Reformed Seminary shills for Frank James' wife...

• shill: a beguiler who leads someone into danger; an associate of a person selling goods or services who pretends no association to the seller and assumes the air of an enthusiastic customer; a person employed by the casino to begin a game, or to fill empty seats at a table.

(Tim, w/thanks to Jeff and Andrew) Several readers called my attention to the just-released E-newsletter of Reformed Theological Seminary which hypes the latest book of their president's wife, Carolyn Custis James, as follows:

NEW! CAROLYN JAMES’ BOOK, THE GOSPEL OF RUTH, NOW AVAILABLE
Traditionally, the Book of Ruth is viewed as a beautiful love story between Ruth and Boaz. But if you dig deeper, you will discover startling revelations, including:
  - God makes much of broken lives
  - God calls men and women to serve Him together
  - God counts on His daughters to build His kingdom
Click here to order now.

According to James, simpletons think "traditionally" while "warriors" dig deep and find hidden treasures that just happen to conform perfectly to their own feminist ideology. You know, stuff like "God calls men and women to serve Him together."

Tip your hat to the new constitution.

"God counts on His daughters to build His Kingdom."

Take a bow for the new revolution.

James is just one more run-of-the-mill feminist idealogue, but among the conservative reformed community this is new and heady stuff. So Covenant College, Reformed Seminary, and Westminster Seminary join with Campus Crusade to provide forums for James' self-promotion. (New readers can look here for documentation of James' feminism.)

Well, if anyone needed a clue as to which seminaries and campus ministries to avoid, it would be hard to find a better barometer than James' itinerary. Here we have another example proving Schaeffer's dictum that the evangelical church is always the world, but ten years later.

But it doesn't have to be this way. What a joy to live by faith, particularly in the matter of father-rule. May God cause us all to recommit ourselves to this healing Biblical truth. Father-rule is a Trinitarian doctrine founded in the archetypal Fatherhood of God.

I believe in God the Father Almighty. Do you?

Comments

[Sam Steinmann]

I believe in God, the Father Almighty, and believe that the book of Ruth was given "for doctrine, for reproof, for instruction in righteousness."

[Martin]

Why wouldn't you think that God counts on His daughters to build His kingdom? Even if you don't believe women should be leaders in the churches, I don't see where you get the idea that God doesn't use women to build His kingdom?

[Tim Bayly]

>>I don't see where you get the idea that God doesn't use women to build His kingdom?

You don't see it because I didn't say it. Of course God uses women to build His Kingdom. Has there ever been anyone across all salvation history who's denied it?

But for Carolyn Custis James, it's a "startling revelation."

[Fr. Bill]

Pr. Tim is correct, even moreso than he expressly demonstrates.

Has anyone in the Church ever denied that God makes much of broken lives? Among those things writ so large that one who runs can read them is this: it is broken lives, only broken lives, and always broken lives that God “makes much of.” There's all that stuff about Christ seeking to save what was lost, and coming as a physician to those who are sick. There's all that stuff in Paul that “not many noble, not many mighty, not many wise” among the redeemed, because God deliberately chooses the foolish and the weak.

So, is it really a startling revelation, found only by digging deeper, that God calls men and women to serve him together? Of course not. What about Adam and Eve? Abraham and Sarah? Isaac and Rebekah? Jacob and Rachel? Moses and Zipporah? Samson's parents? Samson and Delilah? See? They don't even have to be married to advance God's kingdom, even in their sin and folly!

How about Elkanah and Hannah? The lovers of Song of Solomon? Zacharias and Elizabeth? Joseph and Mary? Aquila and Priscilla?

How about Hosea and Gomer? You want broken? There's some broken for you! And, in a marriage too! Or, how about Ananias and Sapphira? God called them to serve Him, and when they disobeyed, they still served Him in their disobedience, so that great fear fell upon the Church for its good.

The point: Ruth and Boaz is just one of many examples of God calling on men and women to serve Him together. It's the most non-revolutionary, ordinary, pedestrian notion you can find in the Bible. And all the devotional, theological, and practical wisdom surrounding this idea was well developed within a thoroughly patriarchalist Church centuries before Carolyn Custis James or her marketers were born.

Perhaps James and her marketing supporters think that modern Christians are hopelessly ignorant dolts; and, so, they trumpet as revolutionary ideas that are as plain as the noses on their faces. If this isn't what drives their marketing hype, what does?

Pr. Tim is correct again: it's the first-wave feminism of the 1970s, baptized and offered to the Brave New Egalitarian Church of the 21st Century. Lurking beneath the hype is the slander that those who eschew James and her ilk think that God makes much of male lives only, that God only calls men to serve Him, that God never advances His kingdom through the lives of His daughters. Also lurking here is the lie that the contributions of men and women together, or the contributions of women considered by themselves are incompatible with the patriarchal order of marriage, family, church, and society which God fashioned at the beginning and called “very good.”

[Marshall St. John]

You may be aware that the Philadelphia Presbytery of the PCA is overturing the GA to set up a committee to study women in the Diaconate...

http://blog.gajunkie.com/2008/01/30/pca-overture-about-diaconal-ministry-and-the-participation-of-women.aspx

Best regards,
Marshall

[Suzanne McCarthy]

I have been interested for some time in following your series on James and I think this is an valid countrerpoint.

it's the first-wave feminism of the 1970s,

This, however, baffles me. Perhaps I have misunderstood this comment. Isn't first wave feminism Francis Woolard and the Temperance Movement, Catherine Booth and the Purity Movement, and Susan B Anthony and the abolition of slavery.

[Suzanne McCarthy]

Oops, Frances Willard.

[Jeffrey M]

Sam;
Brother, your post is analogous to a politician avoiding a penetrating question by wrapping himself in the flag and spouting off patriotic prose and singing "America the Beautiful."

Nobody here is criticizing the book of Ruth.

What is disturbing is that one of the bastions of faithful adherence to biblical truth, which RTS has been, now actively promotes books by a woman known to be feminist in her beliefs and teaching on sexuality, which run counter to the confessions that RTS itself was built on.

[Fr. Bill]

Suzanne is correct that “first wave feminism” is the term of art to refer to those (mostly women) in the late 19th Century who agitated against the de jure distinctions between men and women in the body politic, primarily the right to vote.

It is a term coined by the feminists of the 1970s, to burnish their public image by associating themselves with those of an earlier era whom they supposed were held in high esteem by their contemporaries, much as egalitarians today insist that they are orthodox Christians.

My reference to “the first-wave feminists of the 1970s” was, of course, to those feminists of the 1970s who were legitimizing their cause by just this kind of simplistic appeal, even while they were repudiating values that genuine first-wave feminists held (such as prolife values). In a similar way, modern egalitarians claim the mantle “evangelical” while repudiating core values that original evangelicals stood for, particularly the perspicuity of Scripture, and its pervasive patriarchalism. The “first wave feminists of the 1970s” were “first wave” only in their public relations propaganda, or (at best) very flawed and compromised descendants of a world-view they retroactively baptize with their own agenda. In similar fashion, egalitarian evangelicals are “evangelicals” only in their public relations propaganda, or (at best) very flawed and compromised descendants of classical evangelicals. Jeffrey makes the same point about James in his comment just above.

I apologize for being overly subtle here. I trust the previous paragraphs make clear what formerly baffled.

[Suzanne McCarthy]

I am trying to follow your argument. Are you saying that egalitarians today are to evangelicals, as second wave feminists are to first wave feminists?

You are perhaps correct in that Catherine Booth, while a preacher herself, upheld the perspicuity of scripture.

[Sam Steinmann]

Jeffrey,

I misunderstood the post. Pr. Tim's comment clarified what he was saying.

Sam

[Kevin Donald H.]

There is much wisdom in the old saying, "People would rather believe a simple lie than a complex truth."

[Jeffrey M.]

Sam;

Excellent. God Bless, brother!

Jeff

[Alan]

When you were criticizing Westminster, you meant Philadelphia, right?

[Michael]

And when you were criticizing RTS, you meant Orlando (not Jackson, etc.) right?

[Tim Bayly]

Philly and Orlando, yes. Sorry for the confusion.