If God gives us any voice at all in our culture, it will be from the cruciform platform of ordinary acts of faithfulness, from dishes and diapers to street evangelism and closing on Sunday. To be heard, we must say that to which no one will listen. Like Daniel, we must bury our seeds of influence in the ground to see any cultural fruit. We must die to the world to win it. 

Once, after hearing a very gracious, gentle, nuanced pastor preach a particularly bold sermon warning against false teachers, I commented to him, “It’s good to see a vertebrate in the pulpit.” To my surprise, he replied, not skipping a beat, “I call it having evantesticles.” (He also knew that puns are my love language.)

This virtue—whatever you want to call it—is in short supply. And while it’s tempting to use a more polite term for it than the one above, to do so would be to prove my own point. We lack Christian men in positions of influence doing what only men, parts and all, can do. This is manifest whether one looks to the home, the pulpit, the county board, or the Twitters.

I am not saying we need more abusive, faux-masculine, lumbersexual, macho alpha males going around grunting, starting controversies, demeaning women, and just plain being jerks. But in our flight from this empty shell of masculinity we’ve run into the arms of effeminacy. We find ourselves in an age where a pastor is free to persist unrepentantly in pornography, gluttony, or neglect of family, so long as he is “authentic” about his shortcomings, while to speak a slightly sharp rebuke in a online debate over doctrinal issues of life and death can result in exile from the Christian cool table. Mimicking Carnegie more than Christ, we care more about making friends and influencing people than fearing God and keeping his commandments (Ecc. 12:13). What we need, in evangelicalism and beyond, are men with chests. Says Lewis:

“In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.” (The Abolition of Man)

Well, speaking of geldings, one biblical example of this type of godly masculinity is the prophet Daniel—a true man’s man who, ironically, might have been a eunuch.

Dare to Be a Daniel

“In the third year of the reign of Jehoiakim king of Judah, Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon came to Jerusalem and besieged it. And the Lord gave Jehoiakim king of Judah into his hand, with some of the vessels of the house of God. And he brought them to the land of Shinar, to the house of his god, and placed the vessels in the treasury of his god. Then the king commanded Ashpenaz, his chief eunuch, to bring some of the people of Israel, both of the royal family and of the nobility, youths without blemish, of good appearance and skillful in all wisdom, endowed with knowledge, understanding learning, and competent to stand in the king’s palace, and to teach them the literature and language of the Chaldeans.

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