Goodwill toward men
And suddenly there appeared with the angel a great multitude of the heavenly host, praising God and saying: "Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to men on whom His favor rests!" When the angels had left them and gone into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, "Let us go to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened, which the Lord has made known to us."
When the Bible was written, and until the rise of Marxist feminism in the 20th century, the term "men" as used in these verses meant "all humankind" but with the intentional, unmistakable overtone that the male sex was absolutely dominant over the female sex, individually and collectively. That straightforward summary of God's natural order for family and society was never viewed as something negative for or toward women, but was rather God's chosen system for women to flourish – under the provision and protection of men mandated by Him to cherish them as His greatest gift and most fundamental responsibility.
In practice it was always a flawed system because ALL of God's standards for human conduct are "aspirational" goals for always imperfect man. But the failure of the church to preserve God's system of male/female relations as best it could, even within the walls of its institutional denominations, is the primary cause of modernity's social and cultural collapse.
As James, the brother of Jesus and first bishop of Jerusalem, wrote in his letter to the church, "Pure and undefiled religion before our God and Father is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world."
What is the one crisis common to both widows and orphans that makes caring for them the purest form of religion? It is the loss of the male "covering" over them – causing women to become husbandless, and children to become fatherless. Indeed, it was the desperate need for a husband for Ruth, ancestor of Jesus, that drove the widow Naomi to orchestrate (by God's plan) Ruth's womanly allurement of the kinsman redeemer, Boaz, who was smitten by her beauty and virtue.
Had "feminism" prevailed in her day, the capable and self-sufficient Naomi would likely have instead become the CEO of her own thriving business back in Moab and God's plan for redemption of man by God would have been thwarted, lacking the legal status of Judean ancestry, through Joseph, necessary for Jesus to qualify to inherit the scepter of Hebrew royalty.
One of the chief contributions of the book of Ruth to Christendom is the timeless lesson of the central importance of female submission to male authority. These Bible stories aren't mythology for us to separate out and cherry-pick details to suit our fads and whims – they are expositions of biblical law framed and illustrated by historically factual events to teach underlying legal principles that remain constant and binding despite the passage of time. To highlight that truth, Jesus drove an explanation point like a golden stake on the Mount of Beatitudes, proclaiming, "You have heard it been said that … but I say to you …" Each one of those pronouncements declares the superiority of the eternal spirit of the law over the temporal letter of the law, keeping them fresh and timely despite changing social mores and logical adaptations of the laws' letters. (We don't still stone teens to death for rebellion, but teen rebellion remains legally punishable within the spirit of the law.)
Right about now, many female readers are fuming, and their feminized male companions are rationalizing like a whore caught in adultery – because it IS a form of adultery to choose the ways of the world over The Way. "Friendship" (wink, wink) with the world, is enmity toward God, warns James, adding "You adulteresses! … whoever chooses to be a friend of the world renders himself an enemy of God. Or do you think the Scripture says without reason that the Spirit He caused to dwell in us yearns with envy? But He gives us more grace. This is why it says: 'God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble.'"
The sin-root of feminism is surely pride. The sin-root of male submission to feminism is, as James writes "double-mindedness" (compromise). The combination of the two sins in human relations paints the very picture of "being polluted by the world" because none of the talking points of feminism come from the Bible – which offers only a few out-of-context verses to bolster them, and even then very feebly against the overwhelming counter-argument of Scripture as a whole.
The fatal flaw in most church efforts to restore "biblical masculinity" is their unwillingness to chop the root of the tree bearing the poisonous fruits we're so desperate to overcome: feminist ideology itself. They want to be sensitive to differing opinions, meaning they are "double-minded." But as I used to teach in my classes on critical thinking and debate, you can never win an argument in which you've adopted your opponent's presuppositions (for example on LGBT issues, agreeing that "discrimination" against homosexuality and transgenderism is morally wrong) because conclusions are dictated by premises.
Mine was the first generation of American boys indoctrinated with feminist ideology, which descended on our public schools like the Spanish Inquisition in the early 1970s. I didn't break free from it until the late 1980s while separated from my wife, who had kicked me out of the house to end the heated war of wills I had going with my oldest step-son over obeying basic house rules. It was shortly after my miraculous deliverance from alcoholism and drug addiction (since the age of 12), and I was no longer the happy-go-lucky permissive drunk the step-kids tolerated and sort of liked. I was becoming a man for the first time.
I came home to my lonely Portland, Oregon, apartment one afternoon to find Dr. James Dobson starting a lecture called "Where's Dad" on secular television. Talk about a divine appointment! Over the next half hour he laid out the fundamental principles of biblical masculinity so clearly that I found myself at the edge of my seat exclaiming "yeah, yeah!" as he dismantled, one by one, all the precepts of feminism I had been indoctrinated in. Thirty minutes later I was a totally changed man (and years later got to share this story personally with Dr. Dobson when we were both speakers at a conference in D.C.).
Now, my wife, a former Vassar girl with a masters in anthropology from the University of Chicago, was about as feminist as a woman can be who still prefers men. But, again, just days later by divine intervention, God broke her independence and both of our hearts as we stood helpless together looking through hospital glass at our infant son strapped to a gurney in ICU over multiple grand mal seizures triggered by an ear infection. God melted us back together in that moment, and we've had an exemplary Christian marriage ever since. We've both changed a lot over those years by following the biblical model.
In my next article, I will focus on the solutions to the problem I outlined here, but I wanted to first establish my credentials to speak on this topic both intellectually and personally.
Civilizationally speaking, goodwill toward men (mankind) starts with honoring the dominant role of men (males), the chief model for all being the man-in-infant-form Jesus whom the shepherds longed to see.
Content created by the WND News Center is available for re-publication without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@wndnewscenter.org.
SUPPORT TRUTHFUL JOURNALISM. MAKE A DONATION TO THE NONPROFIT WND NEWS CENTER. THANK YOU!
The post Goodwill toward men appeared first on WND.