Scary Screenshots and the Telos of Man

What I and many others pray for and desire to see is repentance and restoration for Aimee Byrd and the others who are part of this movement, truly. But some NAPARC denominations seem to be capsizing as we speak, and the greatest concern is for the vulnerable sheep. What we are seeing can really only be described at minimum as an Egalitarian uprising with nods to Feminist leaders past and likely present, with leanings that portend things that are even worse as more and more “yellow wallpaper” (but what we understand to be Scriptural teaching) gets torn down and thrown into the ash heap of history. True reconciliation and righteousness is what is desired, but in the mean-time the Lord will not be mocked, and faithful shepherds must speak out and decry this dangerous teaching, and yes, show even with ridicule and righteous mocking just how twisted and dangerous the various false teachings in our denominations actually are. Many of us do not believe that the other side is interested in an honest conversation; this whole website kerfuffle serves as Exhibit A, and we didn’t come to that conclusion overnight but over many months (and for some much longer), trying to reach out to the other side in order to have an honest and direct conversation. The leaking and distorting of the posts in Genevan Commons is really a case in point of this unwillingness to communicate and genuinely reconcile. When administrators and moderators of Genevan Commons asked the other side where the problematic posts in Genevan Commons were so that they might be reviewed, my understanding is that a reply was never given. With the screenshot website dropping, I think we now know why.

That was bad enough. But then, many and even some prominent OPC elders/pastors/teachers signed an open letter of "concern" on Aimee Byrd's own blog over the whole Genevan Commons ordeal. I'm talking Chad Van Dixhoorn and John Muether to go along with the expected Todd Bordow types. These men should be rebuking Byrd for trying to change what Christians have believed about biblical manhood and womanhood for 2,000 years (or in other words, since Jesus Christ walked on this earth), but instead they rush in to defend her and falsely accuse others of things they don't even know or understand. Shame on these men. When some of them have even allegedly admitted in private that they have never read any of Byrd’s writings, never read anything written by the men in Genevan Commons concerning Byrd, and only saw the doctored front page of the screenshot site before signing off on the letter of concern, their shame is increased and stupidity on the matter revealed.

I've believed for a long time that the PCA was basically busted. I didn't think the OPC was. But it is. Maybe not as bad, maybe it is salvageable, but it too finds itself far from its founding principles. I for one have had it. It really is not possible to give the "benefit of the doubt" any longer for most of our NAPARC denominations, publishing houses, seminaries, coalitions and parachurch organizations, etc. If you've heard of it, it is much more likely to be operating to one degree of shameful compromise or another than being faithful and true to the Reformed faith. How else could Aimee Byrd work her way up the ranks the way that she did through the supposedly conservative men and platforms that she had? Yes, she is still a small bird in the grand scheme of things, but do we realize how tiny Reformed denominations are among American Christianity? Do we realize how small and far gone biblical Christianity in America already is? It is time to stop playing the long defeat. It is time to expel the evil, or be expelled by them. And if you are expelled, you should consider it a blessing from God!  

So no, we are not pretending that the other side is debating fairly and wants to have a completely straightforward and honest dialogue with Bibles open and the Holy Spirit alone guiding hearts and minds as we study the text. I would certainly HOPE that is what both sides desire, but at this point it seems quite clear that neither side believes such about the other. And that is something to truly lament. I pray that I am wrong, that both sides want true reconciliation and to truly conform to God’s word. If we are all genuine believers in Christ, God commands that we reconcile, confess our sins to one another, and embrace the truth. But I cannot ignore contrary evidence, I cannot ignore those acting in bad faith time and again. As others have noted, it appears Byrd and some other ladies are beyond authority and submission, and are convinced they must persist, while some men and ministers continue to platform these false teachers and give them spaces in our denominations, seminaries, and conferences to spout their erroneous message. I have in mind Ligon Duncan’s Jemar Tisby and Al Mohler’s Jarvis Williams as well as many others. The rot goes deep. Even if some of these men are eventually cut loose from our denominations, even if Byrd is eventually set free from her OPC cage, the damage will have been done, for they will be taking many astray with them. And others will rise up from within our own ranks and erode our churches even more, because the conservatives are not only failing to decry and denounce the false teaching, but are actually platforming and giving a voice to it.

For alas, our culture in general and even many of our NAPARC churches do not wish for open rebuke, only “love” carefully concealed (a jarring reversal of Prov. 27:5). Open rebuke is not fair game; you are not allowed to denounce and work through public, published errors in books, blogs, and other media by means of similarly public writings and replies, and if you then attempt to do so with some degree of privacy and safety like Genevan Commons, spies will be sent in to be sure you haven’t committed any thought crimes, or sarcasm crimes, or laugh emoji crimes. Even if you just submit a list of questions to open up a dialogue and increase understanding of positions that sure sound dangerous, it appears Aimee Byrd cannot withstand even the possible hinting that what she is saying is inappropriate and unbiblical.

Again, who is winning the framing, the tone, the positioning here? If you were allowed a fair fight, Genevan Commons likely would not even exist, or it at least would not be the one safe haven (or so some thought) to hash out the issues of Feminism in reformed churches today without being accused of hateful misogyny that should get you shamed or even fired. The powers that be want to move leftward, or at least do so unwittingly, being lenient toward those to the left while stern and strong toward any to the right of them. But those to the right must not be afraid, because God says these issues matter. In many cases, we are not dealing with secondary or tertiary doctrinal differences. If you push far enough against who is permitted to teach in God’s church, and what manhood and womanhood is and who bears authority and in what ways, you will wind up losing the gospel, and therefore Christianity. The same holds for the “gay but celibate” advocates and those who divide the Church with what I can only describe as reverse racism. That’s not to say that Byrd and company are so far gone now as to be outside the faith, but the fear is the wind is blowing hard enough to take them to that ultimate destination, revealing that they departed from us/the apostolic faith because they were never of us/the apostolic faith (I Jn. 2:19).  

So where do the winds in Aimee Byrd’s sails come from? What precisely is her doctrine, her basis for being a female teacher? I have not wanted, in writing all this, to focus primarily on Aimee Byrd’s teaching, but to sort of lay out the twisted landscape that many NAPARC denominations find themselves in, which allows all manner of twisted doctrines to spring forth from a variety of persons, largely unabated. Aimee Byrd is just one symptom of the disease that plagues many churches in NAPARC. The root issue, the disease proper, is a failure in the pulpit and among the eldership to speak with the prophetic voice and to exercise the keys of the kingdom in church discipline as God has called them to do. A fear of man, doctrinal confusion over what it means to speak the truth in love, tone policing -- these all come together to mute the prophetic voice and to loosen up church discipline. 

While others have also written on Byrd’s views/teachings and are much more capable to get into the details, it is helpful to express my own understanding of her false teaching to give the reader a framework for all that I have said, and to help illustrate my point once more about what is a symptom and what is the actual disease in our denominations.

Best I can tell, the essence of Aimee Byrd's error is that she believes man’s telos/ultimate end is to see in Eve/woman his telos, since he/man also becomes part of the she/bride of Christ. Now that Christ has come, He is the last man, and earthly men are now only the masculine part of (almost like a demotion) the bride of Christ. If that sounds muddled and confusing, I agree. Her doctrine is hard to trace and seems to not be fully fleshed out or defined yet. She will probably embrace this ambiguity and mystery as a good, glorious, and profound thing, which is what often happens when someone is teaching error. 

Aimee Byrd speaks of what she and her friend call “ripstick” theology, where the man must lean into the woman, and the woman into the man, for either to understand the other and for both to realize their potential and calling. What this exactly entails is unclear. But whatever it is, to my ear Byrd does not believe in or at the very least have much of a place for man/the husband being the representative of Christ in the marriage and family. The husband's headship, if it exists, does not entail authority. And if that is the case, then it is not Christ-like headship, unless she is prepared to say that Christ does not carry any authority. The overarching motif and image-bearing for man/males, according to Byrd, seems to be that he is simply the masculine counterbalance within the bride of Christ, and even then can only truly realize what he is called to be by “leaning” into his wife by trying to think and understand from her perspective. After all, Eve was created last and as a bride, and since all in Christ form a bride, then women are the true crowns of creation that men must aspire to know deeply, since in some sense they become feminine/the bride of Christ. If that sounds like Feminist exegesis, or something similar, then there is a problem, correct?

So for her, men and women relate as equals insofar as they are both brides/parts of the bride of Christ, and the only difference is that man is the masculine part, woman is the feminine part. So the Egalitarian emphasis comes to the fore. Man is in no way, shape, or form, the head as Christ is the head, he is only the head insofar as he is a masculine counterbalance to his feminine counterpart in the bride/body of Christ (which a body and bride, as you know, is not a head at all). I doubt Aimee Byrd would consider this an entirely fair representation. I certainly hope she would not, and would quickly and heartily affirm that she does in fact believe man/husband is the head of woman/wife as Christ is the head of His Church, His body (Eph. 5:23), and therefore the wife submits to her husband in a way that reflects the Church’s submission to Christ (5:24), which also means that the husband does not submit to the wife in this way as he does not represent the submissive body/church but authoritative head/Christ.

Yet even if Byrd does pay the biblical doctrine some degree of lip service, her emphasis is on her notion of the telos of man, which for her is man/males giving way to Christ the last man, such that earthly men become more like the feminine Eve/woman since they are eternally to be the bride of Christ (I know I am being repetitive, but she is repetitive on this). Setting aside the speculative question of what things will be like for men and women in the eternal state, the fact of the matter is that Christ has appointed men as His representatives on earth over their wives such that wives must be subject to their husbands "in everything" (Eph. 5:24), and nothing about the eschaton should obliterate or even downplay this present reality. Even if Byrd's eschatological anthropology is right (which I have serious doubts), her over-realized eschatology is showing.   

What are the kinds of things that can happen if we use an eschatological trajectory (one which is itself faulty) as the basis for how we should live and behave in the present age? Well, we don’t have to wonder what happens if we keep going along faulty eschatological trajectories on other current issues in our NAPARC denominations today. We have the evidence. You end up with conferences hosted and/or coordinated with PCA pastors and professors and churches, with men speaking at them who look like this and say things like below:

This is Jack Bates, who gave a talk at the inaugural Revoice Conference entitled "Coming Out in the Shadow of the Cross: Queer Visibility As Redemptive Suffering," And yeah, this time I am saying that the guy tweeting and the drag queen in the photo are the same person.

Or what of this vile and filthy man, Grant Hartley, who needs to be told straightforwardly, for the sake of his soul, what he already knows -- that his mannerisms, beliefs, and teachings are a high offense in the nostrils of God, that he must repent and be saved from his sins, including especially his outward and most defiant sins of his blandishments of speech and general deportment, revealing a proud and wicked heart and mind that is reveling in rather than repenting of his vile passions? Only such thorough repentance leads to experiencing the true liberating grace of God found in Jesus Christ. Do you think these men are honestly wanting to hold to the historic biblical sexual ethic, as Revoice claims the speakers and conference is for? Hartley has spoken at more than one Revoice Conference (his first message was infamously called “Redeeming Queer Culture: An Adventure” with a subtitle which asked “What queer treasure, honor, and glory will be brought into the New Jerusalem at the end of time (Revelation 21:24-26)?" Perhaps if the Church held more truly to biblical manhood and womanhood, of masculinity and feminity, these men would know better, or at least not be allowed membership into the Church without first repenting, as we all must do. 

But look, notice the eschatological trajectory. The question is not “how could it be possible that queer treasure, honor, and glory” enter the kingdom of heaven given all that is unrighteous and defiles is removed (Rev. 21:27), but rather what queer treasure, honor, and glory will make it in! The point is, things can go downhill quickly when you twist a certain doctrine (anthropology, hamartiology, a theology of ethnicity/nations) and trace a biblical theology from it through the Scriptures, leading to something in glory that is nearly the complete opposite of what glory will actually be like. Then, when you try to break in the eternal state right now, you begin thinking things like homosexuals are just taking friendship “too far” and actually have a “genius for friendship” and hospitality, as one Revoice speaker claimed. So their rich friendships and hospitality and style is not seen as external manifestations of their vile passions, but gifts from God that straight people should learn from!  So these vile passions and expressions will enter into the eternal kingdom of God as some sort of treasure, honor, and glory. God help us!    

Hartley recently Tweeted out this putrid, wicked rejoicing in his effeminacy and vile passions, as if God grossly approves and will allow it into His kingdom:

Here is a link to his most recent Revoice message on Queer Culture if you are interested. Be warned, it will turn your stomach. To say such is not mean, no more than finding a pedophile’s craving disgusting.

[By the way, as I recall, one of the speakers at a Revoice Conference announced some time ago on Twitter that he was considering enrolling at Covenant Seminary, the seminary of the PCA. I could not find the tweet, but it shows you something of Covenant's reputation.]

Now I am not saying Byrd and her group endorse and support Revoice. I am not saying she and others in her camp are in favor of Hartley and Bates. But they are using the same tactic to somehow dupe more conservative officers in Reformed denominations. The race baiters do the same thing, I have heard this from white guilt sermons at presbytery. The claim is that because in glory people will be in God’s kingdom from every tribe, tongue, and nation, if your church isn’t multi-ethnic, you are almost certainly prejudiced and racist and are reinforcing white structures that, like the yellow wallpaper, need to be torn down. Revoice claims to be upholding “historic Christian teaching about marriage and sexuality,” and they say and advertise that their conferences are for those struggling with homosexuality but striving to hold to the “historic Christian sexual ethic.” But listen to the speakers! They sound like homosexuals, walk and talk like homosexuals, and do it without shame and guilt but in bold defiance and sinful glee, as if it is God-approved. They speak of bringing in queer treasure into the New Jerusalem. So to claim that this is the historic Christian sexual ethic is an absolute joke! To say your church must have equal representation of all ethnicities matching the demographic of your city (as if you could play the Holy Spirit) is a joke! To say that men must become brides in glory and therefore must be more submissive like brides now and come to see that women are the real capstone of creation is a joke! 

This should be ridiculed and scorned in all righteousness, so that these wicked men and women might perhaps be ashamed, truly repent, and find the freeing forgiveness of salvation in Christ, and so that others will not be likewise duped and led astray. The Revoice movement should not be given the dignity of serious and solemn consideration, with committee papers written ad nauseum, no more than should “celibate pedophilia” or anything else get such treatment as if it were a difficult matter to discern, or only a minor sinful indulgence. And when, in not so many years from now, we form study committees on women being not just deacons but elders, the fact that most everyone will agree this is something that needs to be scrupulously examined as if the verdict is in doubt and God’s word is not clear on the matter, we already will have sinfully compromised and brought shame and reproach to our churches. You don’t negotiate with false teachers led astray by their lusts. You don’t give them a seat at the table to discuss whether their sly attempts at slipping into the bounds of Confessionalism might just work. You might as well form a study committee concerning whether Christ was really incarnate if you are going to do that.

So I am urging you to note a different kind of trajectory. The slippery slope toward apostasy. Look at the underpinnings and logic in Byrd’s arguments concerning manhood and womanhood, husband and wife, and female teachers. They are in the bounds of the Westminster Confession, they say. Except that they aren’t, and she wants to tear some of the men who wrote or revered the Confession down, along with the theology of the Confession and these men. She is engaging in doublespeak. You cannot claim to hold to the confessional standards of so-called misogynistic men, which are both written and inspired by misogynistic men, coming from a long, misogynistic heritage, while at the same time denouncing said heritage and misogyny and perhaps even some of the misogynistic men themselves, and further urge the entire Reformed church to move beyond it all and recover from it! To move beyond and recover from is to exceed the bounds and break with the Reformed heritage and Confessions! It is a call to reject the Confessional standards regarding manhood and womanhood, which will not leave untouched gender and sexuality, and ultimately church officers and those who bear authority and are permitted to teach officially in the Church. 

This is no small matter, especially as the “beyond” that will be moved into seems open ended. But the ploy is quite obvious. There are images of Aimee Byrd conducting herself like a teacher, behind pulpits, behaving and speaking as one with authority. Yet we are to believe that she is somehow no such thing -- despite looking the part just as much as Grant Hartley looks like the queer he claims to be -- but rather she somehow is and somehow will continue to hold to the historic and confessional teaching on male headship and male-only ordination. I say this in all seriousness – to believe such is foolishness, it is naïve and stupid. Aimee Byrd has to tear down Hodge’s/our Confession’s natural theology because, if she is successful, you can no longer say that Hartley “looks the part” anymore than Byrd “looks the part,” since one cannot provide chapter and verse for what an effeminate looks like or what femininity looks like.

The bottom line is that their books and teachings are plainly in error and not worthy of serious consideration, so why do we pretend that they are and that their ideas have legitimacy? It must be in part because it is pounded into you to believe that being Christlike means thinking no evil of someone else, always giving the benefit of the doubt, being charitable, tone policing, being gentle, etc. All the while Byrd is teaching, though she is not called teacher. Hartley is a homosexual exhibiting his vile passions with pleasure, disgustingly claiming to feel God’s pleasure while doing it, yet he is somehow “within the bounds of the historic Christian sexual ethic”. Bates actually dresses in drag, and now boasts this ungodly amalgamation as his tagline on Twitter:

Behold, the Christian pansexual who is gender fluid and embraces queer liberation theology. But not to worry, he’s Nicene (“inside” general orthodoxy like Byrd is inside our confessions). Oh, and a drag queen and night-time stand up comedian to boot.  

The net effect of Revoice as well as Recovering from Biblical Manhood and Womanhood is to subvert whole households, so Byrd must get treated like the false teacher she is, be warned against (yes, even warning others who might hear her at their churches as she goes about circuit riding) and rebuked as such. In fact, Byrd's book arguably gives more theological meat on the bones of "Redeeming Queer Culture" and even cross-dressing since men become brides and look to the woman to find out what they are to become. If Mrs. Byrd were merely behaving as a layperson asking questions and was confused, this would be an entirely different matter and pastoral sensitivity ought to take on an entirely different tone. But despite her attempt to sometimes position herself as merely a layman (other times a colleague of Dr. Master whom she cannot bother to reply to), she is  a self-proclaimed and self-appointed teacher of men with doctrinal influence greater than many pastors, and is trying to usher in a sea change on manhood and womanhood in Reformed churches. She is already touting her next book on the Song of Songs to further her agenda, where she says the Church is –

“…ripe for a positive kind of sexual revolution in the church and recovering a good theological anthropology will have a lot to do with it. I am convinced that it will take a cooperation of academics, pastors, and informed/thoughtful laypeople (men and women) to do it. We desperately need to peel away the Aristotelian mindset of men and woman that still pervades much of the teaching on sexuality in the church today. Teaching on some of the themes in the Song of Songs is just one contribution to this.” 

And as I stated above, the endgame for Byrd is woman, and man is no longer the groom but only part of the bride of Christ. Here is Byrd one last time:

“Woman reveals the endgame. We were created to be the bride of Christ. She is an embodiment of eschatological glory. We see woman’s distinct glory from man in dynamic, synergetic, fructifying of the word. And the typology of the bride endgame is showcased in Revelation 21:11 and 22:17, prophetically adding her voice to the Spirit’s, calling her brothers to perseverance to come to the water of life, of which her whole body is a homology. In her we see the responsibility of laymen and laywomen, as the bride of Christ, to hear and speak the testimony of Jesus, spurring one another to wakefulness and perseverance.”

So why aren’t we allowed to firmly rebuke and point out the absurdity of her whole effort? Is it because of real abuse throughout the years in the pulpit and among the eldership by bad men who did not embody true biblical manhood? Well, shame on those wicked ministers and elders! Those abusing their power, truly, as defined by Scripture and not the whims and emotions of certain women and men, should be removed; we do have church discipline for a reason. But tearing down God’s creational/natural order, clear teaching in Scripture, and destroying His own image bearers as male and female is surely not the solution to abusive male authority. Church discipline is, however, for it is what God has commanded and prescribed, though the church is admittedly woeful with exercising such justly, if at all. Yet it is God’s prescribed means, and are we wiser than God?     

The other similarity between the Revoice crowd and the Feminist push is they both have a false sense of calling or destiny from God to believe and do what they are doing (this is true of the black liberation movement as well). After all, if this is all eschatological, it must be destiny. Remember Beth Moore’s “they cannot take our callings” from us. The most loving thing is to tell these men and women straightforwardly that they are making God out to be a liar when they claim such wickedness. Beth Moore says explicitly to Byrd to persist, using a political campaign slogan from a woman as wicked as Elizabeth Warren to put forward the “girl power” message, and Hartley encourages the supposedly “Queer Christians” with the same sense of undeniable and infallible calling from God in the face of all righteous opposition and haters:

I’ll close with this – the conservatives have compromised in what they know God is calling them to say and do, and they have done it precisely to appease women like Byrd and queers like Grant Hartley while convincing themselves they are just being Christlike, gentle, and loving. The lengths we have already gone from God’s word are dangerous enough. Where we are headed and what is already beginning to occur is full-blown apostasy and the fierce judgment of God upon His own apostate churches. NAPARC denominations are hemorrhaging. Some men have tried to stand up and stop the bleeding, only to be shot down by both those causing the bleeding and those alleging to stop it (and many who allege to stop it are instrumental in causing it), the so-called conservatives who hold the line by constantly moving it to the left when they think no one is looking. May God have mercy. May He give us the boldness and sense of divine calling that the homosexuals and feminists claim to have! Many conservatives have lost their prophetic sense, and so do not rebuke and exhort with all authority. Meanwhile, those who are at best misguided and at worst are pernicious and intentional with their progressive agenda do not have their mouths stopped; they are convinced of God’s favor and calling upon them, so they subvert whole households and lead especially women, vulnerable women, astray (Tit. 1:10-11; 2 Tim. 3:6). Pictures really do reveal a thousand pernicious doctrines, for those who have eyes to see how the game is rigged and who haven’t firmly planted their heads in the sand.

But for God’s true people, we will not be ashamed of the Gospel (God help us not to be!), for it is the power of God to save us all (Rom. 1:16). We fear and obey God rather than effeminate men and mouthy women (Acts 5:29; Mt. 10:28), and when we begin to despair and lose hope because all the Christians in name only have decided to abandon Jesus and leave His people to face the trials and tribulations alone, we remember the words of Christ, to take heart, have courage, and be of good cheer, for “I have overcome the world” (Jn. 16:33) and “the God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet” (Rom. 16:20). This is the true trajectory, the real telos for all of God’s people who abide in Him and are not ashamed before Him at His coming (1 Jn. 2:28).