in The Feminization of American Culture (New York [1977], 1988), the pastoral ministry in the United States became radically feminized last century, mainly as a result of the decline of the residue of the virile, doctrinal Calvinism of the colonial era. Ministers—and not only Unitarians—became sentimentalized agents of syrupy storytelling and psychological good-feeling clap-trap. The learned, forthright ministry of the Puritan age was transformed into the lumpy, soothing clergy of the nineteenth century. These later Ministers of Mush eschewed the world-conquering Faith of their virulent Calvinist forefathers (whom they deemed—dare we say it?—too “dogmatic”) and settled in for a tender footed feminized faith. When the epochal and inevitable institutional split erupted early this century, the anti-supernaturalistic and worldly liberals took their erstwhile orthodox institutions straight into apostasy, while the supernaturalistic and otherworldly fundamentalists took their backwater Bible institutes, pietistic missions agencies, and retreatist churches and galloped straight into Separatist Land. One trait held these seemingly disparate groups together—hatred for virile, masculine, world-conquering Calvinism (even today, the only sector the fundamentalists hate more than the liberals is those “dangerous” Calvinists: feminized religionists hate Calvinism more than anything else).

The theologically liberal paradigm has collapsed into the waiting arms not merely of feminism, but of a blasphemous goddess cult (see Theodore P. Letis, “Feminine Spirituality: Eve Shakes An Angry Fist at YAHWEH, But He Triumphs Through the Son” Journal of Christian Reconstruction, Vol. IX, Nos. 1, 2 [1982-1983], 182-199). Today the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Biblical Literature, among the world's most prominent Biblico-theological societies, are honeycombed with apostasy—and the most prominent expression of that apostasy is radical feminism (Peter Jones, “God Need Not Apply,” World, February 10, 1996, 24, 25). The extent of its prominence is unnerving:

There is nothing startling in the observation that the feminist hermeneutic has acquired general acceptance in the academy as a new, unquestioned orthodoxy and is introduced explicitly or implicitly into almost every debate. But statistical data gives objective proof of the power of the ideological locomotive. Of the 386 major academic sections [at the annual joint meeting of the societies], 59 were entirely devoted to feminism and 30 had major feminist components. That is, virtually a quarter of the program specifically featured the various aspects of this one agenda. From where things were twenty years ago, this is astounding, (ibid., 25)

Conference topics included “Amazing Grace! How Sweet the Sound! Southern Evangelical Religion and Gay Drag in Atlanta,” “God Raised Him Erect: Lactantius and the Male Body,” “Sisterhood Among Lesbian Women Psychiatric Patients,” “The Hetero-gendering of the Queer Male Jewish Body,” “Toward a Goddess Theology,” and “The Challenge of Lesbian Theory to Heterosexual Biblical Interpretation” (ibid., 24, 25). Radical feminism and attendant perversions have become common fare in the smorgasbord of modern religion: the evisceration of Calvinism eventually lands squarely in the lap of Ms. Left.

Conservatives went in another direction, though one no less vulnerable to deviation because of their repudiation of historic Calvinism. They were “ripe pickin's” for three chief emasculating retreatist movements of the antebellum period: deeper-life devotionalism, Billy Sunday revivalism, and prophetic dispensationalism (see Douglas Frank's excellent study Less Than Conquerors [Grand Rapids, 1986]). Out of this motley mix (and a few other retreatist factors) emerged modern evangelicalism, the most dominant expression of conservative Christianity in the United States (with the possible exception of Roman Catholicism).

Emotion and “Relation,” No Doctrine, Creeds, or Theology

The modern evangelical paradigm therefore bears distinctive marks of the non- or anti-masculine, i.e., feminized religion. One is its aversion to doctrine, creeds, and theology, and an obsession with emotion and “interpersonal relationships.” Woman is designed by God as a relational being—relating in the human sphere to her husband (Gen. 2:21-23; 3:16). The evangelicals (including the fundamentalists) are, like the woman, essentially experiential, grounding their faith in the “born-again” conversion experience rather than the objective word of God and Christ's judicial work. Intensity of emotion is increasingly the index of vibrant faith, and accurate theology and the historic creeds and confessions identified with “dead orthodoxy.” Theology and confessionalism arise from the Spirit-empowered employment of the rigorous exertion of gifted intellect, and they are quite correct who identify this exertion with Christian men (women did not compose any of the historic creeds or confessions). The assault on theology and confessionalism is emphatically an effect of feminized faith and eventually turns into a barrage against a masculine faith itself.

As men have sacrificed intellect for emotion, creeds for psychology, and theology for relation, the church has traded its virile theological heritage for a mess of sentimentalized, deep-feeling weepiness, the most graphic example of which is exhibited in the huge “men's conferences” which ironically meet in masculine football stadiums while learning to practice feminine religion. The 80s man was to “learn to express his tender emotions”; the man of the 90s is to “get in touch with his feminine side.” At this rate, the man of the next millennium will be androgynous.

Subordination, No Dominion

Another distinctive of the modern evangelical church which male irresponsibility has permitted is the tendency of subordination to, rather dominion over, modern culture (see my “The Feminization of the Church,” Chalcedon Report, July 1995, 3-5). Jeremiads like Richard Quebedeaux' The Worldly Evangelicals (San Francisco, 1978), Francis Schaeffer's The Great Evangelical Disaster (Westchester, IL, 1984) and James Davidson Hunter's Evangelicalism: The Coming Generation (Chicago, 1987) pinpoint the problem of evangelical accommodation to the world system but pointedly fail to furnish the solution. More fundamentally, they fail to observe the conditions which render such accommodation not merely possible, but inevitable. In fact, it is impossible to understand the impotence of modern evangelicalism apart from the sexual-egalitarian revolution of the present century.

When the natural, inherent, God-ordained—and, I might add, noble—orientation of women as domesticated, subordinate creatures (Tit. 2:5) pervades the church and the Faith in the latter's relation to the present world, the church and Faith lose their aggressiveness—their dominion spirt—and develop an acquiescent, sometimes servile approach toward modern culture. The church properly is feminine (subordinate) in its relation to Christ, but masculine (dominionist) in its relation to the world. The modern evangelical church, by and large, has reversed these roles. The modern church wishes to dominate Jesus Christ and submit to secular culture. Rather, God has called the church to masculinity, to external aggressiveness in its approach to culture (Mt. 28:18-20).

Camile Paglia's half-comical, though scatological description of the man's symbolic attachment of projection to urination captures the truth of dominion as an inherent aspect of masculinity much more adroitly (and certainly delightfully) than do most modern men, let alone Christian men:

Concentration and projection are remarkably demonstrated by urination, one of the male anatomy's most efficient compartmentalizations. Freud thinks primitive man preened himself on his ability to put out a fire with a stream of urine. A strange thing to be proud of but certainly beyond the scope of a woman, who would scorch her hams in the process. Male urination really is a kind of accomplishment, an arc or transcendence. A woman merely waters the ground she stands on. Male urination is a form of commentary. It can be friendly when shared but is often aggressive as in the defacement of public monuments by Sixties rock stars. To piss on is to criticize. John Wayne urinated on the shoes of a grouchy director in full view of cast and crew. This is one genre of self-expression women will never master. A male dog marking every bush on the block is a graffiti artist, leaving his rude signature with each lift of the leg. Women, like female dogs, are earthbound squatters. There is no projection beyond the boundaries of the self. Space is claimed by being sat on, squatter's rights. (Camile Paglia, Sexual Personae [New York, 1991], 20, 21)

Paglia, as a self-professed pagan, imputes to “nature” scaled-down qualities and actions of the Triune God of the universe, and thereby degrades man and woman. Her recognition of man's “outward” propensity is quite correct, though. It is God, in fact, who instilled in man (i.e., males) the urge of “projection” (i.e. dominion). Woman was given to man because it was not good for him to be alone; woman is called to assist man in his calling—dominion in the name of the King (Gen. 2:15-23). She has no independent calling. As a derivative creature, her life is lived out with main attention on her covenant head, ordinarily her husband. We do not hereby imply women have no direct contact with God, as though the husband is a medieval-style intermediary or confessor, only that woman's God-ordered calling in this life includes revolution around and investment in the life of her covenant head. She is a primarily a domestic creature, while her man is primarily a dominion creature.

When the conservative church fails to resist the romanticized lure to feminization, however, it necessarily assumes the feminine trait of domesticity in its relation to culture. The evil culture then “acts manly” by exerting dominion over the rightful heirs of the earth, i.e., Christians. The disenfranchisement and outright slavery of the church and Christians in modern western culture will not be remedied by electing more Christian politicians (though they are desperately needed), nor by establishing more Christian schools (though we could use them) nor by holding more state-wide revival meetings (which we can frankly do without) but by reorienting the character of the contemporary feminized church. The church must regain its masculine (dominionist) attitude toward the world and life.

God's Covenantal Order

Because men are covenant representatives (Jos. 22:13, 14; 1 Cor. 11:3), they do not act for themselves alone. Just as Adam acted for his covenant posterity, and Christ acted for his covenant posterity (Rom. 5:12-21), so men act for those under their covenantal authority. In the case of the wife, this authority is demonstrated most graphically when during the wedding ceremony the minister asks, “Who giveth this woman to be married to this man?” As the father responds, “I do” (or, somewhat less covenantally, “Her mother and I”), he utters a supreme covenantal statement. By this symbolic act the bride is transferred from subordination under her father's covenant authority to subordination under her groom's covenant authority. Women are never independent creatures; they are never (in this life) liberated from concrete male covenantal representation (if they are widows with no remaining family, the [male!] eldership of the church represents them [1 Tim. 5:3-10]). The woman naturally assumes her husband's name; she becomes a member of his family.

Likewise, offspring of marriage are represented by the father; orphans are represented by the church (Dt. 14:27-29; 16:10-14). Minor sons remain covenantally represented by their fathers until they marry (Gen. 2:24). The concept of unmarried sons not covenantally represented by fathers is an affront to the covenantal order. As noted above, the covenantal representation of the daughter is transferred to her husband.

In Scripture there are three classifications of adult males: married men, usually with offspring; unmarried men actively seeking a wife; and unmarried men gifted with the single state in special uninterrupted service to God (1 Cor. 7:7-8, 32, 33). (Widowers may constitute fourth category). The Bible knows nothing of the perpetual unattached playboy (Christian or unchristian) who resists the calling of covenantal headship. Men in Scripture are called to represent families. Some from among these are called to represent the church (1 Tim. 3:1-5). Certain are called to represent the citizenry (Dt. 1:15, 16). The Biblical calling to man is a calling to covenantal headship. For a man to evade this calling—for example, to attempt to transfer it to the wife or the church (or worse yet, the state)—is to war against the covenantal order.

The man is divinely selected to assume this covenantal responsibility which includes two main tasks: loving and providing for a wife (Eph. 5:25-28), and bringing up children in a godly manner (Eph. 6:4).

The War on God's Covenantal Order

Satan's war on the covenantal order is no less intense or wily today than it was in Eden. Indeed, if anything it is more ferocious. Anything that works to subvert that covenantal order is evil. God's covenantal order in the church, school, vocation and state sustains intense Satanic attack today. Nonetheless, Satan unleashes his most severe assaults on the fundamental earthly institution, the Christian family. He knows that if he can subvert the family (as he did in Eden), he can subvert the wider covenantal order. The evils of wanton divorce, adultery, and pornography are widely (and correctly) recognized as chief illustrations of this subversion. Less obvious, however, are the deeper factors that fuel this subversion, the sins constituting the root out of which grows the more overt and seemingly more egregious fruit modern Christian conservatives assail.

Men's Dereliction of Covenant Duty

The refusal of Christian men to lead their families in the Faith (Jos. 24:15), including family worship, is the fundamental cause of the present gender corruption. If the man abdicates his calling as God's covenantal representative in the family, he lays the ground for the erosion of church, state, and the wider society. All the clean-up-culture campaigns in the world cannot compensate for a lack of men's covenant government in the family. When men begin to order their own lives and their families according to the law-word of God, they sow the seeds of ecclesiastical and cultural reconstruction.

Women's Dereliction of Covenant Duty

Another root cause of the present debacle is the pervasiveness of two-income families (father and mother both working full-time outside the home). The Bible, strictly speaking, does not forbid a wife's employment outside the home, but it does insist that the maintenance of the home is her principal calling (Tit. 2:5). The woman who makes something other than the home and the care for husband and children the central task of her life subverts God's covenantal order, and the husband who collaborates with this subversion is perhaps more guilty than his wife. All the arguments about the necessity of two incomes to maintain a good, upper-middleclass lifestyle fall prostrate before the law-word of God, which requires the woman to be a “keeper at home.” Some may argue, of course, that this cause is merely the effect of another cause—increased and burdensome taxation. To this I rejoin, “But what is the root cause of the wanton taxation, if not the designs of a paternalistic and messianic state, in business because of the failure of Christian men to maintain family government.” Any way you slice it, guilt for cultural evils usually ends up at the doorstep of irresponsible men.

Creating Family Division by Social Policy

The cultural attitude toward women (another result of Christian men's dereliction!) contributes heavily to the erosion of the culture itself. One thinks immediately of the political and ecclesiastical franchise. When women were given the franchise in both state and church, the perpetrators (many of whom were professed Christians acting on assertedly Biblical “principles”) cut a crucial cord of covenant continuity. When the universal-franchise peddlers altered the federal and church constitutions, they didn't enfranchise women and teenagers so much as they disenfranchised the family. The family acts in its covenant head. It is counted in its covenant head (Mt. 14:21; Mk. 6:44; Lk.9:14). It is both blessed and cursed in its covenant head (Ex.20:5, 6; Jos. 7:24-26). It decides in its covenant head (Mt.27:25). Luring women and teenagers (and, if the trend is not soon reversed, smaller children) to combat their father and covenant head and his God-ordained authority is to strike at the very foundations of God's covenantal order. As nineteenth-century Calvinist luminary Robert L. Dabney notes:

If the Jacobin [radical French revolutionary] theory be true, then women must be allowed access to every male avocation, including [civil] government, including war if she wishes it [!], to suffrage, to every political office, to as absolute freedom from her husband in the marriage relation as she enjoyed before her union to him, and to as absolute control to her own property and earnings as that claimed by the single gentleman, as against her own husband. (R. L. Dabney, Discussions of Robert Lewis Dabney [Edinburgh, 1982], 25)

Universal suffrage is no benign benefit crafted to enhance the state of women. It is rather a pernicious assault on God's covenantal order, one thread of a web of egalitarian fancy calculated to erode the Biblical family. It furnishes wives and children independent authority, the power to strike at covenantal headship and thereby subvert the covenant. It degrades women and children by undermining their proper domicile.

The solution to these phenomena and others—root causes of the present plight—is a revival of Biblical family government, the covenantal order of the Christian family. These are certainly not the only factors, but of one thing we can be certain: Anything that works to subvert God's covenantal family order is evil. To war against that which subverts the Christian family order is to do God's bidding. Subverting all that subverts the family covenant is critical to the rejuvenation of Biblical Faith in all spheres of life.

Neglecting Basic Issues

Because modern conservative theologians and analysts tend to accommodate (often unintentionally) the prevailing egalitarian spirit, they are blinded to a prime source of the failure of the church. The fundamental problem, as always, is sin. But the most fundamental of the fundamental sin is the sin of attempting to alter God's created order. It is to be as God, reordering life according to one's own whims, reason, or experience. The division of man as created in God's image into male and female and their relation and respective callings constitute the central fact of God's creation in this universe: only man (male and female) is created in God's image. It is no coincidence that Satan's tactic to lead the human race into sin and judgment focused on this central sexual fact (1 Tim. 2:13, 14). It is no less astounding that the reputedly perceptive analysts of our modern malaise should so blithely overlook this. The fact is perhaps so obvious that they cannot see it; it has perhaps so pervaded our culture that it has seeped into their very thought processes. Their usual lack of historical perspective forbids an objective perspective from which they can accurately view the error and the solution.

There will be no revival in the church and the wider culture until there is revival in the family. And there will be no revival in the family until there is revival in the understanding and practice of the covenantal order of man and woman.

This is the issue for our times.