This accusation against us is so utterly disgusting. Tell that to one woman in the churches we serve and they’ll laugh and laugh and laugh. Tell that to my wife. To any of my daughers. To my granddaughters. I have fifteen years of posting on woman’s moral agency, and there you and your fave Mr. Anonymous are endlessly harping on one string which, as I said, was a document that needed to get a majority in the committee and assembly floor. You say Mr. Anonymous couldn’t have known this, which is an ignorance of basic polity hard to fathom.
I have no hope of winning you or any other of Mr. Anonymous’s anonymous acolytes. But for readers seeking the truth, two things:
First, anyone who reads us knows we have spent a good portion of the past few years confronting and counselling churches, their sessions, well-known sex abuse “experts,” and perpetrators of abuse in many churches across the country. Central to those confrontations is the wives and mothers who have known of the abuse and allowed it to continue. We confront them and some of those we have confronted and called to repentance have come to our church and joined, afterwards.
Second, Mr. Anonymous Two (Nereus) and Mr. Anonymous One both mislead their readers by reporting me as speaking of men “making women serve in combat.” Never said any such thing, but then, accuracy of language is the very thing you men (not “guys”) seem to be incapable of. What I actually wrote was “we have placed our daughters and sisters in the untenable position of seeking to be killers…”. Is it really possible this man Anonymous Two as well as Anonymous One don’t understand man’s authority?
When a daughter enlists in the military for a combat position, the father has placed his daughter there by virtue of allowing her to do so. Same with a wife. Can it really be these men are so oblivious to the way the authority of a father and husband works? We are responsible for our women. Scripture commands it. What we don’t speak against we answer for, even down to their vows. Have these men really never read Numbers 30?
Finally, to men of goodwill who are listening, the perpetual refrain of the wicked feminists who almost made up the majority of the committee I served on was “you men want to discipline women in the military!” It was a scare tactic trying to sway the broad middle of the committee. Is it really so hard to understand why the paper didn’t explicitly call for the discipline of women combatants?
Tone deaf and brain dead to the actual practice of leadership these men are. Mr. Anonymous Two, please do me the kindness of going back to Mr. Anonymous One and talking among yourselves. It wearies me having to respond to your kludginess and deceptions.
I could multiply examples, but to any objective man, this will be sufficient. From a decade ago:
From 2009:
"Yes, yes, our churches are filled with hot-tempered men with the besetting sin of pornography. No question here, nor with much of what was said above. But.
At some point, we must ask ourselves whether in this post-patriarchal world, there’s any room for the moral agency of woman?
Scripture doesn’t blush to present the sin of woman, and to exhort them to holiness. But today, we consistently blame the men for woman’s sin, implying (or directly stating) that when men become godly, they’ll find their daughters and wives there on the top of the holy mountain waiting for their arrival, greeting them with a gentle and quiet spirit, submission, obedience, and all those things their men had forfeited their right to until they became holy.
So what? Eve wasn’t to blame? It was the silence of Adam that left her vulnerable to Satan’s deception?
Note that Eve was cursed, too. Note that Adam was rebuked for listening to his wife. Note that all the household commands in the Epistles contain exhortations to women–not just to men.
Nowhere does Scripture promise men their wives will submit if just for once they’re finally given a husband who loves as Christ loved the Church and gave Himself up for her.
It’s time we recover the moral agency of women. It’s time we stop falling all over one another trying to show how good women are, and how frustrated they are waiting for men to catch up to them.
After 25 years of pre and post-marital counseling and preaching and visiting and praying with, and speaking to singles and married and college and graduate students, as well as fathering and husbanding–here’s the truth: for every evil man, there’s an evil woman. The evil is different in its manifestation, but evil it is, and equal in its wickedness.
Scripture teaches us that man is depraved. Depend upon it. And Scripture’s “man” is the entire race, both man and woman. Love,
"She always feels regret when she sees her husband with a black eye..." | BaylyBlog
Now, can we please be done with this sniping? This was written a decade ago and is typical of my writing. I agree with the criticisms of complementarians, as anyone who has read me knows. I left them. Must I be tarred for their unfaithfulness as if I were like them? Love,