These brothers have reacted reprehensibly to recent books by sisters in Christ who have the courage to raise questions about the biblical integrity of particular conceptions of manhood and womanhood popular and popularized among conservative evangelicals in general and the Reformed community specifically.  And yes, it takes courage to raise such questions publicly.

I hope to engage this matter further in a subsequent post when time allows, but I’ve been deeply disheartened of late by the online antics of some Christian men, including some office bearers in the church.  These brothers have reacted reprehensibly to recent books by sisters in Christ who have the courage to raise questions about the biblical integrity of particular conceptions of manhood and womanhood popular and popularized among conservative evangelicals in general and the Reformed community specifically.  And yes, it takes courage to raise such questions publicly.  Look no further for evidence than the condescending and sometimes just crass comments that have erupted against them via social media, sometimes from men who haven’t even read their books, and from some published critiques.  I’m thinking of responses to books by Aimee Byrd and more recently, Rachel Green Miller.

Not content to let these works stand on their own to receive the scholarly scrutiny to which any published work is subject, some of our brothers have subjected these sisters – who operate firmly within a Reformed and even Westminsterian framework, no less! – to ad hominem attacks ad nauseam.  The insults range from passive-aggressive in the more formal critiques to just plain aggressive in the comments sections of social media pages. Sometimes the latter features sheer, blatant mockery of women in general and of these women in particular. Misogynist bloviations meet bawdy applause among men who are ostensibly championing real manhood over and against the “liberal” “garbage” anthropology which they slanderously claim these new books posit. (If the irony of their behavior is lost on them or anyone else, it suggests all the more forcefully our need for such books). It’s gotten so bad that Pastor Todd Pruitt, host along with Aimee Byrd and Carl Trueman of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals’ “Mortification of Spin” podcast, recently threw together some pertinent thoughts on the subject at the MOS blog site.

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