Paul David Tripp recently visited Louisville for a conference on biblical counseling. Gender Blog was fortunate to have an opportunity to sit down with him and discuss issues of gender and culture. Following is the third part of a three-part interview with him. Read Part 1 and Part 2.

Paul Tripp is the president of Paul Tripp Ministries, a nonprofit organization, whose mission statement is "Connecting the transforming power of Jesus Christ to everyday life." He is on the pastoral staff at Tenth Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia, Pa., where he preaches on Sunday evenings and leads the ministry to Center City. 

 Gender Blog: Let's change gears a bit and discuss something that is intimately related to what you just said, to put some legs and feet on it. You and your wife Luella raised four children. As the kids were growing up what did a typical day in the Tripp home look like in terms of family worship and interacting about the things of God with your children?

Paul David Tripp: We always planned our mornings so that the last thing we would do before we went out the door was to ask one anther about their day and pray for one another. So, it was a reminder of God's presence, but it was very specific to what was going on that day and it was wonderful if, for nothing else, to have that moment of love and sanity before we left the home. It was mandatory and we would plan our morning so we had that five or ten minutes before going out the door. Our family worship tended to happen around the supper table. It was our pattern that we always read our children adult books. This has changed now, but back then there wasn't much in the way of children's Bibles with good content. What I would do is read ahead and dumb down the language in places where I needed to because I didn't think it would help my children if there were words that they didn't understand. So, I would find similar words that were faithful to the content that they could understand and check out the illustrations, because sometimes I would insert another illustration that would be more at their level. We wanted them to be exposed to rich, content-filled things because we wanted them to learn to self-consciously think from a biblical perspective. And we were always very willing for our children to question or disagree because we thought that was a part of learning and internalizing.

 Gender Blog: What would a Gospel-centered home tend to look like?

Paul David Tripp: I think Gospel-centered parenting has this gorgeous law-grace balance. On one hand, I really do esteem that the Law is a schoolmaster to bring us to Christ. There is a way in which my sense of need is built as God's standard is held before me and I begin to break under the burden of the standard, I begin to feel how much I fall short of the standard and that builds in me a sense of need. Now, if that's all I have, I will break my children. So, that has to be balanced with the rescuing, forgiving, empowering, delivering message of God's grace. Now, if I don't have the law, all I have is a sense of His grace and that results in a sort of easy-believism and a sort of lazy Christianity that doesn't take sin and struggle seriously. It's that harmony of those two things that need to be expressed. I don't think that law will that which ultimately rescues my children, because if law does that, then Jesus would not have had to come. I also think you only get excited about grace if you have a sense of need. It's the harmony of those things that I want to structure the way I interact with my children.

Paul David Tripp recently visited Louisville for a conference on biblical counseling. Gender Blog was fortunate to have an opportunity to sit down with him and discuss issues of gender and culture. Following is the second part of a three-part interview with him. Read Part 1.

Paul Tripp is the president of Paul Tripp Ministries, a nonprofit organization, whose mission statement is "Connecting the transforming power of Jesus Christ to everyday life." He is on the pastoral staff at Tenth Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia, Pa., where he preaches on Sunday evenings and leads the ministry to Center City. 

Gender Blog: How specifically do parents combat gender confusion? Do we insulate our children completely from the world?

Paul David Tripp: You ought to want to protect your child from that, but you will never successfully insulate your child. It's nearly impossible for a family living in Western culture not to breathe some of its air. When I think of isolating my children, I tend to think of it in one of two ways: it's sort of like the medieval monastery, which didn't work, or it feels like what Tom Ridge told us to do when there was some concern about a biological attack on America—‘Get a lot of plastic and duct tape.' I was thinking, ‘Are you serious, this is going to keep us safe?' Well, I think there is a whole lot of plastic and duct tape going on in Christian families. I think a better protection is just getting the topic on the table. Be honest with your children. Be honest early and don't stop being honest. Parents need to build relationships with their children where their children know it's safe here for me to talk about all my confusion and for me to ask embarrassing questions. I'll never be mocked. I'll never be made fun of. My parents will never respond in fear and end up grounding me or punishing me. This is a place of safety and grace and patience and we are going to talk our way through all of the confusion and all of the attack and all of the distortions and delusions that are out there. So that means you can't have just one talk about sexuality. You have to open that topic and keep it open and build relationships with their children where they feel safe and comfortable in both talking and listening.

Gender Blog: Is it ever too young to start teaching about gender?

Paul David Tripp: No. I think we would all say the greatest guardian for our children against falsehood is to enculturate them with truth. So, a boy who is taught God's design for a man, a girl who is taught God's design for a woman, will be taught honestly about the dangers and distortions that get all mixed up and blended and will also be taught about the dangers on the far end of a man being a chauvinisic arrogant blowhard—that's not godly—or a girl being so prissy and delicate that she becomes a diva that nobody can touch, which are distortions too. You have to do that in a way that is wholesome and balanced, but wow, we've got to do that. My son is 33 years old, but I would feel a much bigger burden to do that today than I did when he was coming up. That's how much things have changed. We did that, but it's a huge issue now.

Paul David Tripp recently visited Louisville for a conference on biblical counseling. Gender Blog was fortunate to have an opportunity to sit down with him and discuss issues of gender and culture. Following is the first part of a three-part interview with him.

Paul Tripp is the president of Paul Tripp Ministries, a nonprofit organization, whose mission statement is "Connecting the transforming power of Jesus Christ to everyday life." He is on the pastoral staff at Tenth Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia, Pa., where he preaches on Sunday evenings and leads the ministry to Center City. 

 Gender Blog: As you travel and speak across the evangelical world, are you seeing more men and women embracing God's good design for the home and the church as it has been historically understood by the church?

Paul David Tripp: My observation of this present generation of young families that are in the church is that they are more serious and more informed than my generation was. When I am doing parenting conferences, I am talking very strongly about boys needing their dad and girls needing their mom to teach them what a godly man looks like and what a godly woman looks like. I see young couples who are eating that up. On the other hand, I think that our 10-year-olds to 18-year-olds are absolutely under siege. I think androgynous Western culture is everywhere. I think homosexuality is normalized to the junior high schooler/high schooler in ways that are shocking. We are facing a tidal wave of gender-confused young people in the church. 

Gender Blog: Where do you see culture pushing in on biblical truth and causing such gender confusion?

Paul David Tripp: When you have girls who sort of like intense relationships with their peers and guys who like to have ‘best buds' in their lives and you have a culture that sexualizes all of that, it creates all kinds of confusion. They see on television young girls kissing one another and those kinds of things—what is a natural desire for community gets interpreted as being something sexual—and then it begins to blur the boundaries of what a woman is and what a man is, and there is the whole genre of music and fashion that caters to that; it's vexing.

Gender Blog: Where are some specific places you see this happening? 

Paul David Tripp: There is a college in the suburbs of Philadelphia, as part of their week of orientation, have a couple of days of gender clarification. Basically, they ask a set of questions and put students through a set of exercises that, unless you are very strong and very aware, you will leave absolutely confused as to what it's like to be a man and what it's like to be a woman and whether you are a homosexual or straight. It is a crafted attempt to blur all the boundaries. When you add to that the whole normalization of "transgender," homosexuality, I just think that our kids are under siege. I can't help but think that this is fairly typical in our colleges and universities.

Gender Blog: Given the present cultural realities, must parents be intentional in teaching on gender from a young age?

Paul David Tripp: When I talk about sexuality in that way, every time I do a parenting weekend, I say to parents, ‘It's no longer just an issue of sexuality or gender, it's a fundamental cultural redefinition of human identity.' It's that profound and we do not have the ability to be silent because the world is not silent. We have to speak in ways that are clarifying to protect our children against that confusion... I have a letter that was handed to me from a man who is in ministry in Philadelphia that tries to minister to the homosexual community. He spoke at Tenth (Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia) on Sunday, and it was a letter written by a 15-year-old girl who had attended Tenth her whole life and who was in massive confusion. She was very offended by what he had said and could not believe that God would ever treat these issues and treat these people in this way. Her parents have no idea, because she has matriculated in that wider culture. So, while her parents are being silent—had one quasi-embarrassed talk about the subject—the world is not being silent.

[The following excerpt is from Elisabeth Elliot's chapter in Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, entitled "The Essence of Femininity: A Personal Perspective." It can be accessed in full here.]

The feminist theology of Christians (I cannot call it "Christian feminist theology") is a Procrustean bed on which doctrine and the plain facts of human nature and history, not to mention the Bible itself, are arbitrarily stretched or chopped off to fit. Why, I ask, does feminist theology start with the answers? One who spoke on "A Biblical Approach to Feminism" defined her task (a formidable one, I should say!) as the attempt to interpret the Bible in a fashion favorable to the cause of equality. The "interpretation" called for amounts to a thorough revision of the doctrines of creation, man, Trinity, and the inspiration of Scripture, and a reconstruction of religious history, with the intent of purging each of these of what is called a patriarchal conspiracy against women. Why must feminists substitute for the glorious hierarchical vision of blessedness a ramshackle and incoherent ideal that flattens all human beings to a single level-a faceless, colorless, sexless wasteland where rule and submission are regarded as a curse, where the roles of men and women are treated like machine parts that are interchangeable, replaceable, and adjustable, and where fulfillment is a matter of pure politics, things like equality and rights?

Gender Blog continues with the latest installment of our "Unchanging Truth" series. These articles, while not as current, are still beneficial, and they demonstrate the consistent application of biblical truth by complementarian scholars, authors, and pastors through the years.

The following is an excerpt from an interview with John Piper entitled "Courage in the Pastorate", first published in 2000.

JBMW: How did you come to your convictions about biblical manhood and womanhood?

JP: None of us know exactly how we have come to think the way we do because the seeds of our convictions are sown long before we know anything about it. Most important was the fact that I grew up in a Bible-believing home, where my parents said that the Bible is true and to be obeyed, regardless of what the culture says. So I've never felt a strong impulse to change my views just because they are at variance with the culture-at-large. I don't care about being up-to-date in Kansas City. I care about honoring the Scriptures. So when I realized that the Scriptures teach a complementary view of manhood and womanhood, I accepted that teaching, even though it went against the dominant viewpoint of the culture. Further, I viewed the Scripture's teaching as a good thing, because God is good.

However, I would be naïve if I didn't say that the home where I grew up had a significant impact on me, though not exactly in the way some people might think. My dad was away from home two-thirds of the year in evangelistic meetings, so my mother was everything to me. She was my financial adviser, the one who taught me how to make pancakes, the one who taught me how to clean my room, and the one who made sure I got out and played football and basketball with the guys. And yet when my daddy came home, he was clearly the leader. He took the initiative. He was the one who said, "We're going to worship this morning," or, "Let's have devotions, Mommy you read this, Johnny you read that." When we went to a restaurant, he drove the car, and he paid the bill. He was taking all those intangible initiatives, and I was absorbing his words and actions and the fact that my mother loved it-omnicompetent though she was. I had the privilege of seeing my mother run the household by herself most of the time and yet also see her gladly submit to Dad's leadership when he was there. So the idea that his leadership signified her incompetence never occurred to me.

When I graduated from high school, as I recall, I was nineteenth in my class, of 300 or so, and the eighteen who were ahead of me were women, except for my friend Kenny. When I went to Wheaton, it was women who were always ruining the grade curve because they were so bright. I grew up surrounded by tremendously intelligent, articulate, competent women, most of whom were very happy that men were strong, godly leaders in their homes and in the church. So this background strengthened me for the days of controversy when I had to decide for myself: "Am I going to go with the cultural flow of egalitarian feminism, or am I going to stick with the plain meaning of Scripture?" And the more I studied the issue, the less compelling the arguments on the egalitarian side seemed. So I remain a believer in a very happy, hope-filled, creative, complementarian view.

One more point. The essential thing about God, as I see Him in the Scriptures, is that He is sovereign and good. This means that when He tells us to do things, they're good for us. So I'm going to trust His Word and believe that for the man to be the head of the woman in the home and for men to be the godly, spiritual leaders in the church is really good for women, good for men, good for kids, good for evangelism, good for world missions, and good for every kind of ministry that the church ought to do.

You can read the rest of this interview here.