Elspeth speaks truth to the Churchians.
Men are leaders, yes. And men lead women, yes. But men lead their own women and no one else’s. This is the way it is supposed to be. Any effective hierarchy demands that those in charge be able to trust subordinates to do what is required of them, This is as true of the woman under her man’s authority as it is for whomever he is under the authority of.
It is not the job of men as a collective to police women as a collective. It has never been that way. Men respected appropriate authority over them, and they also did the work of managing those under their authority, which included their women. The women in turn managed those under their authority under the directive set forth by their authority.
Whether it was in the family, the church, or the greater community, this is how it was done. I imagine it was how it was done when Paul penned the Epistle to Titus.
I know this sounds like just one more thing I’m saying men need to take responsibility for bur hear me out. When husbands authority over their wives is respected, and daughters are taught likewise (likely more by their mother’s example as much as by their father decree), then women can and must be trusted to pass these truths on to successive generations of women.
We simply cannot ignore Biblical directive with the excuse of “But it doesn’t work!” Yes, it does work. Doesn’t the idea of a random men feeling free to band to police other men’s women sound odd to you?
I suspect part of our divide is that you are gravely concerned with the society at large in which we live, while I am of the mind that the larger culture is a lost cause. Not because I’m a nihilist (I hate what has become of Western culture), but because Scripture makes it clear that men will wax worse and worse, and that we have to be primarily concerned with conduct within the church and her first and foremost.
Well she’s right. It is wrong for one man to interfere with another — and as a father of a married daughter I have to stand way, way back and let him lead (even when he is making a complete mess of it). Because she is no longer being led by me.
That was poorly worded. My overall point with that incoherent ramble is that women teaching and training other women does not preclude men being in leadership of women. If the church (as we are my primary concern) would reject feminism wholesale- and we can only do that incrementally as more of us are bold enough to stand for truth- we can restore a Biblical system in the church. And in that system, women train and admonish other women in right conduct and godly character.
Men are certainly still leading under that model. They just aren’t having to do EVERYTHING and perpetuating the faulty premise that women are not moral agents but rather creatures that need to be trained like animals.
No Elspeth, it was not poorly worded. It was describing the natural order until the progressive revolution, and the longer version has important information in it. The issue of moral agency of women is not being disputed by most in the Christian tradosphere, instead we are rediscovering that if you teach the law you will get opposition, in the church and without it. Having quoted Elspeth, this reponse outlines the problem.
Worldly girls acting slutty don’t care if they are shunned, shamed and rejected by Churchian women. First and foremost, they don’t care because they know that the bulk of their Churchian “sisters” are also engaged in sexual immorality. Further, they don’t want to be part of the Churchian social circle.
Worldly girls acting slutty will only care if they are shamed, shunned and rejected by MEN. That’s the only thing that’s going to get their attention.
I get what SSM is saying; I just don’t know how it’s practically fleshed-out in today’s society. The Churchian men don’t shun, shame and reject them. Some Christian men don’t even shun, shame and reject them (though they wouldn’t care, because they don’t want men like that anyway.) The players don’t shun, shame and reject them. The beta providers don’t, either.
What once worked in the days of the movie (and book) “The Help” (shunning the girl who got knocked up outside of marriage and had the shotgun wedding) won’t work anymore. There’s plenty of women who don’t care if she’s a whore, and she’d rather be accepted by them anyway, because they don’t “judge” her.
So, basically, the church doesn’t care if she is a whore, the society doesn’t care and actually rewards the fruit of being a whore, and there seem to be men who will always take a whore and even MARRY her!
I don’t have a solution…
Well, actually, women do care. This was the very point that the blog author (who now has over 200 comments on one post that I am shameless mining) made: that a first year university student who was acting in porn was shamed when she was outed. That people do react, and they are hurt.
The church has been cowardly here. People have forgotten that you can tell your son or daughter that they are being totally stupid, ruining their life — by the numbers — and that if you want to keep on going down that path you will end up… either like you (the parent — Ozzy Osbourne, for instance, preaches against drugs with what remains of his drug-addled brain) or like Uncle Jim the creep or Auntie Sally with her ten cats. Individually, as fathers we need to do this. As mothers we need to do this.
What the church leadership have to do is stop being scared about this. Teaching the law is not about damning but saying it — and the spirit will work if the word is out there, for it is active, and searches. Providing pastoral care to those who are damaged by our fallen society, me included, is indeed the work of the church. But it’s not nice, it’s not pretty — and if you think it would be nice and pretty in the secular therapy world, I can tell you, as someone working there, it is no different there. Habits are identified that need to change — indeed the current PC rules are tediously contradictory and the scriptural rules are easier.
Where can we start? With the family around us. Is it going to be easy? No. But the more families that choose to subvert the current system, love each other, and let not the social fascist through the door, the smaller the space the government has, to the point where it again becomes small, and we turn again to our families and to God, not to any tyrant.
