Over the last century, feminism has radically reshaped how the family, church, and state are led. While God’s Word calls on men to helm these spheres, even churches in more “conservative” denominations have compromised, allowing women to take on public roles not condoned in Scripture. Professing Christians have also slid from God’s standards in how they approach authority in the home and civil realm. In this podcast, hosts Scott Brown and Jason Dohm, joined by author Zachary Garris, survey this checkered landscape in light of the Reformers’ testimony. Their charge: rather than bow to the prevailing culture, men and women should buck this trend and joyfully embrace their God-given roles. 

Welcome to the Church and Family Life podcast. Today we have Zachary Garris on to talk about manhood and womanhood and how feminist the church has become. But hey, I hope you can come and join us at our national conference next year. Next May, Manhood and Womanhood, the Glory of God in the Creation Order. Hope to see you at the conference and I hope you enjoy the discussion with Zachary Garris.

["The Glory of God in the Creation Order"] Zachary Geras. So Jason, I bumped into this book, honor thy fathers, recovering the anti-feminist theology of reformers. Wow. Sounds like a guy who's looking for a fight. He's looking for a fight.

Yeah. Yeah. His name is Zachary Garris. We have him with us today. How's that?

Hey, how you doing? Good. How are you guys? Good to be with you. We're doing great.

Yeah. Thanks for, thanks for joining us. You know, you, you, you made this funny line, you know, at the beginning of the book that feminism has fallen on hard times, but not hard. It hasn't fallen hard enough. But there is really a return to biblical manhood and womanhood in evangelicalism, particularly in people who have embraced reform theology and things like that.

So we're really thrilled. But your book, I loved your book because you just outlined the theology of the reformers, the anti-feminist theology of the reformers. So why did you write this book? Well, it's somewhat of a follow-up to my prior book, which was called Masking and Christianity. That was more of a biblical approach, just doing some exegesis.

It had some historical information and background. But this, I wanted more of a historical angle looking at what did the Reformers and the Reformed Orthodox after them, so 16th and 17th century Reformed theologians, what did they think on this subject? You know, I mean, one challenge here is, I mean, I'm a Presbyterian, so we subscribe to the Westminster standards. They don't explicitly, I do argue in the book they implicitly do, but they don't explicitly speak to some of these subjects related to men and women and male leadership. And some of that is because that was in some of the other documents they published, such as the Directory for Worship and ministers who can lead worship.

I mean that's always an issue. But you know they weren't dealing with feminism at the time and so you have to go kind of find their other writings on these things. And so that's kind of what I did is I tried to gather them. Obviously, it's not exhaustive, but I try to cover a lot of the big guys like Calvin and the like, and put them together, make it accessible. And so yeah, I mean, the first half of this book is kind of just introducing the reader to the theology, men and women, among the earlier Reformed theologians.

The second half of the book is a little more, you could say polemic. It's criticizing some modern practices, especially focusing on Presbyterian and Reformed churches and arguing how there's been a lot of deviation, sometimes minor, sometimes major, from the earlier Reformed theology. Zach, I don't think any of us are surprised at all that what's happening in the world is happening in the world, meaning outside of professing Christianity. But we're all dismayed about what's happening within evangelicalism because there's compromise in every kind of corner of it on biblical manhood and womanhood. But even now in highly theological conservative corners, over the last 10 or 20 years, we've seen kind of slipping in this category as well.

What currently are you seeing on that front in highly theologically conservative corners, but you're seeing things slip here? Well, I mean, I guess the question is what do we consider to be highly conservative theological corners? I mean, the fact is that has probably gotten redefined. It's shifted in recent years. So I'm a minister in the Presbyterian Church in America.

The PCA is known to be fairly broad, but we have a lot of differences on these things. I mean, so you have everything from, you know, the views I advocate, which would be more traditional reformed approach. And then you have more progressive churches that are allowing all sorts of things, especially, you could say, non-ministers or non-ruling elders, there's non-officers leading worship in the church, but then also when they do that, they tend to put women in those positions because it's a way for them. They don't ordain women, they're not allowed to in our denomination. So it's a way for them to put women up front.

So very common practices are women reading scripture during public worship service, leading prayers of some sort. Some do even more than that. I've seen some like even have the you know women do the call to worship, which is even more problematic. You have, what else do I say that? Well we've had one issue with the New York Metro Presbyterian where they've had a woman preaching.

And so that got dealt with, but it's getting dealt with even right now because there's a minister who thinks women are allowed to preach, at least on occasion. So this is supposed to be a clearly non-egalitarian denomination and we still have these issues. And that's just talking public worship. You've also got, how are these churches approaching male headship in the home? I mean, I can't even tell you that because that would be more on an individual basis.

I don't know if they're preaching those texts. You know, this would come out in counseling, especially. Although I will say one thing here, and this isn't even concerning the PCA, it would just be broadly, is there is an epidemic of divorce. I mean, this has been happening for a while, I guess, in the church, where there's divorces. I mean, divorce happens, okay, but churches aren't using church discipline.

And then one thing that we're seeing is, I mean, some of this is anecdotal, but I do think there's statistics to back this up, is there's a high rate of Christian women, they're not leaving the faith, but they'll maybe claim broad categories of abuse, which we're not talking physical. I mean, that would be one thing, but often spiritual abuse is very loosely defined and churches will allow divorces under this and then they won't discipline either party. I mean I've seen that from other churches firsthand and there's a man I know who does counseling quite extensively and he says this is a massive problem. And so the church is actually enabling, I would argue, unbiblical divorce because, well, in part, they're not embracing male headship in the home. They don't actually, they don't practically believe that the husband actually should lead his wife and the wife submit, right?

I mean, that's controversial. You preach that the wife should submit to her husband. And I mean, even in conservative confessional churches today, that's controversial. It's clear in the New Testament, of course, but it still is controversial nonetheless. So you throw that in, plus just the churches as far as public worship, and yeah, we have a lot of problems before us.

So I think these are things that need addressed, and that is also partly why I wrote this book. Yeah, why don't you walk us through your arguments? Let's talk about the three spheres. Why don't you talk about the home first, and then the church. Of course, you know, we believe in the regulator principle of worship.

We believe scripture is sufficient for the home and the church and the state, and it speaks to the state. I guess the state might be one of the most visible controversial matters with mega-feminism running the world right now, you know, where you have all these women in authority. But I'd like you to just sort of lay the theological and historical foundation for male headship in those three spheres. Sure, well, we should always start with the home because that's I think the clearest in Scripture. And also I'll note this is the the Reformers tended to say that the the home is the was the seminary for the church and the state and so it's the the training ground and so the home is serves as a model.

I mean I would even argue that the church is, I mean, it's based on the home. The church is the spiritual household, and it's made up of several households. And the same with the state, right? The commonwealth is made up of many households. So let's start with the home, though, is you have the Scripture texts that are very clear, like Ephesians 5, Colossians 3, where they say that the husband is the head of his wife and they command the wife to submit.

So, you know, I know the egalitarians try to argue that, well, the Greek word for head doesn't always mean head, it can mean source. I mean, a lot of that is really just irrelevant in a sense. I mean, they're wrong, but it's irrelevant because you have the command to submit, and it's only given to the wives, except for the mutual submission passage in Ephesians 5, I think it's 21. And There's multiple ways to explain that, but I think it's just saying, submit to one another, that is, submit to those who are an authority over you, and then that's why the Apostle in Ephesians 5 and 6 goes through wives, submit to husbands, children, obey your parents, and the like. The William Gouge, some of the older writers would say it's, well, there is a sense in which we submit to one another, but they still would say, you know, wives submit to husbands and not husbands submit to wives as far as, you know, headship in the home.

Yeah, I think Gujj, he's saying there that there's a general submission in the church. We submit to one another in different ways. We weep with those who weep, we rejoice with those who rejoice, we moderate, we have compassion on one another. Those are sort of manifestations of the way that submission works everywhere. I mean, in some ways, we're kind of submitting to one another even here now by listening to one another.

So I think Guj thinks that verse 21 is really sort of a general principle of life, and then he narrows down into the marriage relationship. Yeah, I mean, that principle is certainly true. And that's why I say it doesn't really matter which view we take from the text there in Ephesians five. But the key principle is that God has actually instituted hierarchy in the world and that there is, you know, the husband is the, has headship, has authority over his wife in the home. Of course, the reformers all explain this and, you know, even Paul's command, right?

The husband's still to love his wife. He's to lead her lovingly and care for her. All of that is clear in the text. But we have to affirm that authority. The husband actually has genuine authority in the household, and the wife is actually supposed to submit just as the church submits to Christ.

So that's the foundation for the home. You have that also in the Old Testament. I mean, I would argue all this is founded in the creation account, but then maybe it's more clear later on. Numbers chapter 30, which deals with vows in the Old Testament, also gets into male headship. So it's not...it's still there in the Old Testament.

I mean, nobody really argues that Old Testament Israel was not patriarchal. I mean, I don't know how you could argue that. So that's the home. Then the church is, I mean, we can extend those arguments. So even if we didn't have passages speaking to this, I think we would be able to still make these arguments is that If men are head of the household, then only men, only those who lead their household, the household is an example for leadership.

We see that even in 1 Timothy 3 when you have requirements for elders and deacons, is they lead their household well, and then that qualifies them along with other requirements to be an officer in the church. And so if a woman can't lead her own household, then we have to ask, well, how can she lead other households spiritually? How can she be an elder in the church? It doesn't really make sense. Because if her husband were still alive, she would actually then be over her husband in authority in the church.

That just raises all sorts of problems, of course. So I think that's part of just the theological argument, but then of course we have some Scripture texts that speak to these things as well. I think if you go through first three is it's only speaking of men and it's the it's not women I know some people try to insert that in there but only men are to be officers and it's especially clear with elders. And then you have course the prohibitions first to me too. And then you have, of course, the prohibitions, 1 Timothy 2, 11 and 12, where Paul commands the women to be silent and then says, do not permit a woman to teach or exercise authority over a man.

And so that's part of the prohibition. Women aren't to have a teaching authority or exercise really any authority in the church as far as they're not supposed to be elders. And then you have the parallel passage in 1 Corinthians 14, 34 and 35. And that one is part of where they're, you know, that we're having to deal with modern reform thinking, even complementarianism, because there's a lot of men who would affirm what we're saying on 1 Timothy 2, but then they would say, well, 1 Corinthians 14 is actually just, it's more limited, prohibiting women from interpreting prophecy. I mean, that was D.A.

Carson's view. So I argue against that, and I show actually no one ever held that amongst the Reformed until recently. So that actually it's a parallel passage to 1 Timothy 2 when it says, let the women be silent in the churches. So it's prohibiting them from public speech. It's not prohibiting them from, you know, congregational singing, but it's prohibiting them, women, from getting up front and preaching or teaching or leading prayer or anything like that.

So how did this shift happen? Because almost every church around us has women reading scripture, they're praying, they're leading, things like that. And there are not very many female pastors around here. They're usually LGBTQ churches around here anyway. I mean, we're in- They're mainline denominations.

They all have them. And in the mainlines, yeah. But in our circles, you're almost never gonna find a woman preacher, but you are going to find women doing all those other things leading in particular ways. How did that happen in conservative evangelicalism? Well, I think what happened, I think it's a fairly recent change.

But I think what happened is you had liberalism for the last 100 plus years in church. And so you had the push for women preaching and women pastors for a while, but you had the response to that, which you had denominations like mine, the PCA come out of the Southern Presbyterian Church formed 1973, and they embraced male headship. They responded to feminism. You had more particular for us here is the Complementarian Movement in the 1980s, late 80s and the 90s, and that's tied with like the Council of Biblical Manhood and Womanhood. And one thing I've argued is that they did a lot of good.

They affirmed male headship in the home and in the church, but they kind of left some things untouched or there's just maybe various views amongst advocates of complementarianism. And there were, I think there were cracks in the dam from the get-go. And that's kind of- Let me just interrupt you for a second there, because I was around when all that happened as a pastor. What Wayne Gerutem and John Piper did is they actually caused a revolution that were, I think that we're feeling some of the good effects of, I don't think, I think you're right. They were afraid to declare the patriarchy.

They were afraid to declare. That's what I think happened. But they moved the church light years ahead in terms of manhood and womanhood. And so I really, I'm one of those guys that really appreciates what they did, but I completely agree with you. They were afraid to declare the patriarchy.

Yeah, I absolutely agree with you. I think Piper and Grudem did a lot of great work, but we're also dealing with the consequences of the fact that they weren't all and I don't know if it's them too when grudo maybe did differ with piper actually some on some issues but. What other men involved in that movement. Had various disagreements and part of part of what I think was the problem that we're feeling, I mean, so we have all the positive where churches were rejecting egalitarianism, but there was also some shift away from the earlier traditional Christian view here, and that includes things like 1 Corinthians 14. You could also mention there was definitely a shift away from wanting to embrace male leadership in the Commonwealth or the state.

They definitely moved away from that. Some guys still held it, But they weren't very vocal about it. Piper's known for this. He would say that a woman shouldn't be president of the United States. But that's controversial, right?

So you have things like that. And so coming back to where you're asking about women leading prayer and reading scripture and public worship, I think there was just some shift away from the more traditional reformed or Christian view here, which as we would call patriarch, I think that's a correct description, and it enabled some of these other things. So, I mean, some churches will call themselves, to this day, will call themselves complementarian, and they'll still allow women to preach occasionally under the argument that she's under the authority of the elders of the church. Now, I totally disagree with that, but I know that's a practice. And so the same is with women reading scripture.

So I think what's happened is there's so much pressure from the culture, feminist culture, to have women in leadership, even with, it's not just outside, it's within. Congregations feel this. And so one, I think they're tempted to have some women up front in order to appease, at least somewhat, You know, okay, we can't have women pastors or women elders. We think that's clear, but we're going to get some women involved upfront. And so I think that's just what's happening.

Like in my denomination, part of it is we also don't have, PCA doesn't have a binding directory for worship except for some chapters on the sacraments, and so there's kind of some loopholes there. And so as time has gone on, more progressively minded pastors have exposed those, And I'm sure this happened in other denominations, kind of in the same way. Zach, I heard you order those three spheres, home, church, state. I don't know anyone, excuse me, who would order them differently than that. I think everybody assumes that the home is the most fundamental, and then the church, and then the state.

So when the breakdown in how home life got viewed in terms of authority and submission, but also in terms of life focus, viewing a wife and mother's primary calling as being a keeper of the home, when that broke down, it instantly puts tremendous pressure on church life. Instantly. Because wife and mom is now boss at work. Some of them, you're talking about very smart, very capable women, and they achieve at work, and that instantly puts pressure on church life because there's an expectation that if that's not important and fundamental at home, then why in the world would it be in the church? And then once you get outside the church, then all bets are off because we're not even talking about people who embrace the Bible as a revelation of the truth of God.

So I think it all starts when a woman as a homemaker in her primary calling breaks down, then you start to see fishers instantly elsewhere. Yeah, I absolutely agree with that. And so I do think the home is fundamental. And with the breakdown of male headship in the home, you're going to get the breakdown in these other spheres. Of course, then you've got the pressure from the outside, right?

Because if we have, you know, as many women leading in the political realm as we do, it just becomes, it looks normal. And then there is more pressure on the church, well, why don't you have women leading there? And, but yeah, it's not just outside, it's also even in the church, right? We have a lot of career women and this is a very touchy subject, but I think it's an important one. And I do think the New Testament puts the emphasis on motherhood.

And so that's the angle I take on this is motherhood is extremely important, extremely valuable. And feminism has attacked and degraded the status of the mother and tied with that the housewife. And so that's all wrapped up with our dropping birth rates. And there's other causes, industrialism and things like that. But I do think we're also seeing a reaction to this.

And so there are a lot of younger Christian families that are embracing not just male headship in the home, but tied with that is also the New Testament's directing women towards domestic duties and motherhood. And, you know, if you're going to have a large family, it's hard to have both spouses working full time outside the home. That doesn't really work very well. There's a pretty strong, I think everyone would probably agree, there's a pretty strong correlation between stay at home wives, mothers, and number of children. So, dual income families tend to have fewer, especially if they're full time, tend to have fewer children.

It's just, it's not, it's very hard to take care of the kids otherwise. So anyway, all of that's a big issue, but it is wrapped up with this. And I do think we're seeing some good trends, although obviously the American birth rate is still continuing to decline. So that's not a good sign. Yeah.

Well, I mean, I think we've seen a revolution, really a family reformation that's taken place over the last 20 years. There are so many families that actually have returned to biblical order. You have men, I've never seen so many men in all my life who actually believe they are the heads of their households and they're having children and their children now are having children and a lot of them. So I'm pretty encouraged by a lot of what I see. It's not happening in the mainstream, but it's happening in churches that really embrace the sufficiency of Scripture and who embrace the regulative principle, who really understand biblical authority in all the spheres.

I remember years ago, I was preaching at a conference, there were 700 men at this conference, and I asked them, how many of you ever had your dad read the Bible to you, and probably 10 or 15 hands went up. If I do that now at one of our conferences, hundreds, hundreds of hands will go up because something has changed. And I think that you put your finger on it, it's really a recovery of historic doctrine for the church and for the family and for the state. And John Knox was right, there is a monstrous regiment of women that is rising up and being promoted when actually these women should be at home raising children. But I'm seeing a tremendous surge of this taking place all over the United States.

And I think probably your book is probably part of it. And that's why I so appreciated it. It was just, it was such a fresh voice, you know, to bring it all together and to collect up the doctrine of the reformers. So I really, really appreciate you doing that. Well, I'm happy to write it.

I hope it helps this revolution even more. I was just thinking, I mean, here's part of the issue is this stuff is very, it's all over the New Testament, you know, teachings related to the family. And if we're going to take our Bible seriously, how do we take justification by faith seriously? And then, you know, just kind of skip over the passages related to the home. And so I think that's what's going on.

Hopefully this is just a genuine embrace of the Bible and Christianity. I mean, this is what happened during the Reformation. I wrote a book a few years ago called Family Reformation of the Legacy of Sola Scriptura in Calvin's Geneva, because you did have a recovery of the Doctrine of Justification, but because of the five solas, you actually had a family reformation going on in Geneva, through Luther, through Calvin, they really revolutionized family life in Europe. So that reformation was very broad, it wasn't just stuck on justification, everything was reformed. And I think that seed has broken out in our times now.

And I think that's why during the Puritan era, there were so many books coming out on family life. That's happening right now. And your book is about that, actually, honor thy father to really recover in biblical order in the church and the family and the state. So I wonder what it's going to be like in another 10 or 20 years. So, you know, you wrote the, you mentioned this book, Masculine Christianity.

I'm mostly way through this book. It's a great book. I really encourage anybody, you know, who wants a really helpful treatise on masculinity. Zach, you did it. I really appreciate it.

Thank you. I'm glad to be able to contribute. Good deal. Hey, and thank you for joining us today. We're really, really grateful for your time.

Thanks for having me. Okay. And thank you for joining us on the Church and Family Life podcast. Hope you can be with us next time. Church and Family Life is proclaiming the sufficiency of Scripture by helping build strong families and strong churches.

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