November 22, 2011

Name That Glory!!

Let’s play NAME THAT GLORY!

What is the glory of Paris? The Eiffel Tower, you say? Good answer! Oh, I see. This other fellow says it’s the Arc de Triomphe. Well, okay. There’s no law that says Paris can’t have two glories.

And, so, what is the glory of Athens? The Parthenon! There you go. See? This isn’t such a hard game after all!

What is the glory of Rome? Most folks will say the Coliseum. Or the Seven Hills (though they’re harder to actually see than the Coliseum). No biggie. If Paris can have more than one glory, so can Rome.

How about the glory of Vienna (I used to live there; eat your heart out)? People who’ve never been to Austria might say the Blue Danube. Folks who live there might easily say it’s St. Stephen’s Cathedral smack dab in the center of the city.

You see, when we’re talking about places (at least in English), it is easy to understand “A is the glory of B.” “A” is what comes to mind when we’re speaking of “B.” The glory of a place is what always comes to mind when that place is mentioned. That’s why, in the Old Testament, we find several examples of the cedar tree as the glory of Lebanon.

When we’re speaking of people, however, English speakers don’t often use the formula “A is the glory of B.” However, we have seen that this formula is easily used in the Bible when speaking of people. And, so “strength” is the glory of young men, because strength is what comes to mind when young men are mentioned. Gray heads are the glory of old men, for the same reason – when old men are mentioned, we think immediately of men with gray hair. And, as we’ve seen, skill at psalmistry (composing/singing songs to a plucked instrument such as a lyre or a harp) is the glory of King David in the Old Testament.

Now here is an amazing thing …

I have often presented the subject matter of this and previous blogs in this series, at seminars held in churches or at men’s retreats or similar venues. My students have been able to follow the inductive steps that let them see what “A is the glory of B” means. They can play “Name that Glory!” with complete accuracy.

And then I say, “Okay. We come to 1 Corinthians 11 and Paul tosses off the statement that men are the glory of God and woman is the glory of man. What does each of these phrases mean? Any hands?

No hands!

I wait. Still no one raises his hand. Many puzzled faces look back at me. A few of the faces are not puzzled, but they are suddenly very wary. Many faces go completely blank and unreadable; and long experience has taught me that when this happens in men’s faces, it is because they are alarmed or angry or terrified, and they instinctively grab hold of their emotions and hold them with a very tight rein, refusing to let what’s going on in their hearts show on their faces. It’s a sort of social defensive maneuver, deployed to keep one’s options open.

Why do you suppose this happens? Why does “man [the male, that is] is the glory of God” produce these reactions?

One hundred years ago, I doubt I’d see such reactions. Since the ascendency of feminism beginning in the 1950s through the 1970s, since the dominion of feminist values in politics, economics, academia, and cultural media was consolidated in the 1980s and codified in law and court decisions ever since then, and – most importantly – since evangelicals have more or less made their peace with religious feminism within their own ranks (and, this includes the so-called complementarians), on this side of all these developments over the past 70 years, evangelical men either cannot or will not acknowledge the meaning of “man is the glory of God.”

If they cannot acknowledge the meaning of “man is the glory of God,” it is usually because they are so conditioned against the meaning of that phrase that they are simply incapable of attaching that meaning to the words which convey it.

If they will not acknowledge the meaning of “man is the glory of God,” it is because they know better than to own up to what Paul is saying in 1 Corinthians 11:7. They know very well how powerful are the deterrents against such an idea, how punitive are the consequences for candidly owning up to Paul’s meaning.

So, let’s put it out on the table and look at it in all its modern scandal: “man is the glory of God.” What this means is this: when God is the subject of our speech or thought, a man comes to mind. A woman does not come to mind (at least not in the Biblical faith!). That is why woman is not the glory of God.

No, it’s a man who comes to mind when Christians speak of God.

When Jesus ministered for three years before He was crucified, the awareness steadily grew in the minds of the religious authorities that this rabbi was saying and doing things that lead inexorably to the conclusion that He was God. And, it because a mere man claimed to be God that Jesus was crucified.

Today, Jesus would be crucified for exactly the opposite claim – that God is a man, not a woman. And, of course, the Apostle Paul would be crucified right alongside him.

We’ll begin to unpack this scandalous meaning of “man is the glory of God” in subsequent blogs. Stay tuned!

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Filed under 1 Corinthians 11:2ff, Egalitarianism, Evangelical feminism, Gender wars, Man, the glory of God, Woman, the glory of man

November 19, 2011

“Man, the glory of God” Means What? Part Three

man glory godNow it’s time to tackle the semantic question: what does it mean to say man is the glory of God? Paul says flatly that man is the glory of God but woman is the glory of man. Yet he never expounds these phrases; he assumes his Corinthian readers already know what he means when he uses these phrases. It’s an assumption that cannot be made with much confidence today.

Fortunately, as we shall see, the idea working in these phrases is comfortable in English prose. And even more fortunately, the Old Testament contains exactly the formulaic phrase “A” is the glory of “B.” along with a few more verses easily reducible to it.

So, to get a handle “A” is the glory of “B,” let’s look at a few examples. And, the first example – while not expressed in exactly the formula we have in 1 Corinthians 11 – is close enough to show us the idiomatic sense of the formula.

Read the following two verses from Isaiah 60, which look to Israel’s future when the Gentile nations shall worship Israel’s God in Jerusalem:

13 “ The glory of Lebanon shall come to you,
The cypress, the pine, and the box tree together,
To beautify the place of My sanctuary;
And I will make the place of My feet glorious.
14 Also the sons of those who afflicted you
Shall come bowing to you,
And all those who despised you shall fall prostrate at the soles of your feet;
And they shall call you The City of the LORD,
Zion of the Holy One of Israel.

In verse 13 a number of trees are mentioned. How many? What are they?

Inexperienced Bible students will see three trees mentioned here: the cypress, the pine, and the box tree. More seasoned Bible students will add one more to this list: the cedar.

“Where is the cedar mentioned?” you ask. It is mentioned in that phrase “the glory of Lebanon.” The cedars of Lebanon were so large, so remarkable in their size and beauty, that the region itself became synonymous with these trees. The cedar tree was the glory of Lebanon – it was what came immediately to mind when one thought of Lebanon itself. And, though the trees which originally lent their reputation to Lebanon have largely disappeared, their reputation was so great for so long in history that today the national flag of Lebanon still features that tree at its center.

The cedar is the glory of Lebanon. It is what comes to mind when one thinks of Lebanon.

Now, let’s keep in mind what the phrase “the cedar is the glory of Lebanon” means, and then let us examine a few examples of the exact formula “A is the glory of B.” We’ll begin with something straightforward and simple, Proverb 20:29 –

The glory of young men is their strength,
And the splendor of old men is their gray head.

First, we note that this proverb (like almost all of them) are couplets, two lines in some form of parallelism (formal, rhetorical, semantic, synthetic, whatever). This proverb is called a synonymous parallelism – the ideas expressed are synonymously parallel, and almost perfectly parallel in a formal way as well. For this reason, glory in the first line is parallel with splendor in the second line.

Now, we need to ask, what is the proverb telling us when it says that the glory of young men is their strength or that the splendor (a synonym of glory) of old men is their gray head? Well, if the cedar is the glory of Lebanon because the cedar is what comes to mind when Lebanon is mentioned, then …

When young men are in mentioned, what comes to mind is their strength, their youthful vigor or some other kind of potency arising from youth itself. When old men are mentioned, the color of their hair – the gray color of their heads – is what comes to mind. Again, when A is the glory of B, then when B is mentioned or thought about, it is A that comes to mind.

Will this interpretive formula work in other instances? Indeed it does. Consider, for example, Proverbs 17:6:

Children’s children are the crown of old men,
And the glory of children is their father.

This again is a couplet, though the parallelism is a bit looser than the previous example we examined. “Crown” in the first line is an emblem, it is emblematic of a reward or a prize for meritorious accomplishment. Today we think of a crown as an emblem of royal office – something a king wears on his head – but in the Old Testament that idea is more often expressed by a different emblem of royal office, the scepter.

So, the first line is saying that grandchildren are a reward, a prize of old men.

And, the second line? Ever heard the taunt “Who’s your daddy?” Wikipedia explains this taunt in this way:

Who’s your daddy? is a slang expression that, in one use, takes the form of a rhetorical question. It is commonly used as a boastful claim of dominance over the intended listener. The phrase itself stands out as a noteworthy lyric from the 1968 song “Time of the Season”, by The Zombies: “What’s your name? Who’s your daddy? Is he rich like me?”

The same idea lies behind the second line of Proverbs 17:6 and the contemporary taunt “Who’s your daddy,” namely that one’s worth or identity arises from the identity (and, therefore, the worth) of one’s father.

Interestingly, Jesus’ virgin birth very early on led to the gossipy slander that Joseph did not, in fact, sire his son Jesus, bur rather some Gentile. “Where is YOUR father?” the Pharisees taunt Jesus in John 8:19. Later, in the same argument with Jesus (John 8:41), they challenge him with “We were not born of fornication [implying that Jesus was!]. The taunt “Who’s your daddy” is far older than the Zonbies song in 1968!

Knowing that “A is the glory of B” means that B comes to mind when A is being spoken about helps us to understand statements in the Psalms that would otherwise be very murky indeed.

Consider, for example, the introduction to Psalm 57, written by King David:

1 O God, my heart is steadfast;
I will sing and give praise, even with my glory.
2 Awake, lute and harp! I will awaken the dawn.
3 I will praise You, O LORD, among the peoples,
And I will sing praises to You among the nations.

Now, consider that interesting phrase at the end of verse 1: even with my glory. What is that talking about? What does it refer to? If someone were to point to something we could see that is “David’s glory,” what would he point to?

Well, one must know something about David to answer that question. And, the thing we would need to know is listed in 2 Samuel 23:1 which introduces the last words of King David before he died:

Now these are the last words of David. Thus says David the son of Jesse; Thus says the man raised up on high, The anointed of the God of Jacob, And the sweet psalmist of Israel.

Among the things for which David is renowned – things that are his glory, if you will – is the fact that he is “the sweet psalmist of Israel.”

We have lost a sense of the term “psalmist” that was clear to the original listeners of this Old Testament text, namely that a psalm was a song accompanied by a plucked string instrument. No doubt, David developed his musical talent, particularly his skill on the harp, during the long days he spent alone in the fields with the sheep when he was a boy. It was a skill he maintained and matured into adulthood, and it shaped his formation of the Levitical choirs which he created for the worship of the Temple, even before Solomon constructed it.

Now, go back to verse 2 of Psalm 58: “Awake harp and lute! I will awaken the dawn,” David cries out. David addresses his signature instruments as if they are people he awakens from slumber. He declares that he will make such a torrent of music that even the sun will get up!

All that to explain this: when David says in Psalm 58:1 that he will sing and give praise, “even with my glory,” that phrase my glory does not refer to some fuzzy, mushy capacity of David’s soul; rather, it refers to the musical instrument(s) which invariably accompanied the songs which David composed in order to praise God.

So, what does Paul mean when he says “man is the glory of God?” Or that “woman is the glory of man?” It should now be obvious what he means. And, the implications of this are the subject of the next blog in this series.

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November 17, 2011

Millennial Women Are Burning Out

Larissa Faw, a contributor to Forbes, tells us that “a growing number of young professional women who seem to ‘have it all’ are burning out at work before they reach 30.” Most of her piece summarizes various reasons for why Millennial Women – “ambitious go-getters [who] are working as doctors, lawyers, engineers, and advertising executives, blessed with great salaries, health benefits, and paid vacation – nevertheless flame out while their male peers do not (at least not nearly in the same numbers, with the disparity increasing as the Millennial Careers advance beyond entry-level positions).

For example, Ms. Faw opines that lack of relaxation probably takes a toll. She cites Melanie Shreffler of the youth marketing blog Ypulse: “These women worked like crazy in school, and in college, and then they get into the workforce and they are exhausted.” On the other hand, Captivate Network reveals that compared to their female peers “Men are 25% more likely to take breaks throughout the day for personal activities, 7% more likely to take a walk, 5% more likely to go out to lunch, and 35% more likely to take breaks ‘just to relax.’”

Here’s a shocker: “It’s not as if these women expected their jobs to be parties and good times, but many underestimated the actual day-to-day drudgery.” And why, you ask, is this so shocking to read? Well, it’s because the classic work of women – to make a home for husband and children – was so thoroughly trashed by all the feminist founders of the Millennial Woman lifestyle, beginning with Betty Friedan in the 1950s and on to all the Women’s Studies centers in universities which insinuated their agenda into every other degree program in every other college on campus for the past 50 years.

Home making? Drudgery! And, now the workplace is filled with drudgery too? Who knew??

Ms. Faw continues, without the slightest hint of embarrassment: “Also, while earlier generations may have opted out of the workforce through marriage or motherhood, these paths aren’t viable for these self-sufficient women, who either are still single or unwilling to be fully supported by men.”

Well, there you have it. Women need men like fish need bicycles, right? Self-sufficient Millennial Women can’t “opt-out” through marriage or motherhood. These are paths Millennial Women are unwilling to take. Evidently, they prefer single self-supporting drudgery to the drudgery of companionship and (yes, it’s shocking to say such a thing nowadays) the support of a husband. It’s soooo demeaning to be a “kept-woman,” dontcha know!

Purdue University’s Teri Thompson’s analysis is cold comfort. Ms. Faw summarizes Thompson’s insight this way: “Ultimately these women are going through the difficult realization that they may have to redefine their goals and come up with different measures of success in order to thrive in the corporate world.” Why, we wonder, is departing the corporate world for something more – uh, well, sheltered? – not a possibility to consider? Instead, Millennial Women “are turning to therapists and prescription medicines, as well as [to] explore alternative remedies, including acupuncture, yoga, and even psychics.”

Over a hundred years ago, when feminism was giving its first full-throated cry, G. K. Chesterton had its mistake accurately analyzed and published for all to read in What’s Wrong With The World (1910). Following the teaching of Christendom, which itself had learned from the Bible how men and women differ in their work, Chesterton nailed the feminist mistake about the old way of women in the home with these words:

When domesticity, for instance, is called drudgery, all the difficulty arises from a double meaning in the word. If drudgery only means dreadfully hard work, I admit the woman drudges in the home, as a man might drudge at the Cathedral of Amiens or drudge behind a gun at Trafalgar. But if it means that the hard work is more heavy because it is trifling, colorless and of small import to the soul, then as I say, I give it up; I do not know what the words mean.

To be Queen Elizabeth within a definite area, deciding sales, banquets, labors and holidays; to be Whiteley within a certain area, providing toys, boots, sheets, cakes and books, to be Aristotle within a certain area, teaching morals, manners, theology, and hygiene; I can understand how this might exhaust the mind, but I cannot imagine how it could narrow it. How can it be a large career to tell other people’s children about the Rule of Three, and a small career to tell one’s own children about the universe? How can it be broad to be the same thing to everyone, and narrow to be everything to someone? No; a woman’s function is laborious, but because it is gigantic, not because it is minute. I will pity Mrs. Jones for the hugeness of her task; I will never pity her for its smallness.

These days, of course, “woman’s function” is nothing like what it was in Chesterton’s day.  That function –  to be wife and mother to a family – is now deemed to be drudgery in the nonsense meaning Chesterton describes above.  Rearing children is something for the State, at as early an age as politics will permit.  And wifery?  Well, Friedan broke women out of that comfortable concentration camp (her term for domesticity, in case you haven’t read The Feminine Mystique).  Now women are free to pursue their Millennial Careers as Millennial Women – single, self-sufficient, and burned out.

The penchant women have for playing the generalist, in contrast to the specialist bent of most men in the workplace, is a distinction between the sexes as old as Adam and Eve in the Garden. And, if we take the human who is by design (yes, yes, feminists won’t grant you that one either, I know) equipped to administrate in a private domain 100 disparate agendas simultaneously and place her instead in competition against the male in the public arena where he excels in a narrow focus relentlessly pursued as a hound chases a fox – well, might we not predict the woman to burn out as Ms. Faw describes?

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Filed under 1 Corinthians 11:2ff, Feminism, Patriarchy, St. Paul and Sex, Woman, Misstress of the Domain

November 16, 2011

“Man, the glory of God” Means What? Part Two

Getting at an answer to the question “What does it mean to say that man is the glory of God?” is not really all that difficult. But, before laying out an answer, it’s vital to dismiss two false answers that are sometimes given to this question, lest they confuse subsequent discussion of the meaning of these phrases.

First, some claim that “man is the glory of God” is telling us that man glorifies God in the sense of giving glory to God or ascribing (or being) an honor to God.

There are a couple of things wrong with this idea.

As noted in an earlier blog, Paul is everywhere in 1 Corinthians 11:2-16 drawing distinctions between man and woman. Note also the formal identity between the phrases “man, the glory of God” and “woman, the glory of man.” Each follows the form “A is the glory of B.” So, if the point of such a phrase is that “A gives glory to B,” then the two phrases about man and woman distinguish men from women only insofar as each sex gives glory and honor to different “targets” as it were.

This understanding of “man, the glory of God” and “woman, the glory of man” leads to spurious conclusions. Manifestly, such a sense does not distinguish men from women or vice versa. Women give glory to God, for example. They do so in most of the ways men do: singing God’s praises, confessing faith in Him, offering petitions to Him, and so forth. While women were not required to attend the three annual feasts of the Lord under the Old Covenant, they were always permitted to do so. And, so, Mary went up to the Feast of the Passover with Joseph on the occasion that Jesus stayed behind in the Temple.

And, if “man, the glory of God” means that men give glory to God, it follows that “woman, the glory of man” means that women give glory to men, and that in pretty much the same way that men give glory to God. Such an idea – no matter how one tempers it with caveats – is far afield of whatever Paul is talking about in 1 Corinthians 11!

So, “man, the glory of God” does not mean “the man (i.e. the male of the species) gives glory to God.” He may, in fact do so of course; but, that is not what this Pauline phrase is telling us.

Another failed interpretation of the phrase understands “man” to mean “mankind.” And, so, “man the glory of God” means that mankind glorifies God, or mankind gives glory to God, or something similar.

And, of course, one may argue on other grounds and from other statements in Scripture that mankind does exactly that. Indeed, the kings of the earth are exhorted in the strongest possible terms in Psalm 2 to do this:

10 Now therefore, be wise, O kings; Be instructed, you judges of the earth.

11 Serve the LORD with fear, And rejoice with trembling.

12 Kiss the Son, lest He be angry, And you perish in the way,

When His wrath is kindled but a little. Blessed are all those who put their trust in Him.

But, “mankind gives glory to God” is not what Paul is getting at when he says that “man is the image and glory of God.” For one thing, the use of the word “image” pulls us back into Genesis 1:27 where “mankind” (in our vocabulary) is said to be created male and female. “Man” in Genesis 1:27 is the inclusive masculine – referring to both males and females, as the immediate context confirms. “Man” in the Pauline phrase “man, the glory of God” must be referring to man as a collective noun for the male of the species, for it is contrasted with “woman” which is a collective noun for the female of the species.

The one place where “man” may, indeed, be the male inclusive for “mankind” is, ironically, in the phrase “woman is the glory of man.” But, to see this clearly, we must turn our attention, finally, to elucidating what it means to say that “A is the glory of B,” a subject for the next blog in this series.

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