Sexual Fidelity Versus Sexual Apostasy

Greetings in our Messiah. “A joke’s a very serious thing,” Charles Churchill observed. Evidently, the Second Council of Constance (1418) thought so, too. One of its ordinances reads, “If any cleric or monk speaks jocular words, such as provoke laughter, let him be anathema.” The beloved Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones followed in this strain by noting (really quite irrelevantly) that the Gospels record no instance of Jesus laughing. Many modern-day Puritans seem intent on maintaining this tradition of humorlessness, however odd its exegetical justification. But some things—especially, it seems, in modern ecclesiocratic circles—must lead one to laugh. Or weep. Witness the recent decision of the Christian Reformed Church, once the flagship denomination among North America Reformed bodies, to allow women in all ecclesiastical offices. The Grand Rapids synodical decision was announced while the PCA General Assembly was in session in Dallas. A PCA apologist for the CRC “progressives,” Rev. Eric Perrin, seemed not to be fully cognizant of the implications of his chosen metaphor when he declared to the Presbyterian officers, “Well, the cows are out of the barn and there’s no getting them back in.” Delegates could be seen rushing to the hallways to bellow with laughter.

Even more humorous, though at the sardonic end of the scale, was the phrasing employed by the CRC to usher in their “new age.” Each passing year makes it more difficult to discern any substantive difference between modern churchmen and the Pharisees so trenchantly condemned by our Lord: “You have a fine way of setting aside the commands of God in order to observe your own traditions” (Mk. 7:9). Ignoring for the moment the utter lack of principle inherent in their decision, its testimonial to the death of CRC courage, its watershed status marking the CRC’s earnest entry into the lost country of America’s “mainline” churches, and ignoring the chaos-insuring manner in which God’s normative and regulative Word will be permanently displaced in the CRC over the next five years (call them at 616-246-0744 for a copy of the decision), we’ll note only that the majority of the delegates treated the issue as if it were merely a church order nicety. Article 3 limited office to “confessing male members. “The synod has capitulated to the feminists in language which would please the most radical Lesbians: they declared the word male to be “inoperative. “Think about that for a moment, will you? I don’t recall a more fitting frame for a feminist victory. An entire denomination declares their maleness to be inoperative. At one time such confessions were kept private.

It would be funny if a joke weren’t such a serious thing. For while the decision is cast as an instance of justice for women, something is for women only as it is such for them as women, and not as abstracted, politicized, pseudo- independent and genderless integers. The glorious Law of the Eternal One is the only standard among men which is unqualifiedly for women. Feminism requires a reality overhaul of the first order. It starts its deconstruction with the core institution of society: marriage. Virtually every decision supposedly for women has been against them (yes, including the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution). Woman was created for man (1 Cor. 11:9). Recognizing women as distinct fro, different from man, as the Law of God does, is the bedrock of her security as well as our collective sanity. After decades of hearing how men and women are the same, we’re now being exposed to a spate of articles and documentaries that boys and girls really are different. Has there ever been a clearer example of God making foolish the wisdom of man, that man would need study-committees to discover what everyone in the world already knows? Civilization requires that societies 1) recognize women as the weaker sex (1 Pet. 3:7), and, as a result, 2) regard and treat women deferentially.

“This is a man’s world,” screeched soulman James Brown, “but it would be nothing without a woman.” Well, not quite. This is God’s world first, yet He has given it to man (Ps. 115:16). But it would be brutal—far more brutal than even it is—without women as women. For this is also a fallen world. Throughout history women have been the single greatest earthly power in civilizing and taming fallen man. Men control the world; women control the men. Their discretion concerning the latter has made for a most pleasant arrangement. Disregard those lying statistics about American women being oppressed because they don’t earn as much as men. The true indicator of economic power is found not in how much is earned by women, but rather how much is spent. But it’s hard to generate sympathy for a gender which controls uncountable billions in consumer dollars, so don’t expect to see a chart on it in the Times.

Woman domesticates man, makes him fit and proper for home use. She does this, not through the direct employment of her native brute force, but by harnessing his. A woman, by being a woman—by being nurturing (a quality which feminists one day deny, the next affirm), by being loving, caring, encouraging, soothing, comforting, stimulating, challenging, by needing—causes man to behave deferentially. Precisely because she is not his equal, man makes decisions with women’s needs in view. Civilizations crumble when women fail to harness men’s sinful urge to dominion through the evil use of force, or their sinful propensity to sexual straying. Men’s power in the world is created by God to be direct, women’s indirect (but not a whit less real). The moment women are societally accepted as equal they cease to be fit subjects for deference and their powerful constraints on men are lost. Enter the State to try to do through ludicrous legislation what only a woman as woman can do. Feminists—have you noticed?—are demanding that the state do what the CRC did: render male inoperative. The price of “equality.”

Moreover, when women demand and are afforded equal treatment as per egalitarianism, really bad times for women follow. They are increasingly used, abused, abandoned and despised. Confusion reigns, love dies. Love’s highest earthly incarnation is discovered in Christian marriage and family life. Love and marriage will share the same status in a society. The stronger the marriages, the more deeply will love pervade a culture. Blest be that God-created tie that binds. Despise marriage and look in vain for many manifestations of Biblical human love in the social arena. We once thought of human love as most splendidly described by the Doors: “Hello, I love you, won’t you tell me your name?” Deep stuff, this. Societal love requires marital love at the core. Marriage is matrimony and that means “mother-mony.” Man needs woman and woman needs marriage, but not, as Dabney wisely pointed out, marriage between “equals.”

“In the correct Biblical theory of marriage it is the wife who is not made full equal in the copartnership, but is made subordinate, in a limited degree, to the affectionate   authority of the husband. Hence, a superficial person may think that women would gain by substituting the infidel Jacobin [egalitarian] theory of marriage for the true one. But this is a huge practical mistake. It will ever be the women who will incur the chief calamities from this instability of the marriage relation. The history of six thousand years has shown the only fortress for the safe defense of the rights, dignity and happiness of women (who is practically the weaker vessel) is scriptural and life- long monogamy. The sure tendency of all lower forms of union is to corrupt the offspring, to barbarize the male sex, and reduce the ‘weaker vessel’ from the honored place of wife to that of a toy of man’s lust, and then the slave of a superior brute force. Will our shallow, conceited age utterly refuse to learn from history? Where else has woman escaped practical enslavement, except in the lands where she is a scriptural wife... The American woman who seeks this liberation... is clutching at a shadow, but letting slip the vital substance... She has her Jacobin freedom, but she has sunk herself from the wife to the concubine” (The Practical Philosophy, 369).

Don’t be Ms. led. Feminism is not for women but is against the family as defined by God and, consequently, against love’s birthplace. Remember the “Let’s-take-the- mommies-away-from-the-baby-monkeys-and-see-what- happens” experiment we were all forced to read about in Psych 101? The same callous hand guides feminism, a hand which disdains such “trivial” occupations as rocking the cradle. Feminism is constitutionally—not just incidentally—anti-child & pro-abortion, anti-love & pro-lust. It cannot be separated from birth control and the delusive dream of consequence-less sex. Feminism needs abortion-on-demand or it fails. Women must control their reproduction if they are to control their marketability as pseudo-men in the workplace. Feminism needs to render maleness inoperative, instead of merely under control. It must redefine everything to redefine something, viz., woman. But you cannot successfully redefine what Almighty God has pre-defined. Like all anti-Biblical revolutionary ideologies, it will die from its own inherent frigidity and sterility. The Christian Reformed Church, for which I still carry great affection, has tragically aided and abetted an agenda intent on destroying the family, destroying the church, destroying love. “I do not permit a woman to teach or have authority over a man,” God says with good reason. Now that the CRC so permits, it will not be long before those who conscientiously oppose this decision will share the fate of Bible-believing Lieut. Commander Kenneth A. Carkhuff, who was forced out of the Navy “for failing to support and carry out Pentagon policy regarding women in combat.” Tolerance as clamored for by liberals is never an ideology but only a device, discarded as soon as their victory is won. In the CRC, they’ve won. I urge my brothers and sisters remaining within her walls to take to heart the advice of Bob Dylan: “You must leave now, take what you need, [what] you think will last. But whatever you wish to keep, you better grab it fast... It’s all over now. Baby Blue.”