Masculine Christianity

Scripture teaches in Genesis that when God created man in His image, He created us male and female. The implication is that God’s character spans the full spectrum of masculine and feminine qualities. This attribute is also revealed in the person of Jesus, born as a male, but manifesting both masculinity and femininity in His actions. When exhibiting feminine qualities, Jesus was more nurturing and relationship-oriented than any woman. When exhibiting masculinity, Jesus was more forceful and results-oriented than any man.

Unfortunately, the modern American church, along with the majority of its leaders, has rejected masculinity in favor of an effeminate Christianity. Too many (though by no means all) of today’s pastors, priests, deacons and elders shrink timidly from the challenge of the world, more interested in decorating the interior of their church buildings than in doing cultural and political battle with the enemies of God. Ravening lions rage unchecked throughout the land, while Church leaders hold potlucks and retreats.

Where is the masculine Jesus of the Bible in the life of today’s church? The Jesus who threw down the tables of the moneychangers and drove them out of the temple with a whip? The Jesus who faced down and tamed the Gerasene demoniac? The Jesus who, to their faces, excoriated the cultural and political leaders of the day as a "brood of vipers," and "whitewashed sepulchers full of dead men’s bones"? This masculine Jesus has been ejected from the American church. In His place is a false and emasculated Christ, as submissive and fearful of controversy as the men who now lead His flock. Brethren, this is not an attack on femininity. If anything, the church should be commended for its appreciation for and fulfillment of the feminine aspects of its role. Such vital relationship-centered ministries as feeding the hungry, clothing the naked and soothing the broken-hearted are prospering today. These ministries are very much a reflection of the feminine side of Christ’s complete personality.

Instead, this is vigorous rebuke to both women and men within the church who reject the masculine side of Christianity and have thus abandoned those outside our "church families" to fend for themselves against the forces of evil in the world. This is a rebuke to male church leaders, who channel their masculine competitiveness into sporting contests in church gymnasiums instead of contending for influence over the community outside the church walls. This is a rebuke to those pastors’ wives who keep their shepherd husbands safely close to the flock when they should be sometimes out hunting the bears and wolves.

Masculine Christianity fights to champion what is right and to defeat evil. It is the applied force for good against which the gates of hell cannot prevail. It is an embodiment of the spirit of conquest in which the Great Commission was given. It is the unyielding determination to prevail against all odds and at any cost to achieve a righteous goal -- even unto death on a cross. Masculine Christianity is the engine of revival: prophetic, expansionist, uncompromising.

In Biblical history, the greatest heroes of the faith exemplified masculine Christianity. Abraham did not sit idly by when his brother Lot was captured by the four kings. He armed his servants and went out to rescue him by force. Moses faced down Pharoah in a series of aggressive confrontations. David fearlessly challenged and defeated Goliath and then cut off his head as a trophy of battle. God blessed these righteous men and backed their righteous deeds with His power.

Josiah is honored in scripture as one of the most righteous of all the kings for banishing the "perverted persons" from the land and destroying the foreign idols. Joshua and Caleb were the only men of their generation allowed to enter the promised land because, out of all the Israelite spies sent into Canaan, they alone called for immediate invasion of Canaan when the others backed away out of fear. John the Baptist, who boldly and publicly rebuked Herod for his sexual immorality was praised by Jesus Himself. Jesus stated that among men there was none greater than John.
Extra-Biblical history is also replete with examples of masculine Christianity. The period of the American Revolution is one in which deeply religious men took up the sword to overthrow an unrighteous oppressor. The great missionary and reform movements are additional examples of masculine Christianity at work.

The defining characteristic of each of these examples is the conquest of evil by God’s people -- mostly men. Masculinity is by no means the exclusive domain of men, but it naturally has greater appeal to men in the same way that feminine ministries of the church appeal more to women. Indeed, this explains why the majority of church members today are women or married couples in which the husband attends church at the request of the wife. Where are the men of this generation? Though some are in church, they are significantly outnumbered by women, and they tend to be the least active members of the congregation. Is it any wonder in the light of the de-emphasis of masculinity by the church?

The church and this nation cry out for a revival of masculine Christianity, which is to say that we church leaders need to stop being such, for lack of a better word, sissies when it comes to social and political issues. We need to spend as much time confronting perpetrators as we do comforting victims. We need to do less fretting, and more fighting for righteousness. For every motherly, feminine ministry of the church such as a Crisis Pregnancy Center or ex-gay support group, we need a battle-hardened, take-it-to-the-enemy masculine ministry like Operation Rescue (questions of civil disobedience aside). For every God-hating radical in government, academia and media we need a bold, no-nonsense, truth-telling Christian counterpart: trained, equipped and endorsed by the local church.

These are not easy words to hear for those in authority in the church today, but I offer no apology for saying them, because this is the hard truth that all of us must confront. We are on the brink of utter defeat by our cultural adversaries and the church is only now beginning to wake up to the consequences of our past passivity. We are rapidly nearing a point in time when even a strong call to action, were it to be heard from every one of America’s pulpits, would be insufficient to resolve our nation’s moral crisis. There comes a point of no return in every declining culture.

I imagine us Christians as reclusive householders in an Old Testament walled city. A few of us have stepped out onto the street, confused and dazed, to find our city overrun by enemy soldiers with more coming over the walls. Buildings are burning, the watchmen are falling back under an incredible onslaught, and most of our warriors are still sleeping soundly. We have reached that split-second of decision in which we must choose whether to rush forward into battle on the chance that we can defeat the invaders, or to surrender and look on in resignation as our children are marched off into slavery in a foreign land.

Why The Democrats Are The Way They Are -- Phyllis Schlafly Nov. ... Women are victims of an oppressive patriarchal society; all men are guilty both individually and collectively; and men who abuse women are not anomalous but typical.

Domestic Tranquility: A Brief Against Feminism by F. Carolyn ... The principal targets of feminist fire in the on-going "gender wars" are not men but traditional wives and mothers, says a lawyer-turned-housewife in a powerful critique of contemporary feminism.

Family First - Book Review of "Domestic Tranquility".With the exception of Betty Friedan, who found taking care of her family mindless, the great feminist revolutionaries and theoreticians were, by choice, childless. And either by their own admission (Gloria Steinem) or the revelations in recent biographies (Simone de Beauvoir), we now know they were textbook examples of emotional damage whose relations with men were often so pathetic as to make a healthy reader cringe.

Books in Review: Blessed Be Bachofen’s ideas influenced not only Friedrich Engels, who incorporated the defeat of the matriarchy into Marxism, but Carl Jung and later, Joseph Campbell, who viewed the myth of the powerful earth or moon goddess as a universal human archetype.

Amazon.com: Books: The Church Impotent: The Feminization of ... Reviewer: Ruth Sprague (see more about me) from Seattle, WA USA

The church needs both genders, because without the female, men tend toward nihilism and without the male, the women tend toward pantheism and panentheism, a view I can agree with. Witness the goddess revolution, mostly by women, who embrace a New Age kind of belief that all people will be ok, with universal salvation and no judgment to answer to.

Reviewer: A reader from Tukwila, WA

The long march through the institutions has resulted in a feminization of all the Christian orders. A simple reading of Genesis will remind these feminists that a woman is meant to be submissive to her husband as part of the penalty for misbehavior in the Garden of Eden. Feminists call this historical, and want to right it, but in doing so deny the timeless nature of God. In doing this, they deny God (in many Protestant faiths it is much worse than here stated in that to even refer to the Deity with a masculine pronoun means that one can be dismissed from the seminary).

What feminism has done is arrogate to itself the right to determine who and what God is, or in other words, deify their own will. Their will is thus no longer subject to God, but is rather the determiner of God, the maker of God, and thus there is no belief at all in God within feminism, but only in their own will.

Feminism is thus self-idolatry.

This book lays out the situation within Catholicism. Within all the mainline Protestant orders the situation is even worse.

Feminist women are completely berserk, using the churches to justify their self-righteousness, their demand not only to be equal to but superior to men, to murder unwanted children, to have equal pay without equal productivity, and to self-deification. Already there are Protestant churches in which I've heard feminist pastors dare to invoke the gnostic goddess Sophia in the church of Our Lord.

Such pastors have no right to call themselves Christian. This is not to say that they aren't religious, but they are practicing the religion that St. Paul threw over in Ephesus -- the worship of Diana -- or in other words -- witchcraft. That it is happening all over the western world is apparent. Podles' text is not nearly violent enough. He is a gentleman, where Christ was a tiger, in throwing imposters out of the church.

The Decline of a Nation

Introduction

Our problem is that we don't really learn from history. George Santayana said that "those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it." The philosopher Hegel said, "What experience and history teach us is this: that people and government never have learned anything from history or acted on principles deduced from it." Or as Winston Churchill said, "The one thing we have learned from history is that we don't learn from history."

The Decline of the Family

Nations most often fall from within, and this fall is usually due to a decline in the moral and spiritual values in the family. As families go, so goes a nation.

This has been the main premise of thinkers from British historian J. D. Unwin to Russian sociologist Pitirim Sorokin who have studied civilizations that have collapsed. In his book Our Dance Has Turned to Death, Carl Wilson identifies the common pattern of family decline in ancient Greece and the Roman Empire. Notice how these seven stages parallel what is happening in our nation today. In the first stage, men ceased to lead their families in worship. Spiritual and moral development became secondary. Their view of God became naturalistic, mathematical, and mechanical.

In the second stage, men selfishly neglected care of their wives and children to pursue material wealth, political and military power, and cultural development. Material values began to dominate thought, and the man began to exalt his own role as an individual. The third stage involved a change in men's sexual values. Men who were preoccupied with business or war either neglected their wives sexually or became involved with lower-class women or with homosexuality. Ultimately, a double standard of morality developed. The fourth stage affected women. The role of women at home and with children lost value and status. Women were neglected and their roles devalued. Soon they revolted to gain access to material wealth and also freedom for sex outside marriage. Women also began to minimize having sex relations to conceive children, and the emphasis became sex for pleasure. Marriage laws were changed to make divorce easy.

In the fifth stage, husbands and wives competed against each other for money, home leadership, and the affection of their children. This resulted in hostility and frustration and possible homosexuality in the children. Many marriages ended in separation and divorce.

Many children were unwanted, aborted, abandoned, molested, and undisciplined. The more undisciplined children became, the more social pressure there was not to have children. The breakdown of the home produced anarchy.

In the sixth stage, selfish individualism grew and carried over into society, fragmenting it into smaller and smaller group loyalties. The nation was thus weakened by internal conflict. The decrease in the birthrate produced an older population that had less ability to defend itself and less will to do so, making the nation more vulnerable to its enemies.

Finally, unbelief in God became more complete, parental authority diminished, and ethical and moral principles disappeared, affecting the economy and government. Thus, by internal weakness and fragmentation the societies came apart. There was no way to save them except by a dictator who arose from within or by barbarians who invaded from without.

The Decline of Values

There are many factors in the decline of a nation. Certainly a major one is the breakdown of the family. But another potent but less perceptible force is the power of ideas.

False ideas are bringing about the decline of western culture. Carl F. H. Henry, in his book Twilight of a Great Civilization, says:

There is a new barbarism. This barbarism has embraced a new pagan mentality . . . not simply rejecting the legacy of the West, but embracing a new pagan mentality where there is no fixed truth.

Today we live in a world where biblical absolutes are ignored, and unless we return to these biblical truths, our nation will continue to decline.

To understand how we have arrived at this appalling situation, we need to go back a century and look at the influence of five intellectual leaders who still profoundly affect the modern world. The first person is Charles Darwin (1809-1882). In 1859 he published The Origin of Species and later published The Descent of Man.

The second person is Karl Marx (1818-1883). He and Friedrich Engels published the Communist Manifesto around 1850, and Marx devoted his life to writing about the demise of capitalism and coming of communism.

The third person is Julius Wellhausen (1844-1918). Although he may not be as well known as the other two men mentioned, his influence was just as profound. He was a German Bible scholar whose theory on the dating of the Pentateuch completely transformed Old Testament studies.

The fourth person is Sigmund Freud (1856-1939). He merely took the logical implications of what Darwin was doing in biology and applied them to what today is known as psychology and psychiatry. Freud argued that humans are basically autonomous and therefore do not need to know God. Instead, we need to know and understand ourselves since our problems stem from those secret things that have evolved in our lives from our past.

A fifth person is John Dewey (1859-1952). He is the founder of modern education and published his first work, The School and Society, in 1899. John Dewey was also one of the co-signers of the Humanist Manifesto in 1933.

Spiritual Decline

n fact, Romans 1 shows the decline of a civilization from a societal perspective. Looking at the Hellenistic world of his time, he reflects on the progression of sin in a nation.

The first stage is when people turn from God to idolatry. Although God has revealed Himself in nature to all men so that they are without excuse, they nevertheless worship the creation instead of the Creator. This is idolatry. In the past, this took the form of actual idol worship. In our day, it takes the form of the worship of money or the worship of self. In either case, it is idolatry. A further example of this is a general lack of thankfulness. Although they have been prospered by God, they are ungrateful. And when they are no longer looking to God for wisdom and guidance, they become vain and futile and empty in their imaginations. They no longer honor God, so their foolish hearts become darkened. In professing to be wise, they have become fools.

The second stage is when men and women exchange their natural use of sex for unnatural uses. Here the Apostle Paul says those four sobering words, "God gave them over." In a society where lust- driven sensuality and sexual perversion dominate, God gives them over to their degrading passions and unnatural desires. The third stage is anarchy. Once a society has rejected God's revelation, it is on its own. Moral and social anarchy is the natural result. At this point God has given the sinners over to a depraved mind and so they do things which are not proper. This results in a society which is without understanding,untrustworthy, unloving, and unmerciful.

The final stage is judgment. God's judgment rightly falls upon those who practice idolatry and immorality. Certainly an eternal judgment awaits those who are guilty, but a social judgment occurs when God gives a nation over to its sinful practices.

Notice that this progression is not unique to the Hellenistic world the Apostle Paul was living in. The progression from idolatry to sexual perversion to anarchy to judgment is found throughout history.

All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing. - Edmund Burke

SODOMY : Santorum Crisis Exposes Republican Weakness or is that MALE WEAKNESS.

Amazon.com: Books: The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism ...

The author of the provocative bestseller Who Stole Feminism? returns with an equally eye-opening follow-up. "It's a bad time to be a boy in America," writes Christina Hoff Sommers. Boys are less likely than girls to go to college or do their homework. They're more likely to cheat on tests, wind up in detention, or drop out of school. Yet it's "the myth of the fragile girl," according to Sommers, that has received the lion's share of attention recently, in hot-selling books like Mary Pipher's Reviving Ophelia. When boys are discussed at all, it's in the context of how to modify their antisocial behavior--i.e., how to make them more like girls.

This book tells the story of how it has become fashionable to attribute pathology to millions of healthy male children. It is a story of how we are turning against boys and forgetting a simple truth: that the energy, competitiveness, and corporal daring of normal, decent males is responsible for much of what is right in the world. No one denies that boys' aggressive tendencies must be checked and channeled in constructive ways. Boys need discipline, respect, and moral guidance. Boys need love and tolerant understanding. They do not need to be pathologized.

Capitalism Magazine: The War Against Boys by Thomas SowellOf nearly 20 million prescriptions written last year for drugs to treat "attention deficit hyperactivity disorder," most were for children and most of those children were boys. This is part of a growing tendency to treat boyhood as a pathological condition that requires a new three R's -- repression, re-education and Ritalin.

Some schools have gone to such extremes as banning recess, since boys tend to be boisterous at recess. Competitive sports are likewise banned or made non-competitive, sometimes by banning winning and losing. An aptly titled book, "The War Against Boys" by Christina Hoff Sommers, catalogs the amazing array of things that schools do to keep boys from being boys.

Some of this is being pushed by propaganda from radical feminists who want boys to be like girls. Their dogmas declare that the behavior usually seen in boys is a result of society's indoctrinating them with a male role stereotype. The answer? "We need to raise boys like we raise girls," according to Gloria Steinem. Gloria Allred is more specific, "we need to socialize boys at an earlier age, perhaps to be playing with dolls." Some schools have followed such advice, even to the point of encouraging boys to wear dresses.

Thanks Remedy,

Another scholarly post—as always!

I've got some additional resources for this subject.

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How did the American Catholic priesthood go from an image of wise, strong men like Spencer Tracy in Boys Town and Bing Crosby in Going My Way, to an image of "pedophile priests"?

In Goodbye, Good Men, investigative reporter Michael S. Rose provides the shocking answer – an answer the mainstream news media has missed.

He uncovers how radical liberalism, like that found on many college campuses, has infiltrated the Catholic Church and tried to overthrow her traditional beliefs, standards, and disciplines – especially Church teachings on sexuality. In bringing the "sexual revolution" into the Church, liberals have welcomed – even preferred – radicalized active homosexuals to orthodox seminarians in the name of "diversity" and "tolerance." That "tolerance" has now been exposed as a toleration of criminal acts.

Here, in stunning detail, is the story behind the headlines – the story that made those very headlines possible. As Dr. Alice von Hildebrand says, Goodbye, Good Men "holds the key to a phenomenon which, to many, is also an enigma: Why are so many seminaries empty? Michael S. Rose has the courage – a courage that many Church leaders lack – of giving us the fearful but uncontestable answer: because vice has penetrated into many of them, and those who do not condone vice are excluded."

A riveting work of extraordinary reporting, Michael S. Rose shows how the very institutions charged with inculcating Catholic theology and discipline have come to prefer gay priests to straight ones, pop psychology to religious devotion, and Playboy to the pope.

Praise for Goodbye, Good Men

"Goodbye, Good Men provides additional evidence that the problems behind the headlines run deep and wide. Recognizing that and acting on that recognition will, please God, lead to a Church renewed in fidelity to what she teaches."

--Rev. Richard John Neuhaus Philadelphia Inquirer

"Anyone, Catholic or non-Catholic, who wants to understand the causes of the current scandals in the church couldn't find a better explanation than that contained within the pages of Goodbye! Good Men."

-- Phil Brennan NewsMax.Com

"Mr. Rose is a courageous man: he is willing to say publicly that the emperor has no clothes—that most of our [Catholic] seminaries, from the point of view of doctrine, morals, piety, and simple good manners, are a disaster."

--Rev. Kenneth Baker, S.J. Editor, Homiletic & Pastoral Review

"American Catholics have been left reeling by recent clergy sex scandals, and have wondered how things could have gotten so bad. Goodbye! Good Men has the shocking answers. Rose presents evidence that the destruction of Catholicism in America has primarily been an inside job carried out by unchaste gay priests, feminist nuns and theological dissenters in control of the institutional Church - and he names names. Goodbye! Good Men could not have come at a better time for the American Church which is in desperate need of authentic reform. At last, someone has written the blockbuster book orthodox Catholics have been hoping and praying for."

-- Rod Dreher National Review

"Surely providence arranged the timing of Michael S. Rose’s newest salvo against modernism. The Church sex-abuse scandal that has recently stunned American Catholics is given a wrenching twist in Goodbye, Good Men."

--Mary Jo Anderson Crisis Magazine

"As an expose in the best sense of the word with meticulous documentation, Michael Rose's bombshell should be required reading for every bishop committed to the much-needed renewal of our Church."

--Dr. Joseph Nicolosi Inside the Vatican

"Few books in the past thirty years have shed more light on the continuing crisis in the Catholic Church. In particular, anyone who wishes to understand the pedophilia scandals, and how they could have occured, must read this book."

-- James Hitchcock Professor of History, St. Louis University

"American Catholics everywhere are reeling from appalling revelations about priestly pedophilia, and asking themselves, 'How could this possibly have happened?' Readers of Goodbye! Good Men, staggered by Rose's revelations about seminary life, will answer, 'Now I see. Here's how.' This book is not to be missed by anyone who cares about the Catholic faith."

-- Donna Steichen author, Ungodly Rage and Prodigal Daughters

Michael Rose has done it again. Having just dismantled the assumptions of recent church architecture, he now examines the shifting sands on which these complex edifices have risen. Goodbye! Good Men investigates the training of priests over the past decades and shows how a shortage has been artificially created by keeping good candidates out and admitting effete and unorthodox ones. The scandals of homosexual priests and bishops now testing the faith and loyalty of American Catholics have their origin in the situation Rose describes in this book. I would recommend it to all bishops, but any bishop unaware of what Rose has written is guilty of culpable ignorance.

-- Ralph McInerny Professor of Philosophy,University of Notre Dame and author, What Went Wrong With Vatican II?

"This book holds the key to a phenomenon which, to many, is also an enigma: Why are so many seminaries empty? Michael S. Rose has the courage -- a courage that many Church leaders lack -- of giving us the fearful but uncontestable answer: because vice has penetrated into many of them, and those who do not condone vice are excluded. True vocations are disqualified."

-- Alice von Hildebrand, Ph.D. author, Soul of a Lion

"Goodbye! Good Men may be dismissed by some. But for those of us who were there -- for those of us who were in seminaries in the 1970's and the 1980's, this book has a sure and certain ring of truth to it. Anyone who is appalled by the current scandals in the priesthood, anyone who has been saddened for years by the visible weakening of the vigor of the Catholic Church in our country will find in Michael S. Rose's careful prose an important part of the answer to the question, 'How can these things be?' The tale Rose tells in his book is unbelievable -- but it is true. He has performed a great service to the Church in the writing."

--Rev. Joseph F. Wilson Diocese of Brooklyn

"Michael S. Rose has put his finger on the dark secret behind the vocations crisis. It is 'artificial and contrived,' and created by people within the walls who, actually discourage viable candidates from being ordained to the priesthood."

-- E. Michael Jones, Ph.D author, Libido Dominandi and The Slaughter of Cities

MICHAEL S. ROSE is author of two previous books: Ugly As Sin and The Renovation Manipulation. During the past seven years, while editor of St. Catherine Review, he has emerged as one of the freshest new voices in the Catholic world. As an investigative reporter and editorialist he has illuminated a number of highly controversial issues in contemporary Catholicism, most notably the scandal surrounding unpopular remodeling of older Catholic churches and cathedrals across the U.S. His articles, editorials, and essays have appeared in venues such as Wall Street Journal, Catholic World Report, New Oxford Review, Homiletic & Pastoral Review, Envoy, Adoremus Bulletin, National Catholic Register, The Wanderer, Lay Witness, A.D. 2000, Challenge, This Rock, and Catholic Dossier. Educated at Brown University and the University of Cincinnati, he is married with four children, and lives in Cincinnati.

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