Cindy K

What do I think?

I think you are right.  I think that Genesis 2 and 3 makes Eve out to be the first apologist (one who gives an account of their reasoning for faith in God).  Adam did nothing like this and just sinned.  Eve worked to discern the truth and the wisest choice that would have resulted in what was best for everyone.  She had to be deceived in order to get her to do what was wrong.  Today, Christian apologists, counter-cult or otherwise, don’t always get things right.  We do see through a glass darkly and we are all in the process of getting sanctified.  So we do not have perfect truth.  But we have advantages that Eve did not, including the benefit of the knowledge of her experience.  We know much more today than Eve did then.  Above all things, we have the inspired Word that is the only authoritative and objective standard.  “I believe that it says ___” falls far behind the inspired Word itself and the Holy Spirit who watches over the Word to perform it.  The Word always accomplishes that which God intends it to do.

I also agree that Peter and Paul had ample opportunities to be more direct and clear, particularly when discussing submission and wives and gender.  When Paul alluded to the old oral traditional prayer of “King of the Universe, thank you for not making me a goy, a slave or a woman” in Galatians 3:28, if he had meant what so many people imply from an argument of silence and circular reasoning that presupposes hierarchy, then Paul certainly coulda, shoulda, woulda put his “true meaning about male headship and federal representation” to us plainly and and directly so that there could be no misunderstanding.  He did not.  When Peter talked about slaves and wives and such, he coulda, shoulda, woulda pointed out something more specific, but he didn’t say anymore than what he wrote for us.   That which was/is/always will be God-breathed does not need additional inspiration or extra breath, does it?

For that matter, considering that I don’t agree with Ortlund, I don’t believe that he is deliberately and willfully “misquoting God” either.  I think that he and those who follow the dogma of CBMW are very much like Eve — they are deceived.  Part of living the Christian life involves cutting through both our ignorance and our deception with the sharp, sharp double-edged Sword of the Word of God.  It is a process that continues until we are changed and no longer see through a glass darkly.  And having lived a “Christian” lie in some of this mindset and in others that were passed off to me as Christian and were anything but, I have great compassion for those who are deceived.  It is a terrible thing.

And I am deeply grieved when I read this stuff, seeing to the lengths that some go to and the dances that some do in order to create something that gives the appearance of an “iron clad” argument for their position.  Why “monkey around” with Genesis if you believe 1 Cor 14 and 1 Tim 2 says women cant ever teach or speak in church, or whatever particular twist you put on the verse ?  We are all to be obedient to the Word, and those Scriptures should be able to stand up as truth and stand up to scrutiny without any additional help.  Right?  Why then also warp the Trinity, too?

But I remember the days when I would have taken a bullet for Rodney Howard Brown or my old pastor, and I would have fought to the death to defend their honor.  I used to argue the Word of Faith dogma that it’s God’s will and can only be His will that we walk in perfect health at every moment of our lives, and that if we are ill, we either have sin in our hearts or we do not have enought faith.  Faith comes by hearing and hearing by the Word, so add water and stir, and you will get your healing.  And I had to watch the Word of Faith guaranteed formula fail (in myself and in others in the hospital in the Southern “Bible Belt”) many times before I would consider that this might not be what the Word taught.  (BTW which does not mean that I am against divine healing or mediating on the Word for healing.)  But I would have argued man’s wisdom, partly because my world (my presuppositions and rested on my faith in the fact that how man made sense of the Word was true and as true as the Word was itself.

It must be perhaps the toughtest thing on earth to go back to what you’ve believed was true, used to build up the bedrock of what you built the rest of your understanding upon and esteem it as an error.  If you are a minister and have taught a particular position that was based upon a misconsception that you used to lay the foundations of your understanding of who God is and how we as His creatures relate to Him, this is all the more difficult.  Your matters of personal faith become public and doctrinal.  And I think some of that definitely gives way for us into willful error.

I don’t know how these guys are ever going to pull back the curtains and look for cracks in the foundations of the worlds they’ve built on some of these ideas.  It seems like they just keep building supports and props to keep up the spires into which they’ve vested themselves.