In case you are a glutton for punishment.
But this one is not a debate nor an interview about ancient giants, but a gentle rambling testimony interview. Chris and I discuss what it’s like having a pastor for a father, how to read the Bible without pressure, and what it means to “lean not on your own understanding.”
Do you want to know how I fell down the Calvinist rabbit hole? Of course you do.
I was raised in your basic free-will-Baptist, Arminian environment. I discovered Calvinism in college, but I didn’t know right away that it was called Calvinism. I just knew I was encountering deeper Bible teaching than I had seen before, teaching that seemed to be based on good exegesis, to contain a great deal of psychological insight, and to fit with my own experiences of belief, spiritual growth, and successful and unsuccessful evangelism. Above all, this teaching had the effect of exalting Christ and making the great kindness and mercy of God shine all the more bright. In other words, Gospel teaching.
Not long after, I found out that one of its most copious articulators had been Calvin.
That was OK with me. Anybody who does a great job expounding the grace of God abounding to the chief of sinnners is someone I call friend. If they wrote volumes about it and were insightful and articulate, so much the better. I think this teaching is Biblical; that’s why I’m a Calvinist. But I’m not personally loyal to Calvin or to the idea of Calvin. (“I am of Apollos; I am of Paul.”) I wasn’t growing in the grace and knowledge of Calvin, but of Christ.
Anyway, the upshot was that I started attending Presbyterian churches whenever I was able to find one. That seemed to be where the good stuff was. Oh, and then I married a guy who was also a convert to what we call Reformed Theology or covenant theology. So, you know. I was in pretty deep by this time. All this went down about twenty-five years ago.
Over the years, I’ve interacted with quite a few Christians who are hostile to the name Calvin. These interactions have, in general, served to strengthen my conviction that the doctrine is true. That is because anti-Calvinist arguments, instead of presenting troubling “oh, I never thought of that!” Bible passages that make me call covenant theology into question, usually just seem to be reacting to a straw man of Calvinism, often a really egregious straw man. Here are a few.
The straw man of Calvinism that I most commonly hear presented is as follows: Calvinism is a completely deterministic system in which God controls all people, angels, and demons like He’s Jim Henson and they are the Muppets. It looks like you are making decisions, but it’s actually God steering you with His hand inside your little felt head. You have no free will.
Usually, this straw man came about in one of two ways. First of all, the person has not actually read much (or any?) Calvinist literature but has just heard the doctrine of predestination summarized, often in a hostile way, by someone else. And/or, the person has taken the doctrine of predestination and/or irresistible grace and has tried to work out all its implications in a completely logical system of thought such as we might find in the hard sciences, ignoring human psychology, other Bible passages, and even other Calvinist doctrines.
At its very base, this caricature is based on a naive misunderstanding of the nature of human will.
You see, my friends, our wills are not actually free when we are bound in sin. Sin is like addiction, and we all know that the addict is not free. He is not free to do anything but indulge over and over again in the the thing that has mastered him. Believe me, the working of the Holy Spirit of God on your heart is not nearly so damaging to your free will as is sin. That’s why the Bible says that whoever sins is a slave to sin.
This is basic human psychology, and most people understand it when they are not contemplating Calvinism. None of our decisions are ever completely “free” in the sense of not being influenced by anything at all. That doesn’t make them not decisions. Yes, you did decide to follow Jesus … it’s just that first, He had to set your heart free to do so.
But wait, isn’t the doctrine that God decided back in eternity past who would be saved and who would be damned? How, Madame Calvinist, you ask, can you call that free will? Hmmm?
Well, true. But keep in mind that this doctrine does not only apply to salvation. The sovereignty of God over all things in the universe is a doctrine that is found throughout the Bible. Who of you by worrying can add one hour to his life? God knows about every sparrow that falls, and don’t worry, you are worth at least several sparrows. And even the very hairs of your head are all numbered. He sends rain on the just and on the unjust. He changes times and seasons; he sets up kings and deposes them. The heart of the king is like a watercourse, and the Lord turns it wherever he pleases. The Lord opens and closes the womb. He gives and takes away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.
The sovereignty of God, as I say, is an extremely basic doctrine, and even Christians who hate the name of Calvin will affirm it in a general way when it is presented like this. To try to deny it would land us in much deeper difficulties. (Cue Darwinistic determinism.)
So, God is sovereign over every molecule and every sentient being in the universe (a basic doctrine), AND this universe includes beings other than God (animals; demons; you and me) who make actual decisions with actual consequences. That is another doctrine that is not only blindingly obvious from our experience, but is affirmed, directly and indirectly, in numerous places in Scripture.
Is this a paradox? You bet. Not everything in Scripture is a paradox, but this one is. Not everything in our universe is a paradox, but this one definitely is. Don’t ask me to explain how it works. I’m not God. But to be fair, I should not have to be able to explain how it works in order to assert that God is sovereign over all of creation including the human heart, AND that humans make decisions. Remember, no one else has been able to come up with a philosophical system that accounts for human nature without landing us in determinism, either. This is a paradox that all of us, Calvinist and non-Calvinist, have to live with. If you follow Darwin or Marx instead of Calvin, you will get to determinism a lot faster, and you will like it even less when you get there.
So, this thing about “Calvinisim means we have no free will” is the result of an attempt to woodenly apply human, binary logic to a doctrine about the sovereignty of God, and to draw the conclusions that we think must follow from it (even though they don’t actually follow from it in Calvinist teaching or in Scripture).
Another objection I often hear (which is actually a corollary of the first misunderstanding): “If, as Calvin says, God ultimately determines who will be saved and who will be lost, why then there is no point in preaching the Gospel, calling people to repentance, teaching our children about Christ, or combating false teaching. After all, it’s all decided already.”
Again, this is a mischaracterization of actual Calvinist teaching. It’s what people think follows from what they think Calvinism is. But if you crack open any Reformed piece of writing (say, the Canons of Dort), you will very quickly encounter the doctrine that God uses means to accomplish His purposes. Prayer, preaching and the Lord’s Supper are called “the ordinary means of grace.” In other words, sometimes God can use extraordinary means, as He did with Saul on the road to Damascus, in order to call someone to Himself. But ordinarily, the means He uses are someone gave you some good Bible teaching, and so you heard the Gospel. God is sovereign, AND, due to the way He has designed the world, false teaching can do real harm and Gospel teaching can do real good.
Furthermore, God typically (not exclusively, but typically) works in families. So, if you were born into a Christian family, were loved and were taught God’s Word, these were the means He used to bring about your salvation (which He had determined from all eternity past, but that part might not be super relevant to your experience right at first). In my experience, parents in Reformed churches are more serious about giving their children good Gospel teaching than those in other Protestant traditions. So, you may think that Calvinism implies there is no need to teach our children the Gospel, but in actual fact that is not how Calvinists behave, nor is it what they teach.
From childhood, I have sat under both Arminian and Calvinist types of teaching. (Arminian would be the typical Baptist “altar call.”) From personal experience, I can say that certain types of Arminian teaching, especially the kind you get around the campfire in youth group, put a lot of pressure on the individual. “Deciding to follow Jesus” becomes a work that you do, whereby you whip yourself up into an emotional fervor to manufacture a spiritual experience. “Turn over every area of your life to Christ.” That’s right, don’t just repent of the sins you know about and that the Holy Spirit is bringing to mind right now, and then trust Him to reveal more of your sin later. That would be too easy. Instead, you need to do a thorough self-examination and personally peer into and clean out every dark corner of your heart, right now, tonight. After all, it’s your choice. You save yourself, Christ does not save you.
Another bad effect of this shallow understanding of choice, will, and grace is that it tends to keep us trapped in spiritual immaturity. Since people choose God instead of God choosing people, when a child or a teen who has believed on Christ shows that they are still immature, or falls back into sin (which we all do), the tendency of an Arminian is to take this as a sign that the person did not “really” decide to follow Jesus. So instead of being given rebuke, teaching, encouragement, and exhortation, they are terrified with the prospect that they’re not really saved, and invited to manufacture a second (or a fifth or a twentieth) conversion experience. It would be much more helpful to these young people to treat them as Christians who are immature and sinful. This would allow them to grow in spiritual maturity as they gain practice in battling against sin. Such an approach (Calvinist, by the way) is also less insulting to Christ. Christ can save teens and children. He does not just save the good ones. His power is not so frail as to be foiled by the fact that we are lazy, stupid, proud, a bully, or have fallen into sexual sin.
So, over the past 25 years of delightedly growing in grace, I have read a number of books by Calvinist authors. These include books and essays by Martin Luther, R.C. Sproul, John Piper, Ted Tripp, Ed Welch, Matt Whitling, Douglas Jones, and Douglas Wilson. I’ve read a few of the older confessions and creeds, such as the Westminster Confession and the Canons of Dort. I’ve sat under some fantastic Reformed teaching. But one thing I had never done was read a history of Calvin’s life, conversion, and time in Geneva.
That changed this fall, when I was obliged to read up on Calvin (and on his magnum opus, Institutes of the Christian Religion), in order to teach a unit on him. Reading, in fact, is what I am supposed to be doing instead of writing this excellent blog post.
Anyway, what I have found out so far is that his original name was Jean Cauvin. It got Latinized to Calvinus when he entered school, and then later the -us was dropped. He grew up in northeastern France, in and around the stunning cathedral of Noyon, as a Roman Catholic. His dad actually worked as a secretary to the bishop of Noyon, and Calvin was educated with the bishop’s children. Later, Calvin boarded for a while with a godly old man who was a Waldensian (French Protestant). At this same time, the Waldensians who had settled in the Piedmont in Italy were being gruesomely butchered for refusing to convert to Roman Catholicism (read Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, and tremble). The Inquisition was still going on.
Now I have to get back to reading the Institutes and stuff like that. I haven’t come to the bottom of the rabbit hole yet. Have a great weekend, and if you feel a tug, read the Scriptures! It’s probably God calling you, as He determined to do out of His sheer kindness to you from all eternity past!
Having a “life verse” used to be a thing in evangelical Christian culture.
I once knew this guy who was interested in dating this girl. He was kind of a new Christian, and she wasn’t 100% sure he was sincere, because guys have been known to fake spirituality in order to get the girl. So she kept grilling him, trying to figure it out. And one question she asked him was, “What is your life verse?”
So if you thought the title of this blog post sounded like a pickup line, you weren’t entirely wrong.
I don’t actually know whether life verses have faded away as a practice, or whether they are still a thing that gets talked about, but I have just moved into denominational circles that are less silly.
Why do I say silly? Not because picking a “life verse” involves meditating intensely on a passage from the Bible. The Word of God is certainly powerful and active and worth returning to as a theme (provided we are actually responding to what the verse actually says, not just to a meaning that we project onto it). Anyone who makes a regular practice of prayerfully reading their Bible has had the experience where a verse, or a passage, seems to pop off the page and hit you between the eyes like a two-by-four. And then you spend several weeks or months revisiting that verse, turning it back and forth in your mind like a huge jewel with many facets, internalizing it, wondering why you didn’t notice it before.
No, the reason I think the idea of a “life verse” is kind of stupid, is that it’s too restrictive. You are going to limit yourself to just one two-by-four verse? Why? The Bible is full of two-by-fours just waiting to whack you. It can happen every few months, or once a year, but definitely there is a going to be a different theme verse for every season in your life.
And if we are talking about a verse that describes your particular experience of life, that might exist, but it’s hard to imagine you how you could pick it as a 20-year-old. Sounds more like the kind of thing that is awarded retroactively, maybe by your biographer.
For example, after several decades of experience, I think my life verse might just be II Corinthians 12:11: “I have made a fool of myself, but you drove me to it.”
I think that would look great on my tombstone. Although, the “you drove me to it” part is debatable.
Anyway. As faithful Out of Babelites are aware, I spent part of last year further educating myself on Gnostic and Hermetic philosophy. Partly as a result of this, I’ve been steeping in the book of Colossians, which is almost entirely about Hermetic and Gnostic beliefs and cults, and how they are not the Gospel once delivered to the saints. Paul was worried about Colossians, who in his absence might be confused by one of the Hermetic “teachers” who were so numerous in the Mediterranean world in the first century. If you want to know whether Gnositc/Hermetic teaching is really the same as what Jesus taught, just in different words, please read Colossians.
So, one of my two-by-four verses this year is this:
Such regulations indeed have an appearance of wisdom, with their self-imposed worship, their false humility and their harsh treatment of the body, but they lack any value in restraining sensual indulgence.
Colossians 2:23
Especially in my youth, I was easily impressed by ascetic and mystical claims and practices. How could these things be bad? They have an appearance of wisdom. “Such regulations” could be found in yoga, Mormonism, Islam, legalistic/Hebrew-roots sects of Christianity, or modern environmental Gnosticism where we save ourselves by education, sensitivity training and clean living.
Now I know: such regulations lack any value in restraining sensual indulgence. They do not give people power to resist sin. That explains why every ascetic cult seems to generate its own sex scandals. It explains why we can expect such scandals from such quarters, even when they have not yet come to light.
So anyway, that’s my life verse for now. Patiently waiting to be clocked by the next two-by-four.
Here is my top six list of systems, other than our own sinful hearts, through which it is particularly easy for demons to attack us:
6. Barometric pressure
5. Your hair
4. Your skin
3. Electronics
2. Your digestive system
This is Mary Harrington. She has written a book, and here it is:
Mary is an academic. She describes herself as someone who has “liberalled as hard as it is possible to liberal.” She believed all the lies that were told her by the sexual revolution, and though she has no desire to share the details, says her experience of it was comparable to that of Bridget Phetasy, with her famously heartbreaking article, “I Regret Being A Slut.”
As you can see from the phrase that makes “liberal” into a verb, Mary has quite the way with words. The basic thesis of her book is that the progressive religion, by making personal autonomy the only definition of the good to which everything else must be sacrificed, has gone way past the point of diminishing returns and is now actually harming women rather than helping them. But since Mary is so articulate and fiery, she can put it far better than I can:
We’re increasingly uncertain about what it means to be [sexually] dimorphic. But when we socialise in disembodied ways online, even as biotech promises total mastery of the bodies we’re trying to leave behind, these efforts to abolish sex dimorphism in the name of ‘human’ will end up abolishing what makes us human men and women, leaving something profoundly post-human in its place. In this vision, our bodies cease to be interdependent, sexed and sentient, and are instead re-imagined as a kind of Meat Lego, built of parts that can be reassembled at will. And this vision in turn legitimises a view of men and women alike as raw resource for commodification, by a market that wears women’s political interests as a skin suit but is ever more inimical to those interests in practice.
What we call ‘feminism’ today … should more accurately be called ‘bio-libertarianism,’ [and it is] taking on increasingly pseudo-religious overtones. This doctrine focuses on extending individual freedom as far as possible, into the realm of the body, stripped alike of physical, cultural or reproductive dimorphism in favour of a self-created ‘human’ autonomy. This protean condition is ostensibly in the name of progress. But its realisation is radically at odds with the political interests of all but the wealthiest women — and especially those women who are mothers.
… nothwithstanding the hopes of ‘radical’ progressives and cyborg feminism, a howlingly dystopian scenario can’t in fact be transformed into a dream future just by looking at it differently.
ibid, p. 17, 18, 19
I mean, I couldn’t agree more. The most obvious people to suffer from the real-life application of what Mary elsewhere calls “Meat-Lego Gnosticism,” are children. Babies and children need their moms. In fact, Mary’s thinking began to really change on this topic of progress when she had a child of her own and was shocked by the instant bond.
But even a little bit of thought shows that women are also suffering, because most women, like Mary, actually want to bear and raise their own children, preferably in a household with the child’s father. And, in fact, men are suffering too, not only because half of those motherless children grow up to be men, but because it turns out that humans were made to be embodied, and so living a disembodied life, alienated from our physicality and from human relationships, makes all humans miserable.
Mary calls herself a “reactionary feminist” because she is reacting against “progress” in favor of the interests of women.
Often, when people reject progressive feminism, the only alternative that they hear presented is “traditional marriage,” by which they mean the 1950s sitcom model. But that model is actually not traditional marriage so much as postindustrial marriage.
Harrington spends a lot of space in the book pointing out how, with industrialization, many of the homesteading tasks that were once the responsibility of the housewife got outsourced to the market. She draws on Dorothy Sayers for this, who pointed it out a long time ago in her essay “Are Women Human?” I wanted to quote Sayers directly, but don’t have a copy of the essay on hand. Essentially, she says that before the industrial revolution, women got to do milking, cheesemaking, beer brewing, baking, spinning, weaving, sewing, mending, and a number of other arts and crafts that took quite a lot of skill and are also fun. Sayers’ main point is that, in the wake of all these trades being moved out of the household, it is no wonder that middle- and upper-class women are bored and would like to do something other than sit around the house. Harrington’s application of this point is a little different. She points out that in economic terms, before industrialization a wife contributed really essential labor to the household. A husband could not get along economically without her. Because both spouses were committed to keeping the same ship afloat, the man was less likely to abandon the woman.
Post- Industrial Revolution, the woman (particularly in upper and middle classes) now contributed much less to the household economically. The man was the sole wage earner, which gave him a lot of economic power. He could treat his wife badly, and she’d have no recourse. It is to this shifting dynamic that Harrington attributes the rise of Big Romance. A husband and wife must like each other, must be madly in love, and then he will treat her kindly despite the imbalance of economic power.
I think Harrington’s analysis has merit, though it doesn’t tell the whole story. For example, I would argue that relations between men and women first got badly messed up at the Fall. Wife abuse was certainly possible before the Industrial Revolution. Also, I would argue that Big Romance owes something to the concept of Courtly Love in the Middle Ages, which in turn owes something to Paul’s exhortation to newly Christianized former pagans: “Husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the church and gave Himself up for her.” But all that said, I do think Harrington is on to something here. Obviously, when we are talking in broad strokes about the relationships between men in general and women in general, over centuries or millennia, there are going to be a ton of cultural and historical and literary and religious and yes, economic factors that go into it, even if we confine our survey to just the West.
So, if we don’t like Meat-Lego “feminism” and we don’t like 1950s Big Romance, what’s left? At this point, Mary’s book begins to have the feel of re-inventing the wheel. Metaphors abound that compare modern men and women’s situation to rebuilding, using broken tools, in a postapocalyptic wasteland. Mary doesn’t know a lot about what a life that is good for women, children, and men should look like, but she is pretty sure that for the majority of people, it’s going to be in families built on heterosexual marriage. And she’s aware that, to find a good model, we’ll have to go back before the Industrial Revolution.
Here’s what she comes up with.
The weakness of [proposals to go back to 1950s style marriage] isn’t that they’re unworkable, or even that they’re ‘traditional,’ but that they’re not traditional enough. For most of history, men and women worked together, in a productive household, and this is the model reactionary feminism should aim to retrieve.
Remote work, e-commerce and the ‘portfolio career’ are not without risks … But cyborg developments also offer scope for families to carve out lives where both partners blend family obligations, public-facing economic activity and rewarding local community activities in productive mixed-economy households, where both partners are partly or wholly home-based and work collaboratively on the common tasks of the household, whether money-earning, food production, childcare or housekeeping.
ibid, p. 179, 180
She then profiles two young women who are doing just that. Willow, in Canada, is a writer and mom to a small baby who, when childcare allows, also works with her husband on the family woodworking business. (He does the building, she does the finishing, basically.) Ashley and her husband, in Uruguay, have three children and do a mix of homesteading and language teaching.
In [Ashley’s] view, the romance comes not through the ego-fulfillment of a perfectly congenial partner, but working with someone to build something that will outlast them: ‘It’s much more romantic in the end when you realise this home, this life, these children, if they’re thriving it’s a result of our shared ability to create something greater together through our interdependence and cooperation … We’re working towards something bigger than ourselves. We’re building a legacy.’
Isn’t this a rather bleak and utilitarian view of a long-term relationship, though? To this I can only say that in my own experience, in practice the Big Romance focus on maximum emotional intensity and minimum commitment is bleaker. … A commons is, by definition, not available for consumption by anyone with the freedom to contract, or the money to buy, but only to those who share and sustain it.
ibid, pp. 183 – 184
What’s interesting about this vision of the household is that it has been described, not by “conservatives,” but by Reformed Christians, frequently, even within the past few years. Douglas Wilson, whom Mary Harrington has perhaps never heard of, has by now written a small library’s worth of volumes on this very topic. His daughter, Rebekah Merkle, has a book and a documentary about it, both called Eve in Exile.
And here, in his video Theology of the Household, Alistair Roberts lays out a view that is strikingly similar to the one in Harrington’s book:
Not surprisingly, these Christian thinkers are getting their picture of a household that is good for both men and women from … the Bible. And now I’d like you to meet Reactionary Feminism’s poster girl, and surprise! it’s not Mary Harrington.
A wife of noble character who can find? She is worth far more than rubies. Her husband has full confidence in her and lacks nothing of value. She brings him good, not harm, all the days of her life. She selects wool and flax and works with eager hands. She is like the merchant ships, bringing her food from afar. She gets up while it is still dark; she provides food for her family and portions for her servant girls. She considers a field and buys it; out of her earnings she plants a vineyard. She sets about her work vigorously; her arms are strong for her tasks. She sees that her trading is profitable, and her lamp does not go out at night. In her hand she holds the distaff and grasps the spindle with her fingers. She opens her arms to the poor and extends her hands to the needy. When it snows, she has no fear for her household, for all of them are clothed in scarlet. She makes coverings for her bed; she is clothed in fine linen and purple. Her husband is respected at the city gate, where he takes his seat among the elders of the land. She makes linen garments and sells them, and supplies the merchants with sashes. She is clothed with strength and dignity; she can laugh at the days to come. She speaks with wisdom, and faithful instruction is on her tongue. She watches over the affairs of her household and does not eat the bread of idleness. Her children arise and call her blessed; her husband also, and he praises her: ‘Many women do noble things, but you surpass them all.’ Charm is deceptive, and beauty is fleeting, but a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised. Give her the reward she has earned, and let her works bring her praise at the city gate.
Proverbs 31:10 – 31, NIV
Wow!
So, this is an older lady, a matriarch. She has children, and she is honored both by her husband, her children, and the public for her role as a matriarch. (Contrast this with Meat Lego feminism, where being a mom means you are dumb and irrelevant.) Perhaps this lady is beautiful, but we are not told that. In any case, she is an older woman, and “beauty is fleeting.” Her beauty has faded. But she has style (clothed in linen, purple, and scarlet). There is a lot of emphasis on her strength and capability. She engages in cottage industry, she has employees (servant girls), and she handles money and gets into real estate. She speaks with wisdom and faithful instruction, which probably primarily is directed at her children, but this could include her mentoring younger women and nowadays it could include being a writer like Willow. Her husband is a pillar of the community, and this is not to the exclusion of his excellent wife, but because of her and because of the kind of household they have built together. She, too, is known in the community and opens her hands to the poor. They are the people you go to if you need advice or help.
And, finally, this lady is not meant to be an outlier. “Many women do noble things, but you surpass them all.” The idea is that there are a lot of amazing women out there, but every husband should feel this way about his wife, that she is the best. The Prov. 31 woman is an older matriarch, so she has had time to build up an impressive portfolio of skills and accomplishments that for many young moms is years away. But this is where they can end up, if they are given support and honor in their role as moms and are shown what is possible.
In other words – I wouldn’t make this a headline without context as it would be misunderstood, but — the Prov. 31 Woman is the original Girl Boss.
… the man who serves his God with his whole heart is apt to forget his surroundings, and to fling himself so completely into his work that the whole of his nature comes into action, and even his humor, if he be possessed of that faculty, rushes into the battle.
Spurgeon, from Eccentric Preachers, quoted by Douglas Wilson in A Serrated Edge
He knew even better than she did that you could never predict, any more than you could completely understand, what human beings were capable of. Before an overwhelming temptation everything went down, all the moral and legal sanctions, the privileged education, even religious belief. The act of murder could surprise even the murderer. She had seen, in the faces of men and women, astonishment at what they had done.
The Murder Room, by P.D. James, p. 219
[Tally needs to pick up her young handman, Ryan, who might be in trouble. She is giving him directions on the phone.]
“There’s a church, Ryan, All Saints, Margaret Street. Walk up Great Portland Street towards the BBC and Margaret Street is on the right. You can sit quietly in the church until I come. No one will worry or interfere with you. Or you can kneel. No one will speak to you then.”
“Like I’m praying? God’ll strike me dead!”
“Of course He won’t, Ryan. He doesn’t do things like that.”
“He does! Terry — my mum’s last bloke — he told me. It’s in the Bible.”
“Well He doesn’t do things like that now.”
Oh dear, she thought. I’ve made it sound as if He’s learnt better.
The Murder Room, by P.D. James, pp. 237 – 238
In the Sanctified Brethren church, a tiny fundamentalist bunch who we were in, there was a spirit of self-righteous pissery and B.S.ification among certain elders that defied peacemaking. They were given to disputing small points of doctrine that to them seemed the very fulcrum of the faith. We were cursed with a surplus of scholars and a deficit of peacemakers, and so we tended to be divisive and split into factions. One dispute when I was a boy had to do with the question of hospitality towards those in error, whether kindness shown to one who holds false doctrine implicates you in his wrongdoing.
Uncle Al had family and friends on both sides of the so-called Cup of Cold Water debate, and it broke his heart.
Leaving Home, Garrison Keillor, p. 155
Good thing this never happens outside of tiny fundamentalist Christian churches.
Wow. This was devastating. It shows exactly how, not only the weird Christian subculture created by Bill Gothard, but the patriarchy and Christianity itself, which supports it, create an environment where sexual abuse and cover-ups are rampant.
Just kidding. That’s what the media desperately wanted this book to say. And because it doesn’t, that’s why they are going to call this book just another cover-up. In a moment, I’ll address the claims in the paragraph above. But first, what is this book actually?
I would say the book has two goals. One, it’s a memoir. Two, it tackles head-on the false teaching offered by Bill Gothard’s Institute in Basic Life Principles, and distinguishes it from the true Gospel. These two purposes are woven together in a very natural way in this book.
In case you didn’t know, Jinger was one of the Duggar family. They were a Christian family who, partly because of the teachings of Bill Gothard, came to the conviction that it is wrong to use birth control of any kind. Now, some families who make this decision only end up with a few children. But the Duggars ended up having nineteen. Later, they were approached about making their family the subject of a reality show, and after praying about it, decided to do it. They did not expect that the show would continue for ten years. Part of their rationale for agreeing to do the show was that they believed their family could be an example to the watching world of how following Gothard’s teachings leads to happiness.
Unfortunately, Gothard was, in retrospect, an obvious false teacher.
In the late 1960s, Gothard started teaching his seminars at churches, Christian schools, camps, and youth programs around the country. His timing could not have been better. For Bible-believing Christians, [the 1960s] were a scary, uncertain time. Parents feared losing their children to sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Bill Gothard offered parents confidence. In his lectures, he claimed that he had discovered the key to a successful Christian life. According to Gothard, to enjoy God’s blessing, a Christian should closely follow the seven principles he laid out in his seminars.
ibid, p. 26
Right away, Gothard displays several marks of a false teacher. The number one red flag is that he made himself indispensable to living the Christian life. He would find secret principles in the Bible that no one else had, and would identify unintentional sins that a person could commit that could wreck their entire life. Like a classic cult leader, he created fear in his followers (in this case, fear of accidentally displeasing God, which could lead to any number of bad consequences including death). Then, he offered himself as the solution to that fear. In other words, he was trying to take the place of Christ, the Bible, and the Holy Spirit.
I shouldn’t need to point this out, but Gothard was teaching what the Apostle Paul would have called “a different gospel.” In this case, it was the hoary old heresy of works righteousness, whereby a person can save themselves simply by following the right rules. Gothard didn’t seem to understand that sin nature is far too powerful to be restrained by rules. Nor did he understand the need for the new birth. It was a new insight to Jinger to realize:
Contrary to what I grew up believing, the ultimate threat to you and me is not the world. Instead, the ultimate threat to me is … me. I need freedom not from the influence of world, not even from a religious system, but from myself. I am born enslaved by my own sin.
ibid, p. 130
(Reformed folks call this idea “total depravity,” and it’s the first of the five theses in the TULIP acronym. Needless to say, Bill Gothard’s teaching was far from Reformed.)
Gothard also didn’t seem to think that God has revealed His plan of salvation clearly in the Bible, implying instead that God was a trickster who hides His will from people. Jinger gives many examples in this book of how Gothard would cherry-pick proof texts to support whatever point he was trying to make, but never taught straight through a long passage of the Bible, following the flow of thought. Finally, Gothard appears to have added a little “health and wealth” heresy to his teaching: follow these rules, and you will be blessed in every way.
Interestingly, Jinger remembers having an overall positive experience as she grew up in the Duggar household. Her parents did actually understand the Gospel and teach it to her, so she got that alongside Gothard’s harmful false teaching. However, Gothard’s false teaching seriously stunted her spiritual growth, causing her to live with an attitude that was simultaneously fearful and Pharisaical. It wasn’t until she met her future husband that she was exposed to better, more solid biblical teaching and was encouraged to study the Bible on her own, looking at what the passages were actually saying, not through the lens of Gothard. She left his false teaching in order to step in to a truer, richer understanding of the Gospel. I think it’s entirely appropriate that she share her story in a memoir that also examines Gothard’s false teachings. Through no choice of her own, as a Duggar she has been made a minor public figure and a representative of Christianity (not to be confused with Gothard’s teachings).
However, not everyone who grew up in a Gothard community was so fortunate. Gothard himself, who never married even though he gave lots of marriage and parenting advice (think that’s a red flag???), for years flirted with and sexually abused young women in his community. And Jinger’s older brother, Josh, became a sexual predator who ended up going to jail for possession of child pornography. As Paul points out about rules like Gothard’s, “Such regulations indeed have an appearance of wisdom, with their self-imposed worship, their false humility, and their harsh treatment of the body, but they lack any value in restraining sensual indulgence.” (Col. 2:23)
However, instead of seeing these sexual sins as an indictment of false teaching like Gothard’s, many people will see them as the natural outcome of Christianity. They will hold Jinger, as it were, responsible for these things unless she also rejects Christ. So, let’s look at the claims in my intro paragraph.
Out of Babel Books 