Beyond the "Uber-Masculine": Finding Identity in Christ’s Authority ⚓

00:00:01 Speaker 1: The world is becoming increasingly proficient at telling stories that deny God. As such, we need Thinking Christian to become as natural as breathing. Welcome to the Thinking Christian podcast. I'm doctor James Spencer, and through calm, thoughtful theological discussions, Thinking Christian highlights the ways God is working in the world and questions the underlying social, cultural, and political assumptions that hinder Christians from becoming more like Christ. Now onto today's episode of Thinking Christian. Hey everyone, welcome to this episode of Thinking Christian on Doctor James Spencer. I'm joined by doctor Ashish Pharma, and today we're going to be discussing, you know, continue our discussion of Biblical masculinity, and I want to address some work by somebody that I would consider to be a fairly influential evangelical who's written on manhood. Now, there are a lot of people who I could have chosen. I will say I ran across this work not because I read this individual frequently, but because I was referred to it by someone else. They were asking me some questions, and so I really got into this topic in part because people were asking me questions about it. So what I want to do is read part of this book. It's called Act Like a Man, Nine Ways to Punch Life in the Mouth. That's the title by Rob Driscoll. And so this Mark Mark, Yeah, not Rob Mark, Mark Driskoll. That tells you how much I read him. My apologies. Part of the reason for reading this is not to detegrate Driscoll, right, it's not the point. The point is that this is an influential pastor who is I will trust to trying to do something that is constructive and helpful for his congregation, and in writing this book, I feel like has made a real deep mistake in the way he frames masculinity. And so I do not like his content. I would not enjoy it, endorse his content, but I don't really know him well enough one way or the other to say that. You know, I don't want it to come off as a ad hominem attack. So what we're going to do here is we're going to read through this passage that he includes. This is on the feminization of the church. It's it's his historical take of why the church has become more feminine. And I don't agree with the history of this. I think there's good reasons not to agree with the history of this. We'll get into that a little bit, and then I think just the way this whole narrative is framed, it sets up a very stereotypical notion of masculinity that then we'll go ahead and talk through for the rest of the episode. So I'm going to start by reading a rather long section out of this book and then we'll discuss So here goes. I'll be looking away with this, yeah, Gregor t I'll be looking away from the camera for those of you who are watching the video because the book is over here, But just ignore that part and listen to what's going on here. So this is quote from Driscoll's book Act Like a Man. Historically, what has happened in our nation has also affected the church in many generations. Like during World War two, young men left the country to go to war. They were almost thirteen million active duty military, which was around nine percent of the whole population going to war. War took the young men out of the country and placed them under strong male leadership with brotherhood. Who had a battle. Meanwhile, back at home, who's left in the church? Women and children? We love women and children, and they also need to be in church. But the church no longer has strong young men, so then the women in the church decide they're going to run the church. All of a sudden, church starts to look like women decorated it. As an aside, whoever decided mauv was the official color of Christian decor, We forgive you hard since there Since there are a few men in church during war, all the programming is for the women and children, so they hire an older guy who isn't off at war to be a pastor. He's retired and he's kind of like a really kind hearted grandpa who's going to love women and children. Next, they need to find a guy who will lead worship. This is where things get offensive. All the strong men are off at war, so they find a really nice guy who can lead worship. The least masculine guy is leading worship. I'm not criticizing, I'm just observing. In the Old Testament, the worship leader is a guy named David, a shepherd, which in those days was actually more like a cowboy with a gun than your typical mental picture of a docile man in a tunic. This guy isn't like David, so we have a nice Old pastor who's a grandpa and his confused grandson leading worship, and they emotionally connect with the women and children. Then the men return from war and they show up in church. They think, I'm not going to listen to that old man. I can't relate to him, and I can't sing like that guy. I can't get in that octave unless I have an injury. I would need not wear a cup to hockey night and then I could sing like that guy. The men walk into what feels like a feminine environment. It sounds like a feminine environment, and it seems like it's for women and children. The men of the church left and never came back. End quote. So that's what Driscoll writes about the feminization of the church. It's hard to know exactly where to start with us, but I'll go with a couple of the obvious points. Number One, it seems like from the statistics when people came back from World War Two that seminary enrollment actually went up, that you had a lot of soldiers who were coming back and going to seminary in order to go back into the churches. So I think that is narrative here of the men left the church and never came back isn't quite right. I think you had a lot of young men come back go to seminary with the intention at least going back into the church. So I would say from that aspect, his narrative is a bit off. I would also question his note on all the programming became about women and children. This is not the era of the megachurch in World War Two. These are denominational churches by and large. At this time. You're talking about Presbyterian, Lutheran, even the Baptist churches are going to have a relatively rigid, durable structure to them. This is not like a megachurch or a seeker sensitive church that you can shift because the audience changes. You know, Lutheran Church. I can go back to the Lutheran Church today and it's the same Lutheran church I went to as a kid. It hasn't gotten more masculine, it hasn't gotten more feminine. It's the same exact church I went to. And so when I'm saying those durable rituals, I think he's overplaying his hand with that, just from a historical perspective. And then the last thing I'll note is just the reference to David as a worship leader. Yeah, I'm not sure about that, not sure that I'm even comfortable with the analogy of having an Old Testament worship leader and especially identifying that person with the King. Now, there isn't a clean differentiation between the cult in the Temple and the Old Testament, but I mean, arguably the priest would be the more logical person to say is the quote unquote worship leader in the Temple. Even then I'm not really sure I would. So those are just three points from this that I would throw out there just to kind of show, like, I think he's making moves intellectually that are probably not quite right, and so this entire narrative to me doesn't really read as a historical narrative. It reads as historical fire that is made up in order to reinforce the point that he's trying to make, which is the Church doesn't feel comfortable to manly men, and manly men need to take it back. 00:08:14 Speaker 2: Yeah. I have a few thoughts on this. Thanks for that overview. That there's some I didn't know that about seminary enrollment in post World War two, So that's that's quite the splinter for him. To have to dig out just the idea of taking for granted what the manly man is. Philosophers would say, that's begging the question. I think we've we've done pretty well in the last couple of episodes of methodologically getting to the root of the problem with those sorts of claims, so I'll leave that one alone. I find it interesting the way though, that he seems to identify maturity with physical traits. Researchers have shown that roughly speaking, men reach their athletic primes in that twenty five to twenty eight range that generally overlaps with what we see in professional sports, for instance, where people reach the height of their physical abilities during those times, at least in male professional sports. A women's athletic prime I read was a little bit younger, early twenties, and then after you get to probably around thirty, you start to see the people that endure that stay around. They've adapted their games. So right post thirty, Michael Jordan, everyone could see couldn't jump as well as he could, but he perfected the post game, right. I think we've seen similar sorts of things with Lebron James, where the longevity of his career is because of the little things that he didn't do when he was younger that he's profect did. And you can see this in various sports. Tom Brady, he wasn't great into his forties because he was every bit as good athletically. He did something right, He adjusted dietary needs, he got really flexible. He was smart in the way that he took contact from the pocket those sorts of corus. Anyway, I don't know of any other walk of life than that sort of for lack of a better term, Muchi's moode that would look at that sort of prime athletic pocket of twenty five to twenty eight and maybe up to thirty and called that the peak version. Right, Even in athletic events, very few people think that athletically prime Michael Jordan was the best version. 00:10:47 Speaker 1: Of Michael Jordan, that's right. 00:10:49 Speaker 2: You know most of his championships came actually after that. 00:10:53 Speaker 1: That right. 00:10:56 Speaker 2: So it's an odd sort of claim. Biblically, it's even more odd when I think of, for instance, proverbs. Right, you get these lines about that silver crown upon the man's head as the marker of wisdom. Yes, it's referring to gray hair and gray hair doesn't happen to the young. It happens to the old. Now, it doesn't mean that everyone who's gray in the head is wise, but the idea of play there is that wisdom is developed as a sign of true maturity. Yes, well, that that inherently coincides with the loss of muscle mass, right right, the loss of those quick twitch muscle abilities, the need to stretch more so you don't strain that calf or whatever. Right, So on that most basic level, that's interesting. Historically, it's also really odd because what you see there is of movement to a kind of ideal that, for both Christian and non Christian historically doesn't exist. 00:12:08 Speaker 1: Yeah. 00:12:08 Speaker 2: I mean you think about Aristotle, who's writing around the mid three hundred's BC, becomes particularly influential in his work during the Middle Ages in the Western world, But he describes the virtuous person. For him, it's the man, right, And I think there's a lot of criticism to give to Aristotle right there, but what we can hold that off to the side. For him, the woman is inherently not virtuous because she's too easily led by her passions. I'll leave it at just false. But his instructive point is that for him there's a balance, and so while he's not willing to understand women as potentially virtuous, that's on the negative side. A positive dome from Aristotle was that he also was not willing to accept the machismo as virtuous. He saw it as frankly meat headed. He saw it as too instinctual, not deliberative enough, not able to wrestle with nuance, not able to think through what's good for society at large. Right, thanks too much in terms of hormonal imbalances, hormonal desires, thanks too much of the self. And so for him, the balance was someone who was thoughtful, was someone who was in tuned with a larger society. For him, it was the polus level the city. It was someone who had friends and was able to relate to those friends as peers, not as someone who owed those friends things, and nor someone who depended upon those friends in order to make ends meet. Right, It was a peer level sort of thing. And I think on the positive evaluation, if we get rid of sort of the genderation of what Aristotle was doing, there was a recognition, even by the Church when he became influential, that there was something important to the balance here. Now, the Church at times fell into deep problems with embracing the genderization, and at times, when I think here, of the Cappadocian fathers challenged it. Basil the Great, for instance, one of the great Cappadocian fathers, referred to his sister Macrina the elder as the truly smart one of the family, referred to as the truth theologian as a family, and depicted her as the virtuous one in the family. Right, So there's a challenge to that notion, though not often enough in the broader context. But the instructive point here is that over time, this thing that, whether Christian theologian or Greek philosopher, there was a general understanding that the machismo effect that comes with all the superior physical abilities of one's athletic prime where the farthest thing from the actual maturity that goes into wisdom, and the actual maturity that goes into the too, what we would think of as excellence or virtue. Yeah, and yet we live in a time and maybe we can ask the question at some point of chicken or the egg. I'm not entirely sure, but we live in a time in which the genderization still exists, but we've we've chopped off the crown of silver hair, and what we've made instead is that machismo as the image of valor. Right, we see that, we see that in our popular depictions. Right, the superhero crises, as I like to call them, they're all they're all meaty figures not necessarily known as wise figures. Open up DC comics and Batman, Superman, even one woman. Just these incredibly ripped and toned muscles. Incredible, Right, I don't know anyone in real life who has those other than prime David Robinson. But that's another conversation. And here we have Driscoll elevating that over a sort of thoughtfulness. And I don't want to devolve us into a place in which we think well to be intellectually or bookishly smart is therefore to be wise. No, we couldn't be farther from the truth there either, Right. But it's the ability, the maturity to be able to reflect upon these things that scripture itself, Right, the crown of silver hair points to as something that we ought to pay attention to. But not only does do we have in that passage that you read a denigration of sorry an uplifting of the physical prime as the state of maturity and the true manliness. We also have the denigration of elderly, specifically, no one wants to listen to their grandfather? 00:17:04 Speaker 1: Are you kidding me exactly? 00:17:07 Speaker 2: I mean, I'll pause there thoughts. 00:17:10 Speaker 1: No, I mean, I agree, I mean, I think you there's so many layers to this. I think what you're saying about, you know, this sort of idea of macheese mo here and the contrast of them to the elderly grandfather who's in this story. The funny part is that the guys who come back with macheesmo, who are in their physical prime, what do they do well? When they can't play a game that they like? They take their ball and go home. I think the story ends with these petulant children who can't stand to be in a maw of church moving on. And you sit back and you say, how is that a picture of manhood? 00:17:49 Speaker 2: Like? 00:17:49 Speaker 1: In what world do you walk into a church and say, my wife and children are really being fed here? Right, let's just say that that's what happened, and my wife and children are really being fed here. But because I don't relate, I'm now going to stop my feet and leave. That is not my picture of it doesn't It doesn't even fit with my picture of like a cultural picture of masculinity. Nor does it fit with what we talked about at the end of the episode last time, which was this imitation of Christ, the paradigm that Christ sets forth. Why is it that a man who's coming back from war, who is supposedly supposed to be like the leader and the guy, why can't he sit in that discomfort and enjoy watching his wife and child be fed. Why is it that self sacrifice is not part of what these men who self sacrificed in war. Why is it that they won't do that for the church. It's such a strange way of crafting this narrative that these strong men coming back from the war are just unwilling to sit, like I said, in the mauve walls of a church, like who cares what color churches? Right? Like the dumbest possible thing to be frustrated about, you know, Like the whole narrative. It takes everything that you would want to see biblically, elevation of the elders, right Karen, protection of women and children, right, brotherhood that recognizes the gifts of everyone in the church, as opposed to claiming the least masculine guys up there singing falsetto right. It takes all that throws it out and says the church you returned to the men who went off for more. Yeah, the ones who left, the ones who decided they couldn't stand being in this uncomfortable situation, that's who we should give the church back to. I'm really uncomfortable with that. I don't want to give it back to them. 00:19:51 Speaker 2: Yeah. Great, great point. And that's that's taken for granted. That he's right that they left. 00:19:57 Speaker 1: Right. 00:19:58 Speaker 2: It seems to me that if if you had record high levels of enrollment at seminars at that point, it sounds like that tales already false. 00:20:05 Speaker 1: Right. Like I said, I think his narrative is completely historically inaccurate. But if you look just within the narrative, even the characters he creates within his narrative, these are not the guys you want to turn the keys of the church over to. 00:20:18 Speaker 2: Not at all. They're not praiseworthy. They're not people that you want to imitate. It's sort of like they're the If we want to accept that image of the modern superhero and his physique, to to have the one as the prime, the one to look up to. We're not even talking about the superheroes. We're talking about the ones who didn't make it into Avengers Tower or the Justice Hall, the halls of Justice, right right, the ones who are on the outside looking longingly and maybe bitterly. That's sort of the image that he's given us. Can I say too, as a side note, I have no idea what MOV is, and I'm okay with not knowing, because I think that's so beside the point that, yes, just move along, Driscold. 00:21:05 Speaker 1: I'm going to take it what came to my mind because I had to look this up, right, because again, I grew up Lutheran Church. There are times when the Lutheran Church is adorned with purple. Now, purple is not, usually, like in our day and age, a manly color. Right back in the day, purple clothes would have been worn by the rich. It would have been assigned especially royal, right, especially royal. But nowadays, like there are certain colors that are culturally associated with masculine and feminine, but purple would be more on the feminine side. And so you sit back, and it's like, well, the Lutheran Church has been doing that for as far as I could tell, ever, right, I mean, I think there is times when they have pink, right, And so you just sit back and you're like this whole color thing that he throws in. There is this little chuckling aside. It's a jab, right, and I know he's trying to be funny, but it's also just sort of unnecessary, and it drives home a point that I think he is actually trying to make, which I just sit back and I say, this may be the worst point ever. I'll I'll throw this in, let me, let me add this little I'll read another passage from him, and we can kind of get this response. But overall, what I would say is this historical narrative is not historical. I think it's a fiction designed to fit what he's arguing. He's retrofitting history in order to fit his scenario that he wants to advance in the present. But after this passage, directly after this passage, so the men are uncomfortable in this feminized environment, and he writes this quote true or false? Can women feel comfortable in a masculine environment if it's not angry or aggressive? True? Can you take your girlfriend to a sports bar? Yes? Comfortable, healthy heterosexual, normal men feel comfortable in a profoundly feminine environment. No. I've never seen a healthy guy ask his gal. Can I go to the nail salon with you? If you're that guy, you need to know, with the full love of Jesus, you're a weirdo. 00:23:20 Speaker 2: Philosopher me wants to pipe in again and say you've begged the question of what a healthy guy is right when I put again and we won't go down that route. 00:23:28 Speaker 1: I have been to the nail salon with my daughters. I feel perfectly fine there. Do I get my nails done? No, But that's more just me, not like I think it's unmanly to get my nails done. I'm perfectly comfortable in the nail bar with the girls. 00:23:45 Speaker 2: Yeah. 00:23:46 Speaker 1: I don't feel like I'm a weirdo. 00:23:48 Speaker 2: It's an odd thing to refer to the painting of nails or the colors of walls. We're talking about wavelengths of light. Right, It's an odd thing to refer to those things as inherently or female in way, in terms that are anything other than cultural. Right. You mentioned the Lutheran Church in purple. My mind went to if you go to the Vatican Museum, you can't miss it. As you're walking through the halls of the Vatican Museum, this gigantic bathtub functionally from the ancient Roman Empire, and it's purple. It is unmistakingly purple. And you know what, we know that it was an emperor's because it was purple, because it was the color. So that's why I got the idea of royal right there, right, And I wonder if the Lutheran Church is some sort of genealogy from that. But we know that it was an emperor. You know, I can only imagine fill in, fill in the blank, whichever emperor was Diocletian. Diocletian refused to take a bath in that gigantic imperial tub because it was purple. Come on, give me a break, right. The idea that waveplanks are white are gendered, right, right, And the same thing goes for the painting of nails, like yeah, okay again, that screams cultural stereotype more than it does something inherently true of a different wavelength of light bouncing off of someone's fingernails than mine. 00:25:19 Speaker 1: When I think it goes a lot of what he talks about in this whole section that I've read. He's also doing what we were suggesting in those first couple episodes. You're taking something that's second order. What does it mean to be feminine? What does it mean to be masculine? Well, we don't really exactly know, like it's never told to us. We're just supposed to know in and of itself, right, And so that makes then mauve feminine, nail salon's feminine, but sports bars masculine. And then there's some correlator that we're supposed to make to the church that the church has become feminized, right, But the only thing we're really given are there's an old pastor, there's a guy who sings too high, and in the walls are the wrong color. Like to me, what he's doing is begging a second order question back into a you know, a first order problem. And the way he wants to fix that, it seems, is to make the church more comfortable for men and then let the women and children just be in it, because they will, but we won't, right. 00:26:35 Speaker 2: Well to that point, not just even men for particular men. 00:26:38 Speaker 1: Right, right, Yeah, Because evidently the least masculine guy is not going to be fully comfortable in the new Church. 00:26:45 Speaker 2: Absolutely not right. And the reality is that to say this is what a man is, what would you have to do? Well, we'll give it a voice range. Look, the voice range between me and you is already arrange, right, And we're just two people body type. All right, you've got the muscles, but I play basketball. Does that count? You know? But then you've got other people who couldn't care less about the muscles or the basketball. Who's to say that that's less man? So in effect, what he's done here, deeply ironic, is what he said is we've got this group of people, and we'll call them men, as if only men have these interests. Right, we have, by the way, the WNBA, and we have the whole women's side of the aisle of the Winter Olympics or the Summer Olympics or something like that. Right, right, last I checked, there's women doing that. Your own daughters are volleyball players, right. 00:27:51 Speaker 1: Not anymore if they do gymnastics and lacrosse, and so it's like, got it, my daughter can do a lot. 00:27:56 Speaker 2: Deeply, Yeah, yeah, there you go. I have four kids and the one who's probably going to end up being the most accomplished athletically is one of my daughters. Yeah, it just is, what like, there's nothing to say about that other than it's an observation of a statement of fact. But the moment you create the sort of dynay decrease. So we've taken this collection of people, but we've identified it as distinctly male. Not only have we done something to those women who have similar interests, we've also done something to those men who don't have that interest. So that we've now said and we kind of do this. Unfortunately culturally, well, those women are tomboys whatever that means, right, and those men are something less than men. And there's countless stories of I'll use the word violence. Violence has been done to them. And unfortunately, when you do that in the name of Christianity, the Church and especially Jesus, begin to put at the feet of Jesus a particular notion of gender, or particular notion of realized mature masculinity that frankly, no one can ultimately live into, right, even even the person who is that otherwise image of deep voice, muscular, athletic interested in quote male things that goes away. Right as the testosterone decreases. When you grow older, your muscles start to atrophy, your fast twitch goes away, your voice lowers, your your ability to move quickly and with strength, just like it goes away. You've ultimately put everyone into a bucket of at some point, some more than others, of being unable to be male. Yeah, and to me, that signals a poor understanding, as we've said before, of being human first and foremost, poor understanding of what maturity means. Yeah, if your designation of maturity is a very narrow window that only belongs to some, and you're not making some sort of ethical claim about that, right, Like, it's one thing to say, yeah, few people truly are mature because very few people ultimately care to be ethical beings. That's a very different conversation than a few people are ultimately mature because they just don't have that athletic skill set. For instance. Yeah, you'd you've created a problem and never mind Again, as we talked about in previous episodes, none of that even makes sense of the person of Jesus. 00:30:39 Speaker 1: That's right, And I mean I think this is when I first read riscal and there are other passages in the book that I find just way off base. Things like Paul wasn't married because he died too early biblically undefensible, like you, there's no shot. You're demonstrating that typically based on what's it's not yet Paul wasn't like, oh, I think I'm gonna die early, so I'm not gonna get married. He never says that it's not even close to what he's thinking, Like. 00:31:13 Speaker 2: Right, he says they're easier to do the ministry that he's doing. 00:31:16 Speaker 1: Without all as a non. 00:31:17 Speaker 2: Married person, which seems to be his way of saying, that's why I'm not getting married, you know. 00:31:23 Speaker 1: So, I mean, I think there are a lot of pieces in this book that do that they're applying and this is where I think this was my initial sort of touch point with this whole conversation. And like I said, there are others who write on this. This isn't just about Driscoll. It just happens to be the first place that I encountered this, that this was so far off that it's reading a cultural script of masculinity back on not only to Christian men, but on occasion, back onto the Bible. Right, I mean goes the one in the previous episode I've mentioned you know, Jesus wept, but he wept like a man. This is where that comes from. And so you're seeing all of these different sort of like he just takes this this map and he slaps it on top of the Bible and says, there, this is what it is. There are so many things wrong with it, this method that he's using. I actually don't disagree with his aims, right. I think we do need young men to grow up into strong, mature Christian men. I fundamentally disagree with his means. Like the approach he's taking to do that, I think is absolutely wrong. I think what it's going to produce is the petulant children of his story who decide that they can't live within a femininized church and they're they're going to be oozing machismo and full of bravado and you know, just ridiculousness. And so I think there's an aspect of this that his work really is the thing that started me down this path. And what I see is he's not talking about creating male disciples of Jesus Christ. What he's talking about is crafting culturally relevant masculine people and A big part of his problem, in my estimation is I listen to some of his videos online as well. I have a deeper voice than he does. I'm going to go ahead and bet that I can bench more than he does. So does that make him less of a man than I am? 00:33:34 Speaker 2: I guess? 00:33:34 Speaker 1: So this sliding scale that he creates, right, if I can't go to his church and look and go, well, he doesn't even you know, bench three plates. I can't listen to this guy. Am I all of a sudden justified in doing that? Like none of what he writes makes any sense because masculinity is a sliding concept. I mean, that's part of why it's cultural. It has no real rooting, right. The discipleship shapes us in ways that if I'm sitting in front of an old grandpa, or if I'm sitting in front of Mark Driscoll, I'm not concerned with who they are, what they look like. I'm concerned with what they're saying. I'm concerned with the wisdom that they embody or the lack thereof. And so I just think there's this sort of real weird tendency very much the way you've described is it Aristotle? Right, yeah, who you know, after his uh, I'm going to say this wrong Monachian ethics and ethics, thank you, ny and ethics. 00:34:45 Speaker 2: Yeah, what's so hard about that? James, aren't you a man? 00:34:48 Speaker 1: It's horrible. I'm yeah, pronunciation, I'm glad it's not a market manhood. After after he does this, and your your comment was, you know, oddly enough, the ideal man looks strangely like him, And I feel that's what we're getting out of Driscoll. The ideal man looks strangely like him, as opposed to being strangely like Christ. 00:35:12 Speaker 2: Yeah, or maybe a small tweak strangely like like what he projects himself to be, because I've also seen him, and I don't think. I don't think he quite lives up to his own image of himself, but at least at least the projection of what he thinks of himself to be. 00:35:28 Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I yeah, I think the I think anybody who picked up acts like act like a man. And even just the subtitle nine Ways to Punch Life in the mouth, I don't even understand how you write that subtitle and think that that's a representative, a representative thing that Jesus would resonate with right, let's punch life in the mouth. It just screams like this sort of weird machismo bravado kind of thing. And so I think anybody who picks this book up, what I'd encourage them with is just this. Number one. So much of this is not historically accurate. Number two, so much of this is not biblically accurate. And number three. If you pick up this book and read it, it's I think his concerns are very much real. I think his means of getting at those concerns are only going to create a greater distortion and problem than what we have right now. That would be my sort of takeaways. 00:36:40 Speaker 2: Yeah, I think of the sort of language of Paul where he says, imitate me? Is I imitate Christ? 00:36:49 Speaker 1: Yeah? 00:36:50 Speaker 2: It would both be absurd and dangerous to look at Paul and assume that he's saying what Driscoll's saying. Yes, it would be utterly dangerous to assume that the predicate of what it means for Paul to imitate Christ and to therefore step forward into his ministry was anything other than the giving of the fullness of his very self, both for those that he encountered, but also so that the fullness of Jesus could shine through him. 00:37:25 Speaker 1: Yeah. 00:37:26 Speaker 2: None of that involved his muscle mass beyond the basics of he needed some muscle mass to move those bones around. 00:37:35 Speaker 1: Right. 00:37:35 Speaker 2: Yeah. None of that involved him even being married, by his own testimony, Right, none of that involved, presumably any kind of romantic encounter. It entirely involved his desire to give himself fully. Yeah, to be sort of a John the Baptist, John, of course famously saying I must decrease so that he Jesus might increase. That was the very mechanism by which we understand Paul's giving of himself. And if we can't understand Jesus, and we can't understand those whom the Father gave to Jesus, whom Jesus then gave to the world as a mechanism for modeling of giving of ourselves for another, then we've done a great disservice to the testimony of Jesus. We've done a disservice to the next generation of youth, whether in or out of the church, And we've done a great disservice to the entirety of creation that we're called to serve. Rather than to domineer. 00:38:41 Speaker 1: Yeah, good ending man, we'll call it there. Act Like a Man by Marke Driscoll is not a book that I would necessarily recommend. We've used it here as a negative example, and I think hopefully you've seen some of the reasons why I don't actually think I picked the worst passage out of the book, although we definitely picked one. I would say that is characteristic of the overarching argument. He does have some interesting insight there at various points, but they're almost always sort of overshadowed by some of the language that I read today. It just gets hyper masculinized very quickly, and the temperate parts of the work are just overshadowed by that sort of bravado that comes through. So I don't recommend it, but as like I said, as a touch point into this conversation, I thought it was important to go through it. In the next episodes, we're going to talk a little bit more about what I would consider to be more nuanced positions, thoughtful positions, especially coming out of the recovering Biblical manhood and womanhood movement. So we're going to talk a little bit about Piper Grudam some of that work that you find in a volume that's called Covering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, which we probably won't agree with either and so, but it is a little bit more reasoned, a little bit more scholarly, and loses some of the bravado that we tended to see in what Driscoll wrote today. So, like I said, I wanted to do this as a touch point, but I don't want to stop here. We need to get into some of the other scholarship and really analyze what's going on there and talk a little bit about what the Bible is saying in these various passes that are treated and how the language of masculine and femininity skews what's being said there. So we'll jump into those in the next episode. Thanks Ashish again for being here, and thanks everybody for sticking with us. We'll catch you next time on Thinking Christian Take Care. I just want to take a second to thank the team at Life Audio for their partnership with us on the Thinking Christian podcast. If you go to lifeaudio dot com, you'll find dozens of other faith centered podcasts in their network. They've got shows about prayer, I Will Study parenting, and more.