VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

Ben Kreps:

Hey everyone and welcome to the Mark Prater podcast where our aim is to connect our global family of Sovereign Grace Churches with our executive director. Mark, those who've been reading or watching the podcast consistently are aware that you recently highlighted a journal called eikon by CBMW, that is a journal dedicated to facilitating conversations about gender, sexuality, marriage, and so forth. But you wanted to hit that again, because you want to impress on us the importance of how we think about these things and you want to equip us to be able to function as best we can as pastors in these areas. So tell us about why you want to go back to talking about eikon.

Mark Prater:

Yeah, thank you Ben. I do want to talk about it again because I do want to emphasize the valuable resource eikon with the subtitle Journal for Biblical Anthropology, and I really want to highlight the spring 2023 edition because as I've been reading through it, I think this is a very important resource that every Sovereign Grace pastor should be reading. I would also encourage members of our churches to be reading. The spring edition is dedicated to responding to articles written or chapters written in the most recent publication Discovering Biblical Equality. They just put out a new edition, and so the authors of this journal are responding to those specific articles. And so as I've made my way through the journal, there are a couple of things that have really stood out to me that I think are really important for our pastors, but also the members of our churches as well.

So two things. First of all, we as pastors have to be able to teach and to show and even protect our complementarian convictions biblically. We just don't want to say it's a value that we have. We have to be able to prove from scripture the complementarian values and the theology that we embrace. And I say that because as you read through this journal, people get to an egalitarian position really through flawed exegesis. And so I'm very grateful for CBMW to publish a journal that is so solid exegetically to defend, even prove complementarianism from scripture. So the main point there is we've got to know our Bibles, we've got to be men and pastors and men and women members of our churches who understand why we embrace complementarian theology because that's what the Bible teaches. So that's very, very important. That's the first one. Let's have sound exegesis.

The second one is that, and this newest edition of Discovering Biblical Equality can show you trends in flawed exegesis with the egalitarian position that can take you to begin to embrace same-sex relationships, same sex marriage. And there's even an article in this most recent Discovering Biblical Equality addition that embraces transgenderism. So you can see the pathway they go down that begins with flawed exegesis and isn't just about an egalitarian theology anymore. It is embracing gender ideology and issues related to biblical sexual ethics. So another reason why I think this particular journal (eikon) is really important, and I would just encourage our pastors to be reading it and even members of our churches to read it. I believe you'd mentioned before we started recording that the journal is actually available free online. Is that on the CBMW website?

Ben Kreps:

It is, yeah. CBMW.org/journal. And the PDFs are all there, including the newest one here, I think. Yeah, that's excellent. There has apparently been a cottage industry that has sprung up in recent years of popular books that are written by exvangelicals or now supposedly enlightened Christians who have come out of the complementarian world, condemning, not only disagreeing, but condemning and declaring that it is toxic. And so we are going to get questions, no doubt from our folks as that kind of material is interacted with. So a journal like eikon is much appreciated. What are some highlights for you from this latest edition?

Mark Prater:

Yeah, I'll mention just three articles briefly and reasons I'm mentioning them. The first one I want to mention is written by Denny Burk, who actually is the president of CBMW and I believe he is a professor at Boyce College. The title of the article is Misunderstood Mutuality: Responding to Ronald W. Pierce and Elizabeth A. Kay, “Mutuality in Marriage and Singleness”. As Burk says, they don't really define mutuality in their chapter, but essentially earlier in the book, mutuality is the term used to embrace the egalitarian position, and they talk about mutuality in marriage and they do faulty acts of exegesis from 1 Corinthians 7.

What Denny Burk does is he just skillfully does solid exegesis to prove that their take on one 1 Corinthians 7 is wrong. And one of the reasons that's important is because where they go, it's an illustration of where Egalitarians go. They misapply mutuality and marriage and they apply it then to singleness in a way that they say it's okay for same sex attracted couples to have an intimate non-erotic relationship, which is something that's been a debate in the last several years, that Christians can have these same sex attractions and yet be in a chaste relationship with someone who is the same sex. And that's okay as a believer, and that can spring from a faulty understanding and misapplication of 1 Corinthians 7. So again, we're not obviously for that as a family of churches, but it's not just saying that we're against something, we've got to prove why we're for something, which is I think what Denny Burk does so well with his article and a good exegesis of 1 Corinthians 7.

Another one I want to mention is written by Andy Naselli. If you know Dr. Naselli, he's up at Bethlehem Seminary. His article is entitled, Yet Another Attempt to Justify What God Forbids: A Response to Cynthia Westfall, “Male and Female, One in Christ”. And I put out this one because what Cynthia Lang Westfall does is she takes Galatians 3:28, a familiar verse for all of us and says, we are all the same. She's trying to stress sameness between men and women, which is a faulty exegesis, as Andy Naselli points out, because what Galatians 3:28 is really about is that we are all justified. It's a justification text, men and women, slaves and free, Greek and non-Greek and Jew are justified through the finished work of Jesus Christ on the cross. So that's where we find there's equality in our justification, but there's not sameness.

And he does just a brilliant job near the end of this article quoting John Piper and Wayne Gruden who do their own exegesis of Galatians 3:28. This is the quote, "the context of Galatians 3:28 makes abundantly clear the sense in which men and women are equal in Christ. They are equally justified by faith. Galatians 3 24, equally free from the bondage of legalism, verse 25, equally, children of God, verse 26, equally clothed with Christ, verse 27, equally possessed by Christ verse 29, and equally heirs of the promises to Abraham verse 29. He does not say you are all the same in Christ Jesus, but you are all one in Christ Jesus. He is stressing their unity in Christ, not their sameness.", which I think is a thoughtful and accurate exegesis. So Galatians 3 can be sort of a classic egalitarian argument, and it's important for us as pastors to understand why we exegete that differently as complementarian. So that's one I would commend to you.

Let me just mention one more, and this one is written by Colin Smothers, who is the, I believe, the Executive Director of CBMW. And the title of his article is Rejecting Gender Essentialism to Embrace Transgenderism? And a question mark there, he's writing in response to Christa McKirland's article, "Image of God and Divine Presence". When I read this, it sort of saddened me of where an egalitarian can go. Basically, McKirland rejects gender essentialism, and that takes her down a path of embracing transgenderism. This is what Smothers writes. McKirland is critical of gender essentialism, which she defines as the idea that men and women are essentially different on the basis of being a man or woman. So she's using image of God and says that basically we are not defined by our masculinity and femininity because of the image, her argument of the image of God. McKirland is upfront about the payoff of rejecting gender essentialism. The scriptures do not make maleness and femaleness central to being human, nor can particular understandings of masculinity and femininity be rigidly prescribed once these are culturally conditioned. So it's a flawed exegesis of the image of God, and really a misunderstanding biblically of just basic biblical anthropology.

We are defined as male and female, and God has chosen us that way. And where it really leads her is down a road where she does embrace transgenderism as okay and even biblical because of the image of God argument. So again, it's an interesting article to read. It's one that we are going to face more and more I think as pastors, I think regardless of what nation we are pastoring in, and therefore we've got to be able to prove from scripture why we believe what we believe, not just on our complementarian theology again, but where in protecting our complementarian theology, we do protect other areas like a biblical understanding of gender and sexual identification. So just some examples of why I think this journal is important. Again, to our pastors, please be reading it, and to our members, I would encourage you to go online and read the free copy and you'll benefit as well.

Ben Kreps:

Excellent. Well, Mark, I so appreciate how you carry the pastors and members of Sovereign Grace Churches on your heart, and you have a real zeal to see us equipped and strengthened in the scriptures and in this important area as well. I mean, the reality is the more you stare deeply into the scriptures and what we are taught about men and women and marriage and sexuality, it's not just defending from charges of it being cruel and crass and all of those things, but there's such a beauty to it. There's such a beauty to God's design. To be able to speak clearly to our folks about the beauty of God's design for men and women is such a privilege. So thank you, Mark for the recommendation. Thank you all for watching or reading. We'll see you here next week, Lord willing. Bye for now.