Someone who gets the RP church...

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Hannah Anderson tweeted this a while back and I thought it mirrored my experiences:

A little advice from someone who grew up in religious separatism: In certain spaces & with certain people, the only shared conviction that really matters is who you condemn & separate from.

You can talk yourself blue in the face trying to convince them that you share the same convictions on a question, but the only thing that will satisfy them is whether you condemn the same people they do. 

They *need* you to condemn these folks because they've based their righteousness on certain folks being WRONG & their being RIGHT. If you don't agree to that inherent calculus, it gets very, very personal very, very quickly. That's why it's never enough to share their position on a question if you also see that question as a secondary issue. The whole point is that the issue MUST be a primary-level issue b/c its primacy is what grants moral high ground. 

In this sense, the real divide isn't what you think about a given question. It's the weight you give that question. It's whether that question has become a means of establishing the boundaries of the group. 

So my advice is don't waste your breath trying to defend your credentials. For certain people in certain spaces, they don't really care what you think. They only care about who you condemn.

I remember this coming up specifically at Geneva with fellow students who were OPC. I didn't know the "RPCNA-correct" way to deal with them. On one hand, they were NAPARC, shared pretty much every doctrine we did, yet they did not practice Exclusive Psalmody, which was taught as a critical doctrine. A lens through which all so-called Christians were to be judged. On the other hand, they were kind and respectful people who obviously loved God.

On another note, the flip side of the same coin is that RPs will read a paper. A certain paper on gender identity comes to mind. The theology and doctrine can be laughably poor and inconsistent, but because it condemns the right people, the denomination unanimously passes it.

objectification (part 2)

In part 1, we see how our worldly culture has pervaded the church and led to objectification [rule and desire]. This becomes the narrative the church proclaims, through worm theology, of our relationship with God.

It's no wonder that Millennials find the church harmful and irrelevant. The church has, at least in the last 100 or so years, proclaimed an objectification gospel that has harmed the sheep. In the last article, I showed that cheerleaders get deluded into thinking that cheering for men on the sidelines is a worthy calling, and this is part-and-parcel of a culture that devalues women societally at the same time it claims to value them.

In the same way, the church devalues members at the same time they claim to be valued. This is done by turning God into the supreme objectifier. I want to be careful about this because the best lies are half truths. YES! It is our chief end to glorify God and enjoy him forever! However, that is not done by grinding ourselves to nothing. I think many verses can be twisted, especially dealing with God being our Lord, master, and we being his slaves and servants. We twist domineering into "servant leadership". But read some verses:

No longer do I call you slaves, for the slave does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, because all things that I have heard from My Father I have made known to you. (John 15:15)

Then she called the name of the Lord who spoke to her, “You are a God who sees me” (Gen 16:13a)

Then He will answer them, ‘Truly I say to you, to the extent that you did not do it for one of the least of these, you did not do it for Me, either.’ (Matt 25:40)

This is just a sampling, but the point is that God isn't a distant taskmaster who thinks nothing of us. God calls us "friends", he pours grace and love into us and desires us to overflow into others. He is compassionate, not because he wants to torch us and Jesus jumps in the way. He doesn't see us as worms. His desire is to convict of us of our guilt so that we can repent and return to his arms. He doesn't want us to be shamed repeatedly and told we are worthless. Before the prodigal son could even say a word, the father was telling the servants to throw a party!

Is that the god of the RP church? I don't think so. I remember a story told by an RP woman. She had a child when she was single. She felt convicted of her sin and went to her session. What did they do? They suspended her because she had to be punished. I wonder if she is RP today or even a Christian. What about the Christian school in the same situation. She chose life instead of abortion, but the father of the child got to walk at graduation and she was forbidden.

Ask yourself? Is the RP church a place where you come each week to be encouraged with the love of God, uplifted and proud to be his beloved child and filled with purpose as you pursue the next step in that friendship? Instead, is the RP church a place where you come each week to be challenged (i.e. reminded over and over of your sins and unworthiness in new and theologically sophisticated ways), to be told God can barely stand to be around you because you are a sinner, and being given more and more things you have to do to "prove" to him that you love him (without which he will be disappointed and offended).

Is our only value to God the things we will do for him? Was the father of the prodigal son welcoming only in anticipation of the extra hand on the farm? Was Jesus's lament over Jerusalem that they weren't working hard enough for him?

The objectification I learned in the RPCNA has continued to be a thorn in my flesh. I didn't learn to value people for who they were. I only learned to value people for what they could provide to my purposes. In the same way, I learned to internalize the objectifying voice I heard from church leaders. My lack of value, my lack of righteousness. That became what I assumed God was telling me, and I have to spend so much time rejecting that inner voice that it is still foreign to thing that he delights in me and sings over me.

God and the church, understanding objectification (part 1)

 I think it's probably time to pull some thoughts together. I talk about the RPCNA being narcissistic and authoritarian. Those are loaded terms, so let me abandon them for this post. Instead, let's go back to Genesis and understand two cultures.

God's "curse" of Eve was that she would desire her husband and he would rule over her. I don't think it's a curse, unlike God explicitly cursing the ground. Instead, I think it is a sad proclamation of what would happen after the fall. I think the conservative church has butchered this because they want to claim that women desire to take the position and authority of their husbands, and the response (some churches say deserved response...) is putting her in her place, i.e. domineering.

I think the core word to describe this is objectification it's the root of many of the ills that have come to the forefront in the church today, although I believe only because God has given a voice to the oppressed. The two lines of light and dark are figured in Cain's line vs. Seth's line. We see Cain's line focus on accomplishments and evil, while Seth's line, less accomplished, but more focused on God.

I'd like to focus on Lamech, not the father of Noah, but the other one. Lamech is notable, Biblically, for inventing polygamy. I wonder if the Bible preserves his wives' names to give them more value than Lamech did. In a good RPCNA sermon I heard, the pastor focused on the word took, in describing Cain's descendants. The point being that those women didn't necessarily have full consent in sharing one man. According to the pastor, took is used again to talk about mighty men (sons of God) taking daughters of men - not some weird angel/human hybrids, but world leaders and authorities amassing women for their own benefit.

This is a vague picture of objectification. These women are not seen. They are merely objects for the enjoyment of men, to be ruled over. I think polygamy is demonstrable evidence of objectification, which is why the church forbids elders from having multiple concurrent wives.

Objectification is primarily the ruling over part, and it's not coupled to authority, but aided by it. So, let's say I look at a rich guy. I think, if I can be this guy's friend, I'll get to live like he does. That's objectification. I don't want to be his friend for companionship, but for what I get. In the same way, I look at a woman, not for companionship, but for what I can get (lust). That's objectification.

What I learned growing up in the RP church was objectifying in that sense. For example, my Sabbath School teacher asked us to write down invitations for five people that we would bring to church. It wasn't about the love we could show, about their value and importance, but essentially, wouldn't it feel good if they came to church?

But, there is another, deeper sense of objectification. This is the desire. I think cheerleading is a challenging sport, but I can't get over the system. The most popular, most talented girls in school are convinced that the most worthy and valuable thing they can do is dance and cheer on the sidelines between football plays. The system works. Scores of girls show up the first day of camp and are whittled down through a grueling process until the squad is set. So, here society objectifies women, and ironically, these women fight over each other to be objectified.

Objectification is the root of worm theology, and we lay Evangelicals are the cheerleaders. See, the church builds up and raises the Lamechs to positions of church authority: those who are noteworthy and strong and accomplished. The rest are told that their calling is to stand on the sidelines and cheer. In fact, we're told that this is representative of our relationship with God - we stand on the sidelines and cheer God's work. So, to a great extent, objectification is not so much a result of the Fall, but something inherent to the structure of Creation. You can find complementarians hedging on this, for example, the CBMW:

As most complementarians understand it, Gen. 3:15-16 informs us that the male/female relationship would now, because of sin, be affected by mutual enmity. In particular, the woman would have a desire to usurp the authority given to man in creation, leading to man, for his part, ruling over woman in what can be either rightfully-corrective or wrongfully-abusive ways.

So, the Fall did not cause objectification and domineering but the inferior trying to supplant the superior. It's therefore okay for the superior (husband, church) to "rightfully correct" the usurpation. And that's why we see women in control of everything by their brilliant manipulation (sigh).

No, what we see is women subjecting themselves continually to the abuse of men and society, and even falling all over themselves to be objects for men - celebrated as SI swimsuit models, or Victoria's Secret underwear models. We see the Hollywood culture of women having sex with powerful men in the hopes of landing a role in a movie. We see corporate culture where women slept with men for promotions. Is this what CBMW means by "usurping"?

No, CBMW, and the broad Evangelical church is furthering the objectification of women and the least in the church through their evil caricatures.