One of the most important roles/metaphors in scripture is that of Father. In Scripture, everything is founded on the idea of Father. God is our Father who art in heaven. Ephesians teaches there is,
6one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.
St. Paul can say in the book of Corinthians,
yet for us, there is but one God, the Father, from whom all things came and for whom we exist.
The idea of God as Father is an architectonic idea without which the Scripture cannot hold together. Clearly, if we get the idea of Father wrong, there is nothing else right that we will understand.
One aspect of God’s Fatherhood is that He rules over all. It is why we can confess Sunday after Sunday, “I believe in God the Father almighty, Creator of Heaven and Earth.”
Jesus revealed God as His Father, told Israel that only God was their Father, not Abraham nor Moses nor David. Further, Jesus never said His Father was the chief apostle, Senior Pastor, President or any other title/function such as most Reverend Doctor, but Father. Worse yet, for the anti-patriarchalists, it is the role of the Son to declare and reveal the Father and to come and do the will of the Father.
So important is Fatherhood that the last verse of the Old Testament promises of the Messiah that with His coming ‘He shall turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers, lest I come and smite the earth with a curse’ Mal. 4:6
One role of the Messiah was to heal the family and He would do so by turning the hearts of the fathers to the children and the hearts of the children to the fathers.
Well, if all this is so, then what can we call any movement that seeks to eliminate the biblical idea of fatherhood and the biblical idea of patriarchy…”Father rule?”
And yet this is where we are at in our social order in the West.
White people … (are for) “blood and soil, patriarchy, and racial hierarchy.”
Paul Krugman
N.Y. Slimes Article
Complaining about 16 Election results
Notice the venom against patriarchy in that statement. That venom is working itself out in a host of ways. Consider with me just a few moments the current attack on men. The facts I have collated here came from a recent news report,
Average American male dies 5 years earlier than the average American female.
One reason for this is addictions. Men are twice as likely to be alcoholics as women as well as twice as likely to die of a drug overdose. In the state of New Hampshire, 73% of the opioid drug overdose deaths were men.
Nationwide 77% of the suicides recorded are by men. This represents a 43% increase in male suicides as between the years 1997-2014. This suicide rate is falling disproportionately higher upon white men when compared to the rest of the US population. Now add to this that 90% of those incarcerated are men.
This trend is starting with our youth. In relation to females, fewer men graduate high school than women. Fewer men attend and graduate from college than women. When in school boys far outpace girls as discipline problems. There may well be a correlation between that fact and the fact that 1 in 5 boys are diagnosed with a hyperactivity problem in comparison to 1 in 11 girls diagnosed the same. Many of those diagnosed are medicated with drugs that have no longitudinal studies that bear witness to the effects of these drugs when consumed over the course of a number of years, though there is increasing evidence that suggests that these drugs cause depression in later life.
Beyond college women decisively outnumber men in graduate programs as well as doctoral programs. Women are now in the majority of new enrollees in both law schools and in medical schools.
This bottoming out for men in the educational realm has translated into the economic realm. Between 1979-2010 working-age men with only high school degrees witnessed their adjusted for inflation hourly wage income drop 20%. This stands in contrast to high school educated women’s income which over the same period spiked.
7 million working-age men are unemployed. Approximately half of those same unemployed working-aged men take pain medication daily. This is the highest rate in the world. No other nation is even close. Far fewer men get married than just a few decades ago and far fewer stay married. About 1 in 5 children in America live with their single mothers. This is double the rate of 1970. This, of course, means that there are millions of more boys, and girls, growing up without fathers.
The stats show that young married age males are now more likely to live with their parents than they are their wives or a girlfriend. This stands in contrast to women of the same age who buy their own homes at almost twice the rate as their single male counterparts. More women than men have drivers licenses.
In terms of the mythical wage gap between men and women it is recognized that when you compare apples to apples — when you compare men and women in the same fields, with the same experience, working the same jobs, for the same period of time, — the putative wage gap not only often disappears but also often is inverted so that there is a slight wage gap in favor of women. One study, using US census data, found that single women in their 20’s living in metropolitan areas now earn 8% on average more than there single male counterparts. Now add that the majority of managers in the workforce are women and suddenly the long talked about unfairness to women in the workforce begins to dissipate like the fog before the morning sun.
Further, women are scoring higher on IQ tests than men are. Not only are men falling behind women in IQ tests but men are physically wasting. One recent study found that almost 50% of the young men trying to join the Army failed their entry fitness exam. Fully 7 in 10 American males are overweight or obese. This is in comparison to 59% of American females who likewise are overweight or obese.
We might say that on all counts men are becoming less male. Male sperm count is down 60% as compared to the 1970’s. Further, there has been a significant dropping in male testosterone. One study has shown that there has been a 1% decrease in male testosterone every year since 1987. This means that the average 40-year-old male in 1987 would have 30% more testosterone than his 40-year-old male counterpart in 2017. Keep in mind here that there is a correlation in men between low testosterone levels and an increase in depression, lethargy, and weight gain while seeing a decrease in cognitive abilities.
Yet the narrative continues that women are victims while men are oppressors. Universities continue to offer “Women’s studies,” with the emphasis being an attack on male power in such studies. In Churches, male patriarchy is attacked and assailed with a vicious vehemence seldom ever seen in the past by pastors who could serve as the poster child for the cucked effeminate male. Politicians craft legislation to help women in STEM fields and continue to support the false narrative of male privilege.
Clearly, men… and by extension patriarchy is under attack.
Now men and the rule of men called Patriarchy have fallen on some hard times, what with the advent of Feminism and egalitarianism. Indeed the Church in the West, in many quarters, is all in a tizzy to find some other paradigm that is more “fair” and is more “wise” than what God has provided in His Word. The consequence of this search to replace the God of the Bible’s authority for structuring marriage with a different god’s authority for structuring marriage has resulted in the wreckage of the Christian family with the residual flotsam and jetsam of broken marriages, single-parent families, and confused children. Consider About 1 in 5 children in America live with their single mothers. This is double the rate of 1970. This, of course, means that there are millions of more boys, and girls, growing up without fathers.
The cure for all this breakage is found in a return to patriarchy. In Patriarchy we find that the Christian faith gives us structure that is characterized by Love, Hierarchy, and Relatedness.
Consider the assumption concerning Fathers behind just a couple verses
Psalm 103:13
Like as a father pitieth his children, so the LORD pitieth them that fear him.
Hebrews 12:7 Endure hardship as discipline; God is treating you as his children. For what children are not disciplined by their father? 8 If you are not disciplined—and everyone undergoes discipline—then you are not legitimate, not true sons and daughters at all.
Clearly, the assumption in these two verses is that Father rule means security, love, and discipline.
So, if that is true, why the attack on Patriarchy?
By attacking Patriarchy God is attacked. God, throughout Scripture, is known as “Father.” This doesn’t mean that God is a physical Male but it means that the way in which God makes Himself known and represented to the World is via a healthy male relationship…. as the Patriarch.
As such one way to eliminate God then is to eliminate Fathers … to destroy all notions of patriarchy. If patriarchy is destroyed completely then even positive patriarchy will be destroyed.
Yet for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist.
One God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.
And call no man your father on earth, for you have one Father, who is in heaven.
Father of the fatherless and protector of widows is God in his holy habitation.
Have we not all one Father? Has not one God created us? Why then are we faithless to one another, profaning the covenant of our fathers?
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places,
But now, O Lord, you are our Father; we are the clay, and you are our potter; we are all the work of your hand.
Jesus said to him, “Have I been with you so long, and you still do not know me, Philip? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’? Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me? The words that I say to you I do not speak on my own authority, but the Father who dwells in me does his works. Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father is in me, or else believe on account of the works themselves.
Psalm 103:13
Like as a father pitieth his children, so the LORD pitieth them that fear him.
The attack on biblical patriarchy is an attack on God. By wiping out patriarchy the thought is that the God of the Bible can be wiped out from our thinking. The attack on patriarchy is an Orwellian attempt to drop the God of the Bible down the memory hole.
So, one way to argue the attack on patriarchy is that it is an attack on God in the attempt to eliminate Him from our thinking. The other way to argue the reason for the attack on patriarchy is that God having already been deleted from our thinking it is only natural then to attack those institutions that have their origination in a God we have deleted from our thinking. Either way, the attack on patriarchy is an attempt to scrub biblical Christianity from man’s thinking.
So, we see that the attack on patriarchy is not primarily an attack on men and their rule as it is an attack on Christianity. Attacking the proper rule of men is just one means of attacking Biblical Christianity. In this respect, it is much the same as the current attack on white people. It is not so much white people who are being attacked. It is rather Christianity which is being attacked through the attempt to genocide white men and women since white men and women, by God’s grace alone, have been the chief civilizational carriers of Biblical Christianity. In the same way Biblical rule by men is attacked because it is Biblical rule by men as God’s representatives that accounts for civilizational Christianity over the centuries.
This attack on men and patriarchy is so widespread that is going after our language and hymns now,
Dr. Jordan Peterson — Came to the fore when he refused to use gender inclusive pronouns on a Canada University campus.
Peterson zeroed in on Canadian human rights legislation that prohibits discrimination based on gender identity or expression.
Dr Peterson was especially frustrated with being asked to use alternative pronouns as requested by trans students or staff, like the singular ‘they’ or ‘ze’ and ‘zir’, used by some as alternatives to ‘she’ or ‘he’.
In his opposition, he set off a political and cultural firestorm that shows no signs of abating.
Indeed Peterson touched the sacred cow of cultural Marxsim, the avowed enemy of Christianity.
Gender Neutral Hymns
“God of our fathers” becomes “God of the ages.”
“Rise Up, O Men of God” becomes “Rise Up, O Church of God.”
In one of the Anglican hymnbooks “Be Thou My Vision,” #339 in the
1990 hymnal was altered. The third verse in the new construction of that hymn became a combination of the second and fourth verses of the original. This combination was made in order to omit the second half of the second verse and the first half of the fourth verse, both of which contain masculine language referring to God.
These are the lines that were omitted:
Thou my great Father, I thy true son;
Thou in me dwelling, and I with Thee one.
and
High King of Heaven, my victory won,
May I reach heaven’s joys, O bright heaven’s Son!
You certainly can understand why all that maleness had to be eliminated.
Recently, I was in a meeting where the gathered group sang such gender-neutral hymns and then was taught by a female Rev.
This attempt to overthrow patriarchy is why Biblically minded people are so adamantly opposed to women in the office of Elder and Pastor. It’s not as if women aren’t just as smart as men. It’s not as if women aren’t as capable or more capable than men to create and deliver a fine sermon. There is nothing about femaleness that obstructs a person’s ability at exegesis, logic, and rhetoric. It is not as if women couldn’t shepherd. In the end, the reason that Biblical Christians are opposed to female Elders and Pastors is that God’s Church being patriarchal in its social order is something that arises out of God’s determination. God determined that women should not be Pastors or Elders. And when the visible Church ignores that then as one of the leading social order institutions in the culture the Church gives God’s imprimatur … His stamp of approval on the feminization of the rest of the social order. The visible Church enters in league with those who would attempt to destroy the invisible Church.
This ignoring of God’s order that occurs with the attack on patriarchy is not original to us. Indeed, many scholars offer that when the serpent went to Eve in the garden in the Temptation narrative that the serpent did so in order to upset God’s covenantal patriarchal ordering. Other scholars have offered that it was Adam as the garden patriarch who failed to keep and tend the garden and that the result of that patriarchal failure was the entrance of the serpent into the Garden culture. If this is accurate than a lack of proper patriarchy is the sin behind the original sin of the Fall.
As we move through Scripture we see the failure of biblical patriarchy to be the failure of God’s people. Usually, that failure is found in men becoming tyrants and so turning patriarchy into something rightly to be despised. Think of the wicked Kings of Israel. Occasionally, the failure of patriarchy is found in male leadership being overthrown in favor of the ugly feminization of the social order. Think of examples like Jezebel and Athaliah.
A great host of matters and people are conspiring in our culture to overthrow men and patriarchy. Consider a couple quotes in closing,
I call this god, the god of white supremacy and patriarchy…This God isn’t the God that I serve…He might be ‘biblical’ but he’s also an asshole.”
~Rutgers professor Brittney Cooper
this quote from Dr. Peter Jones who is paraphrasing Dr. Virginia Mollenkott,
“Compulsory heterosexuality is the very backbone that hold Patriarchy together.” Homosexuality will break that backbone. If society is to turn from patriarchy to partnership we must learn that lesbian, bisexual, and gay issues are not just private bedroom matters of doing whatever turns you on. They are wedges driven into the superstructure of the hetero-patriarchy system.”
Dr. Peter Jones
Paraphrasing Lesbian Virginia Mollenkott
Spirit Wars — pg. 179
If Mollenkott is correct here then we learn that the whole LGBQT movement and all its ancillary perverseness, is, at its heart, amount scrubbing patriarchy from our thinking.
As Christians we must resist this. We must be dissidents in our thinking should we desire to stay loyal to Christ. If the anti-patriarchalists are successful here they will destroy Christianity not by digging Christianity up by its roots but by stripping it of all its leaves.
Illustrations — Two ways to kill a plant.
Conclusion;
What the defense of Justification by Faith alone was to the Reformation the defense of Hierarchy, Patriarchy, and Distinctions are to 2017 and the Reformed Church.
Failure here is failure everywhere.