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The World We Made: Coming soon...

UPDATE: There’s been lots of interest in this podcast, with about 2000 listens from 30 countries and counting! If you haven’t subscribed yet, we’ve added a few links to make it easier for those of you who aren’t on iTunes, which is most of you. (Welcome non-Apple fanboys.) Don't miss an episode. Scroll down and subscribe now.

"These are the confessions of American Christians recovering from American Christianity. This is the world we made."

Warhorn Media is pleased to announce a new podcast hosted by Jake Mentzel and Nathan Alberson and featuring Tim Bayly. The World We Made is designed to help ordinary American Christians think through the difficult issues we face in our culture today. Season 1 is about homosexuality.

Over the course of the first season, we talk with Tim about how we went from having anti-sodomy laws in all 50 states (just 50 years ago) to where we are today. What are the changes Tim has seen in his lifetime? What exactly do they mean? What part did the culture play and what part did the church play? How are regular Bible-believing Christians supposed to respond? What has Tim learned as a pastor to help equip us for the challenge of ministering to men and women tempted by homosexuality?

These are the questions we'll be unpacking over the course of eight 20-minute episodes. We'll start out slow and easy, and things will pick up steam as we get closer and closer to the end. You won't want to miss it, so check out the trailer (above), and go ahead and subscribe now in iTunes or Android (or wherever you listen to your podcasts—Google Play Music, Stitcher, TuneInRSS feed) so you're ready when the first episode drops (July 17). 

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Homosexual orientation: just in time, Gospel Coalition and Al Mohler arrive at wrong...

If you love those who identify as gays and lesbians and you want to learn to see through their eyes and lies, other than Scripture, there's no better source.

I'm referring to the survey of the literature titled, "Sexuality and Gender: Findings from the Biological, Psychological, and Social Sciences." I've been intending to post on it for quite a while now.

The survey was authored by Lawrence S. Mayer and Paul R. McHugh, and with or without an education, you can understand the things in this report that are important for our work with those suffering LGBTQ temptations.

The authors are eminently qualified. Mayer is a scholar in residence and McHugh is a prof of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. For twenty-five years, McHugh also served as psychiatrist-in-chief at Johns Hopkins Hospital.

A couple years ago, Al Mohler came out on the national stage saying he now no longer believed in reparative/gender identity counseling. He also "repented" of his former denial of homosexual orientation, stating that he now believes homosexual orientation is a real deal. Mohler goes on to...


Daddy Tried audiobook now available...

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Warhorn Media is pleased to announce that Tim Bayly's Daddy Tried is now available as an audiobook. If you haven't had a chance to read it for yourself, swing over to Audible.com or Amazon.com, download a copy, and have Tim read it for you.

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We're also pleased to offer a free download of the Chapter 1 audio to Baylyblog readers.

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The grace mantra...

The grace mantra is the Reformed man's rosary. - Simper Reformanda


Report of PCA Study Committee on Women in the Church (10): what the Committee should have said...

(This is the tenth and final post in a series critiquing the Report of the Presbyterian Church in America's Study Committee on Women Serving in the Ministry of the Church: first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventheighth, ninth, and tenth.)

For this purpose (God) has set elders over His church, to force the re­fractory to order; and they are not to allow sin to be freely indulged in and to rage with impunity. ...there is no reason why they should allow the church to fall in ruins because of their sloth; there is no cause why they should sit back and connive at the wicked­ness of those who try to turn everything upside down. - John Calvin 1

It's time to bring this series to an end, but one last job remains on my to-do list.

Criticism is only as good as the vision that inspires it, so let me tell you my vision. Of course, it’s not my vision. It’s the vision shared among Biblically Reformed men who have read Scripture and church history and want to die having, by God’s grace, added to the capital our faithful fathers in the faith bequeathed to us. We want to die leaving the church better than we found it. Only by God’s grace, I am zealous to add.

We want to be faithful to fight the battles of today, pushing back against the heterodoxies, heresies, and wickedness we have discovered in our own hearts placed there by the Spirit of our Age. We refuse to spend our lives carving monuments to dead men and erecting museums filled with...


Report of PCA Study Committee on Women in the Church (9): Joey Pipa at the lowest pitch of expression...

Back in the study, I asked Solzhenitsyn about his relations with the West... "[Y]es, it is true, when I fought the dragon of Communist power I fought it at the highest pitch of expression. The people in the West were not accustomed to this tone of voice. In the West, one must have a balanced, calm, soft voice; one ought to make sure to doubt oneself, to suggest that one may, of course, be completely wrong. But I didn't have the time to busy myself with this. This was not my main goal.” (Solzhenitsyn, quoted in the New Yorker, February 14, 1994, p.74.)

It saddened me to read Joey Pipa's response to the Report of the PCA Study Committee on Women in the Church. As president of a South Carolina seminary offering a more conservative option to the PCA’s Covenant Seminary, I’d been hopeful his response, when published, would sound an alarm within the church against the Committee's 60,000 words conniving at the feminist heresy.

Apparently others hoped the same because Dr. Pipa begins by telling his readers that "many friends and former students" asked him to respond to the Report.

What a disappointment they all must have felt watching as Dr. Pipa preciously declines to engage the enemy. Reading his very short response—1,500 words is about one-third of a sermon—you get the feeling you’re watching...


Asleep in Zion...

This is a sermon preached by my father over thirty years ago, a couple weeks before he died. It's short. Give it a listen:

Is Holiness Possible Today (With a Warning from Esau)

If this sermon jolted you awake, it's time to find a church where you and your loved ones will be blessed by God with a faithful pastor who exhorts, admonishes, and rebukes his sheep. Life is short and without holiness no man will see God.

You say you have a Reformed pastor who's never told you that?

Run for your life.

* * *

The painting is Hogarth's "The Sleeping Congregation."


Report of PCA Study Committee on Women in the Church (8): hiding out in a cave...

(This is eighth in a series of ten posts critiquing the Report of the Presbyterian Church in America's Study Committee on Women Serving in the Ministry of the Church: first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventheighth, ninth, and tenth.)

The primary need is the encouragement and respect of the church’s male leadership who can either nourish or break the heart of a woman who is trying to serve God. ...There is additional benefit to churches finding ways to deploy gifted women teachers in their midst. ...When churches recognize a gifted woman’s teaching ministry and incorporate it into the church’s ministry, the expansion of that ministry is an expansion of that church.

- Report of PCA Study Committee on Women in the Church 1

[June 3, 2017: this post has been edited to turn its focus away from one individual.]

Does the Report acknowledge any Scriptural limitations on women teaching and exercising authority over men?

Yes it does, and for most that will be the end of it. As one southern pastor of my acquaintance effused in a fawning tweet, "how very grateful we all are for the wonderful work this wise and faithful Committee has presented to the church!"2

Stopping right there is what the Assembly will do: "Look, they said there are some things only men should do. Isn't that enough? What does it take to satisfy you? Must every last woman be married, barefoot, and pregnant?"

For a long time now, the pastors who posture themselves as conservatives during PCA general assemblies have specialized in avoiding the battle by giving private assurances of their manliness and Biblical convictions while publicly issuing...


Report of PCA Study Committee on Women in the Church (7): silence is obsolete...

(This is seventh in a series of ten posts critiquing the Report of the Presbyterian Church in America's Study Committee on Women Serving in the Ministry of the Church: first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventheighth, ninth, and tenth.)

The women are to keep silent in the churches; for they are not permitted to speak, but are to subject themselves, just as the Law also says. (1 Corinthians 14:34)

In a long section titled "The Roles of Women During the Apostolic Era," the PCA's General Assembly Study Committee on Women's Roles in the Church goes on at great length about what this and that New Testament passage does and doesn't mean. They quote lots of scholars saying one thing and another about the meaning of this and that Greek word. Some of it is unobjectionable, beyond the fact that the reader is left exhausted; and maybe that's the point?

Finally, though, the Committee is forced to conclude something or other about the texts' application to congregations within their own religious non-profit association. Given the spread of their legs from the concrete and timber dock of Jackson, Mississippi to the sleek yacht with a gaping hole in her hull up there in New York City, it's hard for them not to embarrass themselves by...


Report of PCA Study Committee on Women in the Church (6): no minority report...

(This is sixth in a series of ten posts critiquing the Report of the Presbyterian Church in America's Study Committee on Women Serving in the Ministry of the Church: first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventheighth, ninth, and tenth.)

Now Herod and Pilate became friends with one another that very day... (Luke 23:12)

The first thing Presbyterian officers will note about this Report is that it is a consensus report. All Committee members signed off on it, agreeing with the Report as written:

We debated all the matters put to us by the General Assembly and were, by the grace of God, able to arrive at an overwhelming consensus. 1

A consensus isn't a mere majority. Merriam Webster lists "unanimity" as a synonym, yet the Committee feels the need to assure the Assembly their consensus is "overwhelming."

Why speak of an "overwhelming consensus?"

In an earlier post I warned against this Committee's exaggerated...


Report of PCA Study Committee on Women in the Church (5): the ministry role of washing saints' feet...

...if she has washed the saints' feet (1Timothy 5:10)

(This is the fifth in a series of ten posts critiquing the Report of the Presbyterian Church in America's Study Committee on Women Serving in the Ministry of the Church: first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventheighth, ninth, and tenth.)

Talking about this Report with my wife Mary Lee, I picked up my laptop and did a search for "wash" or "feet."

Nothing, and the absence of these words is damning. But first, a few sentences about a word the Committee loves...


Report of PCA Study Committee on Women in the Church (4): read Warfield for yourself...

(This is the fourth in a series of ten posts critiquing the Report of the Presbyterian Church in America's Study Committee on Women Serving in the Ministry of the Church: first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventheighthninth, and tenth.)

At the end of the nineteenth century, Princeton's Benjamin Warfield argued for deaconesses, writing that the office of deaconess would help bring women's leadership in the church into direct accountability to the church's male officers.

The study committee's Report cites Warfield several times in their attempt to get the PCA finally to normalize the Kellerites' practice of woman officers. What they don't explain...


Report of PCA Study Committee on Women in the Church (3): texts left on the scrap heap...

(This is the third in a series of ten posts critiquing the Report of the Presbyterian Church in America's Study Committee on Women Serving in the Ministry of the Church: first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventheighthninth, and tenth.)

The Committee's Report comes in at 63 pages and 32,000 words. Before they're done, the Committee has tipped their hat to many of the exegetical inventions and talking points used by feminists these past fifty years to justify their rebellion. Bad as it is to read the Committee paying their respects to feminist revisionist arguments about this and that passage of Scripture, it's even worse to note the Scripture texts the Committee excludes from our consideration.

This, for instance...


Report of PCA Study Committee on Women in the Church (2): they are "joyfully committed"...

(This is the second post in a series of ten posts critiquing the Report of the Presbyterian Church in America's Study Committee on Women Serving in the Ministry of the Church: first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventheighth, ninth, and tenth.)

On to our examination of the Report itself. We'll use screen shots so we can refer to line numbers.

In the first sentence of the Report (Line 10), readers are assured each of the Committee members are "joyfully committed" to "the Bible's teaching on the complementarity of men and women."

First, that word "complementarity." "Complementarian" is a shibboleth, a word used to communicate the man entering the camp is not the enemy. Among most Evangelicals, saying you're a "complementarian" makes you OK whether or not you can spell it.

Trust is important in our age when sex is such a bloody battlefield.

Many pastors and elders opposed this study committee because they were concerned it would lead to capitulation to the forces of feminism. Then, when the Committee's members were announced, they were even more concerned watching Tim Keller's wife, Kathy, seated as a voting member.

In direct violation of Scripture and the PCA's Constitution, Tim Keller has long had women officers in his church, so the appointment of his wife to the Committee was a clear statement...


Report of PCA Study Committee on Women in the Church (1): Kathy Keller "Voting Member"...

(This is the first in a series of ten posts critiquing the Report of the Presbyterian Church in America's Study Committee on Women Serving in the Ministry of the Church: first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventheighth, ninth, and tenth.)

Preparatory to their 2017 General Assembly to be held in June, the Presbyterian Church in America has released the Report of their study committee on "women serving in the ministry of the church." This is the first in a series examining this committee's work.

When I served on a similar PCA General Assembly study committee on women in the military a few years ago, no woman was appointed to our committee. Study committees of the PCA General Assembly examine the interpretation of Scripture on theological matters where there is a need for the church to come to an authoritative judgment. Thus these study committees have been composed of pastors and elders—officers called to adjudicate conflict and make authoritative judgments. For this reason, many found it disheartening that Pastor Tim Keller's wife, Kathy, was placed on this study committee and that she agreed to serve.

It has long been normal practice for women to be present and participate in elders meetings at Tim Keller's Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City. Mrs. Keller's appointment to this General Assembly study Committee is in line with the egalitarian practices Redeemer has long been practicing in her own fellowship, and advocating within her denomination.

But whereas the women attending Redeemer's elder meetings have been...


Pining for Christendom...

NYT's David Brooks is so very precious about buggery. My friend Mark Albrecht forwarded a link to Brooks's latest piece dissing Rod Dreher's exquisitely titled "The Benedict Option" while flattering Dreher for writing the most important book on religion in ten years. He points out twice in his three-minute read that he disagrees with Dreher's opposition to buggery.

Noted.

Noted again.

Dreher thinks the inspiration for his book's title is the sixth century founder of the Benedictine monastic order who wrote...


Federal Vision and Rome's homoerotica...

Whether its leaders see it or not, Federal Vision has always been a pilgrimage to Rome. Objectivity of the covenant, covenant succession, paedocommunion, celebrations of the Lord's Supper without preaching of the Word, patriarchal fathers communing their wives and children; taken together, we have a path of greased lightning to Rome's sacramentalism, but you'll never get Federal Vision leaders to admit it.

What is Federal Vision? Murkiness and imprecision.

Over a decade ago, I asked my friend Vern Poythress what he thought of Federal Vision and he responded, "You know, I don't think I understand it."

If you know anything about Vern, the one thing certain is that...


Flattery never brings reform...

...if I were to sum up my principal objections to most forms of feminism, it would be in the contention that feminism privileges dogmatic ideology over close and receptive attention to reality.  - A. Roberts, link

In Scripture, authority is symbolically masculine, as it originates with a God who stands over against us ...and who refers to himself with masculine pronouns.  - A. Roberts, link

I have some fairly far-reaching criticisms of complementarianism as most understand it. I believe that it unjustly marginalizes women within the life of the Church and society in many and various ways and tends to devalue them. I believe that women need to exercise far more prominent roles in the life and teaching of the Church, not just as a matter of permission, but as a matter of necessity.  - A. Roberts, link

We need more female spiritual directors, lay teachers, theologians, commentators, scholars, churchwardens, vestrywomen, treasurers, vergers, sacristans, elder women (different from elders), deaconesses, lay chaplains, leaders of Bible studies, missionaries, etc.  - A. Roberts, link

Justin Taylor works for Wheaton publisher Crossway. Now, just prior to their release of a book Heirs Together by UK Ph.D. Alastair Roberts, Justin got Gospel Coalition to run a piece on their blog introducing what Justin assures readers is a "big book." The GC blog post introduced by Taylor is written by Roberts and titled "How Should We Think About Watching Women Fight Women?" 

The post gives us an idea what Roberts's book will be like. He writes about "the particular subjective and objective otherness of the other sex," saying it is an "otherness that should excite wonder, love, responsibility, and care," A few sentences later he writes: "the strength and athleticism of women such as Rousey and Nunes is worthy of admiration in many respects." Then this...


Love letters written to oneself...

While driving to a funeral the other day, I listened to a talk show host make fun of this new trend of people marrying themselves. Self-love is the center of our empire of desire, and it's the cultural elite who lead us.

Take President Obama, for instance; as he leaves office, he takes this opportunity to send out across the nation a love song to himself. He's cut "our deficits by nearly two-thirds." His Affordable Care Act "prevented an estimated 87,000 deaths." His administration has been great. The country is great. The lives of all his subjects are great. His Own Eminence is great.

President-elect Trump tells us he's great, too. He says he'll make America great again, but the egotism of The Donald is so bodacious it's hard not to laugh. He's a buffoon and he knows it.

The one thing President Obama knows beyond the slightest doubt is that he himself is...


Gore Vidal on Truman Capote's writing...

Gore Vidal on Truman Capote's writing:

I can't read him because I'm diabetic. 1

Funny funny. I think this is my problem with certain reformed uber-celebrities. They can't stop with the adverbs.