Three Cheers for Patriarchy! And “Why Sally Can’t Preach”

Three Cheers for Patriarchy! And “Why Sally Can’t Preach”

Aug 29, 2023 | Parents and Family

Since my last post was on the hot topic of Christian nationalism, I figured I’d follow it up with something about another “controversial” topic, patriarchy. I love thinking about the heads exploding at that title! It’s like throwing holy water on a vampire to some lefties, and many who embrace Christianity too. I will let the video do the heavy lifting, but I will say the same God-ordained roll dynamics in marriage apply in some measure in the church, thus the title of a book in the quotes. The author in the video is being interviewed, and I find his thinking helpful in what in our “enlightened” times is considered “controversial,” i.e., patriarchy. That word comes from the Latin for father, and has come to mean male headship and authority in certain contexts like the family and the church. I would love to hear your thoughts.

My Post-Mill Conference Experience and the Children

My Post-Mill Conference Experience and the Children

May 15, 2023 | Parents and Family

If you had told me a year ago that I would be attending a conference on Theonomy & Postmillennialism I would have told you to say no to drugs. But there I was in Georgetown, Texas last weekend with about 500 other people who seem to also have drunk the post-mill Kool Aid as if it was a real, biblical eschatological option. Prior to my “conversion” I didn’t think there were 500 post-mill people in the world let alone that many of them would find their way to a conference in Texas, but there they were. And the vibe was electric. I’m going to do two posts on the conference. While this first one will be primarily about children, and you’ll see why, the next one will be more meat and potatoes eschatology. The two are connected as I hope to convey.

I thought like a death metal concert, most of the audience would be dudes, and especially dudes with beards. Strange how beards have made a come back in America, and we’re talking long, nineteenth century type beards. There were definitely those, but what I didn’t expect was all the children and families. When the speakers were talking there was always the sounds of babies. I was sitting toward the front initially, and had no idea just how many children parents brought to this conference. After initially being annoyed by the disruption, I started to appreciate it, the young, new life, the indication of the blessing of God a la Psalm 127. As Solomon says, “Blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them.” It’s unfortunate how man Christians in our day want fewer blessings rather than more, that’s how infected we’ve become with secularism.

Before I address that, on Saturday morning I was sitting in the midst of these families amazed at how well behaved all the children were. I thought, don’t all families bring their children to a conference on post millennialism on a beautiful spring Saturday? Of course they do! After the session, I asked the gentlemen sitting in front of me with all these kids how many children they have, and he said . . . . ten! Be honest, your first reaction to reading or hearing that is a kind of revulsion, right? Don’t lie to me. In the modern secular post-Christian West having ten children is looked at as at least strange. It almost seems wrong. You think of the poor woman who bore all those children. That’s a lot of work! And raising them is ten full-time jobs. I would contend our initial reaction, while understandable given how programmed we’ve become by secularism, is sin. God tells us children are a blessing, full stop. I found out the man with these ten blessings is Phil George, the pastor of Grace Life Church in Dallas. May he and his wife, and their tribe, increase, and that tribe doesn’t have to have that many children.

Which brings me to an article I providentially read after my profound children post-mill conference experience: Western culture is at fault for dwindling birth rates: We are witnessing the process of demographic crisis in its early stages. The author, Louise perry, starts the piece with a wonderful analogy of the Cassava plant that was made safe to eat by South Americans hundreds of years ago. Without that process, unbeknownst to them, the people eating it would be slowly poisoned to death by cyanide. Though the people didn’t realize the traditions of cleaning and processing the plant was saving lives, they did it anyway. She compares that to the tradition around a fertility culture where extended families and societies made it easier for women to bear the burden of having and raising children. The analogy is powerful. People in the Western world, which is most of the world today, don’t realize we are as a civilization slowly being poisoned to death by what she calls “the sterility meme.”

The word crisis in her title is more appropriate than anyone knows or will admit. Like being slowly poisoned by eating unprocessed Casava plants, civilization is slowly being poisoned by not enough children being born:

The effects of fertility decline will not become evident until the last above-replacement generation dies. In Britain, that tipping point is likely to come in the 2040s, when most of the baby boomers have passed away. Right now, we are witnessing the process of demographic crisis in its early stages, and most people do not recognize it as such. If modernity is cassava, then this is the cyanide.

She states the problem with modernity such:

But what we are now discovering is that, at the population level, modernity selects systematically against itself. The key features of modernity — urbanism, affluence, secularism, the blurring of gender distinctions, more time spent with strangers than with kin — all of these factors in combination shred fertility. Which means that progressivism, the political ideology that urges on the acceleration of modernization, can best be understood as a sterility meme. When people first become modern, they have fewer children; when they adopt progressive ideology, they accelerate the process of modernization and so have even fewer.

These are all complex sociological and psychological phenomena, but Christians are not immune. If you go to many churches today you’ll see that most families have two children. We must ask ourselves as Christians, is having only two children on purpose biblical? Is it living in obedience to God? Or is it succumbing to the “spirit of the age”? I would argue it is the latter.

Having said this, I understand why so many Christian families succumb to it. It’s been pounded into our heads almost as long as I’ve been alive, that there are “too many people” on earth, it’s unsustainable. The word “overpopulation” is an axiom, unquestioned as if it were obviously true. Then there is the little issue of children being expensive, and putting a real crimp in your lifestyle. I laughed out loud, literally, when I read this in the piece:

As one of my friends observed soon after having her first baby, “the only thing that limits your freedom more than having a newborn is going to prison.” She’s right.

Raising children is hard! All consuming. If freedom is a priority in our lives, we will have fewer children, and sadly these impediments to having more children keep too many Christian families from having more children.

I once told an Italian couple at a church we attended some years ago that we need to out breed the enemy, speaking of the secularists. Their look told me they weren’t quite sure what to make of that statement. They now have two children, and it looks like they’re stopping there, unfortunately. If I knew thirty years ago what I know now, as the saying goes, I would have tried for more than three children. Three has been an incredible blessing, so I can only imagine the blessings of more. Christians, and religious people in general, do have more children than secular people, but I pray in due course it would become many more.

 

 

Our Granddaughter Eleanor Geline Lewis Was Baptized Today!

Our Granddaughter Eleanor Geline Lewis Was Baptized Today!

Oct 30, 2022 | Parents and Family

When I was born-again a long, long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, by default I became a baptist. I was born and raised a Catholic and so baptized as an infant, but born-agains don’t do infant baptism, so I got re-baptized. It made sense to me at the time because in this new form of Christianity I had embraced, the way you became a Christian was by making a personal decision for Jesus. Only then could you be baptized. Infants can’t make such a decision, so I reasoned they should not be baptized. I remained a baptist until I was introduced to Reformed theology when I was 24.

There are Reformed baptists, and that’s what I guess I was initially, until I went to a Reformed baptist church service. The gentlemen who introduced me to this strange new theology was a paedobaptist, so he had his children baptized. This new theology seemed upside down enough without me having to change that too, so I resisted it initially. Then I went to that service.

It so happens that Sunday morning they had an infant dedication. I had seen plenty of those in my five and a half years of being a Christian, so didn’t think anything of it. Then when they called up the parents with their children, a phrase snuck its way into my brain, I know not how, but it was disturbing to me. I thought, these children are strangers to the covenant! That didn’t sit well with me. I had been learning how important the covenant was in this new theology, and this dedication process was telling me the children had nothing to do with it. I became a paedobaptist on the spot!

The reason why is as simple as it is difficult for most Evangelical Christians to accept. Most don’t embrace it not because they’ve grappled with the texts and the theology, but because it’s so common to be a baptist that it just seems right. It could be right because my being wrong about something wouldn’t surprise me in the least, but for now I’m convinced baptizing our infant children is what we should do. I’ll give a very brief and probably not very persuasive case for why I believe this.

When I was praying this morning before we left for church, I was marveling that little Eleanor was part of God’s covenant promises to Abraham. She, literally this beautiful energetic little 9 month-old baby was in God’s mind when he said that Abraham’s offspring would be like the sand on the seashore and the stars in the sky. She is one of those! Then I thought, well, she’s really part of God’s covenant promise to Adam and Eve in Genesis 3 when he said to the serpent:

15 And I will put enmity
    between you and the woman,
    and between your offspring and hers;
he will crush your head,
    and you will strike his heel.

Then I realized, she was actually part of God’s covenant promise to himself, which is known in Reformed theology as the covenant of redemption. In the words of RC Sproul:

The covenant of redemption is intimately concerned with God’s eternal plan. It is called a “covenant” inasmuch as the plan involves two or more parties. This is not a covenant between God and humans. It is a covenant among the persons of the Godhead, specifically between the Father and the Son.

That this eternal covenant is revealed and fulfilled in redemptive history is strongly implied by Jesus in John 6:37:

All those the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never drive away.

We believe as Peter preached in the first Christian sermon in Acts 2, that the promise is for us and our children. Not just when they grow older and put their trust in Christ as their Lord and Savior, but now when they pretty much can’t do anything at all. I love the way Moses puts it in Deuteronomy 29:

29 The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but the things revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may follow all the words of this law.

. . . . and to our children forever . . . . Our children are part of the covenant! And praise our Almighty God and Savior for it.

The Beginning of Christian Nationalism: The Family

The Beginning of Christian Nationalism: The Family

Jun 30, 2022 | Parents and Family

Christians throughout history have had different ways of contending with this fallen world. On one end of the spectrum, you might have monks who completely isolate themselves from the world, while on the other millenarian apocalyptic fanatics who mean to usher in the kingdom now by any means. For the rest of us, trying to find out where we fit along that spectrum is the challenge. Fortunately, we have almost 2,000 years of Christian history to guide us, and many examples of Christians in that time who have grappled with these issues. When in God’s providence America came along almost 18 centuries into the story, something very different in the history of the world happened. The antecedents had been brewing for centuries in England, and then the Reformation blew up everything. God saw to it that the printing press was invented, and that made the dissemination of these world-changing ideas possible. We are shortly coming upon the completion of 246 years of this incredible experience in liberty and self-government, and we as Christians, and American citizens, have a unique opportunity to keep this republic, in Franklin’s challenging words at the Continental Congress. I believe we have in front of us the greatest opportunity in modern times to do just that.

As I said in a previous post, it’s so much easier to complain, and most of us just want to be left alone to live our lives in peace. Those are no longer options because our enemies on the Democrat-left want to destroy us. Some might think that is hyperbole, but it isn’t. This is an existential threat, meaning our very existence as a Christian and American people (including those who are not Christian) conceived in liberty is on the line. It is time to fight, and thankfully, God directed America’s founders to put together a system of government for a self-governing people that can really allow us to be self-governed. That means we are responsible at every level for governing ourselves.

Of course, that starts with each one of us in our homes, which the enemy (here I speak of the enemy behind all our enemies, Satan) has sought to destroy from the beginning. Almost immediately after the fall in Genesis 3, we read in the very next chapter how Cain kills his brother Able in cold blood. Yet, the family is the most important civilizational bond available to human beings (because believe it or not, men and women are different!), and it has endured to this day. However, one of Satan’s most influential and destructive disciples, Karl Marx, understood that if his communist revolution was to ultimately prevail, it must see the destruction of two primary enemies of the revolution: religion and the family.

I’m a big fan of Steve Bannon’s War Room (which I catch on Rumble), and Bannon had a special recently on the Juneteenth celebration. All his black guests made a similar point, that the progressives-leftists-Democrats use victimology turn to turn the black community into wards of the state, destroying their dignity. However, their pernicious policies harm people of every color and nationality, especially lower-class working Americans, but families from all socioeconomic strata are harmed. Destroying the family is job one in the process. Ken Blackwell put it well:

The family is the incubator of liberty, and if you want to create dependency on the state, you destroy the family. Mission accomplished! You create an administrative state, and folks move away from being free self-governing citizens to being dependent subjects. This attack on the black family has grown to an attack on the American family. There is a cancer eating away at the American family.

This process of this cancer ostensibly started in the 1960s with the so-called “sexual revolution,” but goes back much further as I said above to the fall. But the family always endured because it is the bedrock of civilization without which is chaos. The modern weakening of the family took a great leap backward with French philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau (d. 1778), and Western intellectual elites have been rebelling against traditional Christian moral norms ever since. That, along with the growth of the welfare state and globalism have created a tsunami of deleterious effects for the American family. I could delineate examples for days, but I think it’s unnecessary. These statistics will not surprise us:

The share of births to unwed mothers stands at 40 percent—up from 5 percent in 1960. We estimate that nearly half of births start as an unwed pregnancy, including two-thirds of first births to women under 30.

That statistic is 77% for black births.  Sadly, this includes many Christians because secular cultural influence is difficult to escape, but it must be challenged at every point, including in its expression of self-centered sexuality. We’ve taught our children that sex outside of marriage is wrong, evil, out of bounds, and we continually critique for them the lies of sexual immorality pushed by the culture. I’ve often told them something that might surprise you. I would rather them sneak around and have sex knowing it’s wrong and not wanting anyone to find out, then to live with their boyfriend or girlfriend and proclaim to the world that it is morally good. It is not! We used to call that “living in sin.” Don’t do that!

In I Thessalonians 4, Paul is addressing just this issue, that we should avoid sexual immorality, and it is worth reading because Paul is positively intolerant! He should be because as he says, “The Lord will punish all those who commit such sins,” and “anyone who rejects this instruction does not reject a human being but God.” He then sums up his exhortation with this:

11 and to make it your ambition to lead a quiet life: You should mind your own business and work with your hands, just as we told you, 12 so that your daily life may win the respect of outsiders and so that you will not be dependent on anybody.

In I Timothy Paul says something, which I believe is primarily directed to men, but certainly includes their wives in some measure:

If anyone does not provide for his relatives, and especially for members of his household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.

The family is central to the health and sustanance of Christian Western civilization, and we must fight for its integrity continually. Next we’ll explore how we can expand our influence out from there.

 

Another Berlin Wall Falls: Roe v. Wade Overturned

Another Berlin Wall Falls: Roe v. Wade Overturned

Jun 25, 2022 | Parents and Family, Politics & Government

It looks like we’ve had another Berlin Wall moment in Western culture with the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade yesterday in its Dobbs v. Jackson decision. In the 1980s there were very few people who took Ronald Reagan’s words to tear down the Wall seriously. We thought, it’s a nice sentiment, Ronnie, but we all know it’s wishful thinking, and not going to happen in our lifetimes. Then a little more than two years later, the Wall came down. There is a lesson in that, but more on that in a moment. Those of us who felt that way in the 80s, felt the same way about Roe. That would also not likely come down in our lifetimes, but it too has fallen. The reason for the pessimism about Roe is that the courts are where the left gets it way because they can’t do it via the democratic process. Conservatives have experienced disappointment because of the courts for decades, until Donald Trump became president. Think about that.

If someone had told you ten, twenty, thirty or more years ago that Donald Trump would be instrumental in getting Roe overturned, we all would have said to that person, Say no to drugs! Trump? Billionaire real estate developer? Hedonistic narcissist clearly liberal Donald Trump who donates money to Democrats, that Donald Trump? Absurd! But in fact, he is the one we have to thank that finally Roe v. Wade has been assigned to the dustbin of history, just as Ronald Reagan was instrumental in assigning the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union to that same dustbin. God certainly has a sense of humor. It would be nice if the NeverTrumper conservatives who loath Trump would admit this, but I doubt they will. Trump Derangement Syndrome seems to be a real psychological malady that keeps people from acknowledging the truth. I know Trump is an acquired taste that some people will never acquire, but he was the most conservative president in our lifetimes. Even Reagan wouldn’t speak live at the March for Life, nor the Bushes, but Trump did.

Roe being overturned doesn’t mean that abortion is illegal in America, only that the decision whether it is or not is returned to the states. Many states are already declaring abortion illegal, thank God, but the battle now changes locations. My consistent prayer is that abortion will one day become as unthinkable in America as slavery. It should because at least the point of slavery wasn’t to kill people, while abortion is by definition killing people. There is no debate about that anymore, only whether those little people deserve to live. This ruling overturning a horribly bad Supreme Court decision will likely save millions of babies’ lives. It’s amazing to me how angry lefties get when they mothers can’t have carte blanche to kill their offspring. Moloch would be proud.

I mentioned above the lesson in this connected to the Berlin Wall. I remember seeing a bumper sticker some years ago: Speaking truth is treason in an empire of lies. The communism of the Soviet Union was as much an empire of lies as is the progressive left in modern American politics and culture; both were birthed in the evil heart and mind of Karl Marx, compliments of the devil. The narrative, whatever the issue might be, attached to their political ideology is all that counts, truth be damned. They don’t even believe in such a thing as truth. Unfortunately, for them, truth exists because Truth exists, and an empire built on lies cannot and will not last. This is why I said in a previous post that the cultural divide in the West today is between those who believe in Truth (and truth), and those who do not. Reality can only be mocked for so long because as the Apostle Paul says, “God cannot be mocked. A man reaps what he sows.” And notice the result when a man (or woman) sows to the flesh (sarx- σάρξ, in Paul’s theology where the principle of sin, i.e., obsession with self, lies): They will reap destruction.

We are at a propitious time in American (and Western) history, and the opportunity to speak Christian Truth to power and it make a real difference has never been greater. As I argued in my previous posts (and some to come) about Christian nationalism, this started to bubble up with Brexit, and the same dynamic made its way into America with the candidacy and then election of Donald Trump. I consider Trump “The Great Revealer.” There is something about the man that God used to break the Democrat-left, and the media, and many so-called conservatives. They could not and still cannot help themselves (witness the lies of the J-6 “committee”), so they have all been exposed for what they are and have always been: enemies of America. (BTW, I don’t consider RINO’s enemies of America, but there is something even more insidious about people who talk a good conservative game, and then enable the Democrat-left to destroy America.)

The reaping of destruction that Paul promises is becoming more apparent than ever before. The Democrat-left can’t help themselves, and God bless ‘em, they keep doubling down. They become increasingly unpopular the more people see that their policies and beliefs lead to real human misery and death, including the killing of pre-born children in their mothers’ wombs (I call it fetal genocide). I’ll end this with a quote from a Francis Schaeffer book I just started re-reading from 1981 called, A Christian Manifesto. Speaking of a shift in people’s worldview from something Christian if even vaguely so,

toward something completely different—toward a worldview based upon the idea that the final reality is impersonal matter or energy shaped into its present form by impersonal chance. These two worldviews stand in complete antithesis to each other in content and also in their natural results . . . not only in how they understand the nature of reality and existence. They also inevitably produce totally different results. The operative word is inevitably. It is not just that they happen to bring forth different results, but it is absolutely inevitable that they will bring forth different results.

It is that inevitably that we are seeing more clearly than ever in the year of our Lord 2022, and it is our great opportunity. Let us grab it with gusto and faith in “the ruler of all things.”

The Number One Responsibility of Christian Parents Raising Kids in a Secular Age

The Number One Responsibility of Christian Parents Raising Kids in a Secular Age

Jan 23, 2022 | Parents and Family

I had a wonderful experience, and privilege, last week, of being on a podcast with a couple British lads discussing my international best seller, The Persuasive Christian Parent (I’ll do another post about the discussion, great fun). In the podcasts I do, I always point out that this is not a parenting book, but an apologetics book for parents. It is not do a, b, and c, and you can get results x, y, and z, or 10 steps to accomplish this or that with your kids, and so on. I’ve never been a fan of such books, on parenting or not. Thinking about this for the last several days, I realized I could boil the purpose of the book down to one. It came to me as I thought about my discussion with my two new British friends, Dan and Phil, and as I struggled to tell them what the book is really all about. This responsibility can be boiled down to this: We must teach our kids that Christianity is The Truth. Everything else is fluff. Of course the latter assertion is over the top hyperbole, but it makes my point. If we don’t major on the former, the latter might not matter. Why? (more…)