The Half Time Huddle
The scoreboard as final authority
Australian Football is the best game played by men. It combines speed, strength, endurance and skill in a way that I haven’t seen in any other sport. A feature of the game is that the best players have an uncanny sense for where the goals are, such that when in range they only need a whisker of space and time to get the ball on the boot and through for a goal. The defender could smother his opponent for a full half except for one brief touch, and the stats sheet would say that he had been outplayed. What is true of the part is also true of the whole. When the half time siren sounds and the two teams run to their huddles they may tell themselves all they want that ‘we’re all over them’, but the scoreboard on the far wing will always be the authority on who is winning the match.
The Christian Scoreboard
My goal is to have a look at the scoreboard to see how we Western Christians have been doing of late. God willing this will act as a precursor to a post on brewing tension between Christians of different eschatologies, explaining why I think the premillenials will be at fault if any rupture does happen within the reformed camp.
My belief is that we post-resurrection Christians have two complimentary sets of marching orders from on high. The two sets of instructions are…
1. Genesis 1:28
“And God blessed them, and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth’.”
2. Matthew 28:18-20
“And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”
It should be clear that these marching orders have a variety of expressions which are context specific, and we have the whole rest of the Bible to give us an interpretative framework for these commands. However, these are the commands. If you walk up to a Christian and say, “What are you doing here?” they should respond with, ‘Filling the earth and subduing it; and converting, baptizing and teaching all the nations of Man.’ These commands are helpfully quantifiable to a large degree. For example, we can ask ourselves how full the world is, and whether it is getting fuller. If it is not full, and not getting fuller, then we are not doing very well. Naturally, we could quibble over what ‘full’ means, as we know that ‘filling’ has just as much to do with distribution as it does with raw numbers (Genesis 11), but such quibbling should not prevent us from a broad agreement on what the goal is on the macro scale. This gives us the opportunity to get out our maps and calculators and figure out whether things are becoming more or less like how God told us to make them.
Filling is just one example. With a little more difficultly we could make some quantifiable metrics of subduing, and we can definitely make quantifiable metrics of converting, baptizing and obeying.
No doubt we all feel like we have been trying very hard, and we probably have. But as we have already seen, ultimately success or failure depends on the numbers on the board, not on how dirty the guernseys are. With this in mind, let us have a look at the scoreboard.
Metrics
The following metrics are Australian specific and so, though my intention is to characterise the success of the Western church, we will need to make a rather large assumption that we can extrapolate from our own context to the situation as a whole. These stats are the work of a 26 year old with 3 hours up his sleeve, and hence though I am confident in their accuracy I have deliberately not attempted precision.
1. Filling
Australia is nowhere near full. We are currently home to 27 million people (ABS 2024), but could easily find room for 100 million and give them all a better quality of life than they currently have.
The birthrate in Australia has been below replacement since the mid 1970’s. As of 2022 it sits at 1.63 births per woman (ABS 2022). Our population has grown during this time and is still growing, but this has been as a result of migration rather than propagation. We have also increasingly concentrated our population in major urban centres, which has lead to a population decrease or even collapse in non-trendy rural areas. It is a guess, but I would think that the population density in Mullewa or Salmon Gums was probably higher before the colonial era than it is currently.
In conclusion, we are a mixed bag for this command. We are meeting the population growth criteria on a technicality though we ourselves are too lazy to procreate. We are going backwards on the distribution part of the requirement, and we will be unlikely to stop do so until some of us bite the bullet and move to the less attractive areas and raise children there, so that they have the God given natural affinity for the less obviously desirable places.
2. Subduing
This is the only metric where I will allow myself to be vague and qualitative. I say without hesitation that we live in an uglier, less ecologically rich and ultimately less God honouring landscape than our ancestors did, due to our choices of urban planning, agricultural practices, wildland management and architecture. Naturally this is not true to an equal extent in all places, and there are probably some places in the West where Godly dominion is increasing.
3. Converting and Baptizing
The rate that Australians identify as Christian has halved since 1970 and currently sits at around 43%. Between 2016 and 2021 the number of Australians identifying as reformed dropped by over 100 000, though this is probably somewhat compensated by an increase of 75 000 in ‘non-denominational’ (read ‘Baptist’) Christians.
Rates of church attendance are harder to find and are probably less reliable. However, the best bet is that church attendance rates have probably been stable over the last 2 decades (Roy Morgan 2021).
In summary, the church is currently clinging on to a draw in this metric. We are haemorrhaging nominal Christians but the percentage of saved Australians has probably remained steady for some time.
4. Obeying
We could choose from hundreds of different specific examples of law keeping to determine whether Australians are becoming increasingly obedient or disobedient to God. I have chosen the three below because they are serious and relatively easy to get data for.
a. Illicit Unions
As of 2021, 38% of children in Australia are born out of wedlock. By comparison, the rate of out of wedlock births sat near 5% from 1900 through to the early 1960’s (AIFS 2023). When it is considered that contraception and abortion are much more readily available now than they were prior to the 60’s, it is safe to believe that the 7 fold increase in out of wedlock births under-estimates the weight of guilt our culture is carrying for the sin of extra-marital sex.
b. Abortion
Australian abortion figures are not perfectly established. As a rough guide, it is likely that there have been just under 100 000 abortions per year in Australia for the last 40 years (Chan & Sage 2005; Children by Choice 2024), which would mean a small per capita decline in the abortion rate over this time due to the increased population size. As an interesting side note, the abortion rate is just under a third of the current birth rate, meaning that if all these children were brought to term we would be sitting on a replacement birth rate.
c. Divorce
It is a very crude metric, but currently in Australia for every 2 marriages there is more than 1 divorce (AIFS 2023b; AIFS 2023c). In 1900 it was closer to 35 marriages to 1 divorce. Apart from a brief explosion of divorces immediately following the implementation of no-fault divorce in 1976 the rate of divorces when compared to marriages has been on a somewhat steady upward trend for 120 years (AIFS 2023b; AIFS 2023c).
On the topic of obedience, I do not have hard data for the following but they are intuitively fairly obvious...
· Gay marriage is currently legal in Australia.
· Porn use is rampant. It is probably not increasing due to already being near saturation.
· There is a well established mental health crisis in Australia, particularly in the younger demographics. This mental health crisis includes significantly higher than historical rates of people desiring to be the opposite sex from what they are, though the current medical establishment does not treat this as a mental disorder.
· Our tax system is either ambivalent or somewhat disadvantageous towards traditional family setups.
· Federal and state governments in Australia are shedding any last vestiges of Christianity and increasingly flexing their muscles in interfering with the Church. For example, during the so called Covid pandemic state governments from time to time effectively banned in person Communion through stay at home orders.
In conclusion, moral decline in Australia has been steady though not precipitous for at least 50 years, and where the decline appears to have stabilized (such as in abortion), this stabilization is likely to be due to saturation rather than repentance.
Time for the coach’s address
As we Western Christians jog in to the half time huddle it is hard to ignore that we lost the last term. When it comes to filling, subduing, converting, baptizing and teaching the scoreboard says that we are losing ground. Having said this, we are still in the game. The most important statistic is the rate of church going Christians, and we have probably managed to keep this fairly steady.
Word runs round the group that the opposition made a serious procedural violation before the game, serious enough that the higher ups will need to disqualify them at the next board meeting of the league. The four points are in the bag, but there is still another half to play. Several players seem to be eyeing off the post match esky and one or two are asking to spend the rest of the match on the bench. The coach notices and begins an impassioned speech demanding that the team play out the game with the same spirit as before. As the speech reaches a crescendo the assistant tugs on his sleeve and points out that the same spirit as before produced a 5 goal deficit in the previous term, and rather blandly states that we are going to need to switch to a more attacking game plan and make some left field positional changes if we are going to win this thing on the field as well as in the board room. A hush falls on the huddle, an awkward tension settles on everyone, except for the original culprits who steel another glance at the beers.
To be continued…
References
Australian Bureau of Statistics (2022) Births Australia. Available from: https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/people/population/births-australia/2022#data-downloads [29th March 2024)
Australian Bureau of Statistics (2022) Religious Affiliation in Australia. Available from: https://www.abs.gov.au/articles/religious-affiliation-australia [29th March 2024]
Australian Bureau of Statistics (2024) Population Pyramid. Available from: https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/people/population/population-clock-pyramid [29th March 2024]
Australian Institute of Family Studies a (2023) Births in Australia. Available from: https://aifs.gov.au/research/facts-and-figures/births-australia-2023 [29th March 2024]
Australian Institute of Family Studies b (2023) Divorces in Australia. Available from: https://aifs.gov.au/research/facts-and-figures/divorces-australia-2023 [29th March 2024]
Australian Institute of Family Studies c (2023) Marriages in Australia. Available from: https://aifs.gov.au/research/facts-and-figures/marriages-australia-2023 [29th March 2024]
Chan A, Sage LC (2005) Estimating Australia’s abortion rates 1985-2003. The Medical Journal of Australia 182, 447-452. Available from: https://www.mja.com.au/journal/2005/182/9/estimating-australias-abortion-rates-1985-2003 [29th March 2024]
Children by Choice (2024) Abortion Rates in Australia. Available from: https://www.childrenbychoice.org.au/organisational-information/papers-reports/abortion-rates-in-australia [29th March 2024]
Roy Morgan (2021) The shrinking proportion of religious Australians. Available from: https://www.roymorgan.com/findings/the-shrinking-proportion-of-religious-australians [29th March 2024]
Lady Preachers and Breastfeeding Men
Finding the ‘why’
Women behind the pulpit are one of the surest signposts of a sick church. To reach this point of antinomianism a church must have such a high proportion of Lewis’s ‘Men without chests’ that it is difficult to see how the rot can be reversed. I wanted to start by saying ‘there is broad agreement among conservative evangelicals that women must not preach’, but I realised that this was ridiculous. The Venn diagrams overlap so closely that one could rather say that to be a conservative evangelical is to be an evangelical who does not believe women should preach.
Thankfully within conservative evangelicalism there is also unanimity on the question of ‘why’. Stop an average Baptist on the street, and ask them this question, and they will reply ‘because God says so’, an answer sweet as cold water to a parched soul. However, ask them another ‘why’, ‘why does God say so?’ and the responses will start to vary. Some will say ‘I don’t know, but He does’, and God bless these faithful ones. Some others will say ‘He just does’, and these good men and women will get their reward in heaven. However, perhaps you might ask an ignorant and uncouth sort, the kind who is covered in tats and can’t shake the language of his former life, and he might say ‘I dunno, I guess they’re f#%&ing useless at it’, and he is the best of all.
Good answers, real answers and correct answers
All three of these answers are admirable, but only one is correct. The first answer, ‘I don’t know, but He does’ is not a real answer. However, saying that this is not a real answer is not to say that it is a bad answer. The implied trust in the authority of God to decide things which are above our understanding is to be commended. For someone who honestly doesn’t know why God says what He says, this is the best answer to give.
The second answer is a real answer, but it is a wrong answer. To say that God ‘just does’ something is to say that there isn’t a reason why He does it, or in other words, it is arbitrary. We should have a lot of patience for this wrong answer though, as it comes from a good place. The answerer is correct that God has the authority to make arbitrary laws, but is wrong in believing that this is one of them.
The third answer is best because it is both real and correct. The reason why God says that women should not preach is because he has not made them to be preachers, and when they try to do it anyway they subvert not only His wishes, but also the natural order that He made.
The natural order
When I say that there is a ‘natural order’ many people will hear ‘arbitrary hierarchy’, and therein lies the heart of the problem. I said in my last post that our life and death struggle with the culture is largely on the nature of reality. Our culture is hell bent on perverting every interrelation in the natural world, as the dark force behind this cultural jihad knows that in so doing he will make us both miserable and impotent. Look around and you will see confusion everywhere. You will see women rolling dogs around in prams, cute blonds in military recruitment posters and children locked in supervised pens until mum and dad need them as an accessory at the weekend function.
As we Western Christians watch this world gone mad we are largely silent, as we have already swallowed the substance of the opposing argument. With our heads we accept their premise that everything is arbitrary, that there is no one way that things will work best. We believe that children must obey their parents because God says so, not because they are stupid and will ruin themselves if left to their own devices. We believe that husbands should love their wives because God says so, not because husbands are blessed by loved wives. We believe that wives must not have authority over husbands because God says so, not because women crumble under a load they were never meant to bear. We are like the defenders of some ancient land, who have ceded every piece of cultural ground to the pagans except for the central citadel of the central city, the last bastion, ‘the Lord said so, so here I die!’
I have a deep appreciation for this spirit, but it is misguided, and also fails in the end. As we so often see, when the time comes to make this final stand, you look around and find that your kin are no longer by your side. These adherents to the ‘there’s no reason why, but God says so anyway’ lose their people for two reasons. Firstly, it is human nature to find the minimum application to arbitrary commands, and this leads to a thin and insipid culture defined by the negative. Everything is framed in terms of how close to the line you can go before it is crossed. ‘What is the maximum amount of skin I can show?’, ‘what is the most I can do on the Sabbath?’, ‘Can we let a woman chair the elder’s meeting without actually taking the title of elder?’ Ironically a culture built around minimal applications feels not just thin but also repressive, as we are always tapping the walls of our prison cells, looking for a way out.
The second reason this viewpoint loses the kin is that it puts a gulf of distance between us and God. Instead of a God who loves us and can help us flourish in this life, we see a God who doesn’t really care. He’s set some house rules we don’t understand, and then sips his coffee and reads the paper, occasionally calling out ‘don’t bother me, just follow the rules’, when we ask why we are allowed to watch all the broadcast tv we want, but no Netflix.
The confusion of the sanctified
In defense of these Christians, they are often far too sanctified to let this view really play out. They know deep down that God is a God of love, that He cares for His children and that His ways are not only right but also good. However, for some reason on the issue of women and authority this understanding falls away. We allow or even encourage our women to view the restrictions on them as arbitrary. Our pastors say from the front that, ‘half of you women could preach through this text better than I can, but God says you must not’. But let us be frank; women are short, cute and weak. They have soft, high and musical voices. They are hormonal, emotional, relational, lovers of peace, haters of brashness. In short they are perfectly created for exactly what God made them to do, which is clearly not thundering His words down from the pulpit.
Heaven or Hell
Someone could counter that they have met women who are 6 2’, have square jaws and lungs like blacksmith’s bellows. They may also counter that some of the best preaching is not thundering, but gentle, caring, emotional. What then?
Firstly, we would need to ignore that preaching is inseparable from pastoring, which brings with it a much broader set of prerequisites and narrows the talent pool down even further. But putting this aside, the way of thinking shown by this question is symptomatic of a much deeper issue, so deep that it is hard to contradict it in words rather than feelings. Let the questioner stop for a moment. What does he feel about this butch woman who could match Whitfield for volume? How would he feel about the gentle preacher if he knew that he had no other volume, even when addressing the great sins? Personally I feel like retching. And there is reason behind this feeling. Even where we can create mechanically coherent exceptions to natural categories, we find that God has built into us a dogged loyalty to these natural categories. We know that a child must obey their parents, even if the child is wiser than the parents. We know that woman shooting at each other from muddy trenches is an abomination, even if they are very good shots.
In a previous post I stated that ‘watching a woman preach is like watching a man breastfeed’. This comparison drew some criticism for, as the critics point out, women are physically capable of preaching while men are not physically capable of breastfeeding. As our tattooed friend pointed out at the start, physically capable is a low bar, and I am yet to meet a women who I think would make a decent preacher (let alone a good pastor). However, all of this aside, God has put into us a longing for His patterns, a deep desire to live in harmony with His creation as He created it. Even where it makes mechanical sense, we know that to violate these patterns brings us to the edge of the Void, where all is chaos. And this is why the analogy of breastfeeding men is an apt comparison for lady preachers. Men shouldn’t breastfeed, but not simply because they can’t. There are rare men with genetic issues who do have lactating ducts, and these men should be locked away if they every put a baby near their chests. It’s an abomination, a revolution against the Lord Almighty, to violate His categories in this way. We have too much of our maker in us to not see the way the world ought to be, and to embrace anything else is to prefer Hell to Heaven.
Sanctification by Mockery
The Horse and His Boy, C.S. Lewis
"Shame, Corin," said the King. "Never taunt a man save when he is stronger than you: then, as you please."
James 5:19-20
“My brothers, if anyone among you wanders from the truth and someone brings him back, let him know that whoever brings back a sinner from his wandering will save his soul from death and will cover a multitude of sins.”
The case of Lisa
At 17 years of age I loaded my gloriously orange corolla for the drive to the big city for uni. On the back seat were some spare clothes and a football, and the boot was filled with a no-nonsense biblical hermaneutic. I had been raised in a Dispensationalist Baptist church. The good Christians who raised me had some amazing strengths, the best of which was how seriously they took their Bibles. The Bible was the Word of God. What it said stood, regardless of how you felt about it. To be a Christian meant to read, believe and obey your Bible.
Despite my expectations I wasn’t raptured on the drive to my new home, an on campus residential college, so I unpacked my clothes, football and divinely translated King James Bible, and before long was making friends with whatever Christians I could find. There was Damon, a Godsent older man who I latched onto like a cobia on a whale shark, and Lisa, a Christian girl from a non-denominational background. I learned to make scones and lemon cake, and lured the others into a small Bible study. And so began my first real experience building relationships with other sorts of Christians.
One day we made the fateful decision to focus on gender roles for our Bible study. Now, I had met compromised Christians before, but I hadn’t met a compromised Christian who was weaker than me. Unfortunately Lisa was both compromised and weaker. She believed that the Bible was the Word of God, but had never had someone point out that this very Word of God actually meant what it said on the issue of woman preachers. Damon and I ran rings around her, brushing aside her nonsensical counterpoints, and naming some of her objections as the insubordination against God that they were. We did this all with a smile on our faces. The whole thing was quite a laugh.
Within two weeks Lisa was no longer a Christian. As she said, “If this is what Christianity teaches about women, I can’t agree with it.” The long and short is that a soul decided to take the road to Hell, and a grinning John held the sign at the cross roads.
Who bears the blame
Damon and I should have borne with our weaker sister by being straightforward but caring when we showed her her error. She was wrong, and this error probably would have ended in apostacy anyway, as gender compromise is normally the first step onto the slippery slide to liberal polytheism. It needed to be addressed, and unapologetically. There is no guarantee that a straighter approach would have saved Lisa, but it would have cleared us of any wrongdoing on judgement day.
The greater reprimand however belongs to every mature Christian who ever had a position of influence with Lisa when she was growing up. These Christians had let her worldview roam free outside the village, with never a warning of the dangers to be found in that country.
The question at hand
This blog post was inspired by a minor disagreement in my Bible study circle. Two jokers made some comments in a whatsapp group, comically bemoaning our mixing with Christians of a different, erroneous theological position at an impending event. Some other members privately admonished the jokesters to remember that, while their sentiments were perfectly correct, they must remember that there were others in the group that were less mature and may privately hold to this false position. All was said, and taken, in love. However, I think that these sensitive souls have things backwards.
The implied critique is that the jokesters may be doing to some members of the group chat what Damon and I did to Lisa. However, I would counter that the sensitive souls are playing the part of Lisa’s neglectful Christian community.
Sanctification by osmosis
People are not machines. We all say we know this, but without a strong dose of Lewis in our literary diet we are prone to revert to our post-industrial factory settings. For most people the way we come to believe things is strongly, almost totally, dominated by the beliefs of those around us. We are largely a product of raw worldview material from our parents, refined over time by peer groups and role models, with breaks of originality brought about by herculean feats of strength. Very little development happens by a formal, structured transfer of information.
The humour and sarcasm we are surrounded by is one of the keys to how we are formed. Every decently clothed joke has an element of the ridiculous, impossible or stupid in it. Each time someone laughs at one of these jokes they give their tacit assent that this was indeed ridiculous. Every time you don’t laugh at someone’s joke, you have found that you disagree with the comic on the nature of reality. If you are the only one in the circle not laughing, you have found that your view on reality is in the minority. Only our most precious views can long sustain an isolation of this kind, and in many cases we will conform without even knowing we disagreed in the first place. This often isn’t a bad thing. It is just one more way that we are shaped and moulded in the image of those around us. Choose good peers and you will find yourself well formed.
People of all stripes use humour and sarcasm to reinforce the bounds of reason. When a man jokes to his sons that fake anatomy covers fake personality, or a pastor notes that his toddler speaks like a Pentacostal, the hearers of the joke are actually sanctified as they laugh, as their worldview is brought into a greater alignment with God’s reality.
Humour is also an easy and fun way to break less mature Christians into more complex theology. Through humour they are introduced to the terminology and a caricatured outline of each position, as well as a helpful framing of what their starting point should be if they investigate further.
The pen to play in
There are clear boundaries for mockery, and depending on which boundary is crossed the taunt can become coarse or mean. We tend to agree on where the line of coarseness is, and we modern Christians are much more likely to be prudish than filthy in mockery. The boundary that we struggle with much more is that of meanness.
There are two rules to follow when using mockery in general conversation…
1. Don’t mock someone weaker than you.
2. Don’t mock an idea when you are really trying to mock the person who holds that idea.
Damon and I violated the first of these rules, which is why our mockery was wrong. However no such conclusion could be made of the two jokers in the group chat. Of course, this doesn’t mean that their humour was high quality, only that it was not mean.
In conclusion
The clearest opposition orthodox Christians face in today’s culture is over the nature of reality. More and more the flood of idiocy is rising around our churches and mature Christians must raise the sandbag walls ever higher to keep the madness out. One of the best ways to keep idiotic ideas out of the church is to name them for what they are, and this can be done just as validly by mockery as by a lecture with slides and diagrams. Meanness can and should be avoided, but some internal embarrassment can not be helped. If people believe something stupid, hear it called stupid, are embarrassed and repent, this is the Lord’s work and we should give thanks.
Christians who want to shield their weaker brethren from reality until their error can be cut out under anesthetic create the very problem they are worried about. By the time the operation is performed the tumour may be so far progressed that a technical surgery is really needed, and the teenage Dispensational Baptist surgeon may only have a hacksaw and duct tape on hand. If a younger Lisa had from time to time heard that “egalitarian preachers are women of either sex” or that ‘watching a woman preach is like watching a man breastfeed’ it is quite possible that she would still be a Christian to this day.