Polemics

What do pastors teach Christian women about relationships and marriage?

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Do young women understand how to get to a stable marriage?
Do young women understand how to get to a stable marriage?

I enjoy reading Dalrock’s blog. Recently, he posted a couple of posts (first and second) about theologian Doug Wilson. A friend gave me Wilson’s book “Reforming Marriage”, and I did not find it to be a helpful guide to marriage. So, I was interested to see what Dalrock found in Wilson’s other writings.

Here’s one quote that Dalrock found:

As the apostle Paul is urging young women to marry, he lets a very interesting comment fall in passing. “I will therefore that the younger women marry, bear children, guide the house, give none occasion to the adversary to speak reproachfully” (1 Tim. 5:14). The word translated here as “guide the house” is oikodespotein. The wife is to be the ruler or despot of the home.

And:

A wife therefore has true authority over her home which no one, including her husband, can take away from her.

[…]In a certain sense, a husband… is an honored and permanent guest… he should learn to see himself as a guest.

Now, that seems to contradict the traditional view that men are supposed to be leaders in the home. I don’t think that Christian women are well-served by pastors who dispute the traditional view.

Apparently, lots of women are being told that the traditional meaning of the Bible doesn’t apply to them. I heard Ben Shapiro talk about a church-attending Christian woman who was raging at the Jewish men she had relationships with, because they had not married her. (in his latest podcast, H/T David)

Shapiro mentions this article from the radically-leftist Washington Post:

At my very first job in New York, a colleague jokingly informed me: “You came in a WASP, but you’re leaving a Jew.”

That statement was in reference to the demographics of the office’s staff. Almost everyone who worked there was Jewish, and I, a recent college graduate who had spent my adolescence in a largely Christian community in the South, was not.

[…]Over almost seven years and two serious relationships with Jewish men who at first said religion didn’t matter — and then backtracked and decided it did — I’ve optimistically begun interfaith relationships with an open mind twice, only to become the last woman these men dated before settling down with a nice Jewish girl.

[…]There were times at church that I saw couples worshiping together and felt pangs of jealousy. But I told myself every relationship had its problems and these were relatively minor.

She attended church, but she thought that a difference in religion was “relatively minor”. Nevermind what the Bible says about it. I think that this woman was taught by her pastor that her feelings had more authority than the teachings of the Bible. And that she could retain the label of “Christian” and attend church, despite holding to a worldview that was essentially feminist at its core.

This isn’t the first time that I’ve met “Christian” women raised in the church who thought that the Bible should not have any authority over their choices in relationships. Most woman I met in my teens and 20s believed that. Their only guides were their feelings and intuitions, and that even led some of them to shack up with atheists. And many of the men they chose were just children studying in non-STEM programs, living at home, and racking up debts. They had empty resumes, and empty bank accounts. Nothing I said to these women from wisdom or from the Bible put a dent in their priorities. And in more than one case, pastors backed them up against me.

What prompted me to write this post today was the conjunction of the Dalrock posts with what a friend of mine told me about the Christian woman he is currently dating. So let’s talk about that second part.

My friend is an absolute stud of a Christian man. He has a STEM career, tons of money, his own house, and he has spent a lot of time studying apologetics and engaging in debates. He also attends church and Bible study weekly, and runs an apologetics discussion group. On paper, this guy has everything.

So I was asking him how things were going with the lady. He was telling her about his adventures debating some moral issue. Rather than asking him for details about the exchange, or saying her own view, she completely shut down and refused to discuss it at all! And she wouldn’t even recognize that what he was doing was praiseworthy, in order to encourage him. You would think that a guy would be able to impress a self-described Christian woman with his adventures as a Christian man. But it turns out that a lot of Christian women don’t look for anything seriously Christian in a man or in a marriage.

The experience my friend described basically summarizes what I saw in my teens and 20s, until I met my friend Mary through my blog. Mary is a serious Christian woman who is chaste and active in apologetics. She can run circles around me in debates, and has a computer science degree. She works in computer science, too. Since Mary, I have even met other single and married Christian women with conservative politics, STEM degrees and solid careers and/or marriages, who read apologetics and engage in discussions with non-Christians. They do exist. But I don’t think that any of these great Christian women learned to value these things in church.

I think most pastors fear hurting women’s feelings by expecting them to take the Bible seriously when it comes to relationships and marriage. They minimize the obligations on women to be chaste, to date Christian men, to be focused on marriage while dating, to let husbands lead in the home, etc. It really bothers me that traditional conservative “complementarian” pastors are either unable or unwilling to tell women that the Bible has something to say about how to prepare for marriage, and who they choose to marry. Pastors are free to push their new revisionist feminist version of marriage. But I didn’t get BS and MS degrees in computer science with the plan of putting in 45 years of full-time work in the private sector for a “marriage” that’s been degraded by radical feminism. I offer a lot, and therefore I won’t accept anything less than a Christian wife and a Christian marriage.

People wonder why men are not marrying as often as they used to. I think it has something to do with the fact that pastors are teaching women that husbands ought not be the leaders of their own homes. A Christian man will want his wife to be chief of staff in the home. She should be intelligent, accomplished and effective. Of course he will consult with her before making decisions on how to proceed. But men don’t marry unless we are going to be entrusted with that leadership role. Male leadership in marriage is non-negotiable. And that’s why women need to be wise about choosing the right man for that job – by relying on her mind, instead of on her feelings. Not everything a woman feels like doing is wise.

If you’re a young woman wanting to impress a Christian man with your qualifications for marriage, then check out my marriage questions, and see how you do.

Videos

Stephen C. Meyer lectures on intelligent design and the origin of life

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Christianity and the progress of science
Christianity and the progress of science

A MUST-SEE lecture based on Dr. Stephen C. Meyer’s book “Signature in the Cell“.

I highly recommend watching the lecture, and looking at the slides. The quality of the video and the content is first class. There is some Q&A (9 minutes) at the end of the lecture.

Topics:

  • intelligent design is concerned with measuring the information-creating capabilities of natural forces like mutation and selection
  • Darwinists think that random mutations and natural selection can explain the origin and diversification of living systems
  • Darwinian mechanisms are capable of explaining small-scale adaptive changes within types of organisms
  • but there is skepticism, even among naturalists, that Darwinian mechanisms can explain the origin of animal designs
  • even if you concede that Darwinism can account for all of the basic animal body plans, there is still the problem of life’s origin
  • can Darwinian mechanisms explain the origin of the first life? Is there a good naturalistic hypothesis to explain it?
  • there are at least two places in the history of life where new information is needed: origin of life, and Cambrian explosion
  • overview of the structure of DNA and protein synthesis (he has helpful pictures and he uses the snap lock blocks, too)
  • the DNA molecule is composed of a sequence of bases that code for proteins, and the sequence is carefully selected to have biological function
  • meaningful sequences of things like computer code, English sentences, etc. require an adequate cause
  • it is very hard to arrive at a meaningful sequence of a non-trivial length by randomly picking symbols/letters
  • although any random sequence of letters is improbable, the vast majority of sequences are gibberish/non-compiling code
  • similarly, most random sequences of amino acids are lab-proven (Doug Axe’s work) to be non-functional gibberish
  • the research showing this was conducted at Cambridge University and published in the Journal of Molecular Biology
  • so, random mutation cannot explain the origin of the first living cell
  • however, even natural selection coupled with random mutation cannot explain the first living cell
  • there must already be replication in order for mutation and selection to work, so they can’t explain the first replicator
  • but the origin of life is the origin of the first replicator – there is no replication prior to the first replicator
  • the information in the first replicator cannot be explained by law, such as by chemical bonding affinities
  • the amino acids are attached like magnetic letters on a refrigerator
  • the magnetic force sticks the letters ON the fridge, but they don’t determine the specific sequence of the letters
  • if laws did determine the sequence of letters, then the sequences would be repetitive
  • the three materialist explanations – chance alone, chance and law, law alone – are not adequate to explain the effect
  • the best explanation is that an intelligent cause is responsible for the biological explanation in the first replicator
  • we know that intelligent causes can produce functional sequences of information, e.g. – English, Java code
  • the structure and design of DNA matches up nicely with the design patterns used by software engineers (like WK!)

There are some very good tips in this lecture so that you will be able to explain intelligent design to others in simple ways, using everyday household items and children’s toys to symbolize the amino acids, proteins, sugar phosphate backbones, etc.

Proteins are constructed from a sequence of amino acids:

A sequence of amino acids forming a protein
A sequence of amino acids forming a protein

Proteins sticking onto the double helix structure of DNA:

Some proteins sticking onto the sugar phosphate backbone
Some proteins sticking onto the sugar phosphate backbone

I highly, highly recommend this lecture. You will be delighted and you will learn something.

Here is an article that gives a general overview of how intelligent design challenges. If you want to read something more detailed about the material that he is covering in the lecture above related to the origin of life, there is a pretty good article here.

There is a good breakdown of some of the slides with helpful flow charts here on Uncommon Descent.

Positive arguments for Christian theism

News

Education Secretary Betsy Devos scores a victory against public sector union

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Secretary of Education Betsy Devos
Secretary of Education Betsy Devos

Although you would never know it from the mainstream news media, Secretary of Education Betsy Devos is doing her best to advance a taxpayer-friendly agenda in education policy.

Here’s the latest from the American Enterprise Institute, a free-market think tank:

In a noteworthy development, DeVos’s team this month radically revamped the collective-bargaining agreement (CBA) that governs the 3,900 employees at the U.S. Department of Education. The new CBA, between the Department and Council 252 of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), includes big changes from the 2013 agreement negotiated under the Obama administration.

The new agreement doesn’t address compensation or benefits, of course, since those are governed by federal law, but it does include a raft of sensible, taxpayer-friendly changes.

The new CBA eliminates the set-aside of “official time” for union business. Under the old agreement, designated union representatives were free to work on union business during normal, government hours — all on the taxpayers’ dime. The old CBA stipulated that “no fewer than 75” (!) union stewards across the country could work up to 40 hours a year on “official time,” while another three union officers would devote 100 percent of their time to union business. Henceforth, union business will be done on union time, rather than on the taxpayers’.

Under the old agreement, department employees were given only a solitary 48-hour window each year in which they could opt out of union membership; miss that, and they were automatically enrolled. Henceforth, employees who wish to be in the union each year will be free to do so, and they will have an extended period in which to enroll — but they will have to actively choose to join.

The revamped accord also removes the requirements for “pre-decisional consultation.” Under the previous CBA, the department was required to consult the union before every agency-wide decision that could be construed as affecting the work of employees (such as transferring employees from one office to another, or even shifting employees from one project to another within the same office). Now, the department needs only notify the union of such decisions.

Under the new CBA, the union will be charged “fair-market rent” for the use of government office space and federally furnished equipment to conduct union business. Under the Obama-era accord, taxpayers were required to provide space and equipment to the union free of charge.

More generally, the new agreement removes a number of provisions that added burdensome procedural directives above and beyond statutory requirements when it came to things such as telework and grievance procedures.

If there is one thing I expected from Betsy Devos, it’s taxpayer-friendly education policy.

Unfortunately, the Republican party didn’t help her very much in that massive $1.3 Billion spending bill that they passed, with Democrat support. Betsy wants to cut federal spending on education, and return control of education policy to the states and municipalities. But the GOP just gave the Department of Education a bigger budget. We really need to switch out some of these big government Republicans for authentic conservatives.