A Gloomy Day-After Independence Day

It's the day after The Fourth of July and I know so many people who are sad about the situation of America, see our cherished history and institutions being trashed in various ways, wondering if the nation is even going to survive.

There are calls for prayer for the nation of course, and some groups and individuals do pray for the nation. Perhaps God is hearing, though it doesn't seem so. Things seem to be getting worse rather than better, but of course they might be a lot worse if people weren't praying.

Still, you have to ask why things seem to continue to go from bad to worse. When I ask that question and pray about it the answer I keep coming up with is that the churches are out of favor with God, and not until the churches reform will our prayers be heard for healing the land.

The famous call to pray for one's nation in 2 Chronicles 7:14 is often quoted to exhort Christians to pray for America, but not very often are the conditions in that verse emphasized enough.

2 Chron 7:14 If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.

When we pray for America how many of us humble ourselves? Do we even think about what that means? How about fasting as a start? How many do that? What about turning from our "wicked ways?" Do we even think we HAVE any wicked ways to turn from? My impression is that most Christians just blithely pray that God would bless America without even thinking about meeting these conditions.

This exhortation was God's answer to Solomon's prayer at the dedication of the newly built temple, after it had been hallowed to God's purposes.

The passage goes on:

15 Now mine eyes shall be open, and mine ears attent unto the prayer that is made in this place. 16 For now have I chosen and sanctified this house, that my name may be there for ever: and mine eyes and mine heart shall be there perpetually. 17 And as for thee, if thou wilt walk before me, as David thy father walked, and do according to all that I have commanded thee, and shalt observe my statutes and my judgments; 18 Then will I stablish the throne of thy kingdom, according as I have covenanted with David thy father, saying, There shall not fail thee a man to be ruler in Israel. 19 But if ye turn away, and forsake my statutes and my commandments, which I have set before you, and shall go and serve other gods, and worship them; 20 Then will I pluck them up by the roots out of my land which I have given them; and this house, which I have sanctified for my name, will I cast out of my sight, and will make it to be a proverb and a byword among all nations. 21 And this house, which is high, shall be an astonishment to every one that passeth by it; so that he shall say, Why hath the LORD done thus unto this land, and unto this house? 22 And it shall be answered, Because they forsook the LORD God of their fathers, which brought them forth out of the land of Egypt, and laid hold on other gods, and worshipped them, and served them: therefore hath he brought all this evil upon them.

Our temple today is built up of living stones, God's people themselves. We are God's house. We know He will never forsake or abandon us if we hold in faith to His promise of salvation through the cross of Jesus Christ, but what if we stray from His teachings? Can we believe we are saved by grace and think it's OK to ordain women or homosexuals to preach? Or are those only the really apostate churches that are no longer God's anyway? Didn't Jesus threaten to remove the lampstands of those churches which had strayed too far?

There are many questions like these that should be asked. I think before we can expect God to hear our prayers for the nation we need to pray first that God would show us where we are out of His will and set ourselves to reform, both personally and corporately in His churches.

I really am convinced that women's not covering our heads in church, and maybe outside of church as well, has shut us out of hope for the nation. I really do, and it's very sad because it's hard to think of this requirement being widely accepted any more by anyone in the churches. It's treated as trivial and it's rationalized and interpreted away by so many respected leaders. Could it at least be asked that people pray that God would show them the truth about this? That's where we need to start anyway, FINDING OUT where we have gone wrong with God so we can reform. We can only find out through His Holy Spirit; thinking alone won't get us anywhere.

I also suspect strongly that the widespread acceptance of the modern Bible versions that really are based on corrupt -- even heretical -- texts, and translations that have been done by men of liberal persuasion who reject much of His word, MAY play a part in this too. I wouldn't dismiss the thought lightly, people, but I know getting a serious hearing for this is not very likely.

These of course are my own hobbyhorses that I've been pursuing in my blogs. Don't take my word for any of it, but DO go read the many references I've given to these subjects; let THEM tell you.

But I'm sure there's more. Any capitulation to liberalism or feminism in a church needs to be confronted. It may be subtle, not easily recognized as a problem.

Or personal sins too. A pastor or elder or deacon who has been divorced? Or compromised teaching about divorce and remarriage? That sort of thing. These things are not just sins, they're actually false doctrine that promotes sin.

I get a sinking feeling thinking about all this. I see so many ways we are out of God's will lately, and so many ways I don't think Christians want to deal with any of it, but rationalize it away, dismiss it as legalism, or otherwise insist that it's not a problem and so on.

If only people would at least pray for light on the subject, ask God to show us where we may have gone wrong as His people. Pray through the Sermon on the Mount asking if we're REALLY obeying Him, perhaps. Anything along these lines would be a huge beginning.

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Later. I'm going to stop reading about feminism, which is only depressing anyway, a real horror story and a BIG reason why the nation is in the pits and some churches have gone desperately wrong as well, and reread some Leonard Ravenhill. He wrote a lot about why we aren't having revival and he wrote a book with the interesting title, America Is Too Young To Die. I think that's the direction I need to go right now.

A Rant Against Feminism 2, but some of the problem is needing more commentary from Mary Kassian

It's been really hard going getting through Mary Kassian's Feminist Mistake, and if I'm now near the end of it that's only because I jumped over some parts on the way. I simply can't read it continuously for any length of time. Then when I do sit down to read it I end up skipping pages and trying to get the gist that way without having to slog through the whole swamp of the feminist mindset so carefully documented there.

I don't understand why she wrote the book the way she did. The title suggests her goal is to illuminate what is mistaken in feminist thought, but so much of the book is nothing but the feminist thought itself without comment from her that the reader is left with no clue to the author's point of view.

At the beginning she states that she has some sympathy with the motives for feminism:

...I believe that feminism has drawn attention to crucial problems that exist for women in society and in the church. In this work I am not so much debating the validity of the questions that feminists have posed, but rather seeking to evaluate the validity of their answers.

A reasonable objective it seems to me so I look forward to seeing her spell out her thinking. Perhaps she's left it for the very end and I'm not quite there yet.

In the meantime I've had to plod through the whole history of modern feminist thought, rather minutely detailed in parts, without the slightest relief from its relentless irrational humanity-crippling and God-defying logic. Not a hint as to which are those questions posed by the feminists that she says she is not necessarily debating, not a hint as to what in all that massive material exemplifies those "crucial problems that exist for women in society and in the church" she says she finds there. This is very puzzling as well as frustrating and even maddening at times.

Again, perhaps she'll save my sanity at the very end -- or possibly I've missed some of it in my skipping around -- but I have to comment that she should have been giving her analysis all along for the sake of the reader. There's an enormous amount of detail there. Surely in all that detail there are many questions she finds sympathetic and many answers she must condemn, and it would help the reader enormously to see her thinking on all that at each stage of the presentation.

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Later. (July 5) I've skimmed around enough to find some places where Kassian does stop to analyze the feminist position she's just described, so maybe I've just been missing it. But through the first third of the book at least I was starved for some comment, and especially something to orient me to what she believes might be LEGITIMATE in the feminist project. So far I've found nothing along those lines. Could be again my own fault since I'm not reading it thoroughly.

But I think I need to take a break from this book for a while anyway. Just had to say this much so as not to give a completely wrong impression about the book.

A Rant Against Feminism

Ugh. I don't know if I'm even going to be able to get through Kassian's Feminist Mistake. So far she's pretty much just spelling out the feminist point of view, not discussing it or answering it. It just reminds me of what I always hated about feminism and I have little patience for it. The stupidity of their accusations and arguments. Blech.

I could never stand the idea, so common in the 60s, that our beliefs and traditions were "conditioned" by hostile or irrational forces, but such an idea is freely thrown about as the explanation for everything someone thinks is wrong with society and of course feminism slings it about too. "Oh it was just conditioned in us by people who want to control us." Blah blah blah. By a "priestly class" perhaps or whatnot.

I hate the practice of giving made-up explanations anyway and this one is pure fantasy. The very term "conditioned" curdles something deep inside me. Yeah I know I'm not being very clear here. This is a post for venting reactions and I hope I'll get more analytical later.

But here's famous anthropologist Margaret Mead being quoted about how we're "conditioned" into our sex roles:

"Mead, in Sex and Temperament (1935) and Male and Female (1949), contended that there was no fixed pattern of male-female interaction and roles. She concluded that differences between male and female were learned and conditioned by culture rather than set by nature." (36)

I knew somewhere deep in my inarticulate gut that was false the first time I heard it. I have a feeling many others did too. But the "scholars" and the "intellectuals" chaired university departments with such idiocies and filled up the world with such mystifying nonsense for years and years, and I guess they're still doing it.

Of course the biggest stupidity, contained in this cultural conditioning notion, was the idea that men and women aren't really different at all, the differences are all made up; therefore the solution to inequities is to assume we're identical by nature and change social forms to free us up to remove all barriers to full and complete personal expression and define ourselves from scratch. The absolute mess that's been made of the family and sexuality and marriage since such notions took over ought to have woken us up, but uh uh.

I could also never see the sense in fighting biology. Women get pregnant. That seems to me to be a rock-bottom fact of life. But feminists knocked themselves out trying to overcome that simple biological fact. How does it help us better know our worth as women to have our very nature talked about as something we have to get rid of?

These things are all problems that have to be thought about in any discussion of female complaints about disenfranchisement by culture or the church, but it seems that feminists and other activists always have to rush to a "solution" before they understand the problem. Or they "understand" the problem by pasting a fantasy label like "conditioned" on it.

I also hated the analysis that women's discontents were the result of Patriarchy (of course patriarchy being a purely "conditioned" artificial cultural situation imposed on us by men rather than God). I never had anything against patriarchy. I always LIKED the idea of men being at the head of things, family or society -- the right KIND of men of course, the just ones, the fair ones, the kind ones, the competent ones, not the "silly boys and drunks and rowdies" Elizabeth Cady Stanton so rightly complained had powers and privileges women didn't have, and not tyrants and misogynists. No, patriarchy in itself isn't the problem, and now I know also that patriarchy is given by God.

You can see that I didn't find much in feminism to attract me. Mostly it gave me a stomachache, EVEN THOUGH I had at times felt mislabeled and insulted for being female and welcomed SOME kind of redress, so you'd think I'd be eager to grasp at any effort to remedy the situation. But I wasn't. The remedy was more offensive than the problem.

Let nobody think all this apparent wisdom I'm showing here worked itself out in my life though. Nope, I didn't live by my own wise intuitions. I was more than happy to "invent" myself, do as I please, ignore biology and get myself deep in sin and social catastrophe. Even with my cynical inner voice telling me it's all a crock. Boundaries were broken down nevertheless, meaning was lost, order was lost, standards were lost, the world was spinning out of control even if it WAS all a crock.

Well I'll try to go on reading Kassian. I would like to know how all this worked itself out in the church, because of course I wasn't a Christian in the early days of feminism, the 60s and 70s. Oh well -- *sigh* -- on second thought I'm sure I know anyway. Liberal Christianity refuses to take the Bible as God's word and so did feminism. We'll just rewrite it to suit our idea of what's right and proper. It was all just invented by men anyway.

No. Any real analysis of the problems of women has to start with a forthright acknowledgement of the facts of life and the fixed decrees of God. THEN we can maybe start to think about it all.

Hm. Come on, Mary Kassian, let's get to the part where you brilliantly dispense with the feminist mistake and show us the REAL way to understand our female dilemmas, our role in the church particularly.

Catching Up With Fifty Years of Feminism

In my last two posts I turned toward feminism as a blog topic and I've continued to read up on it. I'm reading Mary Kassian's books more closely now for starters. (They're both online at the Council for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood website -- just put "Mary Kassian" in the search box.)

Her focus is on modern feminism from the sixties on, and reliving that period through her book, The Feminist Mistake, seems to be bringing up old feelings of my own that go back years, feelings I've apparently suppressed, which is evidenced by the fact that I haven't felt them in all this time -- not since the 60s or 70s at least, some of them anyway. Some of them, however, I've been discovering, go all the way back to early childhood. Hurt feelings, angry feelings, depressed feelings, confused and conflicted feelings, all surrounding my sense of myself as female or my sense of the world's attitude to femaleness, and particularly of course, feelings encountered in specific relationships with others -- parents, siblings, friends, boyfriends, authorities, institutions etc.

So feminism could turn out to be an emotionally very bumpy topic for me. That probably explains why I've avoided the whole arena of women's situation as much as I have. For instance, I researched the woman's head covering quite thoroughly, which is discussed in some cases as part of a broader discussion of women's position as defined by the Bible, but quite definitely did NOT want to read beyond the head covering in any of those discussions. Partly I've just never known how to understand a great deal of what the Bible teaches about women's role and I didn't want to encumber my study of the head covering with other issues. But I have to admit I'm not sure I really want to know too much about the subject. Insofar as I grasp that it places me in a class beneath men, and that this is God's own decree, I've more or less gritted my teeth and determined to accept it, hoping the Lord comes soon and rescues me from this benighted world (since there is no distinction between the sexes, or even sexes at all, in the Kingdom of God). There's a defensive disdain for the whole subject I've cultivated in my attitude, that says something like "I don't need to know all the particulars, just tell me what my role is and because I love God I will make myself live it." It's a cross to bear after all. In other words, a recipe for ignoring the very feelings I'm now having to recognize.

The idea that one could be wholly emotionally in harmony with God's decree doesn't enter into my mental set. Perhaps there are women for whom it is completely fulfilling, but I would have to surmise that there's some conflict for a great many of us. Not because there's anything wrong with God's decree, but because, in this fallen world, God's decrees are distorted in so many ways, and our own natures are so distorted in so many ways, finding such a happy correspondence must be rare. Even God's own good decree is an instrument of death. Just living in this broken world is a cross if we face it rightly.

I should add, however, that I am aware of factors in my personal experience that predisposed me to my own peculiar conflicts about sex roles. If it adds to the topic I'll include some of that as I go, but I really don't want my blogs to turn into a place to vent my own personal angsts. It may be that as I continue my pursuit of understanding these issues it won't really be necessary. I'll have to see as the subject continues. I did want to write some in that direction, though.

See, I lived through the sixties, in a university town where ALL the "liberationisms" of the day were in-your-face all the time. Since becoming a Christian I've come to recognize all that as the amazingly fertile seedbed of what really should be called the Sin Liberation Front, that has now grown up and put out tentacles like some horror-movie monster to engulf the entire world. Not that it was all bad of course. Violations of civil rights needed to be confronted after all. Unfortunately the way it unfolded in the sixties involved "liberating" some very unsavory elements such as the criminal Black Panthers (read David Horowitz's Radical Son for the best expose of that movement and that whole period I've ever seen). The sixties "liberated" such types as Charles Manson and the Symbionese Liberation Army. Everywhere you looked there was some kind of Liberation Army rising up. There were gut-wrenchingly spooky and scary militant feminists too, who wore overalls and heavy boots and carried around Chairman Mao's Little Red Book as their Bible. There was the Society for Cutting Up Men, or SCUM.

I also attended a "lecture" once in those years about "Gay Liberation," still new in those days, which was nothing but an abusive harangue against heterosexuality and against anybody who didn't think they had any homosexual impulses, insisting we're all "bisexual" and in such violently angry terms it was hard to sit and listen to it, but impossible to leave at the same time. If the speaker had had any political power half the audience would have been thrown into concentration camps for claiming to be exclusively heterosexual.

Those years were very depressing to me. I thought the world had gone completely mad. I'd entered the sixties with idealistic notions about the value of reason and intellectual integrity building a sane and civilized world -- you know, truth, beauty and goodness etc. -- only to find the sixties ending up by throwing it all out as the evil fruit of evil Western Civilization ("hey hey ho ho, Western Civ has got to go"), and I just wanted it all to vanish as a bad dream. All I wanted to do was suppress the whole thing -- and apparently I succeeded.

Before it all reached such a fever pitch, of course, the feminist ideas were circulating in a quieter way. Betty Friedan's Feminist Mystique was a conversation piece early in the decade, along with De Beauvoir's Second Sex. Neither of those books interested me one bit, however. It's certainly not that I was immune to the problems of being female in a prejudiced world that they were trying to address -- far from it, as I indicate in my first few paragraphs above -- but for some reason the way they addressed them didn't speak to me, and that continued to be the case throughout the whole development of feminism since the sixties. Although I'm about as temperamentally unsuited to the traditional woman's role as it's possible to get (I'm not bragging and I'm not apologizing, it's just, perhaps sadly, true), I gravitated more to the traditionalist arguments against the feminism I was encountering. The feminist argument was just irritatingly irrelevant and alienating simply BECAUSE I wasn't immune to the same problems they thought they were addressing. But the traditional arguments left me out too after all, so I was philosophically stranded in a no-man's land (or no-woman's land) with respect to both sides of the argument.

Mary Kassian only glancingly touches on the nightmare side of sixties feminism, and sticks to the major theories that launched the saner side, or at least the more intellectual side, of the feminist movement, including Friedan and De Beauvoir as the beginnings but continuing through names unfamiliar to me. She follows the history of both the secular and the religious feminist arguments which she says developed in parallel to one another.

Again, none of this was relevant to me for some reason, and in a way still isn't. Kassian does speak partly for me when she says she believes the feminist movement raised legitimate questions but came up with wrong answers. I can recognize my own experience in that to some extent, but mostly I just want to get to Kassian's own answers to see if I find my experience recognized there. (I don't mean to be making my own experience the important thing, by the way, it's God's word that must determine everything, but the point is that Kassian is right that something in the feminist movement IS legitimate and DOES reflect a social and psychological injustice to women that needs to be sorted out). Yes, I've skimmed ahead but don't see what I'm looking for yet. I suppose I have to read through it all for it to fall into place.

Which I will now continue to do.

A Short History of Feminism, Pt. 2: CBMW's compromised foundations

How the Bible Versions Contribute to Liberalism and Feminism by Undermining Inerrancy

After watching the film about the 19th century women's movement, I went to the website of the Council for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood in search of material on the history of feminism. Of course the preponderance of their work is aimed against feminism.

There I found Mary Kassian's book, The History of Feminism and the Church, where the material I've just covered from the film is reviewed; also a talk by Carolyn McCulley that outlines the movement and its various phases, three phases as she describes it, and also Wayne Grudem's book, Evangelical Feminism: A New Path to Liberalism, an excerpt of which is here.

As I say in my previous post, it seems to me that the feminist movement was itself born of liberalism, so to consider that today's evangelical counterpart in the church could lead to theological liberalism is only to affirm the natural affinity between the two. Grudem traces the phenomenon in the growing practice of ordaining women ministers, and analyzes the various ways Biblical inerrancy and authority are undermined to allow this. A study found that

Biblically inerrant denominations are . . . resistant to formal gender equality.10 .... for "biblically inerrant denominations" the argument that the Bible prohibits the ordination of women is by far the most persuasive argument.11

Of course, what immediately comes to my mind because of my immersion in the Bible versions issues over the last months, is that there has to be a connection with this major influence against Biblical authority. The Bible versions hoax is the biggest Trojan horse ever parked inside the churches, and it is hard to believe that the influence of the liberal thinking that brought these versions to us would not have an undermining influence on Biblical thinking in general. One of the most jarring pieces of cognitive dissonance in the general acceptance of the modern Bible versions, it seems to me, is the fact that their very existence argues against Biblical inerrancy while the evangelical churches that so uncritically accept them nevertheless try to hold onto the idea of Biblical inerrancy without noticing that the foundation for it has been pulled out from under it.

If you can question the authority of the text that was held to be preserved by God up to the King James Bible, throw it all over in favor of the notion that it had been erroneous all those centuries and that only in the 19th century was it possible to begin to reconstruct the true originals, you've stabbed the very idea of Biblical inerrancy in the heart. And this is exactly what the Westcott and Hort revision of 1881 did. They planted doubt in all the Bibles up to their time. They claimed that their own favorite Alexandrian texts had to be the truest because they were the oldest, but that required them to come up with an explanation how it was that the traditional Byzantine texts existed in such great numbers and with such obvious church approval for so many centuries afterward. Their explanation was the completely hypothetical idea that the true texts (their cherished Alexandrians) were officially revised early on, meaning officially corrupted, and that this corrupt line became the basis for the Bibles in all languages including all the English Bibles through the King James. According to this hypothesis much was added to the text that didn't belong there.

As John Burgon points out, this very hypothesis defeats itself since it implies that the church leaders must have regarded the Alexandrian texts as the corrupt ones if they felt it necessary to reject them and try to reconstruct what they considered to be the authentic text, and in the third century they would still have had access to the earliest manuscripts to work from.

In any case, this is pure conjecture. There is no evidence for this hypothetical early revision; it rests absolutely on the unsupportable assumption that the Alexandrian texts are superior, and the evidence against that assumption is voluminous. Just read John Burgon. But the assumption has prevailed in the minds of those who accept the modern versions. And it would have to work its poison into their thinking in many subtle ways, insinuating that the Bible is not inerrant but subject to the same treatment as any man-made book, which is exactly the viewpoint aggressively endorsed by the revisers themselves.

The Council for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood doesn't question the modern versions. Some probably have no idea of the anti-inerrancy textual criticism principles that underlie them, but it can't escape all awareness that so many versions can't all be right, and that fact in itself undermines Biblical inerrancy. So to my mind the Bible versions Trojan horse must contribute to the thinking that brings liberalism into the churches by justifying opinions that contradict the Bible. They hold firmly to Biblical inerrancy with the one hand while the other surreptitiously throws it away.

I also found at CBMW that they deny that women are literally to cover our heads, in favor of a culturist explanation that effectively renders meaningless the whole idea of the covering in 1 Corinthians 11, and this seems to me to be another way Biblical authority is undermined even while it is proclaimed. In fact this is an attitude that's similar to some of those Grudem outlines as the thinking that leads to liberalism. He lists two that seem most pertinent, one being "2. Saying that New Testament teachings are "seed ideas" showing that superior teaching would come later." If Paul really was calling for a literal head covering, and this is in fact recognized, but in our superior wisdom we know he really really was only affirming the cultural standard of his day, isn't this similar to judging that what the New Testament actually said needs our superior perspective to be fully grasped? It isn't quite the same as another of Grudem's points: "4. Saying that Paul was wrong" but almost.

This is relevant because CBMW makes much of the concept of male headship in their work, but 1 Corinthians 11 is where Paul defined the concept most particularly, arguing strenuously that headship authority is symbolized by the literal human head. The head of the man is to be uncovered because he is the glory of Christ and has headship over the woman, but the woman's head is to be literally covered in order to conceal her own glory and the glory of man which she is, and to show subordination to the man's authority. But CBMW and others who follow them have dropped the literal human head part (in favor of the vague "feminine dress" which ignores the head), yet they try to hold onto the headship idea.

Along with the leaking away of Bible inerrancy through the embrace of the Bible versions, it seems to me they've got a serious leak in the idea of male headship, and the poison of liberalism is already within their own house.

A Short History of Feminism Pt. 1: A Project of Liberal Christianity

Over the last couple of months I've watched some good Ken Burns documentary films on my computer monitor through my Netflix account. I saw another one over this last weekend, this one about the 19th century women's movement led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. I had no ambition beyond entertainment and perhaps improving my understanding of history from watching it, but afterward it seemed there was blog material there that's right down my alley, though I'll probably need to do more research.

I'd known next to nothing about these women or their movement. It struck me as I watched that much of their thinking could be chalked up to Liberal Christianity, which was very big in the 19th century, but this wasn't discussed as such. Just about everybody was a "Christian" in some sense or other in America in those days, but there's no way to sort out the true believers from the nominal with the facts given --in fact, ALL the main actors in the movement seem to be merely nominal, and that may have been the case.

"Progressive" ideas of all sorts were in the air, Marx and Darwin contributing among others as the century wore on, and inventing your own religion, such as by rewriting the Bible to suit yourself, had some popularity since Jefferson himself had done it. Toward the end of the century Elizabeth Cady Stanton also rewrote the Bible to expunge what she considered to be unjust attitudes toward women. Earlier, she and her husband knew some of the "progressive" movers and shakers of the day, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson. For her own wedding ceremony in 1840, when she was twenty-five, she had the word "obey" removed from the vows, and she chose to keep her own first and last names rather than become "Mrs. Henry Stanton."

Her husband was an active abolitionist, had grown up in what sounds like an orthodox Presbyterian church, and for a time before he married he was considering becoming a minister. But it's happened quite frequently that someone becomes a minister who isn't a true believer, and his actual beliefs are not touched on -- in fact I learned these few facts about him from Wikipedia, not the film.

Some of the situation of women that Stanton and Anthony sought to correct seems unjust from a Christian point of view, not just a "progressive" point of view, but sorting it all out would take quite a bit of thought. Women couldn't own property for instance, nor have custody of their children if the marriage dissolved, and they were legally owned by their husbands, not treated as citizens in their own right. Their complete lack of legal and social status except through their husbands or fathers is quite shocking to think about from where we are now. Some of this injustice probably came from a misunderstanding of the Bible. Surely there was justice in some of the reforms sought; yet some of the reforms also have an anti-Christian flavor that is still with us and needs to be recognized.

The movement started out from an abolitionist base as they fought for the freedom and rights of slaves, and although that probably had some genuine Christian support it's hard to tell there too; certainly much of it was done by "progressives" and liberal/nominal Christians. Somebody should do a study of these distinctions some time (or perhaps it's been done but I haven't run across it). It's a shame for the true church if few genuine Christians worked for abolition -- or some of the women's rights for that matter.

Quite a motley list of desired rights and reforms developed as the women's movement got going, including temperance (which was regarded as necessary for protecting women from drunken husbands who abused their wives and squandered the family income), divorce reform, co-education, property rights for married women, equal pay for equal work, and "dress reform," as well as the right to vote, which was the most controversial on the list. The enemy was clearly the men of the society, who, according to Stanton in the speech she delivered at their first Convention at Seneca Falls in 1848, had "systematically deprived women of their rights...." It was of course the men who ran the government and all the institutions of society who refused to give them a hearing, laughed at them and scorned their proposals as ridiculous.

Susan B. Anthony had a Baptist mother and a Quaker father, as well as a Quaker aunt who was a preacher. One of the biographers interviewed in the film says that it was her Quaker experience that gave her a perspective that was "so far beyond what other people had at the time." The Quaker treatment of women as equal even to the point of being able to be ministers was of course "progressive." "Progressive" meant that injustices and oppressions of many kinds were understood to be the doings of "ignorant" traditions from the past, including of course also the Bible which is clear that women aren't to be preachers, though that wasn't directly addressed in the film.

Susan B. Anthony wrote the following at some point, blurring different conceptions of the sexes together, conceptions both at least vaguely biblical and clearly unbiblical:

The old idea that man was made for himself and woman for him, that he is the oak, she the vine, he the head, she the heart, he the great conservator of wisdom, she of love, will be reverently laid aside with other long-since exploded philosophies of the ignorant past.

The society of the day treats women as inferior and incompetent and attributes its authority to the Bible, though the Bible does not teach that. The Bible does call the man the head of the woman, but in the sense of role and responsibility, not as a judgment of competence or capacity (Paul even goes out of his way to try to prevent such an idea in 1 Cor 11:3, 11 and 12) and it certainly doesn't add the sentimentalized nonsense about the woman being the "heart." Yet historically men (fallen unredeemed men mostly?) have misread the Bible to judge women as inferior, or they trivialize them sentimentally, and apparently that view held sway legally in the 19th century.

In such an atmosphere it's hard for a woman to accept being told she was made for the man, as the Bible so clearly says she was, men being so unjust and also such undesirables in so many ways. In fact one of Stanton's most effective speeches in my opinion was her indignant denunciation of the insult to women of the law that allowed silly boys and drunks and good-for-nothing rowdies the vote along with other rights that were denied to women.

Among the first participants in the women's movement was Lucretia Mott, another Quaker minister, as well as the very first officially ordained woman minister, Antionette Brown, a Congregationalist. "Religious equality for women" became another plank in the platform, and here is where the sought reforms clearly conflict with the Bible. Biblical standards are blurred with merely social requirements and all together are treated as the product of the "ignorant past." Later Antionette Brown herself takes a stand against divorce rights based on the Biblical teaching that marriage was ordained by God and therefore indissoluble, despite her own ordination's having already contradicted Biblical teaching. But Liberal Christianity seems to know how to make the Bible say whatever suits, being a "Christianity" that treats the Bible as just another man-made work from which you may pick and choose what you like and discard the rest as merely the backward thoughts of ignorant primitive people.

TO BE CONTINUED.

Not politics, not prayer, not seeking revival. We need light on our sins and repentance.

Some time ago I pretty much gave up on politics. I used to get involved, posted quite a bit on various political issues, especially the rise of Islam that we've seen even after they attacked us on 9/11. That in fact was one clue that events aren't making any sense, that things are out of control and no matter what we do to raise the alarm about dangers to the country the dangers seem to increase.

Finally it really came home to me in truth that it's all in God's hands. I mean, you "know that" but usually you don't REALLY know that so you go on looking for political solutions anyway, at least doing what you can to get the word out, until you REALLY know it. I was even saying the truth before the truth really came home to me: the reason the nation is in so much trouble, the reason nothing we do is working, the reason the forces of destruction keep on bulldozing their way over everything the country once stood for, is that God is judging us. You can't fight God. If God has set His face against us there simply are no political solutions.

So I became more focused on understanding all the ways the nation is under judgment. At first the obvious looms largest: abortion is a big one for instance, the push for "gay rights" another. But then you start wondering how legalized abortion happened anyway, how we got so far down this road to perdition. Oh you can identify causes here and there. Marxist influences loom large and they got very big in the 60s, and those of that mentality are now in power. But really, how could all that have happened so easily? Why have those who oppose it been so helpless to do anything about it? Now on top of Marxism we have Islam increasing in power. Terrible paradoxes.

But the fact that we are falling under leftist and anti-Christian influences means the church had already been effectively silenced. For that to happen at all means the country had already lost its Christian identity. Certainly God judges all nations, pagan and Christian, but "judgment begins at the house of God" and that now seems to me to be the place we should be putting all our attention. I think we have to face that it's the church that has let down the nation. All we seem to do as Christians is complain that the nation does what unbelieving nations are likely to do under the influence of fallen human nature. We complain about the legalization of abortion, we complain about the push to legitimize homosexuality, and so on. We complain and we do what we can to combat such legislation. But as I'm saying here, it isn't working. The church has no clout any more. Hatred of Christianity is getting very strong. "Hate speech" laws are closing in against us. The question is "Why?" Why is the church so powerless?

Sometimes I'll just figure that it's time Christians in the West experienced the kind of persecution Christians all over the world have experienced for millennia. And persecution is good for the church too. It sifts the wheat from the chaff like nothing else. And it strengthens true believers in the spiritual powers we need to make a difference in this world. And if we can't get any further than that in our understanding, at least that's some kind of progress in the right direction.

But we COULD be asking WHY it's happening this way, why we've lost our spiritual power in this world. We should stop blaming it on nonChristians. We should stop pursuing the hopeless route of politics, the life of the flesh, of the fallen human nature, and focus exclusively on God who is the source of everything we need to make a difference. Oh we pray too, of course, but something is just not right, our efforts are just not accomplishing anything. Our focus is wrong. We helplessly watch while more and more dangerous things come against our nation. We get Obama for instance. People seem to have lost their ability to judge things rightly altogether. The nation is acting like the mythical lemmings rushing to certain death.

So I've pulled back from all that in the last few months. My focus is now on trying to understand where the church has gone wrong. I keep finding various ways it has gone wrong that need correction before God might smile on us again, what Biblical principles we have been violating. I have to suppose I've only started to recognize just a small portion of what's been wrong, and keep seeking more light.

I sincerely believe that the fact that women stopped covering our heads some time back in the early 20th century is one reason God has turned His face from us. That's a violation of His Creation ordinance and an insult to Him.

I also have been coming to believe that the proliferation of Bibles based on untrustworthy Greek and Hebrew texts that came out of Liberalism and Rationalism of the 19th century has eroded our spiritual power. There are some hints that make me shudder to think about, that on a supernatural level the expunging of so much of God's word by heretics has actually erased names from our Book of Life.

I suspect that the decline in modest dress is also partially involved, which is why I've got a blog laid out to pursue that topic when I get around to it. And I still haven't got around to thinking through the topic of nonresistance, or Jesus' command not to resist evil, which the church has certainly violated even sometimes to the point of a near-idolatry of military force. Violence of any kind against enemies is utterly contrary to the Spirit of Christ, who told us to love our enemies, to turn the other cheek. We're to die to ourselves, and literally die if it comes to that, not kill or threaten anyone.

Where are the "rivers of living water" the Lord Jesus promised believers? I've also spent quite a bit of apparently futile time on seeking revival. We aren't going to get revival until we have reformation, until we recognize where the church has been going wrong and repent of it.

Leonard Ravenhill was a man of God who knew God's power, and yet he prayed and prayed and prayed for revival, and wrote books exhorting Christians to seek revival, as the greatest need of our time, but he died without seeing revival and we've seen no revival since his death either.

We aren't having revival because we haven't faced our sins yet. We haven't even identified them. We aren't even looking for them. I was disheartened to find out about Ravenhill how much support he gave to Billy Graham, Graham who is a notorious supporter of the Roman Church and devoted to a destructive ecumenicism. I was further disheartened to find out that he didn't definitely oppose the Bible versions although he did seem to believe the KJV is the best. A W Tozer also fell for the versions I believe. I think these things may be a clue to why Ravenhill died without seeing revival. Ravenhill and Tozer were great Christian men with a prophetic bent. If they could be deceived, what makes any of us think we can't be?

God will not bless His people if we have such sins in our midst. Even the best of our Christian preachers seem weak and ineffective these days, sometimes even defending people and ideas they should be confronting instead. We need to wake up and consider that yes indeed we CAN be deceived. We CAN be taken in by clever wolves among us. Who the wolves are is not all that easy to identify. We have to ASSUME that we have many things wrong and submit our beliefs to God's light a lot more often than we do so that He can lead us out of our error. THEN maybe we can hope to have revival. But I don't think we can hope it at all in our present state. A.W. Tozer said that if we did have revival in our present state -- he was writing over forty years ago and it's worse now -- it would be the worst possible thing because it would confirm us in a multitude of errors. He said it better than that but that was the basic idea. But really God won't give us revival anyway in our current state, which is a great blessing. There will be counterfeit revivals of course.

Oh Lord help us. Wake us up. Show us the paths out of our present darkness. Lead us to understanding and repentance and restore us to Your favor that we might overcome our paralysis and have the rivers of living water You promised us.

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I know this is just a long ramble, but I hope it's coherent enough. I suppose as usual I may come back and make changes after it's posted to clarify this or that, sorry for any confusion.