God’s Christ has conquered, and he will return to consummate his inaugurated kingdom. While we wait, the nations are raging, trying to burst his bonds and cast away his cords. It is ours to understand and embrace the interpretive perspective of the biblical authors, to see the patterns in the narrative and then to align those with the patterns of our own experience: the seed of the woman could only come if women are saved through childbearing, and the human race will only continue if men and women embrace their created sexual identities, enter into marriage, and do together what God commanded in Genesis 1:28. The serpent hates the woman and her seed, and he hates Christ and his church.

To give an anecdotal illustration: Two girls in our church, an eleven-year-old and her fourteen-year-old sister, recently met girls their own ages in a public place. Both were asked by separate little girls on different occasions: “Do you like girls or boys?” These encounters took place, not in San Francisco or New York City, but in Louisville, Kentucky.

The loss of the givenness that, for instance, little girls will like little boys represents the successful destabilization of norms, or “hegemonic discourses,” as Antonio Gramsci terms them, whereby the assumption that little girls will like little boys can no longer be made. This “blurring of boundaries” is exactly what things like Drag Queen Story Hour are designed to achieve. The drag queens, by the way, have made it all the way to Jackson, Tennessee. The offensive and perverse sexualization of the public library is meant to call into question fixed categories of male and female. As Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay explain, Queer theorists hold that “we should believe sex, gender, and sexuality to be social constructs, not because it’s necessarily true, but because it is easier to politicize them and demand change if they are social constructs than if they are biological.”^[3]

The water in which we swim is a toxic brew of Marxism, postmodern philosophy, and expressive individualism. It is an alternative religion, a false gospel, as has been observed:

Social Justice Theorists have created a new religion, a tradition of faith . . . a postmodern faith based on a dead God, which sees mysterious worldly forces in systems of power and privilege and which sanctifies victimhood.^[4]

We must take our thoughts and our tastes captive by the knowledge of Christ. Here are the strongholds that need destroying. These are the lofty opinions and arguments raised up against the knowledge of God (2 Cor. 10:4–5). We must bring taste into line with the truth. We must disciple people so that they know the difference between the worldview of Critical Theory and Christianity. The formation of a Christian worldview requires a biblical-theological understanding of who we are and where we live, and biblical theology will also equip us to notice the typological patterns in the way the serpent and his seed keep trying the same things in new ways.

Biblical theology is the attempt to understand and embrace the interpretive perspective of the biblical authors.^[5] That interpretive perspective, or worldview, has an overarching master story, from which those authors derive (1) truths, doctrines, and dogmas, (2) symbols, imagery, and patterns, and (3) values, ethics, and culture. In the Psalms and other expressions of worship (Exod. 15, the hymns in the New Testament, etc.), the liturgical expressions of worship reinforce the truths by activating symbols to build culture.

In other words, the master narrative explains where the world came from, who human beings are, what has gone wrong, and what God has done, is doing, and has promised to do to set things right in the end. Thus the master narrative inspires faith in God and provokes those who believe to respond to him with thanks and praise. The master narrative also generates symbolism and imagery that summarize, interpret, and portend what has been and will be. In the narrative we find recurring patterns whose significance escalates with each new repetition.^[6] And the explanation given in the Bible for why God began the project, how he has orchestrated it and to what telos, is that God seeks to set the fullness of his glory on display. He does this as he makes known his character as a righteous God who upholds his own word when he judges, setting the backdrop and context for the simultaneous display of his character as a merciful God when he forgives and saves the repentant who believe. That is to say, the center of biblical theology is the glory of God in salvation through judgment.^[7]

I rehearse this definition of biblical theology and its central claim to be grounded in God’s revelation of his own character because I want to set the biblical worldview in contrast with what seems to be the predominant worldview that informs the rejection of the Bible’s teaching on how human beings have been created male and female with specified responsibilities. Paul speaks of those who “depart from the faith” to embrace alternative worldviews that inform alternative ways of living as “devoting themselves to deceitful spirits and teachings of demons, through the insincerity of liars whose consciences are seared” (1 Tim. 4:1–2). Note that this comment follows hard on the heels of his statement that he does “not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man” (2:12), shortly after which he explains that he writes so that Timothy might “know how one ought to behave in the household of God, which is the church of the living God, a pillar and buttress of the truth” (3:15).

Carl Trueman explains how the Marxist worldview works:

Take, for example, Christianity’s teaching, taught from myriad pulpits over the years, that husbands and wives should be faithful to each other, should not drink too much, and should work hard and honestly for their masters or employers. A Christian might see these as imperatives because they are the will of God and the means by which human beings, made in his image, can flourish.

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