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The Death of a Feminist
Radical theologian Mary Daly died January
3, 2010, at age 81, ending one of the most interest-
ing and tragic careers in contemporary theology.
Known for her exaggerated outspokenness, Daly
took theological feminism to what she believed was
its rightful and logical conclusion-the absolute
rejection of Christianity and all theistic concep-
tions of God.
In the first phase of her career she was known
as a Roman Catholic, and she taught at Boston
College for many years. Her tenure there could only
be described as controversial. At the beginning her
teaching career was marked by a fight over tenure.
At the end she left Boston College after refusing to
allow male students in some of her classes in femi-
nist thought.
Her critique of the Roman Catholic Church as
a bastion of patriarchy, expressed in her 1968 book,
The Church and the Second Sex, was extended to the
entire Christian tradition. She rejected Christian-
ity's focus on a monotheistic deity and what she
attacked as its intrinsic patriarchy. She asserted
that Christianity's focus on Jesus Christ was just
another dimension of its patriarchy-a Savior in a
male body.
As Margaret Elizabeth Köstenberger explains,
Daly's "complete rejection of Scripture" on the basis
of its "irremediable patriarchal bias" took her far
outside the Christian faith. While other feminists
called for the adoption of female or gender-neutral
language for God, Daly attacked those efforts as
half-measures that fail to take the phallocentricity
of theism seriously.
Her famous dictum, "if the God is male, then
the male is God," stood at the heart of her radi-
cal revision of religion. She accused Christianity
of "gynocide" against women and suggested that
all monotheistic religion-and Christianity in par-
ticular-is "phallocentric."
She referred to feminists as "pirates in a
phallocratic society" and preached her version of
feminist liberation, describing herself as a "radical
lesbian feminist." She rejected the biblical notion
of sin and called for a celebration of lust and the
breaking of all sexual rules. She attacked hetero-
sexuality as inherently patriarchal and championed
lesbianism as a means of the liberation of women
from the "phallocratic" power system of the culture.
In her later years, Mary Daly identified herself
as a "post-Christian-a term that was, if anything,
an understatement.
In the end, Mary Daly will be remembered
for the radical lesbian feminist that she was. She
must be given credit for her honesty in accusing
theological liberals of lacking the courage of their
convictions. As she saw it, they were clinging to
the furniture of Christianity long after rejecting
its central beliefs. She saw the entire structure as
hopelessly patriarchal and called for a complete
break with Christianity and theism.
In the largest sense, she was undoubtedly right
in arguing that the logic of radical feminism is dia-
metrically opposed to the truth claims of Christi-
anity. She was, as she claimed, taking ideological
feminism to its logical conclusion.
Interestingly, Mary Daly also serves as a
reminder that radicals are seldom so comprehen-
sively radical as they consider themselves. Daly was
criticized by transgender and transsexual activ-
ists for her failure to see transsexuals as anything
other than "death-loving Frankenstein monsters."
Womanist author Audre Lorde complained that
Daly, though a radical feminist, did not recognize
the role of race in patriarchy. Even the most radi-
cal thinkers among us apparently have a hard time
keeping up.
According to The New York Times, Mary Daly
died of "declining health," not "gynocide." Her
intellectual work lives on among the radical femi-
nists, but her influence extends far beyond those
who would identify themselves as "post-Christian."
Many of today's liberal denominations and semi-
naries have absorbed and accepted her basic cri-
tique of Christianity, but lack her boldness and
intellectual honesty.
In one of her later books, Daly said, "There
are and will be those who think I have gone over-
board.... Let them be assured that this assessment
is correct, probably beyond their wildest imagina-
tion." The story of Mary Daly is, by any Christian
measure, a tragedy. And, we must add, a tragedy
with lessons we dare not miss.
Drunk: The New Female Tenderness?
So I'm watching the latest romantic comedy
when I sense it coming. "Oh, no, here comes the
drunk scene," I groan aloud.
Everyone else in the room looks at me, ques-
tion marks popping up over their heads.
"Watch," I say, gesturing toward the TV. "This
is the turning point in their relationship. She gets
drunk. He has to care for her. She has to stop being
her pugnacious self and dial down her obnoxious-
meter. She finally receives some protection and
leadership from him, and his ability to see her in
a tender way changes their relationship dynamic."
Ten seconds later, the script plays out in the
predicted manner. And I want to pull my hair out
of my head! Why is this the required plot point in
99 out of a 100 romantic comedies?!
My answer? Because Hollywood has no other
device to help young women receive the care and
leadership of men-other than to have them get
falling-down drunk. Until that point, every female
rom-com character is outspoken, in-your-face,
quirky, and reeking of insecurities that are propped
up by a brittle facade of self-confidence. She spars
with her love interest because she has not been
taught to make room for him in her life, to live
inter-dependently, rather than merely indepen-
dently. And that independence is a sham, anyway,
as the drunk scene inevitably reveals. She needs the
help of others, but she is too proud to admit it. And
that's when his care comes along. He tames her,
so to speak, in her drunkenness. She stops fighting
him and learns to trust him, but only after she has
been humbled by being out of control herself.
Once the drunk scene is out of the way, the
scriptwriters now have a reason for the male and
female lead characters to work together, to trust
each other, and to have some mutual care for each
other. It is sad that women are being told over and
over again that (1) this kind of trust and tenderness
can only come about by losing self-control, and (2)
that alcohol is a female problem (I never see the
men getting drunk in these movies anymore).
My recommendation is that when you watch
these movies, point out this contradiction to those
watching with you-especially if they are young
men and women. Our culture doesn't have a frame-
work for masculine benevolence anymore, which is
sad. It seems the only way to showcase that quality
is for someone to be so obviously helpless, as in a
drunk scene, and then it's okay for a man to exert
protective qualities. As for young women, help
them to understand that feminine tenderness and
receptivity is a good thing, that men today are still
looking for that quality, and that you don't have to
get drunk to find it.
Women Fighting, and Men Doing Little
About It
First, I came across a video of a recent fight
between women in a mall food court. A massive
crowd watches the awful scene before two men-
including basketball coaches Tim Floyd and Henry
Bibby-gingerly break it up. Second, I watched in
horror as college women's soccer players battered
one another, with one young woman outright
attacking her opponents (the footage is gruesome,
I warn you).
In previous days, you might have seen Laila
Ali battering another woman into submission.
There is a common thread, I think, between both
informal and formal female brutality. As femininity
suffers in our professedly "gender-neutral" society,
women adopt the habits of men, including their
propensity for violence and aggression. The two
fights listed above show examples of women acting
in shocking and traditionally masculine ways. In
neither instance is this development positive.
In a way that most people, and that includes
many Christians, don't think about, contact-ori-
ented sports teach and encourage women to engage
in typically masculine behavior. As researchers, fol-
lowing the scent of common sense, have found,
women's bodies cannot sustain the same level of
contact as those of men (see Michael Sokolove's
Warrior Girls for much more on this point).
The Western tradition shows that people have
for centuries recognized the body differences and
role distinctions between men and women. Women
have rarely fought on battlefields, for example. Now,
our modern instincts teach us to be biased against
that point (simply because it's the overwhelmingly
historic position), but it stands nonetheless.
Thanks to Title IX and other factors, women
today regularly engage in contact sports-basketball,
soccer, football, wrestling, and more. These endeav-
ors encourage women to be less feminine and more
masculine, a mindset that is bleeding over into the
broader culture. As women attack one another,
groveling on the ground, punching one another in
the face, men do nothing. Or, maybe after a while,
they wade into the conflict, hesitatingly breaking it
up, fearful of being branded "macho."
We're in a bad situation today. Men are weak,
hesitant, unsure of themselves, depressed, drag-
ging through life, dropping out of school, abdicat-
ing their authority, letting their children run wild,
barely raising their voice above a whisper. Mean-
while, women run themselves ragged, get into
fights, struggle to both provide for the family and
run the home, and grow frustrated with the shadow-
men they everywhere encounter.
Christian men, we need to wake up. We need
to show the world what manhood looks like. We
need to reclaim ourselves. We need to lift our
voices, get off the couch, take a strong and stern
lead in the discipline of our children, work our-
selves hard to provide for our families, teach our
girls to treasure their God-given femininity, teach
our boys what it means to be robustly masculine,
serve in the church, and generally live for the Lord.
We need to be those who deploy our manhood for
the good of women.
Femininity is a gentle, fragile thing. It is a pre-
cious thing. It must be guarded and preserved. It is
inherent to a woman. You can't put a girl into all of
the same activities as a boy and expect that she'll
still possess her full femininity. If you do so, you will
compromise aspects of her God-given womanhood.
Women do not need to be weak or willowy.
With all the efforts to get around 1 Tim 2:11-
15 today, the discussion provided in George Mon-
tague's First and Second Timothy, Titus, the inaugural
volume in the Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scrip-
ture (Baker, 2008), is refreshing. After acknowledg-
ing various efforts to understand the background
of the text, he argues that the text plainly forbids
authoritative public teaching of men by women
and that women are forbidden to hold positions
of authority over men. He then writes, "If this is
the correct way to understand this difficult passage,
it means that leadership and teaching authority in
the Church is not modeled after secular society but
on Christian marriage-and this is within the con-
text of the broader sacramental symbolism of the
Church as the bride of Christ" (68).
This is such a key point often missing even in
churches today. Montague goes on to state, "We are
in the realm of symbols, which the contemporary
mind sometimes finds difficult to understand. But
for the Church, the marital relationship between
Christ and the Church is not mere metaphor; it is
essential to the structuring of the Church" (70).
This truth goes beyond the gender debate-
e.g., our difficulty with appreciating symbols, the
marital metaphor impacting how we structure
church. The church today needs more reflection on
these important issues as well.
Moving to 1 Tim 2:15 on the reference to
women being saved through childbearing, Mon-
tague states,
In our day, when women have assumed
more public roles both in society and
Church, the idea of "salvation by moth-
erhood" may seem antiquated. Yet per-
haps, after the advancement of women
in professional fields formerly domi-
nated by men, it is appropriate to recall
that the role of mothers is crucial for
the healthy psychosocial development of
children and is more than a profession.
It is a vocation divinely sanctioned and
divinely blessed (71).
This is a needed word today, affirming the
incredible value of the divinely ordained vocation
of motherhood.
Some Gender issues in Recent Children's Books
Stories of heroism, exploration and sac-
rifice that will inspire boys to be coura-
geous, honorable and open to adventure.
TALES OF BRAVE AND SELFLESS
DEEDS used to be part of every boy's
education. We grew up sharing stories
with our fathers, uncles and grandfa-
thers of how great men had lived their
lives, met their challenges, reached their
goals and faced their deaths. Becoming a
young man was about comradeship and
standing by your friends whatever the
circumstances. And it meant that some-
times it was more important to DIE A
HERO THAN LIVE A COWARD'S
LIFE.
Some of the Amazon reviews complain
about the focus on warfare and death. This is to be
expected. We do not claim that these are the only
aspects of manliness, but they are an aspect. And
boys are well served by seeing the examples of self-
less heroism of the past. I was delighted to find this
book for my boys, and they are enjoying it.
Interaction with Philip Payne
Late last year I enjoyed a friendly exchange
with egalitarian scholar Dr. Philip Payne, author
of the recent book Man and Woman, One in Christ:
An Exegetical and Theological Study of Paul's Letters
(Zondervan, 2009). In particular, Dr. Payne wished
to discuss my brief note about his remarks at a
Wheaton Theology forum ("Odds & Ends" JBMW
13.2 [2008], 5-7) and about Andreas Köstenberg-
er's rejoinder to Dr. Payne's 2008 NTS article on
1 Tim 2:12 ("The Syntax of 1 Timothy 2:12: A
Rejoinder to Philip B. Payne" JBMW 14.2 [2009],
37-40). Though our differences over the interpreta-
tion of 1 Tim 2:12 remain, Dr. Payne wishes me to
pass along his clarification of his remarks from the
Wheaton Theology conference. He writes,
As I have re-read your transcription of
my unprepared remarks presented off the
cuff, which I did not know were being
recorded, I realize that I misstated my
intent. I wish to issue a sincere apol-
ogy for use of words I should not have
used. In particular, I wish to retract the
word "lies" since it can be used to entail
the intent to deceive regarding what one
knows to be false, and I do not know
people's hearts as our Lord does, and
also since it can imply a habit. Similarly,
I wish to retract "in order to convince,"
"commitment to truth," and "scholars
have been willing to say, ‘The end justifies
the means. I can twist the data in order
to make it say what I think it means'"
since each of these attributes motives
rather than identifying objectively iden-
tifiable statements.
For readers who wish to follow-up on the
conversation between Köstenberger and Payne on
the syntax of 1 Tim 2:12, both articles are available
for free online. Köstenberger's article can be down-
loaded at the JBMW website (http://www.cbmw.
org/journal). The original PDF of Dr. Payne's New
Testament Studies article may be downloaded free
from www.pbpayne.com. Just click on "Publica-
tions," then "Articles," then "1 Tim 2.12 and the
Use of oude to Combine Two Elements to Express
a Single Idea."
Radical theologian Mary Daly died January
3, 2010, at age 81, ending one of the most interest-
ing and tragic careers in contemporary theology.
Known for her exaggerated outspokenness, Daly
took theological feminism to what she believed was
its rightful and logical conclusion-the absolute
rejection of Christianity and all theistic concep-
tions of God.
In the first phase of her career she was known
as a Roman Catholic, and she taught at Boston
College for many years. Her tenure there could only
be described as controversial. At the beginning her
teaching career was marked by a fight over tenure.
At the end she left Boston College after refusing to
allow male students in some of her classes in femi-
nist thought.
Her critique of the Roman Catholic Church as
a bastion of patriarchy, expressed in her 1968 book,
The Church and the Second Sex, was extended to the
entire Christian tradition. She rejected Christian-
ity's focus on a monotheistic deity and what she
attacked as its intrinsic patriarchy. She asserted
that Christianity's focus on Jesus Christ was just
another dimension of its patriarchy-a Savior in a
male body.
As Margaret Elizabeth Köstenberger explains,
Daly's "complete rejection of Scripture" on the basis
of its "irremediable patriarchal bias" took her far
outside the Christian faith. While other feminists
called for the adoption of female or gender-neutral
language for God, Daly attacked those efforts as
half-measures that fail to take the phallocentricity
of theism seriously.
Her famous dictum, "if the God is male, then
the male is God," stood at the heart of her radi-
cal revision of religion. She accused Christianity
of "gynocide" against women and suggested that
all monotheistic religion-and Christianity in par-
ticular-is "phallocentric."
She referred to feminists as "pirates in a
phallocratic society" and preached her version of
feminist liberation, describing herself as a "radical
lesbian feminist." She rejected the biblical notion
of sin and called for a celebration of lust and the
breaking of all sexual rules. She attacked hetero-
sexuality as inherently patriarchal and championed
lesbianism as a means of the liberation of women
from the "phallocratic" power system of the culture.
In her later years, Mary Daly identified herself
as a "post-Christian-a term that was, if anything,
an understatement.
In the end, Mary Daly will be remembered
for the radical lesbian feminist that she was. She
must be given credit for her honesty in accusing
theological liberals of lacking the courage of their
convictions. As she saw it, they were clinging to
the furniture of Christianity long after rejecting
its central beliefs. She saw the entire structure as
hopelessly patriarchal and called for a complete
break with Christianity and theism.
In the largest sense, she was undoubtedly right
in arguing that the logic of radical feminism is dia-
metrically opposed to the truth claims of Christi-
anity. She was, as she claimed, taking ideological
feminism to its logical conclusion.
Interestingly, Mary Daly also serves as a
reminder that radicals are seldom so comprehen-
sively radical as they consider themselves. Daly was
criticized by transgender and transsexual activ-
ists for her failure to see transsexuals as anything
other than "death-loving Frankenstein monsters."
Womanist author Audre Lorde complained that
Daly, though a radical feminist, did not recognize
the role of race in patriarchy. Even the most radi-
cal thinkers among us apparently have a hard time
keeping up.
According to The New York Times, Mary Daly
died of "declining health," not "gynocide." Her
intellectual work lives on among the radical femi-
nists, but her influence extends far beyond those
who would identify themselves as "post-Christian."
Many of today's liberal denominations and semi-
naries have absorbed and accepted her basic cri-
tique of Christianity, but lack her boldness and
intellectual honesty.
In one of her later books, Daly said, "There
are and will be those who think I have gone over-
board.... Let them be assured that this assessment
is correct, probably beyond their wildest imagina-
tion." The story of Mary Daly is, by any Christian
measure, a tragedy. And, we must add, a tragedy
with lessons we dare not miss.
- R. Albert Mohler
Drunk: The New Female Tenderness?
So I'm watching the latest romantic comedy
when I sense it coming. "Oh, no, here comes the
drunk scene," I groan aloud.
Everyone else in the room looks at me, ques-
tion marks popping up over their heads.
"Watch," I say, gesturing toward the TV. "This
is the turning point in their relationship. She gets
drunk. He has to care for her. She has to stop being
her pugnacious self and dial down her obnoxious-
meter. She finally receives some protection and
leadership from him, and his ability to see her in
a tender way changes their relationship dynamic."
Ten seconds later, the script plays out in the
predicted manner. And I want to pull my hair out
of my head! Why is this the required plot point in
99 out of a 100 romantic comedies?!
My answer? Because Hollywood has no other
device to help young women receive the care and
leadership of men-other than to have them get
falling-down drunk. Until that point, every female
rom-com character is outspoken, in-your-face,
quirky, and reeking of insecurities that are propped
up by a brittle facade of self-confidence. She spars
with her love interest because she has not been
taught to make room for him in her life, to live
inter-dependently, rather than merely indepen-
dently. And that independence is a sham, anyway,
as the drunk scene inevitably reveals. She needs the
help of others, but she is too proud to admit it. And
that's when his care comes along. He tames her,
so to speak, in her drunkenness. She stops fighting
him and learns to trust him, but only after she has
been humbled by being out of control herself.
Once the drunk scene is out of the way, the
scriptwriters now have a reason for the male and
female lead characters to work together, to trust
each other, and to have some mutual care for each
other. It is sad that women are being told over and
over again that (1) this kind of trust and tenderness
can only come about by losing self-control, and (2)
that alcohol is a female problem (I never see the
men getting drunk in these movies anymore).
My recommendation is that when you watch
these movies, point out this contradiction to those
watching with you-especially if they are young
men and women. Our culture doesn't have a frame-
work for masculine benevolence anymore, which is
sad. It seems the only way to showcase that quality
is for someone to be so obviously helpless, as in a
drunk scene, and then it's okay for a man to exert
protective qualities. As for young women, help
them to understand that feminine tenderness and
receptivity is a good thing, that men today are still
looking for that quality, and that you don't have to
get drunk to find it.
- Carolyn McCulley
About It
I have been shocked of late to find two vid-
eos showing women enacting brutality against one
another. Femininity is a contested sphere nowa-
days, both literally and figuratively.
eos showing women enacting brutality against one
another. Femininity is a contested sphere nowa-
days, both literally and figuratively.
First, I came across a video of a recent fight
between women in a mall food court. A massive
crowd watches the awful scene before two men-
including basketball coaches Tim Floyd and Henry
Bibby-gingerly break it up. Second, I watched in
horror as college women's soccer players battered
one another, with one young woman outright
attacking her opponents (the footage is gruesome,
I warn you).
In previous days, you might have seen Laila
Ali battering another woman into submission.
There is a common thread, I think, between both
informal and formal female brutality. As femininity
suffers in our professedly "gender-neutral" society,
women adopt the habits of men, including their
propensity for violence and aggression. The two
fights listed above show examples of women acting
in shocking and traditionally masculine ways. In
neither instance is this development positive.
In a way that most people, and that includes
many Christians, don't think about, contact-ori-
ented sports teach and encourage women to engage
in typically masculine behavior. As researchers, fol-
lowing the scent of common sense, have found,
women's bodies cannot sustain the same level of
contact as those of men (see Michael Sokolove's
Warrior Girls for much more on this point).
The Western tradition shows that people have
for centuries recognized the body differences and
role distinctions between men and women. Women
have rarely fought on battlefields, for example. Now,
our modern instincts teach us to be biased against
that point (simply because it's the overwhelmingly
historic position), but it stands nonetheless.
Thanks to Title IX and other factors, women
today regularly engage in contact sports-basketball,
soccer, football, wrestling, and more. These endeav-
ors encourage women to be less feminine and more
masculine, a mindset that is bleeding over into the
broader culture. As women attack one another,
groveling on the ground, punching one another in
the face, men do nothing. Or, maybe after a while,
they wade into the conflict, hesitatingly breaking it
up, fearful of being branded "macho."
We're in a bad situation today. Men are weak,
hesitant, unsure of themselves, depressed, drag-
ging through life, dropping out of school, abdicat-
ing their authority, letting their children run wild,
barely raising their voice above a whisper. Mean-
while, women run themselves ragged, get into
fights, struggle to both provide for the family and
run the home, and grow frustrated with the shadow-
men they everywhere encounter.
Christian men, we need to wake up. We need
to show the world what manhood looks like. We
need to reclaim ourselves. We need to lift our
voices, get off the couch, take a strong and stern
lead in the discipline of our children, work our-
selves hard to provide for our families, teach our
girls to treasure their God-given femininity, teach
our boys what it means to be robustly masculine,
serve in the church, and generally live for the Lord.
We need to be those who deploy our manhood for
the good of women.
Femininity is a gentle, fragile thing. It is a pre-
cious thing. It must be guarded and preserved. It is
inherent to a woman. You can't put a girl into all of
the same activities as a boy and expect that she'll
still possess her full femininity. If you do so, you will
compromise aspects of her God-given womanhood.
Women do not need to be weak or willowy.
But neither should they be vicious and manly. We
are teaching our daughters the wrong lessons today.
One that we must consider is sports and general
decorum. For the glory of God, girls should look
and act differently than boys. For the glory of God,
parents should teach girls to treasure and preserve
their womanhood.
New Catholic Commentary on 1 Timothy
are teaching our daughters the wrong lessons today.
One that we must consider is sports and general
decorum. For the glory of God, girls should look
and act differently than boys. For the glory of God,
parents should teach girls to treasure and preserve
their womanhood.
- Owen Strachan
With all the efforts to get around 1 Tim 2:11-
15 today, the discussion provided in George Mon-
tague's First and Second Timothy, Titus, the inaugural
volume in the Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scrip-
ture (Baker, 2008), is refreshing. After acknowledg-
ing various efforts to understand the background
of the text, he argues that the text plainly forbids
authoritative public teaching of men by women
and that women are forbidden to hold positions
of authority over men. He then writes, "If this is
the correct way to understand this difficult passage,
it means that leadership and teaching authority in
the Church is not modeled after secular society but
on Christian marriage-and this is within the con-
text of the broader sacramental symbolism of the
Church as the bride of Christ" (68).
This is such a key point often missing even in
churches today. Montague goes on to state, "We are
in the realm of symbols, which the contemporary
mind sometimes finds difficult to understand. But
for the Church, the marital relationship between
Christ and the Church is not mere metaphor; it is
essential to the structuring of the Church" (70).
This truth goes beyond the gender debate-
e.g., our difficulty with appreciating symbols, the
marital metaphor impacting how we structure
church. The church today needs more reflection on
these important issues as well.
Moving to 1 Tim 2:15 on the reference to
women being saved through childbearing, Mon-
tague states,
In our day, when women have assumed
more public roles both in society and
Church, the idea of "salvation by moth-
erhood" may seem antiquated. Yet per-
haps, after the advancement of women
in professional fields formerly domi-
nated by men, it is appropriate to recall
that the role of mothers is crucial for
the healthy psychosocial development of
children and is more than a profession.
It is a vocation divinely sanctioned and
divinely blessed (71).
This is a needed word today, affirming the
incredible value of the divinely ordained vocation
of motherhood.
- Ray Van Neste
Typically you can know what to expect from
certain publishers when it comes to addressing
gender issues in children's books. In recent months,
however, I found a positive surprise in yet another
good book for boys, which has come across from
the U.K. (a previous one was The Dangerous Book
for Boys). Amazing Tales for Making Men Out of Boys
by Neil Oliver (William Morrow, 2009; previously
published in the U.K. by Michael Joseph, 2008) is a
collection of the sorts of stories that used to always
be passed down to boys. Included are D-day and
Omaha Beach, the Charge of the Light Brigade,
the Alamo, Shackleton's Journey, Scott in the Ant-
arctic, John Paul Jones, and Thermopylae and other
stories. These lines from the book's back cover cap-
ture the essence of the book well:
certain publishers when it comes to addressing
gender issues in children's books. In recent months,
however, I found a positive surprise in yet another
good book for boys, which has come across from
the U.K. (a previous one was The Dangerous Book
for Boys). Amazing Tales for Making Men Out of Boys
by Neil Oliver (William Morrow, 2009; previously
published in the U.K. by Michael Joseph, 2008) is a
collection of the sorts of stories that used to always
be passed down to boys. Included are D-day and
Omaha Beach, the Charge of the Light Brigade,
the Alamo, Shackleton's Journey, Scott in the Ant-
arctic, John Paul Jones, and Thermopylae and other
stories. These lines from the book's back cover cap-
ture the essence of the book well:
Stories of heroism, exploration and sac-
rifice that will inspire boys to be coura-
geous, honorable and open to adventure.
TALES OF BRAVE AND SELFLESS
DEEDS used to be part of every boy's
education. We grew up sharing stories
with our fathers, uncles and grandfa-
thers of how great men had lived their
lives, met their challenges, reached their
goals and faced their deaths. Becoming a
young man was about comradeship and
standing by your friends whatever the
circumstances. And it meant that some-
times it was more important to DIE A
HERO THAN LIVE A COWARD'S
LIFE.
Some of the Amazon reviews complain
about the focus on warfare and death. This is to be
expected. We do not claim that these are the only
aspects of manliness, but they are an aspect. And
boys are well served by seeing the examples of self-
less heroism of the past. I was delighted to find this
book for my boys, and they are enjoying it.
- Ray Van Neste
Interaction with Philip Payne
Late last year I enjoyed a friendly exchange
with egalitarian scholar Dr. Philip Payne, author
of the recent book Man and Woman, One in Christ:
An Exegetical and Theological Study of Paul's Letters
(Zondervan, 2009). In particular, Dr. Payne wished
to discuss my brief note about his remarks at a
Wheaton Theology forum ("Odds & Ends" JBMW
13.2 [2008], 5-7) and about Andreas Köstenberg-
er's rejoinder to Dr. Payne's 2008 NTS article on
1 Tim 2:12 ("The Syntax of 1 Timothy 2:12: A
Rejoinder to Philip B. Payne" JBMW 14.2 [2009],
37-40). Though our differences over the interpreta-
tion of 1 Tim 2:12 remain, Dr. Payne wishes me to
pass along his clarification of his remarks from the
Wheaton Theology conference. He writes,
As I have re-read your transcription of
my unprepared remarks presented off the
cuff, which I did not know were being
recorded, I realize that I misstated my
intent. I wish to issue a sincere apol-
ogy for use of words I should not have
used. In particular, I wish to retract the
word "lies" since it can be used to entail
the intent to deceive regarding what one
knows to be false, and I do not know
people's hearts as our Lord does, and
also since it can imply a habit. Similarly,
I wish to retract "in order to convince,"
"commitment to truth," and "scholars
have been willing to say, ‘The end justifies
the means. I can twist the data in order
to make it say what I think it means'"
since each of these attributes motives
rather than identifying objectively iden-
tifiable statements.
For readers who wish to follow-up on the
conversation between Köstenberger and Payne on
the syntax of 1 Tim 2:12, both articles are available
for free online. Köstenberger's article can be down-
loaded at the JBMW website (http://www.cbmw.
org/journal). The original PDF of Dr. Payne's New
Testament Studies article may be downloaded free
from www.pbpayne.com. Just click on "Publica-
tions," then "Articles," then "1 Tim 2.12 and the
Use of oude to Combine Two Elements to Express
a Single Idea."
- Denny Burk
