“This is why the question of women’s ordination is emphatically not about a simple matter of including women in Christian ministry. It is not a simple matter of rearranging the furniture. This is about redefining the nature of Christian ministry, in order to make it compatible with another religion entirely. And this is why, once …
The First Law of Sanctification
“We are seeking to understand the disintegration of the culture around us, and in order to do this rightly we have to keep coming back to this foundational principle. Worship drives and shapes all of human existence, and it does so according to this principle: you become like what you worship” (Why Ministers Must be …
Avoiding the Arbitrary
“Traditionalists are fighting a rear-guard action, trying to keep women out of a post that they clearly more qualified for than men are. Feelings can run high in the debate, but the debate is essentially over whether men only or women and men both should occupy the post of an essentially feminized office. If anyone …
Heading Off the Sweetest Boy . . .
“At the same time, because of sentimentalism and pietism, the definitions of piety have become increasingly feminized. The definition of what constitutes devout piety has drifted into feminine territory, and ministers have labored to keep up with the shifting expectations. The sweetest and gentlest boy in the church is the one who is told repeatedly …
Maybe Two Word Studies
“Depending on the issue and the text, liberals are sometimes more to be trusted with the message of the text than conservatives are. This is because liberals are not stuck with the results of their exegesis the way conservatives are. Because conservatives confess that the teaching of the text is normative, the conservative has to …
Because the Disobedient Don’t Care
“Settling this exegetically won’t settle anything, as the last several decades have demonstrated. If there is enormous pressure to go in this direction, and there is, then we need to bring the gospel to bear on what is causing that pressure, and stop bringing isolated texts to the symptoms of that pressure. Trying to stop …
Compare and Contrast
“At the same time, we don’t want to assume that any position that ticks feminists off must be biblical. That can’t be right — it is far too easy to do. And, as with so many issues, we have to distinguish different levels and layers. If, as I have noted, our holy fathers used to …
Or From Anywhere Else?
“If the apostle Paul would not allow an inspirited prophetess — whose words were from the Spirit himself — to join in the weighing and sifting of the prophetic utterances, then why would he let her do it just because she has an MDiv from Fuller? (Why Ministers Must be Men, p. 29).
That Languid Soccer Player Way
“Before the discussion gets sidetracked on the basis of caricature, lett us grant that the arbiter of long and short ought not to be a particularly strict dorm monitor at a fundamentalist Bible college. Paul says short, not ‘less than a quarter inch, with pink sidewalls around the ears.’ He says long, not ‘over a …
Source Material
“Gravitas can also be inherited from relatively healthy families who simply tell their stories well. The southern novelists Flannery O’Connor once claimed that anyone who pays attention to his or her childhood could write novels for the rest of his or her life” (Barnes, The Pastor as Minor Poet, p. 50).