In the previous post, I took N.T. Wright to task for trifling with the text of 1 Tim. 2:12, and for insulting our intelligence. A discussion broke out in the comments about whether I had been too cavalier and dismissive of Wright. So here’s a little something about all that. In the first place, I …
Fresh Butter at Ephesus
The other day, when I responded to N.T. Wright’s foray into extreme Pauline makeovers, a friend sent me a link to a longer and more scholarly defense of Wright’s posish. That link I now pass on to you. And being a good Christian, and a fair-minded soul, I read it. All the way to the …
Squeezing Harder Than That
The Church of England just recently said no to women bishops. There were howls of outrage from all the predictable quarters, for whom such a troglodyte move is just smack-the-forehead baffling. Now I can understand a vote against women bishops as a preliminary move to try to undo the ordination of women priests. And I …
A Brief for Israel
Yesterday I tweeted this . . . “If you read the escalating fighting in Israel with anything other than sympathy for Israel, then you need to turn the book right side up.” . . . and the responses I got indicated I needed to say something more. So here it is. A few qualifications first. …
Reductio Ad Infernum
A college in Washington is allowing a man who thinks he is a woman (where? down in his heart!) to make free use of the women’s locker room. So although he is a male, his internal confusions qualify him as one of those T things that the progressives love to go on about when they …
Bluestocking Feminism
Rachel Held Evans was recently on the Today show, promoting her new book A Year of Biblical Womanhood. Rather than address the whole stunt (designed to see if, in the grand tradition of Rocky III, this particular cash cow has any milk left), I thought I would just riff off one thing she did with …
Tyler and Stephanie
Whenever we celebrate a wedding, it is right and proper for us to reflect on the first wedding. Jesus teaches us that we are supposed to understand what we are doing with regard to marriage by reflecting on how it was “from the beginning.” And so this is what we do. Given the nature of …
Red State Incarnationalist
There are a number of reasons why Christians are reluctant to bring their ideas down out of the realm of ethereal abstractions. One of those reasons is that to do so requires us to take responsibiltiy. Another reason is that taking responsibility brings us into conflict. In short, we can’t come down from the heights …
Joy and Melancholy
INTRODUCTION:What are we to make of a disruption of joy that does not appear to proceed from unconfessed sin, and which also appears unrelated to external afflictions? What are we to make of that broad category of minor depression, major depression, other forms of mental illness, the blues, or simply other forms of unhappiness? They …
A Tall Tree and a Short Rope
[Trigger warning: strident feminism pretending not to be] Sarah Moon writes here about complementarianism’s “ugly relationship with rape.” She poses two questions of us bad people, and they are as follows — first, how do we define rape? And secondly, what do we propose to do about it? Okay. I would define rape as having …