Make Patriarchy Great Again

Make Patriarchy Great Again

Jan 22, 2025 | Parents and Family, Western Civilization

I recently read Masculine Christianity by Zachary M. Garris, and in many ways it’s an eye opener, but in many other ways it’s stuff I’ve accepted all my life. Growing up in a traditional Italian family, masculinity was not a problem, but men abusing their masculinity sometimes was. My family, and extended family on both sides, was for the most part nominally Catholic, so the Christianity part never seemed to make much of a difference. I also met my wife to be at Westminster Seminary in Philadelphia, and we could not have been more on the same page in terms of masculine and feminine, and how that plays out in a marriage and family setting. So patriarchy was never something I felt the need to think about; it was invisible because I am a pretty patriarchal guy. Prior to getting married and having to live out patriarchy, I’d been a politically and culturally engaged conservatives for six or seven years, so my radar was up on the evils of feminism, but that obviously wasn’t an issue for my wife and I. Looking back over 37 years, however, I can see how feminism, like the secularism that birthed it, has influenced how we see things. I just didn’t realize how much.

In the late 1980s and 1990s, the term complementarianism started showing up in Christian circles, and I wasn’t sure what to make of it. Clearly, God created men and women to complement one another, but was this how we were to counter feminism? I’m not sure why their arguments didn’t impress me, but it was more confusing than anything. Ok, men and women complement one another. So what. What difference exactly does that make in a relationship? Who calls the shots? It seemed like complementarians didn’t want to deal with such an uncomfortable question in the modern world. When Paul commanded wives to submit to their husbands, what exactly does that mean? I’ve never really had to pull rank on my wife, so does this command have any real practical application unless I have to do that? And does this submission apply anywhere outside of the home? Like in the church? In society? And what does this all say about the nature of men and women, and how feminism has had an impact about how Christians think about and live lives as men and women? Garris answers these questions, and many more, in exhaustive detail.

So after we were married I went on my merry way not thinking about Patriarchy, and I can’t remember in over four decades as a Christian every hearing a sermon in church about it. Then when I embraced postmillennialism in August 2022, I discovered patriarchy was a big deal with this crowd. As in, if we’re going to re-Christianize America and Western culture in general, then patriarchy will be a critical component for that to happen. So in the now overused phraseology thanks to President Trump, we will need to Make Patriarchy Great Again. The question, though, is what exactly that means. There is of course a lot of disagreement among Christians about that, and if we can’t even agree on what it means, how are we to change cultural perceptions on the matter? This is really a question about living in a world that is a result of several hundred years of the Enlightenment and secularism, and what exactly that will all look like. Making it Christian again will not somehow turn the 21st century into the 16th century, any more than we can go back to the world before the industrial revolution. Yet I get the feeling from some of the patriarchy bros that it is exactly what they expect and are convinced needs to happen.

Before I move on, what exactly does patriarchy mean? Pater means father, and patriarchy father rule. Over time it came to mean male rule in general because in Christianity the family is the fundamental relationship in society.

Patriarchy and the Bible
One of the reasons I know Patriarchy is crucial for the re-Christianizing of America and the West is because the destruction of the family was one of the top priorities of Karl Marx; it needed to be abolished in the pursuit of a communist Utopia. What better way to do that than making men and women indistinguishable by destroying sex roles as created by God. Thankfully, the Marxist demons got carried away in the last ten years trying to turn men into women, and boys into girls, and vice versa; for normal people that was a bridge to far. Reality can only be distorted to a certain degree until it slaps the distorters back in the face. Feminism has distorted reality as well, albeit to a lesser and slower degree than wokeness, but the consequences are more widespread, long lasting, and horrific. I’ve known feminism was an enemy for decades, but Garris marshals the practical and biblical evidence like the lawyer he is. Something he does especially well is to allow his opposition to make the best case possible in their own words and arguments, so you won’t find any straw men in this book. It’s also a great reference work to have on your shelf. If you want to know his take on a certain issue or passage it’s in there.

The created nature of man, male and female God created them, is the fundamental issue at stake. Everything in this debate goes back to Genesis 1-3. Let’s see how Garris defines feminism:

Feminism minimizes sex distinctions, with an emphasis on pushing women away from the home and children and into careers just like men. Feminism is the belief that men and women are fundamentally the same and thus interchangeable. The feminist movements have been so successful over the years that Westerners live in a post-feminist society meaning most people today are feminists without the label.

That last point is an indisputable fact, and the salient question is, is this necessarily a bad thing? If you are a Christian committed to Scripture as God’s infallible revelation to man, then yes, it most definitely is a bad thing. That’s before we get to the evidence of the last two hundred years, which shows us without a doubt it is a bad, terrible, horrible thing. Unfortunately, the idea of equality is so rooted in the Western mind as an unqualified good, itself rooted in Christianity’s influence, that any hint men and women are not absolutely equal in every way is tantamount to heresy.

The Origins and Nature of Feminism
Most conservatives and Christians think of the first feminists as benign, what is called “first wave feminism.” These women were supposedly seeking to bring some balance to the distortions and abuse of the patriarchy at the time, but that is not the case. Garris titles his first chapter, “The Rise of Feminism and the Erosion of Masculinity.” The intention of the early feminists may not have been this specifically, but masculinity was the casualty. The two most popular of these early feminists, Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902) and Susan B. Anthony (1820-1906), were egalitarians who were driven by the growing secular progressivism of the 19th century. All of the Reform movements of that era were influenced to some degree by the Christian culture of the time, but they were in fact revolutionary and anti-biblical. Once Descartes and rationalism come to dominate Western intellectual history in the 18th century, secularism and it’s offshoot, feminism were inevitable. Once the Bible was discredited and no longer the center of Western civilization, the jig was up, and the dance really took off in the 19th century with the feminists leading the way.

To understand the pernicious nature of feminism, starting with the “first wave,” it is important to understand why egalitarianism is not only un-biblical, but anti-biblical. The Bible is clearly hierarchical, even if Christians disagree as to the extent. There are conservative Christian egalitarians, but they are a tiny minority. Liberal Christians in the late 19th and early 20th century no longer believed in the supernatural, but instead of just burning the Bible and moving on, decided to turn Christianity into something it is not, and feminism was part of that turning. Fundamental to the vision of feminism is ridding the family of male authority in the home. Take women’s suffrage, which took until 1920 to become law in the passage of the 19th amendment. Garris quotes B. B. Warfield who points out that giving women the right to vote changes the basic unit of society from the family to the individual. In Scripture, the individual is never the basic unit, least of all in the family. The federal headship of Adam representing the entire human race is central to God’s plan of redemption in Christ, and the husband and father representing his family is evident throughout redemptive history. The assumption of early feminists was that women could and should be independent of men, and at the time the Christian assumptions of society limited that; in due course all limits would be gone.

Which brings us to second-wave feminism and the sexual revolution. In this iteration women not only wanted to be independent of men, but to act like men, and technology in the form of a little pill would accommodate that desire. Now instead of being a servant of their God-given biology, women could now like men have consequence free sex, or so they thought. Sex, whether it results in a child or not, is never consequence free, and few people today would deny that, especially for women. Then a decade or so after the pill went mainstream in the early 60s, the Supreme Court decided women murdering their child in the womb was a “constitutional right.” If the pill didn’t work, just dismember the baby, suck it out, and get rid of it. “Problem” solved, but it isn’t. Women who get abortions are emotionally scarred for life, unless they find the mercy and grace of Jesus. But the sexual revolution was a means to the feminists’ real end of getting women out of the home so they would be more like men. Garris writes:

Feminism is the twisted idea that a woman is free when serving an employer but a slave when serving her family.

This was the basic idea of one of the seminal books of this wave of feminism, Betty Friedan’s 1963 book, The Feminine Mystique. To Friedan, women stuck in the home in American middle class suburbia was exactly another form slavery, and women would only be emancipated when they were emancipated from the home. There are further waves of feminism, but the damage had already been done. Feminism had done the bidding of Marx, and while not abolished, the family has been decimated with all its deleterious effects I don’t need to delineate here.

The Inadequate Complementarianism Response
At some point Christians were going to need to respond, and from the beginning they did, but not in any organized fashion. Since feminism had come to dominate liberal mainline denominations in the 20th century, and started making inroads into Evangelical churches, Christian leaders in the 1980s, among them John Piper and Wayne Grudem, felt compelled to respond. Complementarianism was the result. One of the most valuable contributions in the book for me, among many, is Garris’s chapter on this topic, which he titles, “Complementarianism’s Compromise.” That says it all.

I never quite got why I was always uncomfortable with the term, but the word compromise nails it. As a response to the growing influence of feminism not just in the culture, but in the church, it was actually weak. Why? The first problem is the word itself. All those syllables are unnecessary when what they are trying to defend describes the issue at stake, patriarchy. That compromise alone meant they lost the game before it started. Of course men and women are complimentary; even feminists believe that to one degree or another. That’s irrelevant to the real issue at stake: male authority. They emphasized two points: Husbands have the leadership role in the home, and only men can be pastors and elders. But that leaves a whole host of questions unanswered about where male authority begins and ends, which is exactly the issue: does it end? To complementarians it most definitely does, and there the battle is enjoined.

Feminists and egalitarians believe there is no such thing as male authority, in or outside the home, while complementarians believe male authority is reserved just for the home and the church, which some have called “narrow complementarianism.” Unfortunately, even at that they are uncomfortable with the idea of speaking specifically of male rule or authority in the home, preferring to use the word leadership. It’s less offensive. The problem with trying not to be offensive to modern sensibilities is that it’s counter productive. Those you’re trying not to offend won’t be satisfied anyway unless you completely agree with them. You may as well go all the way and proclaim you are defending patriarchy and male authority. At least you’ll get the respect of not being wishy washy or looking for a mollifying “third way,” which doesn’t exist anyway. The problem with this, Garris says, is that it “creates a dichotomy between the church and society at large.” Inside the home and church men and women are who God made them to be, outside they are something different. That’s the conclusion one has to come to.

The entire chapter is necessary reading for those struggling with these issues, but the bottom line is what God made man and woman to be. In other words, what is the nature of man and woman, and does that affect the gender roles they engage in, both inside the home and church, and in society? If the nature of man and woman are fundamentally different which affects their roles, how is limiting these differences to just the home and church not arbitrary? That’s the question I asked.

Rooting Gender Roles in Nature
I often utilize my old buddy Aristotle when discussing things like this because of his genius in discussing the concept of telos, which means purpose in Greek. He came up with four reasons for why things exist, which he called four causes. We can better understand why the nature of man and woman is important if we understand Aristotle’s four causes. In layman’s terms as I understand them:

  1. Formal Cause-The concept of the thing in the mind, say a table.
  2. Material Cause-The stuff out of which the table is made.
  3. Efficient Cause-The person making the table.
  4. Final Cause-The purpose, or telos, for which the table was made, e.g., to put things on.

In Genesis 1 we learn that God made each thing “according to their kind.” We use the phrase of comparison apples and oranges because those are two different kind of things, so it makes no sense to compare something if they are fundamentally different as if they were not. That is the issue biblically with men and women, they are of two fundamentally different kind of man, male and female. This means the nature of the differences are built into their being, so they are ontological differences. This is the rub, and something we can’t explain away if we’re Christians and we believe God made human beings with a final cause, a specific purpose consistent with their natures. As Garris puts it:

God’s laws regarding men and women reflect their natures, as He did not give divine commands detached from His design to their entire being. A man is to exercise authority because God wired him to exercise authority, and a woman is to submit because God wired her to submit.

For feminists and egalitarians them’s fightin’ words, while for complementarians them’s embarrassing words. They do generally believe this, albeit narrowly, but they aren’t up for the fight so they message with words like “leadership” in place of authority.

Given this is the case, it doesn’t surprise us that they limit the natures of men and women to family and church. Outside of that I guess their natures don’t apply. This I now realize is why I’ve always been uncomfortable or confused by complementarianism. Reality as God made it is hierarchical, and men were created and designed to exercise authority and rule, and women were not. If we are Christians and take the Bible seriously as God’s revelation, I don’t see how we come to any other conclusion. As I said above, though, we are not going back to the 16th century. The secular feminist cat has been let out of the bag for 200 years, and what this looks like going forward in a modern context is hard to predict. We obviously have to start with our own homes and churches, and these truths must be proclaimed and taught with boldness from pulpits throughout the land. God only blesses the nation when the four causes line up with his will, and right now the American family needs it desperately.

 

 

 

 

 

Buchanan, Conservative Pessimism, and the Resurrection of the West

Buchanan, Conservative Pessimism, and the Resurrection of the West

Jan 15, 2025 | America, Uncategorized

I recently finished Pat Buchanan’s, The Death of the West, and it’s been a fascinating experience reading Buchanan’s thoughts about the dying West with twenty-plus years in the rearview mirror. The book was published in 2002, and the Bush administration was in its early days. Given few of us are Bush fans anymore, you’ll be happy to know he was Hitler too. Of course the left now loves him, and the entire Bush-Cheney cabal, because the Uniparty RINOs are just Democrats in sheep’s clothing. The world Buchanan describes, the 90s and turn-of-the-century America, has all the dynamics of the 2020s, with some of the same faces and a few players no longer around, but all playing the same old game. This was before Obama came on the stage to, “fundamentally transform the United States of America,” which turned out to be leftist hubris on steroids. And remember, as the ancient Greeks taught us, hubris always leads to nemesis.

We conservatives, however, aren’t in danger of hubris because given we’ve been consistently losing for over half a century, pessimism is our gig. Buchanan strongly tends in that direction as well. For the time, however, he was appropriately pessimistic about the chances of the West, and specifically America, escaping the probable death coming upon it from the ascendence of the Marxist left. His subtitle says what will cause its demise, and it may sound familiar: “How Dying populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization.” Even for the most pessimistic conservative in the early 2000s, it would have been difficult to fathom the woke destruction heaped on America during the Biden administration, effectively Obama’s third term. What many pessimists failed to grasp is how the left’s success, spiking the football and going into woke overdrive, hubris, was key to their inevitable demise, the judgment of Nemesis. Americans saw something deeply unattractive and harmful in the woke ideology applied on a national level. No lies could paint over the destructive consequences inherent in leftist, culturally Marxist ideology.

Nobody could have predicted this was how the story would play out, America living through the worst woke nightmare until billionaire real estate mogul and reality TV star Donald Trump dashed in to save the day. If you would have told conservatives in the Bush years this was how God was going to save America, or at least give it a chance to be re-founded on true constitutional principles, you would have been laughed out of polite society. Many people of a conservative religious bent like me despised Donald Trump. I hated everything I thought he stood for. It took me a while to believe his candidacy wasn’t a joke, just some publicity stunt. Surely, Donald Trump is not a serious man, right? I’ll never forget the first debate with all 16 candidates in the 2016 Republican Primary when Trump ripped Bush and the Iraq War. It made me physically uncomfortable. You just don’t do that! Of course as we know now, there is a lot Trump does you just don’t do.

His entire first term, ending in the stolen election and J6, perfectly played into the pessimistic conservative perspective on the current culture war, including mine. From 1980 and Reagan’s election to January 6, 2021, I was a good little movement conservative, always living with a low grade pessimism as one might live with a low grade fever. You’re not sick but you don’t feel quite right. As a Christian conservative I’d gotten used to losing, to seeing the conservative movement, which I now affectionately call Con Inc., as an enabler of liberalism. A long time ago Con Inc. had stopped living up to Buckley’s ringing declaration when he founded National Review in 1955, to stand athwart history yelling, STOP!!! Over time it turned into, please slow down. The state got bigger and more intrusive, the culture more hostile to Christianity and coarse, and it seemed like that was just the way things would always be, a cultural Berlin Wall that would never come down.

God and the Resurrection of the West
Pat Buchanan may tend to pessimism, but he is not a doomer. I use that word to label the complainers I come across who are always predicting impending doom. They make Chicken Little look like Joel Osteen preaching your best life now. For them, the worst is yet to come. You might get that feeling reading Buchanan, but I’m happy to say his Catholic faith and Christian worldview keeps him from embracing his inner doomer. Toward the end of the book he says:

While none of us may live to see the promised land, victory is assured. For we have it on the highest authority that truth crushed shall rise again.

That is because He who is The Truth became a man in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, died on a Roman cross to redeem the world from the curse of sin, and rose again in victory over death. That is why truth will always ultimately prevail because truth is a person, God himself who created everything, is the ground of everything, and ultimately in control of everything. There are plenty of ups and downs, zigs and zags, two steps forward, three back, but ultimately the direction of history and ultimate destination are in His hands. This Christian view of history has implications for how we interpret events unfolding in front of us. My perceptions changing of our current moment in history as I fully embraced this are a good example of how this works. During Trump’s first term, God was slowly building into me something I didn’t realize until the stolen election, and especially J6, that God was giving us an opportunity to win in what seemed like perpetual losing. As the Sovereign Lord of history He can do that. I no longer saw losing because He was giving us an opportunity in the circumstances to win.

My book Going Back to Find the Way Forward was the result of this budding awareness. Up until Trump’s apparent ignominious end in January 2021, all I could see in losing was, well, losing. Then after the election by God’s grace and providence I found Steve Bannon’s War Room, back then on YouTube. As I always say, he got me out of the fetal position, and to mix metaphors talked me off the ledge. Bannon, a Catholic, taught me something I should have known all along, but my pessimism blinded me to: God has given us agency, meaning we can change things, and all it takes is, action, action, action! You can’t get much more biblical than that! Bannon is a nationalist populist, as am I now, adding the words Christian conservative to the description. Bannon is the leader of what he calls “The Grassroots Movement.”

For the four years after the stolen election, he would have average, every day Americans on his show exercising their agency to change things, people who take seriously their responsibility of living in a representative republic of “We the people.” Such activists are the greatest fear of the establishment, America’s cultural and political elite, left or right. They represent Americans in general who will not bow the knee to the supposed “experts.” How dare these people know what’s best for their own lives! Which brings us to the historical significance of Trump.

Trump as the Pivot Point in the Resurrection of the West
This would not have been on my bingo card prior to Trump coming down the escalator. It’s difficult, if not impossible, to imagine overcoming conservative inertia and the penchant for losing without Trump. Bannon calls them the controlled opposition, and that’s exactly what they are. As I said above, the conservative movement is an enabler of liberalism, but it’s worse than that. I’ve come to call them liberals in skirts. They are not conservative in any sense of the term, unless you say their job is conserving the liberal, progressive, statist gains of the last hundred plus years. The reason is because of something we now call the “post-World War II consensus” (PWC), a contentious phrase embraced by liberals, including good “conservatives” and despised by populist-nationalists. Against true conservatism, PWC is secularist, globalist, and corporatist. Throw in perpetual war and you have the perfect recipe for a culture war against America and anything truly conservative.

 

This elite dynamic is the way God ingeniously utilized Trump to undermine it. It’s incredible when you look back on how it all played out, and is still playing out. It wasn’t Trump, mind you, but the reaction to Trump that changed everything. The entire Uniparty elite was exposed for the grift it was. I was initially going to title the book, “Trump the Great Revealer” because that’s exactly what God has used him to do, to reveal the rot and spiritual darkness at the heart of American cultural and political life. Being a developer and builder, Trump turned out to be the guy who pulled the siding off the societal house revealing teaming throngs of termites underneath. God always seems to use unlikely people, as a read through redemptive history in the Bible makes abundantly clear, primarily to make it known: “’Not by might nor by power, but by my Spirit’ says the Lord Almighty’” (Zech. 4:6). He is the Sovereign Lord of history. This applies not only to the redemptive history revealed in Scripture, but to all history, which is redemptive, God’s plans working in time and among people to His ultimate glorious ends. God has used this most unlikely man to spark a Great Awakening.

This awakening will be nothing like the Great Awakenings of the past, or like the Billy Graham revivals of the 20th century with stadiums full of people walking down the isle to “Just as I Am.” It is happening on multiple levels, and is thus several great awakenings, not just in people’s religious lives. It is cultural, political, economic, health, as well as spiritual. It’s all spiritual anyway because the Christian faith and view of reality is all encompassing, as is any other faith be it secularism, Marxism-Communism, Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism, Paganism, Animism, whatever. The benefit of Christianity over the others is that it happens to be the ultimate truth about the nature of reality, and true human flourishing and blessing can only happen living according to that reality.

Looking at the political angle because that’s where God used Trump the Trigger, and as the pivot point to resurrect it, the perspective change from Con Inc. to Trump was night and day for me. The Uniparty was given its name because most Republicans were effectively Democrats, and “the establishment” has one overarching goal: sustaining their own power. That’s why many Republicans would talk a good game, get our votes and hopes up, and then inevitably cave to Democrats. Trump would have none of that. When he said during his first election we would win so much we would get tired of winning, that was truly something new under the sun for conservatives. Was winning that much even allowed?

Clear and Present Opportunities
If it wasn’t for Trump and his willingness to stand against the entire Uniparty establishment in Washington, it’s likely Buchanan’s pessimism about the West would likely have proved correct. Circa 2002, he laid out four “clear and present dangers” that will inevitably bring death if they are not addressed. Trump was the one God raised up to turn these threats into opportunities and give us a realistic chance of victory over three of them.

  1. Dying population.
  2. Mass immigration of people of different colors, creeds, and culture changing the character of the West forever.
  3. The rise to dominance of an anti-Western culture in the West, deeply hostile to its religions, traditions, and morality, or cultural Marxism, what we now call woke.
  4. The breakup of nations and the defection of ruling elites to a world government, thus the end of nations, or globalism.

The only thing Trump can’t do is to make people have more babies. That gets to the heart of the matter. As Buchanan says, the culture war is ultimately a religious war, and religious people have more babies than secular people. Christians are going to have to save the West from demographic doom by once again being obedient to God’s command to be fruitful and multiply.

As for 2-4, what happened since Trump came down the escalator and the left went crazy is something Buchanan could not have predicted then. In God’s providence, allowing the election to be stolen was the brilliant strategy of providence, God making it the fundamental factor in the process of exposing the left. With Trump apparently finally vanquished, especially after the deep state PSYOP of J6 when Trump and all of MAGA were finally discredited, they could now get on with Obama’s “fundamental transformation of America.” It turns out Americans are not so fond of Marxist fundamental transformations. And I don’t use the word Marxist frivolously. In the               , Marx and Engles identify four enemies of communism that must be abolished, and they perfectly align with the four “clear and present dangers” laid out by Buchanan. That is not a coincidence. They are:

  1. Private property
  2. The family
  3. The nation-state
  4. Religion, i.e., Christianity

Everything the Democrat Party of Obama-Biden stands for, Marx would applaud because their policies effectively abolish all four of these. The sexual revolution starting in the 60s effectively abolished the family and contributes to dying populations and demographic apocalypse. Again, Christians will have to lead the way in obedience to God’s command to be fruitful and multiply.

When Biden took office, he immediately opened the boarder which means the end of the nation-state, and effectively globalism. So called “free trade” and the dominance of major corporations is an assault on private property, as is global finance and fiat currency. Lastly, woke went into overdrive which is a direct assault on Christianity and the family, and you have the perfect Marxist storm for the death of the West. But therein lay our opportunity for those with eyes to see. The woke globalists were building a fragile papier-mâché Berlin Wall culture that would come tumbling down as the lies were being exposed. Everything the left does, however, is built on lies, and an empire of lies cannot stand. With Trump as enemy number one, the left completely lost their minds and normal Americans woke up and said we’ve had enough. Trump’s “loss” in 2020 was the best thing that could have happened to America and the West.

Not only have Americans, as Steve Bannon says, had a belly full of it, but Trump and the entire MAGA movement have learned a lot in these last four years. The entire apparatus of the administrative deep state is now exposed, and Trump has a mandate to take it on. The dream team he’s assembling will take no prisoners, but as we’ve seen, the establishment will not be handing out the welcome mat for the dissolution of their power. It will be hand-to-hand combat, sometimes like World War I trench warfare, an inch at a time, but the cover of darkness is no longer available to the swamp. Limiting the size and scope of government might for the first time in my life be a real possibility, but MAGA and true conservatives must be persistent, determined, and downright belligerent at times to make sure the ball moves forward, even if it’s two yards and a cloud of dust.

What’s most exciting for me is that Christianity is once again being seem as a positive force for human flourishing. This is especially true among the youngest generation who moved in a conservative direction in a most unexpected way in the election. Young people just don’t do that because, well, they’re young and stupid, and that’s what you do when you’re young. Not this generation. They’ve lived with the lies of secularism, grown up with woke and Covid, and they want nothing to do with it. It’s actually cool for the first time in my life for young people to be conservative! And Christians are able to be “loud and proud” about their faith, instead of homosexuals or feminists about their perversions. The Great Awakening is happening, and it is a thrilling time to be alive. And we’re only just getting started.

 

Peter Walking on Water – You Can Too!

Peter Walking on Water – You Can Too!

Jan 8, 2025 | Theology

Well, maybe not actual water, but in Christ we can do the seemingly impossible in not giving way to fear and doubt because circumstances are greater than our Savior God. The gospel story of Peter walking on water has been significant for my life in many ways. There are several theological and practical takeaways, and I’ve never written anything extensively about it, so here are some thoughts on the gold to be mined from this amazing story.

I want to start with the most important question about this event: Did it really happen? If it didn’t actually happen, who cares what kind of spiritual or practical lessons we might learn from it. If it didn’t happen, it’s a lie, and I’m not interested. As I say, if the Bible isn’t true, throw it in the trash. I have more important things to do than waste my time on invented stories claiming they are true. Yet, all the world’s religions want a piece of Jesus even while they reject the supernatural Creator God Jesus of the Bible. For them it’s a pick and choose Jesus. They want nothing to do with actual Jesus of the Bible, Israel’s Messiah and the Savior of the World, and the one who not only can walk on water, but created it! So, first let’s establish the historical nature of the event portrayed in the gospels. To do that, I will use an argument I develop in my book, Uninvented: You just can’t make this stuff up!

Jesus’ Special Relationship to Water and Nature
Nothing is more absurd to the skeptic than Jesus walking on water or stilling a storm just by his command. Impossible, so they tell us. However, the way in which these stories are told is powerful evidence for their veracity. Before we get to Peter, we’ll look at the power of Jesus’ word over creation, told in Matthew (8), Mark (4), and Luke (8). The details are similar in each telling. Jesus gets into a boat with his disciples and says they are going to the other side of the lake (of Galilee). Obviously exhausted, Jesus falls asleep while a furious storm comes up. Terrified, the disciples wake him and plead with him to save them. Jesus’ reply as Matthew reports it is priceless:

26 He replied, “You of little faith, why are you so afraid?” Then he got up and rebuked the winds and the waves, and it was completely calm.

Are you kidding me? What kind of question is that! How could they not be afraid? A raging storm on a dark night in the middle of a large body of water on a small boat is the perfect recipe for terror. But Jesus is as cool as a cucumber. Mark reports another question they ask in the midst of the squall: “Teacher, don’t you care if we drown?” That’s almost funny. Didn’t Jesus say before they even got into the boat, “Let’s go over to the other side of the lake”? Yes, in fact he did. He didn’t say, we’re going to the middle of the lake to drown. I guess when Jesus says something, he means it, storm or no storm. After the storm is calmed, the disciples’ response is even more priceless than before:

They were terrified and asked each other, “Who is this? Even the wind and the waves obey him!”

So let me get this right. They are terrified during the storm when they think they’re going to die, and now they’re terrified of the guy who saved their lives? The answer to their question, and its implications, must have been troubling to say the least. The portrayal of the story has verisimilitude in spades, it reads real, not at all like mere human fiction.

As I said, if this is a made up story, it’s a lie, and in this case we would have roughly a dozen liars. Then, are we to believe they all made it up, and continued to stick to the story even when they all knew it wasn’t true? We only have two choices, either it happened, or it didn’t. And it’s an awfully odd story to make up if it didn’t really happen. Imagine them getting to the other side of the lake and telling people what happened. They probably didn’t, at least initially. It’s too preposterous! They hardly believed it themselves. There is also nothing comparable in Israel’s history. Even when Elijah called down fire from heaven in his encounter with the prophets of Baal (I Kings 18), he prayed to the Lord, and it was the Lord who did it, not Elijah. Here, Jesus himself is exerting power over nature by his mere word. God does such things, not man, yet here was a man doing it. No wonder they were freaking out. It made no sense! And to top it off, there was no expectation of the long-awaited Messiah having such power, none.

If this isn’t crazy enough, imagine making up the story about Jesus and Peter walking on water (Matt. 14, Mark 6, and John 6). There is nothing remotely like this in biblical history. Instead of Jesus getting in the boat with the disciples this time, he has them get in, and says he’ll meet them on the other side. This has the same problem as the previous episode on the lake for those who deny it happened; it’s a very strange thing to make up. Sometime after three in the morning on a wave-tossed and windy lake, the disciples see what they take as a ghost walking on the water, and it terrifies them. Who wouldn’t be? They respond like real people encountering something unimaginable. Jesus tells them not to be afraid, it is him. In Matthew’s account, impetuous Peter wants a little proof that it is in fact Jesus, so he asks Jesus to tell him to walk out to him on the water. Bad idea. As soon as he sees the wind and waves, he starts to sink. Terrified, Peter shouts, “Lord, save me!” Jesus’ response fits a realistic narrative perfectly:

31 Immediately Jesus reached out his hand and caught him. “You of little faith,” he said, “why did you doubt?”

Again, what kind of question is that! Well, Jesus, because, you know, maybe people just don’t walk on water? That reads so real. Then, Matthew writes something utterly un-Jewish: “those who were in boat worshiped him, saying, ‘Truly you are the Son of God.’” Worshiping a man, any man, even if he walks on water, is blasphemy. Mark has a little different take, saying that even though they were amazed, they really hadn’t understood. Jesus had just previously fed more than five thousand people with a few loaves, but “they had not understood.” Both accounts reflect perfect human ambivalence to something so inconceivable. I’ll quote Jewish Christian biblical scholar Alfred Edersheim (1825-1889) as to why it takes more faith to believe this is made up, than it having actually happened:

Not only would the originations of this narrative . . . be utterly unaccountable—neither meeting Jewish expectancy, nor yet supposed Old Testament precedent—but, if legend it be, it seems purposeless and irrational. Moreover, there is this noticeable about it, as about so many of the records of the miraculous in the New Testament, that the writers by no means disguise from themselves or their readers the obvious difficulties involved.

In other words, it doesn’t read at all like legend or myth because there is no point to it or no precedent for it in Jewish history. The disciples are as shocked by it all as anyone would be encountering something so seemingly impossible. We must remember as we read the Bible, what we know as modern fiction didn’t exist in the ancient world. The gospel writers had no category in their minds of trying to write something that didn’t happen to try to make it look real.

As I also argue in my book, the burden of proof is on those who claim the story isn’t real and just made up. The only reason they can give for claiming this comes from an anti-supernatural bias they bring to the text. In logic it’s called begging the question, or assuming the premise before they get to the conclusion. In this case, miracles can’t happen, these are miracles, therefore, these events didn’t happen. Sorry, that won’t work because it’s pure bias. Having established the historicity of the events, let’s look at the theological implications.

Jesus is God: The Doctrine of Christology
Christology is simply the study of who Jesus as the Christ was, and is. We learn two things about Jesus in these stories. The first is his humanity. We see this in his falling asleep while they are in the boat on the lake; even while the storm is raging he’s still asleep and the disciples have to wake him up. Just prior to this Jesus had fed the five thousand with a few loaves and fishes, and had spent the entire day healing the sick. Most orthodox Christians probably tend to overemphasize the divine Jesus at the expense of the human Jesus, while liberal types do the opposite. The liberal Jesus is pretty much human. The testimony of Scripture and the entire history of the church, however, declares Jesus is both fully God and fully man, something, remember, utterly inconceivable to obsessively monotheistic Jews at the time, or any time.

Christology was a struggle for the church for several hundred years. All the first Christians were Jews, so a man who proclaims by his words and deeds he is God wouldn’t compute. In fact, as we see in the gospels, his claim to divinity was why he was put to death. When the high priest asked Jesus after he was arrested to tell them if he was “the Messiah, the Son of God,” his affirmation of equality with God leaves no doubt, and the high priests’ response confirms it:

65 Then the high priest tore his clothes and said, “He has spoken blasphemy! Why do we need any more witnesses? Look, now you have heard the blasphemy. 66 What do you think?”

And they all agreed, Jesus was worthy of death.

We see how difficult this was for Jews to accept in the story of doubting Thomas, who refused to believe Jesus had come back from the dead. As he said:

 “Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe.”

Did he think Mary and the others were lying or delusional? It’s more likely he didn’t know what to think. Not being a modern post-Enlightenment person who automatically disbelieves in miracles, it wasn’t that Thomas couldn’t believe Jesus came back from the dead. After all, he’d seen him bring Lazarus back to life after he’d been dead four days. I think, rather, it was Thomas as a Jew finding it impossible to believe the supposed Messiah would die on a Roman cross, hung on a tree enduring God’s curse. All Jews knew this passage in Deuteronomy 21:23:

his body shall not remain all night on the tree, but you shall bury him the same day, for a hanged man is cursed by God. You shall not defile your land that the LORD your God is giving you for an inheritance.

You can see why the disciples so quickly wanted to get Jesus off the cross before the Sabbath started. Knowing this is what makes Thomas’s declaration after he encountered the risen Jesus and saw Jesus’ wounds so Christologically powerful:

28 Thomas said to him, “My Lord and my God!”

Yet for hundreds of years heresies would arise denying exactly this, that Jesus wasn’t only just a god, but The God, Yahweh himself, Israel’s covenant making Creator God. This controversy was finally put to rest at the council of Nicaea in 325 from which we get the ringing declaration of the Triune God. Jesus was fully God and fully man, a theological fact upon which our salvation from sin depends.

What Peter Walking on Water Teaches Christians About Faith
Before I get to the lessons, one comment on the word faith. We tend to use it in a non-biblical way to mean intellectual assent. I believe in something, have faith, because I’ve been given logical reasons to do so. I intellectually assent to such and such because I believe it. However, faith in the biblical sense is a synonym for trust. This includes using our intellects, our minds, but so much more. The first dictionary definition I came across defines trust well:

assured reliance on the character, ability, strength, or truth of someone or something, one in which confidence is placed

We can immediately see the focus of trust isn’t me or so much what I believe, but the person or thing I’m believing in, the one or thing in which I place my trust. This is perfect for our story, but more importantly, trust not only includes our mental faculties, but our entire being, our emotions and will as well. My favorite verse about trust in the Bible is Isaiah 26:3, short and sweet:

You will keep in perfect peace him whose mind is steadfast because he trusts in you.

We don’t have perfect peace, we don’t trust. This means no worry, fear, anxiety or doubt. I repent every morning for my worry, fear, anxiety, and doubt because I’m a sinner, and sinners sin. It’s a battle to attain perfect peace, and always just beyond our grasp. Think of it like Peter walking on the water. He’s actually pulling it off. Notice carefully what is making the impossible possible:

Then Peter got down out of the boat, walked on the water and came toward Jesus. 30 But when he saw the wind, he was afraid and, beginning to sink, cried out, “Lord, save me!”

The contrast says it all. For those few seconds he was obviously looking at Jesus and almost didn’t notice the tempest raging about him. The moment he does, fear kicks in, and he starts sinking. Fear, of course, was a perfectly reasonable response, and once he took his eyes off Jesus fear, and thus sinking, is inevitable.

This is the perfect metaphor for the Christian life because of Jesus’s response. It takes us back to Christology, and our own ever present sinful inclinations to live by sight, and not by trust. When Jesus says to peter, “You of little faith, why are you so afraid?” you almost have to laugh? I can imagine Peter thinking in that moment if thought was even possible, “What, are you kidding me? How in the world could I not be afraid? Walking on water is impossible!” Well, if Jesus really was God, Creator of the universe, and all the physical laws of the universe are under his control, then fear was in fact not warranted at all. Jesus seems to be saying, if you would just trust me, you wouldn’t have even seen the wind and the waves, only me, and you would have been able to do the impossible without fear.

We know however, in real life in a fallen world in a fallen body among fallen people it doesn’t work that way. Lack of trust is built into the proverbial sinful human cake. The faith-trust dynamic, and thus struggle, is perfectly captured by Blaise Pascal in his description of human nature:

What kind of freak is man? What a novelty he is, how absurd he is, how chaotic and what a mass of contradictions, and yet what a prodigy! He is judge of all things, yet a feeble worm. He is repository of truth, and yet sinks into such doubt and error. He is the glory and the scum of the universe!

Therein lies the battle of trust. The question for us is, which of these will win in the battle of daily life. This reminds me of the story in Mark 9 when a man brings his son who is often violently possessed by demons, and the man pleads with Jesus to help them. Jesus replied, “all things are possible for those who believe.”   In what must have been a heart wrenching scene, the father responds:

24 Immediately the father of the child cried out and said with tears, “Lord, I believe; help my unbelief!”

The word for belief in Greek is pisteuó-πιστεύω, or trust. This is my daily prayer because I fail continually, “Lord, help my lack of trust!”

Thankfully, sanctification is real because Jesus died, as the hymn rightly says, “to make men holy.” This isn’t only positionally before the Father, justification, but actually changes who we are, what we think and what we do. That’s why Paul in I Corinthians 1:30 shares with us these comforting truths:

And because of him you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption.

When we struggle to trust Him, so experience the seemingly ever elusive perfect peace, we must remember to keep our eyes stubbornly focused on Jesus and do our best to ignore the wind and the waves. We just might find ourselves walking on water, even if only for a fleeting moment, until the next time.

 

Parables of the Mustard Seed and the Leaven: Did Jesus Really Mean It?

Parables of the Mustard Seed and the Leaven: Did Jesus Really Mean It?

Jan 2, 2025 | The Gospel

Ever since, shockingly to me, I embraced postmillennialism in August 2022 and learned about these parables of Jesus in Matthew 13 (also Mark 3, Luke 13), I’ve wondered how people can deny the message he was conveying. Or how they can interpret it to be saying something different than what Jesus was clearly saying. For almost 44 years I never gave the parables a thought, nor did any pastor of any church we ever attended address it that I can remember. The reason is because of the eschatological assumptions I used to hold about the kingdom, which are completely different than what I now believe. I’ll deal with that in more detail below, but let’s first take a look at the parables.

 31 He told them another parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed, which a man took and planted in his field. 32 Though it is the smallest of all seeds, yet when it grows, it is the largest of garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds come and perch in its branches.”

33 He told them another parable. “The kingdom of heaven is like leaven that a woman took and hid in three measures of flour, till it was all leavened.”

First we notice he is speaking about the kingdom of heaven, which is equivalent in the other gospels to the Kingdom of God. The word kingdom is a key concept in gospels if we’re to understand the meaning of what Jesus is conveying in the parables. The word is used 116 times in the Synoptic gospels, so on frequency alone God has revealed it to us as a critical concept for what he is doing in the world. In fact, when John the Baptist and Jesus are announcing his ministry, they use identical words: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.”

The key inference from the word kingdom, and everyone would have understood this in the ancient world, is that a kingdom assumed a king who is ruling, who calls the shots. The king who ruled the world prior to Jesus’ coming wasn’t God, but Satan, the god of this fallen world. We learn this when Jesus is tempted by Satan in the wilderness (Matt. 4):

8 Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor. 9 “All this I will give you,” he said, “if you will bow down and worship me.”

The kingdoms of the world belonged to Satan, so he was their king and ruler, and the one who had the authority to hand them over to Jesus. By rejecting his offer, Jesus was going to earn his kingship and the power to rule the world, not have it given to him by the deceiver. Post resurrection and ascension, the Lord still allows Satan a measure of influence, in case that’s not clear enough from all the misery and suffering in the world. Paul calls Satan “the god of this age” (2 Cor. 4:4), and “the ruler of the kingdom of the air” (Eph. 2:2). The Apostle John tells us “the whole world is under the control of the evil one” (I John 5:19), and he also makes a strong contrast between “everything in the world,” and those who do the will of God (I John 2:15-17). The difference after Christ is that Satan and his kingdom are now on the defensive, and the gates of his Satanic kingdom are no match for the onslaught of the church, Christ’s body on earth.

The Kingdom and the Church
When God created the world, he appointed man in the person of Adam, and eventually his progeny, to rule it. Man is and would always be God’s vice regent, a person who acts in the place of a ruler, governor, or sovereign. When man rebelled he lost this authority, and it transferred over to Satan, man became his vice regent instead of God’s. Now man had a choice, and as history teaches it would always be the wrong one. As Dylan sang, “You gotta serve somebody. It may be the devil or it may be the Lord, but you gotta serve somebody.”

Prior to God calling Abram and creating a new people of His own to take back the world, the default choice of man was always the devil. For all intents and purposes, the devil had complete carte blanche in the world. Until, that is, God chose one single solitary man out of every other person on the face of the earth. With Abram He begin the process of creating a people specifically to engage the cosmic battle of these dueling kingdoms on earth. Since God is never in a hurry it would take 2000 years to fully implement the beginning of the plan in the coming of Himself in the person of his Son. As Shakespeare said, past is prologue, or as Jesus put it in Luke 24, the entire old testament is about him.

The big mistake I made until embracing postmillennialism is that I conflated the kingdom with the church. I’ve written about that here so I won’t repeat the argument fully, but my confusion was that I limited God’s kingdom work pretty much to just the church. It seemed clear to me the work of God in the kingdom was a spiritual work, so it clearly couldn’t apply to non-Christians and all they do in this fallen world. The problem with this is dualism, as in there are two, non-intersecting realities, the material/fallen and the spiritual/redeemed. The world is the former and the church is the latter, and never the two shall meet! This, however, is not the perspective of Jesus and the Apostles and New Testament. There is no spiritual/eternal-material/temporal distinction because all things are spiritual and eternal. As Paul says:

Therefore, my dear brothers, stand firm. Let nothing move you. Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord, because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain (I Cor. 15:58).

Pre post-mill I would have read “labor in the Lord” to mean the “spiritual” work, you know, doing evangelism, church, Bible study, fellowship with other Christians, etc. I would not tend to view my “labor in the Lord” as what I do for a living five days a week, or taking care of my house, or being involved in local politics, etc. That’s this life stuff, not the church, so it’s not kingdom work. As I say in my post about this, there is irony in my conflation because since I was probably 20 and exposed to Francis Shaeffer, I’ve always been a Christian worldview guy, always applying my Christian faith to all of life as best I could, but still the conflation, the bifurcation, the dualism persisted, even if at a subconscious level. I’m sure I could not have made the argument they were the same in any coherent way because I didn’t really think much about it at all. It was an assumption I held without really knowing it, which means it was the default perspective of all the Christianity I’d been exposed to for over four decades.

The Nature of the Kingdom
If the kingdom of God is not the church, then what is it? It is anywhere on earth where Christ rules, and that means in and through and for God’s people, so anything they do unto the Lord is advancing God’s kingdom and extending Christ’s reign. It is Christ’s body and all its parts extending its influence throughout the world. In other words, the kingdom includes the church and anything God’s people do outside of the functions of the church. This opens up the entire world as our field of dreams, every square inch being exposed to Christ’s rule to push back the fall “as far as the curse is found.” Those who are not Christians can then participate in the kingdom of God by experiencing the blessings promised Abraham and the Patriarchs, that through them all the nations of the world would be blessed. There are many passages of Scripture that point forward to God’s kingdom victory, but one that comes to mind is Habakkuk 2:14:

For the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord
as the waters cover the sea.

That’s a lot of knowledge! Notice the metaphor leaves room for earth, so the prophet is not referring to the consummated state when God redeems the entire world, as I used to assume, but here now in this fallen world among fallen people living in fallen bodies. After the fall, God said to Adam and Eve the seed of the woman, the Messiah, would strike the serpent’s head, while the serpent would strike his heal. While the kingdom brought to earth by Jesus will always be one of conflict, the damage we can do to the serpent is far greater, thus victory in Jesus, the advancing of his kingdom rule, was always part of the plan. The plan was never to save people to go to heaven when they die to escape this horrible fallen world, but to bring heaven to earth. The Lord himself taught us to pray after we hallow God’s name, “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven.” The direction of the Christian life and the church’s mission is all heaven to earth, not earth to heaven. Ever since Pietism and dispensationalism effectively took over the Evangelical church in the 19th century, we’ve gotten this exactly backward. Our hope is Christ conquering the final enemy, death (I Cor. 15:25), and our resurrection from the dead to in inhabit this renewed and redeemed creation, not our souls going to heaven when we die.

The justification for our hope, our confidence, and indeed our optimism, is not us! This is critical to understand because the critics of postmillennialism always get this wrong, claiming we think it is primarily because of our efforts that God’s kingdom is advanced. Yes, without our efforts nothing happens, but the only reason things happen is because of the cosmic authority over God’s creation Christ earned by his death and resurrection. Jesus told the Apostles that “All authority in heaven and earth had been given to him, therefore go.” Paul confirms this in Ephesians 1, telling us Christ was exalted to the right hand of God at his ascension into a position “far above all rule and authority, power and dominion, and every name that can be named.” We see a prediction of the ascension and its meaning 500 years before Christ in Daniel 7:

13 “In my vision at night I looked, and there before me was one like a son of man, coming with the clouds of heaven. He approached the Ancient of Days and was led into his presence. 14 He was given authority, glory and sovereign power; all nations and peoples of every language worshiped him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion that will not pass away, and his kingdom is one that will never be destroyed.

For most of my Christian life until just a couple years ago, August of 2022 to be exact, I believed this authority and dominion given to Christ was only for his people and church in this life, and then would be fully realized once he returned to judge the living and the dead and apply his saving work for all of creation. Now I realize this dominion, his kingdom rule, the “new heavens and new earth” promised in Isaiah 65, started at his first coming.  Isaiah’s prophecy in chapter 9 beautifully tells us the nature of this kingdom when this child is born and this son is given:

2 The people walking in darkness
have seen a great light;
on those living in the land of deep darkness
a light has dawned.

The Apostle John tells us who this light is in the first chapter of his gospel:

9 The true light that gives light to everyone was coming into the world.

Light is the nature of the kingdom, and Jesus came to enable the light to conquer the darkness. Light always pushes away darkness. In fact, his ministry of casting out the demonic was a real world metaphor for his parable of the binding the strong man, i.e., Satan, in Mark 3. This victory he accomplished Paul tells us is “for the church,” which then brings this light and victory over the forces of darkness to this fallen world. That process started 2000 years ago at Pentecost.

The Mustard Seed and Leaven
So, we finally get to the point of this post. If we’re going to correctly understand what Jesus was trying to communicate using parables of a mustard seed and leaven, we first need to appreciate the all encompassing nature of his mission to bring the kingdom of heaven into a fallen world, and most importantly, why. We know from the case I made above, the context of everything in this cosmic war initiated in the garden of Eden is this earth. It is difficult to convey just how important this change of orientation is to the Christian life. We must grasp that the vision and hope Christ came to bring is not heaven! That’s almost a distraction from the real business at hand, which is the transformation of life on this earth.

Thus our proclamation is not the immortality of the soul, but the resurrection of the dead! And this coming back to a new life in completely transformed and spiritual physical bodies (incomprehensible to us at this moment), is on this very earth on which we now live. I used to not quite get that, had a kind of muddled idea of something completely new replacing this heavens and earth, but that’s not the hope in which the creation groans (Rom. 1). The Apostle John tells us in Revelation (21):

2 I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband. 3 And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Look! God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. 4 ‘He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death[or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.”

The direction isn’t from earth up, but from heaven down. Without fully understanding the this-world mission of God in Christ, these parable loses their power, their impact, their very meaning, as it did for me for over four decades as a Christian. Maybe I thought they had to do with my own personal sanctification, or the advancement of the gospel and “populating heaven,” if I thought about them at all. My attitude was likely, praise God, we win in the end! Until then, it’s pretty much hell on earth. That’s not the most inspiring vision, and for 1800 years it wasn’t at all the vision of the church.

Rather, at his first coming, the flag of Christ’s kingdom rule on earth was planted like a warrior in battle planting a flag right in the middle of enemy territory to show there’s a new sheriff in town, a new king on the throne, a new way of doing business now. As Paul says, “the old has gone, the new has come.” And when he writes these words 2 Corinthians 5:17, the context are those in Christ who have become a “new creation.” Prior, I assumed this new creation was mainly about me and other Christians, the kingdom is the church and all that, rather than about the only creation that exists, us and us in it!

So, what is Jesus teaching by these parables? Simply, the growth of the kingdom, Christ’s rule and influence in this fallen world, will be slow, mostly painfully slow, but inevitable. That’s it!

This is not a difficult concept to grasp except our Pietistic Gnostic Dualism makes it so. One tiny seed planted, his kingdom, becomes the largest tree in the garden, and it isn’t a coincidence Jesus used the context of a garden. It was in the garden that the kingdom was taken away from its rightful owner, and now Jesus is saying he’s taking it back, step by step, inch by inch, line by line, until all his enemies have been defeated, the final enemy being death (I Cor. 15:25).

The parable of the leaven (yeast) really brings home the message because of the contrast between the leaven or yeast, and the amount of dough. This doesn’t communicate in the English, but the amount of dough is huge. My old NIV says a “large amount,” while other versions say more literally, three measures. The New NIV is more helpful, saying “about sixty pounds of flour.” That is a lot of flour! And will make a very big loaf! The woman took the yeast and mixed it “until it worked all through the dough.” Slowly but surely, inevitably, that yeast affected every molecule in the dough as it turned into bread.

That is the story of the kingdom initiated at Christ’s birth, death, resurrection, and ascension, slow, steady, inevitable progress, often not apparent to us, but happening all the same. And think about it, we’re only two thousand years into the process!

 

Should We Send Our Kids to Public Schools?

Should We Send Our Kids to Public Schools?

Dec 26, 2024 | Parents and Family

It has taken a while for Christians to see public schools in America as an existential threat to their children’s Christian faith. I saw one comment about this topic on Twitter which was the inspiration for this post. The guy said sending your kids to a public school is like playing Russian roulette with the school system. In other words, you’ll be lucky if your kids make it out as Christians. If there is a bullet in the chamber, they on their way to become heathens. I sympathize with this perspective, and agree the public schools are an indoctrination machine into secularism. I will further argue the idea of “public” schools is unbiblical because education is the responsibility of the parents and not the state. The latter idea goes back to something I call the conservative progressivism of the 19th century, which was progressive ideas promoting conservative ends. The Marxists would take over the progressive movement in the latter half of the 20th century, and in the 21st century bring to public education the reality of the Marxification of education, in the title of a book by James Lindsey.

Our children went to public schools because we didn’t know any better. Our youngest was able to start going to a classical Christian school in the 5th grade, which was an educational red pill experience for me. At the same time our daughter was attending Hillsdale College and fell in love with classical education, minoring in it and making it her career. But never when our kids where in public schools would I have for a minute considered it Russian roulette. The reason is because my wife and I saw their education as completely our responsibility. Never did I think it was the school’s responsibility to educate my children. Yes, the schools would teach them the “three Rs,” but it was up to my wife and I to inculcate that knowledge into a Christian worldview. Interrogating them about what they were learning at school, and exploring the hidden assumptions, was a common practice in our home. What they learned there was continually critiqued from the perspective of our Christian faith. They were raised from their earliest days learning that Christianity is ultimate truth about the nature of reality, and everything else is not. I wrote a book showing how I did that called, The Persuasive Christian Parent: Building an Enduring Faith in You and Your Children. Each of our children as adults are committed Christians. That was the plan all along, regardless of where they went to school

Our job as Christian parents is to teach them not only what we believe, but why we believe it. The latter is apologetics, or defending the veracity of the faith, and that is how we need to raise our children in a secular age. This is why I was always lecturing, teaching, and persuading them about why Christianity is true and why it is the only worldview that makes sense of all of reality. In my favorite quote from the ever quotable C.S. Lewis:

I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.

It is only the biggest of big pictures, God in Christ in Scripture, that makes sense of anything and everything. Every particular has meaning because of the universal, the puzzle pieces of life now fit because God is the author of the picture of life.

I say this to declare that a public school has no power over our children if we as parents do our job. That being said, a public school is the last place on earth you want to send you children! The rest of this piece explains why.

The Primacy of the Family in Education
I came across some quotes about the family from President Theodore Roosevelt that in our day would be considered “controversial,” but in the early twentieth century were common:

It is in the life of the family upon which in the last analysis the whole welfare of the Nation rests . . . . The nation is nothing but the aggregate of the families within its borders—Everything in the American civilization and nation rests upon the home—The family relation is the most fundamental, the most important of all relations.

His traditional conception of the family including the roles of men and women as husbands and wives would be positively shocking to our secular cultural elites, woke or not. R.J. Rushdoony states what Roosevelt observed as axiomatic for Christian Western civilization:

The family is, sociologically and religiously, the basic institution, man’s first and truest government, school, state, and church. Man’s basic emotional and psychic needs are met in terms of the family.

This was an inarguable statement of fact until the twentieth century and the rise of secularism, and with that rise the state slowly began to usurp the prerogatives of the family in education. J. Gresham Machen writing in 1925 argued it had already happened:

The most important Christian educational institution is not the pulpit or the school, as important as these institutions are; it is the Christian family. And that institution has to a very large extent ceased to do its work. . . . . The lamentable fact is that the Christian home, as an educational institution, has largely ceased to function.

Wherever as Christians we come down on the nature of education in America on which there will be disagreement, we must all agree with Machen, the education of children is the primary responsibility of the family. But Christian classical education was not yet on my radar.

Then in 2012 while my wife was working at the elementary school our youngest son attended, she was growing increasingly dismayed with what she was witnessing in public education. She insisted that he not attend our local public middle school; unfortunately, a private school was a pipe dream as far as I was concerned. There was no way we could afford it financially, and our other kids survived the public schools, faith intact, and so would he. It’s pathetic when surviving is the criteria by which I judged an education for our children, but we had no choice, I thought. Thankfully, my mother-in-law decided she would cover the tuition, and our son entered Covenant Classical School in Naperville, Illinois for the fifth grade. To say I was blown away by the education we encountered at this Christian classical school would be a massive understatement. But even with our son at a Christian classical school, in my mind the ideal along with home schooling, his education was still our responsibility.

Government and Education Need to Get a Divorce
America’s founders believed deeply in the importance of education, and to that end the Continental Congress in July 1787 passed The Northwest Ordinance in which they stated:

Religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.

Religion to the Founders meant Christianity, and its morality and knowledge was necessary to good government and a happy populace. In other words, civilization depended on education. It didn’t follow, though, that encouragement meant government control of education given the Founders’ deep suspicion of human nature and government power. Yet, over time “public” education came to mean government education subsidized by taxpayers controlled by the government. In this sense, public education is an oxymoron. Machen put this presciently in 1934:

Every lover of human freedom ought to oppose with all his might the giving of federal aid to the schools of this country; for federal aid in the long run inevitably means federal control, and federal control means control by a centralized and irresponsible bureaucracy, and control by such a bureaucracy means the death of everything that might make this country great.

Who can argue with this after 90 years of hindsight. Rushdoony further makes our point, writing in 1961:

The public school is now unmistakably a state school, and its concept of education is inevitably statist. This is apparent in various ways. First of all, education has ceased to be a responsibility of the home and has become a responsibility of the state. . . . the state still claims sole right to determine the nature, extent, and time of education. Thus, a basic family right has been destroyed and the state’s control over the child asserted.

It cannot be both state and family, only either/or. And this is not just an argument for liberty over against government tyranny, but a fundamentally religious question. Secular neutrality is a myth, and American public schools are the establishment of a secular religion in the guise of religious neutrality. Joe Boot explains:

We can clearly see . . . that neither the structure within which we educate, nor the purpose for which we educate, nor the content by which we educate, can be neutral.

Doug Wilson states why this an indisputable fact:

Education is fundamentally religious. Consequently, there is no question about whether a morality will be imposed in that education, but rather which morality will be imposed. Christians and assorted traditionalists who want a secular school system to instill anything other than secular ethics are wanting something that has never happened and can never happen.

He further asserts that public or “common schools were going to be the means by which the entire progressive agenda was ushered in.” Progressive in the twenty-first century is nothing like the early progressives imagined, but in hindsight it’s easy to see how secular progressive education paved the way for a takeover of education by cultural Marxists.

Does this mean that what we know as public education needs to be “abolished,” to borrow from Marx? Yes! School choice may be a good stopgap measure to take away some of the monopoly power of the government, but it is only temporary. It follows from the biblical imperative of the familial responsibility of the educating children, that it must be completely private and divorced from government at any level. Government money always brings with it government influence. Education is a worldview enterprise, and in America parents should be free to decide in what worldview they want their children educated.

What that looks like and how we get there I don’t know. I only know this should be the objective of any Christian who understands the incompatibility of Christianity with any other worldview in the educating of children. In the meantime as we work toward this, I believe that charter classical schools are a critical means to challenging the secular progressive monopoly on education.

The Rise of Progressive Education in America
Having made the case for the complete familial responsibility of the education of children, let’s look at how modern education came to be so horribly modernly horrible.

Conservatives have been complaining about public education for a long time. In fact, a popular book called Why Johnny Can’t Read—And What You Can Do About It came out in 1955. Some people think the 1950s was the golden age of conservatism. It wasn’t. That decade continued the consequences of secular progressivism in American culture, even if the effects were masked by leftover conservative Christian cultural influence. Education was a fundamental part of the progressive vision of transforming America into a “modern” democracy based on “scientific” principles among other things, and progressives paved the way for what has become the Marxification of education in the 21st century.

Progressive education goes back well before there was a progressive movement in America to the influence of Horace Mann (1796-1859), considered the father of American public schools. As a reformer, he convinced Americans they should pay for public, or “common,” schools, and established the Massachusetts State Board of Education. According to Britannica, Mann “believed that, in a democratic society, education should be free and universal, nonsectarian, democratic in method, and reliant on well-trained professional teachers.” We can see immediately from a Christian perspective this is a non-starter, yet not only did it start, but in due course this perspective took over education in America. Nonsectarian eventually became in practice the progressive secular religion.

To reiterate, there can be no such thing as a “nonsectarian” education because education is fundamentally religious and always inculcates a worldview in the children being educated. Also, there is no such thing as free education. In practice, free always means someone else pays. There is no constitutional right in America to insist that other Americans pay for my children’s education, or that I pay for theirs. Yet by the twentieth century this became an unquestioned dogma, and if challenged, charges from the left erupted like a volcano, hot and fast.

Doug Wilson tells how these reformers were uniformly hostile to orthodox Christianity. Many were Unitarians, the number one Christian heresy of the day. As he points out, the local government schools were mostly run by Christians who had no idea the true intent of the reformers above them. If the communities were Evangelical, so were the schools, but the secular progressive die was cast. He writes of one nineteenth century Cassandra, R.L. Dabney (1820-1898), whose prophecies of the inevitable consequences proved true. Dabney wrote:

We have seen that their [the schools’] complete secularization is logically inevitable. Christians must prepare themselves then, for the following results: All prayer, catechisms, and Bibles will ultimately be driven out of the schools.

At the behest of radical atheist Madalyn Murray O’Hair, the Supreme Court in 1962 basically outlawed prayer in public schools—nonsectarian indeed.

Arguably, the Olympic champion of progressive education was John Dewey (1859-1952) who was passionate about “democracy,” and education as the way to achieve it. Cultural transformation starts with education, and the torrent of secular, progressive ideas like a rushing river had a momentum by the late nineteenth century that would not be stopped. The basic outline of Dewey’s influence is found in the word progressive itself; it had to be different than whatever came before, and unfortunately it was. Prior to the progressive era, education in America was basically classical. Progressives believed “classical” was against “progress,” so it had to go. Here is a smattering of Dewey’s ideas:

  • Education should promote the practical over the abstract.
  • Experience was the great teacher, and the scientific method the primary source of knowledge.
  • The idea of “public” should replace the “individual.”
  • Traditional religion, i.e., Christianity, is an obstacle to true education and progress.
  • Human nature is not fixed but can be changed via education.
  • Traditional classrooms stifle a child’s curiosity, creativity, and excitement for learning.
  • Discipline or correction is not a teacher’s duty, but rather to understand and follow a student’s interest and impulses.
  • The utility of ideas is what makes them important.
  • Education is not primarily about academics or morality, but societal change.
  • Goals and standards are harmful to a child’s motivation.
  • Pedagogy must be a discipline apart from subject matter and methodology over content.

Henry T. Edmondson summarizes Dewey’s influence well:

Thanks in no small part to Dewey, much of what characterizes contemporary education is a revolt against various expressions of authority: a revolt against a canon of learning, a revolt against tradition, a revolt against religious values, a revolt against moral standards, a revolt against logic—even a revolt against grammar and spelling.

And a mighty successful revolt it has been! But now there is a counter revolt happening as the poverty of progressive education and its Marxist progeny becomes impossible to ignore. I mentioned James Lindsey and his book, The Marxification of Education above. If you want to see how Marxism in the guise of woke infiltrated K-12 public schools, and many private schools as well, I would highly suggest reading his book.

As with the Enlightenment and it’s offshoot, secularism in the form of progressive education and now Marxification, i.e. woke, took a long time, hundreds of years, to get us here. It will take a long time to turn around, but it’s starting and gaining momentum. When I was growing up, home schooling and classical education didn’t exist, now it’s everywhere. Christians are waking up to the realization that we can’t entrust our kids to the secular, woke indoctrination factories of so called public education. It will be hard for many Christian families to break out of “free” public schools, but the church needs to take seriously the need for that to happen. I trust that will become a more prevalent topic of conversation in the years to come.