Albert Mohler, CBMW Council Member and President of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, addressed the attendees at GodblogCon last Thursday, November 8, 2007.  This gathering for "God bloggers" issued a call for more Christians to engage culture through the new media options available on the Internet.

Mohler said that the Christian faith is tied to communication. Believers should be known as people who have something to say because language is a unique gift from God to humans and is essential to the spread of the gospel message.  We can use more than words, but never less. 

Unfortunately, sin has distorted this gift into mistruths, propaganda, slander and other snarky communications that you find in the comment sections of many blogs.  Anonymous posting and commenting is a temptation to be avoided.  "Don't write what you wouldn't want your mom to read," said Mohler.

Mohler suggested that blogging was a natural extension of other technologies, such as the codex, printing press, radio, and cassette tapes, harnessed by Christians over time to communicate gospel truths around the world.  He argued that this medium will endure because of its lower cost, greater segmentation and accessibility, rapid timing, and appeal to a younger generation.

At CBMW, we are grateful to God for the opportunity to join with other believers who are participating in this new medium of communication.  Our goal is to communicate glorious truths about God's design for men and women every day through Genderblog.  We want to help you to develop a biblically-based complementarian position and to encourage you to stand firm against errors within local churches and the drifting culture .  If you will spare three or four minutes to stop by every business day, (or better yet subscribe to the RSS feed) we will do our best to keep you abreast of how current events relate to biblical truths in the gender debate.

In recent years, foes of historic Christianity have attacked the faith at its very heart by offering a new set of answers to a fundamental question: what took place that Friday morning 2000 years ago "on a hill far away on an old rugged cross?"

Classical Christianity has answered that question according to Scripture's insistence that the Son of God on the cross was dying as a substitute for sinners, bearing their wrath, their curse, their guilt, their shame, giving them an alien righteousness and reconciling them to God.

Pierced for Our Transgressions: Rediscovering the Glory of Penal Substitution, a new book from our friends at Crossway Books by a trio of authors, Steve Jeffrey, Michael Ovey and Andrew Sach, gives an comprehensive biblical defense of the classical view of the atonement and wields the Sword of the Spirit deftly to answer contemporary critiques such as those offered by feminist theologians.

The book begins with a forward by John Piper and is divided into two parts. In the first, the authors build a biblical and theological case for penal substitution and conclude the section with a survey of the atonement in church history, stretching from Justin Martyr to 20^th century evangelicalism.

Section two is devoted to answering the critics and deals with arguments opposing penal substitution in several different realms, including objections that are biblical, cultural and theological in nature.

For example, the authors consider objections commonly made by feminist theologians such as the charge that penal substitution is tantamount to "cosmic child abuse." The book is rife with Scripture in exploding this and other objections. In answering the "cosmic child abuse" accusation alone, the authors cite eight passages.

"According to the doctrine of penal substitution, Jesus died to bring glory to himself and to save his people, as well as to glorify the father," the authors write. "By contrast, child abuse is carried out solely for the gratification of the abuser."

Other charges feminist theologians lodge against penal substitution is that it might justify parents abusing their children or that it could vindicate the abuse of women and children. Jeffrey, Ovey and Sach admit that this is a serious and regrettable charge and rightly condemn any such sinful behavior toward women and children before demonstrating the dangerous theological statement such an accusation makes.

"The troubling thing about [these types of] criticisms as they are expressed is that they make no distinction between God's holy and righteous punishment of our sin in Christ at Calvary and the vindictive and godless atrocities of men and women," they write. "We should be careful before insinuating that penal substitution makes the Father a sadist and the Son a masochist, lest we find that we have committed blasphemy in the service of rhetorical points-scoring."

Given the contemporary theological milieu, the time is ripe for another defense of the timeless and glorious doctrine penal substitution, Ovey and Sach have given believers a Scripture-saturated, God-glorifying exposition of it. Indeed, it displays the full power and beauty of the Gospel. We pray that it gains an expansive audience.

The Student Government Executive Board at Duke University last week created an Undergraduate Committee on Gender to establish gender-related policies for the campus.

While the particular issues the committee will address have not yet been identified, student government president Paul Slattery cited gender as "a persistent unit of analysis across university documents." 

This is not the first time leaders and students at Duke have considered gender issues.

In 2003, Duke published a Women's Initiative study that rightly sought to address issues of gender equality. The study examined issues such as the tenure clock for female faculty with family responsibilities, childcare for younger faculty, the various pressures facing undergraduate women including those related to the "hookup culture," among a host of others.

The new committee seeks to address issues related to both genders, a development that committee members applaud.

"The conversation should include the men on this campus," senior Gina Ireland, student government president for academic affairs told the Duke Chronicle. "These issues have predominantly been approached from the perspective of women as opposed to the perspective of gender. Duke's men are a vital component of this conversation."

While the issues and questions the committee will research remain unidentified, Slattery expects one topic to be space and living arrangements with regard to gender.

As Genderblog has reported in various recent posts, gender and living arrangements is being discussed on numerous college campuses across the United States in the context of accommodating cohabitating heterosexual couples and those students who identify themselves as "transgender."

We applaud the Duke student committee for seeking to address important issues related to gender and for its desire to examine matters that affect both male and female students at the university.

The college years are crucial times in the lives of young men and women, years in which their minds are strenuously working through worldview issues that, in many cases, sets the course for the rest of their lives. Thus, clarity on gender issues is no trifling matter, as the very existence of groups such as CBMW contend.

We would love to see Duke's committee include a Christian who holds to the biblical complementarian position, one who could graciously articulate God's good design for men and women.  Such an inclusion would partially assist the committee in meeting its stated goal of developing a comprehensive and balanced perspective on gender-related topics.  If you are a Duke student, or have a son, daughter, or friend at Duke, you are welcome to This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it as we would appreciate the opportunity to be part of this dialogue. 

Human rights lawyer Cherie Booth, in a high profile address delivered last week in London, said differences of culture or religion must not be used as a justification for denying equal rights to women.  While not identifying herself with a particular position, she issued a call that would find agreement from both complementarians and egalitarians.

"Women's rights are a universal ethic that cuts across all cultures and religions...and are imperative for our shared humanity," said Booth, who is also the wife of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Booth, a Roman Catholic, specifically addressed religious practices that promote domestic violence and laws in certain parts of the Middle East, Asia and Africa, which do not view domestic violence as a crime.  She also criticized religions that ostracize widows and treat wives as their husbands' property.

Booth agreed that women have a fundamental right to adopt religious dress if they freely choose to do so, but raised concerns over whether a woman could fully exercise equal rights if her face is covered in public.

"Women covering their heads, women dressing modestly, I have no problem with at all," she said. "I think, however, that if you get to a stage where a woman is not able to express her personality because you can't see her face, then you do start to have to ask whether this is something that is actually acknowledging the woman's right to be a person in her own right."

All Christians should applaud Booth's bold words, for the worldview that Paul called "the faith once for all delivered to the saints" should not be lumped in with other religions.

Christianity alone, with its understanding that God "created them male and female" in His own image, with its gracious inheritance of redemption in Christ, a redemption in which "there is neither male nor female" (Gal. 3:28), demands and upholds the dignity and value of every female-equal to that of males-as a vital person created imago dei- in the image of God.

As Christians, we must encourage women to use their varied and valuable gifts in the service of Christ's church; when men and women humbly and joyfully complement each other's God-given roles and gifts in the church, the world is given a fulsome and beautiful picture of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Mrs. Booth's words are in harmony with the teaching Scripture. Thus, the abuse, denigration or devaluing of woman must never be tolerated under any circumstance. And that is something upon which both complementarian and egalitarian Christians can agree.

As more new egalitarian arguments are proposed each year through dozens of book and articles, the biblical vision of manhood and womanhood, espoused by the church for nearly 2000 years and championed since 1987 by CBMW, remains the same.  Research over the last 20 years has not led to any fundamental interpretive changes of our understanding of the key gender-related passages of the Bible.

Why is this important? Pastor and noted complementarian J. Ligon Duncan once said, "Biblical authority is at stake in the debate between complementarianism and egalitarianism -- because if you can get egalitarianism from the Bible, you can get anything from the Bible."  Below are three examples from this month's news that demonstrate the progression of what can happen when churches do not cling to Biblical authority:

Tempe UCC church appoints first female pastor

First Congregational Church (United Church of Christ) in Tempe, Ariz., late last month appointed Pamela Hines as the first female senior pastor in the congregation's 100-year history.

Prior to coming to Tempe, she was an associate pastor at the United Church of Sun City. A graduate of Ashland Theological Seminary in Ohio, Hines is a former probation agent for the Michigan Department of Corrections and also worked as a probation officer for the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office in Phoenix.

"I get a lot of, ‘You're too pretty to be a pastor,'" she told The Arizona Republic. "What does that have to do with it? They expect me to look like a nun, I guess."

Fenner becomes first female president of BGCT

Joy Fenner of Garland, Texas, made history last Monday in Amarillo when she was elected as the first president of the General Baptist Convention of Texas, narrowly defeating West Texas Pastor David Lowrie 900 votes to 840.

Fenner served 14 years as a missionary in Japan alongside her husband, Charlie. For two decades, she also led the Women's Missionary Union of Texas. She was elected first vice president of the BGCT last year. The BGCT formed in 1853 in Larissa, Texas. The moderate group split with conservatives in the early 1990s, with the conservatives forming their own convention in the state.

Methodist transgender pastor will remain

The top court of the United Methodist Church has ruled that a transgender pastor may remain behind the pulpit of a Baltimore church.

At a recent meeting in San Francisco, UMC leaders agreed to allow the pastor of St. John's United Methodist Church to remain due to church policy which dictates that a "clergyperson in good standing cannot be terminated without administrative or judicial action having occurred."

The case involved 48-year-old Ann Gordon who, following a "gender-reassignment" procedure in 2006, changed her name to "Drew Phoenix," to reflect her new male gender identity.

 "The gender I was assigned at birth has never matched my own true authentic God-given gender identity, how I know myself," Phoenix/Gordon said, according to The Baltimore Sun. "Fortunately today God's gift of medical science is enabling me to bring my physical body in alignment with my true gender."

At the annual gathering of the Baltimore-Washington Conference last spring, the pastor reportedly received a standing ovation from fellow Methodists, and Phoenix/Gordon expressed hope that the situation would spark conversation about sexual identity so that younger clergy who come after him would have an easier time voicing their identity issues.