Watching recent events unfold in the Middle East reminds us of the courage required to fight evil as grown men, not like boys. Yes, God is good. However, there is still ... (read the rest of the post here )
America is in the middle of a fathering crisis. Some are even calling the United States “Fatherless America.”[1] Consider the following facts:
Source - Denison Forum
https://www.denisonforum.org/biblical-living/podcast/biblical-manhood-toxic-war-on-masculinity-nancy-pearcey/
Nancy Pearcey discusses why she wanted to write on masculinity, sharing her story of meeting Francis and Edith Schaeffer, converting from agnosticism, and her experience with an abusive father (3:01). She reflects on the history of masculinity, the growth of toxic masculinity during the Industrial Revolution, and why modern women seem to hate men (11:26). Pearcey talks about why she wrote the Toxic War on Masculinity, which delves into the ideas of Christ-like and secular masculinity (19:61). They reflect on the dangers of nominal Christianity, why dedicated evangelical men have the best marriages, but Christian-in-name-only men create the worst marriages (36:44). She says, “nominal Christian men can take the secular script and then sort of baptize it, and the end of actually living worse than secular men.” She provides a multitude of research demonstrating that men becoming evangelical Christians makes them less misogynistic (52:31). She closes by reflecting on the current landscape, how men are falling behind women in all areas, and how true Christians can reclaim masculinity in a healthy way (56:09).
Pull Quote: "Men everywhere seem to experience tension between what they themselves define as good men and the way the surrounding culture pressures them to be real men."
When the American Psychological Association (APA) issued its first-ever guidelines for counseling men and boys in 2018, it denounced “traditional masculinity ideology” as “psychologically harmful.” Groups like the APA have injected the phrase “toxic masculinity” into the bloodstream of America’s public discourse. The phrase has become a catchall explanation for male sexism, dominance, aggression, and violence.
Few people are claiming all masculinity is toxic. Yet the message men often hear is that there is something inherently defective in the male character. Many men today feel ... (Read the rest of this Nancy Pearcey article HERE
Hat Tip: The Federalist
by Denny Burk
Feminist theologians have long wrestled with the question of God’s gender. In particular, they have chafed against naming God as “Father” and even against Jesus’ incarnation in a male body. As Mary Daly famously wrote, “If God is male, then the male is God.” Therefore, the business of women’s liberation involves freeing women from patriarchal notions of God. Daly complained that “The divine patriarch castrates women as long as he is allowed to live on in the human imagination.” For that reason, Daly argued, people’s masculine conception of God needs to be castrated. There needs to be a “cutting away the Supreme Phallus.”1
Daly and other feminist theologians view the Fatherhood of God and the maleness of Jesus as fixtures in an oppressive patriarchy designed to subjugate women. Their aim, therefore, has been to rewrite orthodoxy so as to remove all vestiges of patriarchy. That revision includes how we name God and how we think about the incarnation itself.
By and large, evangelicals have been consistent opponents of this program and have insisted on affirming the authority of Scripture, orthodox Trinitarianism, and orthodox Christology. Nevertheless, within evangelicalism, egalitarians have staked out a kind of theological no man’s land. On the one hand, they wish to affirm the authority of Scripture and the integrity of the Christian tradition. But on the other hand, they also wish to take on board some of the feminist critiques of “patriarchal” religion. For the most part, this has led to innovative reinterpretations of biblical texts (e.g. 1 Tim. 2:12, 1 Cor. 11:3, and 14:34-35) while affirming inerrancy, Nicene trinitarianism, and Chalcedonian Christology.
A new book by egalitarian Wheaton College professor Amy Peeler, however, takes a different approach. Read the rest of the article here
We Call Him "Father"
If you primarily think of God as your Father, and if you usually address God as Father when you pray, you have Jesus to thank. For prior to Jesus, no one — not in Judaism or in any other religious tradition — spoke of God or to God as Father in the personal ways Jesus did.
It’s true that Old Testament saints occasionally referred to God as Israel’s father (Deuteronomy 32:6; Psalm 103:13) and even less occasionally called him their Father when they prayed (Isaiah 63:16). But the fact that they rarely did so reveals that they didn’t relate to God primarily as a Father. Certainly not in the way Jesus did — which was also the way he taught all his followers to relate to God.
In all four Gospels, when Jesus speaks about God, he typically refers to him as his Father. And when the Gospel writers allow us to listen in on Jesus praying, we hear him addressing God as Father.
“If you usually address God as ‘Father’ when you pray, you have Jesus to thank.”
This wasn’t merely an endearing metaphor to Jesus. God as his Father was a fundamental relational reality to him. This is clear when, as we hear him pray in Gethsemane, he cries, “Abba, Father” (Mark 14:36). Abba was the most common term Aramaic speakers used when speaking to their earthly fathers — Jesus and his (half) siblings would have used it when addressing Joseph.
This familial way Jesus referred to God scandalized and outraged the Jewish leaders. They understood God as their Father the way a potter might be called the father of his clay creation (see Isaiah 64:8). But Jesus viewed God as his “Abba, Father” the way a child views the paternal parent who begot him. To the Jewish leaders, this led to blasphemy worthy of capital punishment, because “he was even calling God his own Father, making himself equal with God” (John 5:18). Indeed, he was God’s own Son — a reality they tragically failed to discern.
And astoundingly, Jesus, the “only Son from the Father” (John 1:14), wanted all of his disciples, we who are not sons of God the way he is, to also relate to God as our “Abba, Father.” For when Jesus provided us a model or pattern for how to pray, what Christians down through the ages have called the Lord’s Prayer, the first thing he taught us was to address God as “our Father in heaven” (Matthew 6:9).
In quoting Jesus here, Matthew remarkably uses the Greek word pater, the equivalent to Abba in Aramaic — the common, everyday term that everyone used for father. Pause and ponder just how astounding the phrase “our Father in heaven” is, considering the reality it represents: God as our heavenly Pater, Abba, Father.
Unless you were raised in a different religious tradition, addressing God as “our Father” probably doesn’t strike you as presumptuous or offensive. It probably sounds normal, something we take for granted, like calling our earthly paternal parent our father. If we have lost our wonder over calling God our Father, it’s time to recover it.
Keep in mind that observant Jews have always considered God’s covenant name, Yahweh (Exodus 3:14), to be so holy that they dare not speak it aloud. When they write it, they abbreviate it to YHWH, so as not to profane God’s holy name through unholy human lips or hands. Even in English, many will write “G–d” instead of “God.” They consider it no small thing to speak of or to the “Holy One of Israel” (Psalm 71:22).
“It is no small thing for us to have the right to call the Holy One of Israel our Father, and ourselves his children.”
Indeed, this One whom we call “Father” is the One before whom the four living creatures “day and night . . . never cease to say, ‘Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord God Almighty, who was and is and is to come!’” (Revelation 4:8). He “is the blessed and only Sovereign, the King of kings and Lord of lords, who alone has immortality, who dwells in unapproachable light, whom no one has ever seen or can see” (1 Timothy 6:15–16). For no mere human can see him and live (Exodus 33:20).
Even the only begotten Son — he who “in the beginning was . . . with God and . . . was God” (John 1:1), he who is the very “image of the invisible God” (Colossians 1:15), he whom God has “highly exalted” and on whom he “bestowed . . . the name that is above every other name” (Philippians 2:9) — this holy Son of God (Luke 1:35), who called God his “Abba, Father,” also addressed him as “Holy Father” (John 17:11).
What gives us — we “of unclean lips, [who] dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips” (Isaiah 6:5) — any right to call the Almighty “our Father”? Our holy Father himself and his holy Son, our Savior, give us this unfathomable privilege.
It is good for our souls to pause and ponder the astounding fatherhood of God to us, especially if the reality has become too familiar, so we can see with fresh eyes the father-heart of God for us. That is what the Holy Spirit, through the apostle John, wants for us:
See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are. (1 John 3:1)
And what kind of love has the Father given to us?
In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. (1 John 4:9–10)
The Father so loved us that he gave his only begotten Son, that through believing in him we should not perish but have eternal life (John 3:16). And the Son so greatly loved us that he willingly laid his life down for us (John 15:13) to become the propitiation for our sins.
To all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God. (John 1:12–13)
It is no small thing for us to have the right to call the Holy One of Israel our Father, and ourselves his children. For at great cost,
the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ . . . has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. In love he predestined us for adoption to himself as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace, with which he has blessed us in the Beloved. (Ephesians 1:3–6)
See with fresh eyes what kind of wonderful love the holy Father and the holy Son have given to us, that we should be called children of God.
This ocean of gracious love, this vast miracle of substitutionary atonement, this profound and mysterious gift of being both adopted by and born of God, is why when Jesus’s disciples asked him how they should pray to God, he began,
Pray then like this: “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name.” (Matthew 6:9)
God does not want us to relate to him as a mere subject relates to a king, or as a mere sheep relates to its shepherd. Fundamentally, he wants us to relate to him as a child relates to a loving, generous father who loves to give good gifts when his children ask him (Matthew 7:7–11). As Michael Reeves writes,
When a person deliberately and confidently calls the Almighty “Father,” it shows they have grasped something beautiful and fundamental about who God is and to what they have been saved. And how that wins our hearts back to him! For the fact that God the Father is happy and even delights to share his love for his Son and thus be known as our Father reveals just how gracious and kind he is. (Delighting in the Trinity, 76)
If you primarily think of God as your Father, and if you usually address God as Father when you pray, you have Jesus (and the Father) to thank — not only because he taught you to do so, but because he (and the Father) has given you the right to do so. And both Father and Son have provided you with the Holy Spirit — “the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, ‘Abba! Father!’” (Romans 8:15). Make good use of this grace. For your Father in heaven delights in his children.
More dads are working from home and also serving as primary caregivers. World Magazine has the story here ... More dads staying home
More young men are becoming nurses due to the higher pay and career benefits. My wife Pam is a Neo-Natal Nurse Practitioner and our daughter Lauren is a Neo-Natal Nurse. Nursing is a difficult yet highly rewarding calling. There is a huge nursing shortage in the United States.
August 5-6, 2022: Important Gender Identity Conference in Dallas, Texas. Filled with expert guest speakers. Sign up now to stay informed ... Find out more here (Virtual Online options available)
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There seems to be a growing compendium of data collection on school shooters / mass shooters and fatherless young men. The statistics correlate at a fairly high level.
Read: Shooters / Fatherless
Republicans on Capitol Hill say Donald Trump may be willing to cut Social Security and Medicare if he wins in 2020, reportedly describing the potential move as a “second-term project.” (Yahoo News, August 29, 2019)I’m not here to get into politics, nor to discuss the merits and demerits of cutting Social Security. What I do want to say is that America’s churches have a golden opportunity to step up to the plate and assume their biblically mandated responsibility once again. If every church in America took financial responsibility for replacing any cuts to Social Security for just five of their widows, that would be 1.5 million widows the church would be helping.
(a very interesting article from: Acculturated Magazine)
Parenting: The Ridiculous Crusade for Gender-Neutral Toys (By: Jonathan V. Last) Gender-neutral toys Christina Hoff Sommers—who literally wrote the book on the war on boys—notes that there’s a movement afoot to de-gender toys. Target has pulled the “boys” and “girls” labeling from their toy aisles. The White House recently hosted a “summit” on the perils of gender-specific toys. Time proclaims that “the next generation of kids will play with gender neutral toys.” This is crazy on two counts. First, the kind of people who obsess about gender-neutral toys don’t, as a demographic fact, have many children. In America these days, childbearing tends to be the counter-cultural province of people who aren’t social justice warriors. Second, even if you give kids gender neutral toys, they’ll gender the heck out of them on their own. Trust me, I know. In my house, we’re basically hippie parents. We don’t read Dag Hammarskjöld to the kids at bedtime, but we do use a “peace rose” to, as the consultants say, facilitate reconciliation following interpersonal conflict. We favor natural fibers for linens and clothing, occasionally have family meetings where we whiteboard our concerns, and are suckers for the organic food scam. The kids go to a hippie Montessori school where they “choose their own work” and don’t get grades. And we’ve always favored the kind of constructive, creative toys that the non-gender toy people love. Not on purpose, mind you—this wasn’t an ideological decision, it just sort of happened. My son has never owned a single action figure and my daughters own only one Barbie doll, which was a gift from a relative close enough that we couldn’t return it. Yet it turns out that gender stereotypes exist for a reason. When he was four, our eldest, a boy, discovered that sticks make for highly effective swords. Later he realized that the removable flag from the Safety Turtle was an even better weapon, since it could be used as a sword, spear, or lance. Every time he went outside he made himself a weapon and went off to battle imaginary villains.His sisters, meanwhile, gravitated toward decidedly less aggressive play. They use sticks as fairy wands and carry little Ziploc baggies of glitter which they sprinkle as “pixie dust.” In their games, there are no “bad guys,” only perilous situations— “Don’t fall off that cliff!”—where they have to help one another with their “magic.” Over the years we’ve noticed that whenever a “non-gendered” toy is introduced into their habitat, the kids appropriate it along stereotypically gendered lines. Example: A few years ago there was a Rainbow Loom craze, where kids took tiny rubber loops and wove them into bracelets. Everyone was doing it. We bought thousands of the things for our kids. The girls wove bracelets that they collected and gave to their friends. The boy also wove bracelets—until he realized that he could use the rubber loops to weave a long elastic cord that he was then able to tie to a flexible piece of wood. He used the Rainbow Loom to build a workable bow. He never made another bracelet.
rainbow loom We never taught our kids any of this stuff. They just arrived at it on their own. Because—I understand that this is a radical concept—boys and girls are different. As I stare at my children’s play room right now, here are the toys I see: A 5-foot-tall cloth teepee; a large set of Magna-Tiles; a Q-Ba-Maze; Moluk Bilibos (which are even weirder than whatever you’re picturing right now); and about 30,000 Legos. Like I said, we’re hippies.
moluk bilibo Here is what the children do with those toys: All of them use the teepee, the girls as a “fairy house” and the boy as a fort. The girls use the Magna-Tiles to build interesting geometric shapes. The boy most recently used the pieces from the Q-Ba-Maze—which is a modular marble-maze contraption—to build a “laser blaster.” And when it comes to Legos? The girls spend hours designing princess castles and houses, with intricate rooms for their Lego minifigures. The boy has created a series of fighter jets, each one with more missiles and cannons and bombs than the last. One of the oddities of modern life is that polite society currently insists that you are “born this way” if you are homosexual or misgendered. But when it comes to boys who like to play with swords and build fighter jets? For some reason, this is viewed as a societal construct that should be eradicated so that they’ll want to play with dolls. As we’ve discovered at my house, this is a project that’s doomed to fail.
