The well-known reformed theologian, R. C. Sproul, founder of Ligonier Ministries, some of you readers know died on December 14 this year.  I appreciated his defense and exposition of many important aspects of the biblical and historic doctrine of the Christian faith.  He impacted much with perhaps his most well known book, The Holiness of God.

Sproul has stepped out in what is now considered a bold way concerning objective beauty, defending the transcendentals of truth, goodness, and beauty.  In recognition of his recent death, I want to point out his communication of objective beauty as one of the three legs of the Christian faith.  He wrote several articles at Ligonier on beauty to expose and defend this foundational element to the right understanding of God.  Here are several articles (1 here, 2 here, 3 here, 4 here, 5 here, 6 here, 7 here, 8 here, 9 here, 10 here).  He also has done a lot in video (9 part series on beauty, here) and audio (here, here, here, here, and here).  I’m not saying he and I agree on everything, but he puts a lot of effort into saying this is something we can and should judge.

If there is beauty, there is not beauty.  If we can judge something to be beautiful, then we can also judge something not to be beautiful.  The premoderns categorized beauty as a transcendental, that is, beauty proceeds from outside of this world and from God.  Our understanding of beauty should be based on the holiness and majesty of God and separate from mankind. God defines beauty.

I have used the terminology, “truth in the real world,” to apply to what God expects everyone to know.  It is assumed truth.  I wrote a two part series on “effeminate” in a major way to say that we can know what is effeminate.  We can judge that.  We are responsible to judge what is effeminate and God is judging and will judge effeminate qualities of men.  We read the verbiage, “worldly lust,” and it is assumed among many other assumptions of God that we know what worldly lust is.  If the grace of God that has appeared to all men teaches us to deny worldly lust, we should assume that we can know what worldly lust is.  We can’t play dumb with that and many other truths in the real world.

It is rebellion against God to say that we can’t know.  Sproul says we can know.  I believe he compromises and capitulates, but he doesn’t lie and say that we can’t judge these things.  I admire him for that.  What Sproul knows is that people get an understanding of God through what someone is willing to call “beautiful.”

Whatever it is that people offer God with music says what they believe about God.  If what they offer isn’t beautiful, that reflects their understanding of God and also shapes their and others understanding of God.  I have written here many times that God is shaped in people’s imaginations by what God is offered in worship.  If it is worldly and lustful, for instance, than that is the perception of God.  That has, therefore, become the perception of God.  If God isn’t God in someone’s imagination, then he has a different God.  This is a form of idolatry, and it relates to the gospel.

God doesn’t like or accept everything.  We see that throughout scripture.  He doesn’t like fleshly or worldly lust or that which conforms to the spirit of the age.  We can judge that.  We have to judge that.  If we go ahead and offer God what we like, that He doesn’t like, that is our view of God.  It is rebellion against the nature of God, His truth, goodness, or beauty.

The defense is, you can’t judge beauty or aesthetics.  That is an attack on truth.  We can know the truth in the real world.  We are required to know all three:  truth, goodness, and beauty.  This is the greatest threat of apostasy, people’s wrong understanding of God based on the inability to judge.  They conform God to their own lust, replacing the true God in their imagination.

Sproul says that beauty is not in the eye of the beholder.  The eye of the beholder or the beholder himself has become god.  Men don’t know God because their knowledge of God has been distorted in their imaginations by their perversion of beauty.

Today men cannot or won’t identify manhood, because that has become perverted.  This has occurred to the degree that now someone can self identify his own sexuality.  Churches are capitulating here like they have already in music and worship.  Churches won’t judge worldly lust, fleshly lust, and worldliness, because they say scripture doesn’t tell us what they are.  They deny the assumption that we can know.  The path away from God into apostasy doesn’t come mostly from a change in a doctrinal statement, but based upon these issues that Christians today say they can’t judge.  God expects that we will, so we should assume that we can.

An aspect of righteous living is men dressing in men’s things and women in women’s.  Someone may wonder why it’s got to be such a big deal.  Why can’t we just ignore it and act like it’s nothing?  It’s a requirement from God.  A godly culture constitutes symbols of manhood and womanhood as an endorsement or confirmation of God’s design in His creation and to model the distinction.  The culture does this because of God, if it’s a godly culture.  When it stops mattering to a culture, it’s because the culture is turning away or has turned away from God. It has rejected His way, like Lamech rejected God’s definition of marriage, because He rejected God in the ungodly line.

To write about this, I want to start with a baseline of a couple of definitions, two that are important, first, the distinctions between gender and sex.  I’m going to use Wikipedia, despite some’s opinion that it isn’t credible as a source, but to give us something to work with.

The distinction between sex and gender differentiates a person’s biological sex (the anatomy of an individual’s reproductive system, and secondary sex characteristics) from that person’s gender, which can refer to either social roles based on the sex of the person (gender role) or personal identification of one’s own gender based on an internal awareness (gender identity).

Sex and gender are related, because sex is what God created.  Gender should be based upon the sex of a person, but it is also learned or chosen behavior.  Someone is born male and female, but we know from scripture and can see with our eyes that people turn from how God created them based on sin.  Gender is a combination of nature and nurture.  People were born with obvious sexual differences and then those are supported through multiple elements of training, parents and church foremost.  It helps if society at large upholds these, but that shouldn’t be expected.

The other definition is in the title, that being gender fluidity.  A term that didn’t come on my radar until just recently.  Mirriam-Webster says that it wasn’t invented until 1994.  Both these quotes come from the Mirriam-Webster online dictionary.

of, relating to, or being a person whose gender identity is not fixed 

And then I found that gender can have fluidity, which is quite different from ambiguity. If ambiguity is a refusal to fall within a prescribed gender code, then fluidity is the refusal to remain one gender or another. Gender fluidity is the ability to freely and knowingly become one or many of a limitless number of genders, for any length of time, at any rate of change. Gender fluidity recognizes no borders or rules of gender. —Kate Bornstein,  Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women and the Rest of Us,  1994

Sex isn’t fluid, and gender is fluid insofar that people rebel against God’s created designed differences between men and women.  Sin influences this as seen in Romans 1.

Gender fluidity is where we’re at as a culture.  I’m not saying that everyone in the world has accepted it, but most people reading this know that we’ve reached a time where someone can self-identify gender.  If this is going to change, if it’s going to be put in the bottle like it should be, Christians above all must want it.  They must support gender distinction.  If they won’t, it’s not going to happen and we will continue along this same path.

The foundations of gender fluidity, yes, are related to rejection of Genesis 1, proceeding out of naturalism.  If people remove God as creator, then they can choose what they want to be, instead of believing what God did. I’m asserting this began with the rejection of the symbols of manhood and womanhood. Continuing to defend the elimination of the symbols is an embracing of gender fluidity.  This is how it looks in scripture.

Gender distinctions are purposeful.  A culture must believe them and support them to ward off what is now being called fluidity.  The symbols are important, which is what we see taught at least in Deuteronomy 22:5 and 1 Corinthians 11:3-16 (this is taught in several other places too, but those are classic locations). Mocking the symbols, ridiculing the designed distinctions in a culture, is welcoming gender fluidity.  People who profess to be Christians do this now.

More than any other factor, worldliness is the cause of the Christian cooperation with fluidity. Christians don’t want to stick out in their culture.  They want to be Christians, essentially go to heaven when they die, and yet not suffer in the world (my point in Monday’s post).  This is truly a form of Christianity, not actual Christianity.  Christians have hastened gender fluidity, because they themselves are ashamed of the distinctions in gender.  This is easy to see today.

Christian men more than anyone are responsible for gender fluidity.  They have capitulated to women as what are called beta males.  They so want the favor of women, like Adam in the garden, that they cede their manhood, what some call the man card.  Men then talk and walk in an effeminate manner with no repercussions.  Those who say anything are said to be “bullying.”  Most bullying is pointing out the obvious even in a nice way.  It started, I assess, with women not wanting the “rough” treatment of their sons by fathers, who wanted to develop toughness in their boys.

There is something both symbolic and real to women now wearing the pants.  Women wear pants and wear the pants.  Women challenge men and men fold.  The symbols have been eliminated and Christian accede to this in culture, even pushing for it.  The biggest arguments that I read are usually effeminate men who mock in an effete manner.  They don’t have arguments coming from strength, but manipulative, emotional arguments like would be expected from women, then glancing around for similar expressions from similar males for reinforcement.  Here, when I write on related subjects, and they comment, they almost always remain anonymous.

If gender fluidity is going to end, men will have to lead, and to start, in the most simple way, they must return to the symbols of gender established by a godly culture.  Their women must stop wearing pants.  This isn’t all there is to it, but it is so basic, that it is a starting point. Some reading here will say they can’t do that, because scripture isn’t clear, so they do nothing.  Scripture says something, not nothing.  The historic (and biblical) position has not been replaced.  It’s just been dropped.  There is still a female symbol, the dress or skirt.  Men are not wearing skirts or dresses at Bob Jones University and Maranatha and their constituent churches, yet.

The attack on roles almost always goes one direction.  It doesn’t start with men attempting to be women.  That should be obvious.  It should be.  Part of being effeminate for men is feigning ignorance on this, not knowing what I’m talking about.  It’s another lie, just like gender fluidity is a lie.  So fluidity starts with women wearing pants.  Society was aghast to start and then this eroded for the same reasons it always has eroded and does erode.  One book called it the death of outrage. Move on, nothing to see.

If the United States is not going to change on this, and I don’t think it will, it doesn’t mean it should not change in your family and in your church.  That’s where it must happen first.  Judgment begins in the house of God.

Last week I talked about Bob Jones University rule changes.  The girls wear pants to class now.  I haven’t heard why, but other people have explained for BJU out there, let’s call it pantsplaining, providing many different explanations.  Let me explain.  Pants at one time were masculine, a symbol of manhood, which is also one of authority, headship, being in charge, wearing the pants.  Everyone knows that.  It’s a symbol on the door of the men’s bathroom.

Several things have happened. The country has turned away from fundamentals of the truth of the most basic social unit, the family.  This dovetails with a lack of conversion.  If you are saved, you follow God’s design.  This is an attack on scripture and, therefore, God.  Take away God’s design and then created order, and you can have egalitarianism. The symbols have to go.  The representation of the roles have to change.  Women now wear the pants.  This was forbidden in the culture and then accepted.

Professing Christians, who could not handle the truth, dealt with pants on women with a flurry of options, taking away certainty.  It makes my head spin.  They complicate a very simple issue and then say it’s complicated.  Since you can’t really know anyway, pants are fine.  If they still believe in a male garment, they say there are male pants and female pants.  There aren’t female pants.  None are pointed out.  Nothing is designated.  The biggest differential that is noticeable is tightness, which can’t be admitted either.  If women are wearing pants, they’re tighter, and immodest.

The world mocks the idea that women shouldn’t wear pants.  Now professing Christians mock the idea that women shouldn’t wear pants.  If they aren’t ridiculing the practice or the requirement, putting space between them and those who hold to it, then they are talking about how unimportant it is.

Bonobos, which I had never heard before the last two days, is called a “menswear brand,” Walmart owned, I have come to learn.  In an advertising campaign the company is calling “project 172,” it attempts to sell its product by “redefining masculine.” Bonobos is calling this “evolve the definition.”

Some men are the most interesting men in the world, but someone tagged me with the moniker, “the most divisive of all independent Baptists.”  I should be happy, because he called my friend Bobby Mitchell a “lackey” in the same comment.   In the spirit of many fundamentalists, he went personal, mean, hateful, and condemnatory — not divisive though — that title is mainly reserved for resolute doctrinal stands, not schoolyard name-calling.  But I’m happy, because it started some thinking about “divisiveness,” which was a brief theme in a comment thread last week too.  Postmodernism has featured new definitions of terms, like Isaiah prophesied the calling of “good evil and evil good.”  “Divisive” is one of these.  I can’t help but think of George W. Bush’s, “I’m a uniter, not a divider,” using the buzzwords for political advantage.

In present American culture, “divisive” labels the worst possible malfeasance against relativism.  If you “divide,” you’re saying something is right, and let’s stop wasting time, because you’re actually just saying that you’re right and everyone else is wrong.  Can you believe that?  Somebody might be wrong out there.  The “divider” thinks he’s right, which means not everybody is right.  This is where we’re at now with “divisive,” and hardly anyone blinks.  They just accept it as so.

Let’s say you had a whole nation of boot-licking, goose-stepping unity, not that it has ever happened before.  Then you had this small group who thought different, like an Apple designer or something.   They would be divisive.  Bad, huh?   No, good.  Why?  Of course, because the majority is wrong.  Wrong.   Someone is wrong.  People are wrong.  The majority can be wrong.

Being consistent in a relativistic culture means consistently allowing everyone to be right without saying they’re right.  If they say they’re right, then they’re divisive, which is the one wrong, so it’s only their opinion (IMO).  The only dividers are people confident they’re right.  Hail doubt!  Uncertainty brings people together, ya know.  No one could be bothered with like a lack of conviction.  Only like, because there isn’t anything settled about my lack.  I only might lack.  Actual lacking might offend some non-lacking person.  It can be tough being relative all the time, er, some of the time.  Uncertain.

I realize that to stay the most divisive of a small division of a division, that I have to break the relativist’s manifesto of unity and his logo, the question mark.   This thought does bring me to the idea of unity, which is as important as division in the discovery of definitions.  I can’t understand division without understanding unity.  You’ve really got two choices for unity.  So as not to offend, let’s consider the choice of the relativist first.  His unity is built around toleration.  Toleration is the one absolute.   Everyone believes in toleration.  If you want to offend the relativist, burn the question mark in his lawn.  The other choice is absolute truth.  You unify on absolute truth, which is, um, absolute.  It’s certain.  Why do I feel this urge to apologize?  I’m just presenting like the two possibilities.  Come on!

Just want to digress for a moment.  The growing population of effeminate men directly relates to the nuance of relativism.  Part of manhood is decisiveness.  Decisiveness is a violation of relativism, of unity.   Modern manhood can’t make up its mind and gets a standing ovation for this.  Not knowing is a new strength.  This is a reason why a big segment of America doesn’t understand Putin, which is a digression of a digression.  So I am saying that I think someone is calling me a man.   That doesn’t bother me.  I recognize that it should today, but I’m really fine being a man.

Let’s assume for argument sake that the above is the wrong usage for “divisive,” even if it seems to be permissible at least as a form of propaganda.   How should we understand divisive?

Someone who is divisive is dividing off of something.  He isn’t continuing to unify.  Should someone unify around error, even a certain amount of error?  If there is absolute truth, which the absolutist believes, does he do well to continue to unite on error?  This is where we get to differing views of the world, and this relativist-absolutist argument.  What’s happening today is that the relativists are nibbling, nibbling, nibbling, until the absolute is a small list.

I don’t get offended with someone dividing with me over truth.  I’m actually not offended with any kind of dividing from me, because I’m secure in my position.  I don’t like to be called names, but it’s something I should expect in this culture.  I want to be right, and I do believe that it is possible to be wrong.  However, if I believe I’m right, I have no problem standing on that.  I would await some argument from the Bible.  Name-calling isn’t going to persuade me.

Let’s digress again.  I understand the usefulness of name-calling.  It is the chief argument of the apostate.  He is a mocker walking after his own lust.  He traffics in ridicule.  If he argues, he’s got to admit truth and error, so he doesn’t — he mocks.  His point isn’t doing right, but doing what he wants.  He doesn’t want rules or authority.  He wants his own way.  He’s a rebel at heart.  He doesn’t like absolutes, because it appoints some big brother to watch over him.  He doesn’t want to be watched over.  He wants acceptance.  He’s insecure.  He wants approval.  If he doesn’t get it, he calls names.  I see him as a loser.  He can’t argue, so all he’s got is name-calling, because he’s already lost.  There will be people, other losers, who will think he’s made a point.

When I go door-to-door evangelizing, I often tell people I’m willing to be a Buddhist or  Hindu.  I mean it.  To be truly open-minded, you have to be willing to believe something.  I am.  I am willing to believe, not just to taste, but to swallow.  I just never get a good reason to be either a Buddhist or Hindu, and I never run into either who wants even to tell me why to be one.  They’re fine with my being myself.  That’s not good enough.

The Bible satisfies me.  I’m sold on it.  I’m certain of it.  I’m too certain of it for a growing number of people.  I get that.  Men like minded with me divide from error.  We believe someone is wrong and that the truth is worth keeping.

All the relativist has for unity is uncertainty.  The proponents of relativism unify around doubt.  Is that really unity?  Is that what we’re talking about?  If we don’t bow out of absolutes, out of certainty, we’re dividing from the ethic of relativism?  Then we’re divisive?  Perhaps in the world, but not God.

If the truth is unity, then the greatest unifiers are those who unify on the truth and the truth alone, not on some degree of uncertainty.  That isn’t unity.  For that reason, I actually don’t believe that I’m a divider.  I believe with great certainty that men like me are the greatest forces of true unity, the only unity, on earth.

Who is the most intolerant in the whole universe?

The NBA?  They divide 300 or so people from everyone else.  If you don’t play basketball like they do, you are not welcome.  Their fans are similar.  They stop watching if they don’t play very well.  No one calls them divisive.

Medical school?  They have this standard that relatively few can meet.  If they do, they’re doctors. The expectations are very high.  They’re very intolerant.  Their patients are similar.  They want medical schools to be tough and keep people out.  No one calls them divisive.

And then there is God.  He divided the whole world from eight people with water.  He’ll divide the whole world of the future from just a few with fire.  Those who don’t take His way, He sends to Hell forever.  His intolerance brings more pain for more people than anyone.  No one is more divisive.

And then there is evangelicalism and fundamentalism.   Division bad.  Tolerance good.  Almost anything goes.  They’re intolerant of bad entertainment and bad food — totally divisive there.  They are very tolerant of their own comforts and conveniences.   God can take whatever kitsch, sloppy seconds.  That’s tolerated.  And if you won’t, you’re divisive.  Go figure.

• “Sexually active teenagers are more likely to be depressed and attempt suicide. . . . Similarly, girls who reported three or more partners were significantly more likely to report sadness, suicide ideation, suicide plans, and attempts than those with fewer partners.” 

• Teenage boys and girls who are sexually active are three to four times as likely to say that they are depressed “all, most, or a lot of the time” as those who abstain.

• Immoral girls are nearly three times more likely to attempt suicide, and immoral boys are eight times more likely to attempt to murder themselves.

• Nearly two-thirds of teenagers who have lost their virginity wish they had waited and not committed fornication.