The Pastrix & The Unicycle
Last week, I wrote about the root of our modern culture’s hatred of babies and insistence on the glory of elective chemical sterility. Remember, our culture hates children because our culture hates God, and every single aborted baby bears his image. In John 3, the Lord Jesus identified this sin-begotten antithesis towards God as the root judgment standing over us:
“…this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil.” -John 3:19
Our culture’s implacable hatred of God is the reason it embraces death on every plane and wages war against its own good with such reckless vigor. This is one of those principles that, once you see it anywhere, you see it everywhere. Why do we sacralize the self-mutilating impulse of transgenderism, with its surgical removal of the organs of our fruitfulness, as a high and holy good? Why do we bomb civilians into oblivion, sacrifices to the bloodthirsty gods of war? Why do our WiFi signals carry the vilest sorts of abuses onto our screens—our teenage girls stripped naked for the pleasure of a nation of lechers?
Because we hate God. This antithesis is the headwaters of all of our cultural ills; all else is sewage floating downstream from this poisonous source.
One of our conspicuously irrational cultural hatreds becomes understandable in light of this principle: Our hatred of masculinity in general and fatherhood in particular. The concept of male headship has maybe never been more despised than it is today.
See, if you read the Bible, and if as you do so, you happen to forget to filter it through the lens of all of those helpful modern interpretive tools—you know, your standard Critical Race Theory and Gender Studies hermeneutical sieves—you may just see something dangerous lurking there in the dark corners of the text. Something like patriarchy, father-rule, and male headship.
Some bloke on Twitter last week was all in a huff, trying to catch those of us peddling the patriarchy in what he apparently viewed as the gotcha! to end all gotchas! He asked, “Is male headship central to the gospel?”
Now, don’t miss the play that’s being run, here. It’s an old one, but fortunately, one that isn’t all that hard to get out of, should you happen to believe the Bible and not be scared of the person asking the question. It’s the old, “If it isn’t central, it doesn’t matter” play. The first response one should have is to chuckle, pat the questioner on the head, and send him off to play with his friends. “Isn’t that cute?”
Shrinking the circle of things-that-matter down to the size of the so-called “essentials” is nearly always a dumb idea. That’s what got us into this cultural Christianity mess in the first place, this idea that all that matters is defending inerrancy and penal substitution; so long as you’ve got that, the rest isn’t all that important, right?
Wrong.
Pretty soon you’ve got women pastors riding unicycles across the stage with the skit team during communion—but don’t worry; they affirm inerrancy. The unicycled pastrix is a secondary doctrinal issue.
So that’s always reaction number one when someone tries to run this play on you. But the second response that I’d encourage to this line of questioning is simple: Affirm with alacrity. Is male headship central to the gospel? Well, duh.
Did Christ die to bring us to a heavenly Mommy?
Is the Fatherhood of God central to the gospel?
Is the Sonship of the Son central to the gospel?
Must the Bridegroom be male to win this Bride?
Well. Duh.
Don’t blush at male headship to please those who blush at the Word of God. Don’t give in to the tactic. When the PhD’d elite try to make you feel a bit embarrassed for repeating Paul’s words out loud and saying something like, “What he said,” don’t blink. PhDs are great, but they’re not nearly as good as Pauline theology, served neat.
