Andrew Walker’s important new book has just released today. It is titled God and the Transgender Debate, and it is a must-read. That is in fact what I wrote in my endorsement for the publisher: The post-Christian West says that we are what we think we are, not what our bodies reveal us to be and this is one of the chief challenges to Christianity today. That is why God and the Transgender Debate is so important. It is a countercultural, compassionate, must-read book.—Denny Burk, President, the Council for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood The transgender challenge is at the leading edge of Christianity’s interface with secular culture. If you want…
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A Resolution on Opposing Gender Transitions
One of the most astonishing developments of late modernity has been the mainstreaming of transgenderism. In retrospect, the path to our current moment is clear enough (see Carl Trueman’s Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self). Nevertheless, I don’t think I’ll ever get used to seeing grown men in earnest behaving like a cartoonish caricature of an adolescent girl. And yet examples of this kind of thing are proliferating, and anyone refusing to go along with this risks all manner of social and perhaps even professional ostracism and recriminations. It is like Americans have gotten a really bad fever with no indication in sight that the fever will ever break.…
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So calling God “Mother” is no big deal after all?
This week has seen the appearance of two new reviews of Amy Peeler’s controversial book Women and the Gender of God. Both reviews are written by theology professors from Moody Bible Institute—the first by Marcus Johnson in Themelios and the second by John Clark in Touchstone. I reviewed Peeler’s book myself last January, so I read both of these new reviews with a keen interest to see if they saw what I did—that Peeler’s book contains some significant Trinitarian and Christological problems. It turns out that both of them did. That is why I was surprised to see a bit of a meltdown online concerning Johnson’s review in Themelios. No…
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Practical Advice for Christian Parents of a Child Identifying as Transgender
Over the last decade, there has been about a 4,000 percent increase in children declaring they are transgender. Even more alarming is the fact that the majority of this increase has been occurring among adolescent young women. Abigail Shrier has chronicled this story in her watershed book Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters (Regnery, 2020). In my work for CBMW, I am traveling and speaking about this issue all the time. In my own experience, I can confirm that what Shrier writes about in Irreversible Damage is happening across the country, even among young women in evangelical churches. For that reason, parents and pastors often ask me for…
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Book Review: “The Genesis of Gender” by Abigail Favale
I just finished one of the most riveting and timely books that I have ever read. The author is George Fox University professor Abigail Favale, and the book is The Genesis of Gender: A Christian Theory (Ignatius, 2022). Even though I differ with the author on several important points (more on that below), her overall thesis is unassailable in my view. On some of the biggest and most contested issues of our day, this book is a breath of fresh air—indeed, of fresh, clean, Christian air blowing from the ancient past. In the Genesis of Gender, Favale exposes the philosophical and spiritual bankruptcy of what she calls the “gender paradigm” (p.…
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Wisdom from God FOR us or TO us?
The 72nd annual “meeting” of the Evangelical Theological Society begins on Monday. I put “meeting” in scare-quotes because our in-person gathering in Providence, Rhode Island has become another COVID casualty. Nevertheless, the event organizers have put on a fantastic virtual version of our meeting that in some ways may facilitate more scholarly interaction. I’ve already listened to 8 papers including both sections of the “Evangelicals and Gender” group. I never would have gotten to hear so many papers in the usual format. So this is good. Presenters have already uploaded videos of ourselves to the event website, and anyone who is registered for the meeting can watch the presentations. I…
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God’s Calling on Men to Be Protectors
“Complementarianism is being taken to task as feeding abuse. I think that is dead wrong.” – @JohnPiper at #T4G20 pic.twitter.com/3ReI1Xp3kF — T4G (@T4Gorg) April 16, 2020 Last night, John Piper participated in a panel discussion about complementarianism, and today T4G released an excerpt (see above). I really appreciate the point that Piper is making here. He is pointing out that men have a special obligation to protect and to care for women. This obligation, by divine design, is written into their nature. Someone may object: “But doesn’t God’s image in every human being establish abuse as an offense against God? Why does gender even matter here?” Yes, God’s image does…
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God’s Glory Revealed in Christ: Essays in Honor of Dr. Tom Schreiner
Jim Hamilton, Brian Vickers, and I recently co-edited a Festschrift for our Doktorvater Tom Schreiner. The book is titled God’s Glory Revealed in Christ: Essays in Honor of Tom Schreiner (B&H, 2019). The week before Thanksgiving, the publisher was kind enough to host a banquet in San Diego where we were able to present this volume formally to Tom. It was a special moment for all of us who love Tom and who have been touched by his friendship, scholarship, and ministry. I am really grateful for all of those who agreed to contribute. It really is an all-star line-up including D. A. Carson, John Piper, Albert Mohler, Simon Gathercole,…
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Fact-checking the paper of record on its fabulist claims about transgenderism
I have marveled this week at the level of distortion in straight news reporting about transgenderism. It all started with a report in The New York Times about the Trump administration’s plans to reverse an Obama-era directive. The distortion starts in the very first sentence of the report: The Trump administration is considering narrowly defining gender as a biological, immutable condition determined by genitalia at birth, the most drastic move yet in a governmentwide effort to roll back recognition and protections of transgender people under federal civil rights law. Let’s just fact-check this one sentence. How many claims are in error here? All of them.
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What does it mean that “God is the head of Christ”?
Paul’s teaching about head coverings in 1 Corinthians 11:2-16 stands out as some of the most difficult material in all of Paul’s writings. This is not only because there is disagreement over what the head covering means, but also because commentators debate what the covering even is. Even though there are some obscure points in this passage, I would argue that the main point of the passage is clear enough. That main point is Paul’s teaching about headship. Verse 3 reads as follows: 1 Corinthians 11:3 “But I want you to understand that the head of every man is Christ, the head of a wife is her husband, and the…
