Civil Commotion

Rare are the instances when a denomination is faced with a watershed moment that will define its entire future for good or for ill. For the Southern Baptist Convention that moment is this week’s annual conference.

What’s at stake is whether or not the SBC will continue to carry the torch of biblical authority and inerrancy, or begin to travel down a path that leads to full-fledged apostasy. It will either stand on the rock of Scripture or it will be swept away by the same current that has carried Presbyterians, Episcopalians, and Methodists over the falls.

The issue is clear and unambiguous, the Scripture at stake is easy to interpret, and the choice is simple. It is a choice between the Bible and the world.

There is a movement in the SBC to select a woman as the next president of the denomination. Dwight McKissic, senior pastor of Cornerstone Baptist Church in Arlington, Texas, is promoting the idea, and specifically advocating the election of well-known Bible teacher and open borders advocate Beth Moore to the post (The Case for Electing Beth Moore as President of the Southern Baptist Convention).

From a biblical standpoint, this is a movement that should be firmly rejected, on the grounds that the plain meaning of 1 Timothy 2:12 forbids it.

Here’s how 1 Timothy 2:12 reads: “I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man; rather she is to remain quiet.”

Only an idiot — seriously, a bona fide idiot — thinks that the Bible is inerrant, but in the case of I Timothy it’s worse than that: A solid majority of scholars doubt it’s Pauline authorship.

The author of First Timothy has been traditionally identified as the Apostle Paul. He is named as the author of the letter in the text (1:1). Nineteenth and twentieth century scholarship questioned the authenticity of the letter, with many scholars suggesting that First Timothy, along with Second Timothy and Titus, are not original to Paul, but rather to an unknown Christian writing some time in the late-first-to-mid-2nd century. Most scholars now affirm this view. As evidence for this perspective, they put forward that the Pastoral Epistles contain 306 words that Paul does not use in his unquestioned letters, that their style of writing is different from that of his unquestioned letters, that they reflect conditions and a church organization not current in Paul’s day, and that they do not appear in early lists of his canonical works.

In other words, some Bronze Age anonymity had a bossy woman in his life — and women writ large have been paying for it ever since.

In case there are still people out there who don’t know that the Christian marriage is about making babies, and indifferent to the happiness of the parties.

A couple of days ago Archbishop Naumann made an insightful comment regarding contraception that is in many ways as prophetic as Pope Paul VI’s Humanae Vitae. LifeSiteNews reports that Naumann said that, in all cases, the use of contraception is an “intrinsic evil” because it “cuts off one of the goals of marriage which is an openness to life.” We must understand that, once we deny the two goals of marriage (unity and fecundity/fruitfulness), disrespect for the human being is sure to follow because, while God’s design for marriage is perfect, man’s is fatally flawed. Naumann has previously reiterated Pope Paul VI’s concerns for those who prefer man’s desires to God design. Furthermore, he wrote that one of the outcomes of the contraceptive mindset is that it has resulted “in a diminished respect for the human person in general and women in particular.”

Right: If you won’t keep your wife pregnant, you’re disrespecting her.

Once again, then, YAY!! for those who won’t get married in church.

Yeah, yeah. Whatever. Deepity Alert.

As a matter of fact, Baptists do teach that marriage is just animal husbandry in order to grow their stupid and degrading cult. It’s heartening that other people see it, too.

Notice: Not “you can accomplish whatever you put your mind to”, not “you can be whatever you want to be,” the staple urgings of parents since forever. No. “You can do whatever you’re told to do by Your Invisible Friend.” Jesus, these people are awful, and I don’t care if their marketing says they’re the best people in society. Bullshit.

It’s easy to dismiss this as the empty, whistling-past-the-graveyard bombast of eccentrics, but it is an underhanded urging to civil disobedience as well. As the loonies of the Evangelical Right are inexorably forced to the margins of our public life, they will inevitably invoke “a higher court” to justify their nihilistic vandalism.

I pointed a few months ago¹ toward a (then) soon-to-be-published book by Catherine Nixey, The Darkening Age. It was published in the United States in April, and is finally making it into the book review sections of newspapers.

Nixey makes the fundamental point that while we lionize Christian culture for preserving works of learning, sponsoring exquisite art and adhering to an ethos of “love thy neighbor,” the early church was in fact a master of anti-intellectualism, iconoclasm and mortal prejudice. This is a searingly passionate book. Nixey is transparent about the particularity of her motivation. The daughter of an ex-nun and an ex-monk, she spent her childhood filled with respect for the wonders of postpagan Christian culture. But as a student of classics she found the scales — as it were — falling from her eyes. She wears her righteous fury on her sleeve. This is scholarship as polemic.

The ancient world knew that the earth travels around the sun, that the moon travels around the earth, that species evolve and come and go, and had given considerable thought to what is ethical behavior.

When the Roman church seized control of the tottering remains of the Roman Empire, it attempted to systematically drive classical science and ethics off the earth — and nearly succeeded. It annoys Medievalists, but there is sound reason why the period between the collapse of Rome, and the beginning of the Renaissance, is known as the Dark Ages. When you reflect upon the Christian hostility today to evolution, and science’s growing understanding of sexuality, it becomes clear that nothing has changed — that today, as almost two millennia ago, religion is the enemy of the growth of knowledge.

How else could it be? All religions claim to possess Eternal Truth, and the progress of knowledge undermines that claim. Faith will always be the enemy of human progress.

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¹ The book was published in Great Britain last year, and I ordered my copy from a British bookseller.