Absolutely Amazing

I recently had a dialogue with Debbie Maken over on the comments section of the Boundless Weblog, and I am truly amazed. I think the irrationality, not only of Debbie Maken, but also of people who just simply could not represent me properly came out very well. The worst, however, has to be the misrepresentation at the end. Someone asked me about why it was that Hanna was crying in the temple at the beginning of first Samuel. I wrote:

With regards to Hanna, it is more than likely that Hanna was weeping over not having a child mostly because, at that time, being barren was as bad as being a nerd in school. You were often the subject of immense ridicule and that may be what Hanna is upset about.

The response I got back from a man named Darren Allen to this was:


Adam,
Are you joking????
You are comparing being barren and childless to being a nerd??????????
She was upset being ridiculed????
I don't know what sort of la la land you live in but you have lost credibility in this debate.

Then Debbie Maken said:

On my blogspot Adam as Puritan Calvinist said that stewardship of our bodies meant that we should enjoy our maleness and femaleness by refusing to cross dress. Credibility is only one problems here.

This is absolutely amazing. What kind of irrational commitment to a system allows you to misread my words where I specifically say that I am referring to the time first Samuel happened and was written? Then, when told to go back and reread it, they persist in their misrepresentation. Not only that, I have had this same misrepresentation repeated on Anakin "Niceguy"'s blog just this week.

This is a woman who is speaking in London this week. It is bad enough that she has written that book when she has no training in Biblical studies, and has been invited on radio programs to discuss this topic... but now she is being invited to speak to be a guest speaker??????? That is sad.

Also, this woman always accuses her opponents of being childish. How can you accuse other people of being childish, when you say something like this?

We need to have more discernment in our Christian culture. There are many people I read and respect: James White, R.C. Sproul, John Gerstner, Greg Bahnsen, John Frame, and B.B. Warfield [among others]. Yet, I am not in univocal agreement with any of these men. In thinking through what you believe, it requires discernment to know what you should believe and what you should not. Reading other authors can help, but we must remember that we are ultimately responsible for what we believe. We cannot believe it just because it is what is popular or radical.

Also, the modern church is obsessed with counterculturalism. That is, the modern church is obsessed with anything that the Christian media promotes as countercultural. This is dangerious, because what it means is that people who are popular control the morality of the Christian community. In reality, Christian morality needs to be derived from careful exegesis of God's word. We need to test and challange these ideas we get from the popular media, and do the work necessary to rightly divide the word of truth. Are we to be under the authority of a local church? Yes. If someone is not the rule of a local church body, then they are definitely in sin. However, we also must realize that the church is fallible, and makes mistakes. When they do make mistakes, such as allowing someone untrained like Debbie Maken to write her book, they need to be accountable for the bad fruit they cause.

I am not saying that everyone out there in the mandatory marriage movement is like this. I am sure there are honest Christians out there who hold to this position. I can only hope that they will rightly call Debbie Maken to accountability for this kind of childish behavior.