Foster/Tennant attempt to flesh out the concept of gravitas as they go but first consider the fear of the Lord as primary to the sort of gravitas they think a man should develop. As discussed in the last post, the reader will recall that there are actually only three passages in the New Testament directly relevant to something called gravitas. So, building two chapters off of such a passing interest on the part of the Apostle Paul is automatically suspect. True to form, Foster/Tennant make an initial statement about gravitas and then start talking about the fear of God and how they think men should behave. Why? Apart from the authors’ redefinition of the term, there is very little biblical support for what they claim.

But, do the Scriptures actually say that the fear of God moves one toward the sort of gravitas Foster/Tennant argue should be a part of men’s lives? They don’t present any such evidence from the Bible. For the authors “gravitas means to be taken seriously as a man” and “you must become more like Jesus”. Further, Foster/Tennant say gravitas will only come by “making a practice of meditating on the gravitas of God”. But, what do the Scriptures say about God and gravitas? The answer is only silence from God’s word. The Scriptures use the term “kabod” (or “kavod“) to speak of God and his glory as a matter of heaviness. But, there is no real place where the Scriptures say God has gravitas and particularly so given the way Foster/Tennant define the term as a sort of earned recognition from men. Remember here that the authors previously distinguished between “kabod” and “gravitas” as two different concepts so speaking of God as one with gravitas is going well beyond the Scriptures once their own definition is made plain.

Nevertheless, Foster/Tennant want the reader to start with ‘the fear of the Lord’ as the way to make a clean start in getting gravitas. The discussion of fear as it pertains to fearing God here isn’t entirely bad but what they point out isn’t a matter of masculinity or what it means to be a man. Everyone is told to fear God and the knowledge that Christians have as a result of fearing God is available to all, men and women. Another problem with this chapter is what the authors have said to this point in linking the fear of fathers to physical punishment, sex, and power. Foster/Tennant also don’t see fear as something learned without reference to either physical or spiritual fathers, so there is more in the presentation here than the standard Reformed consideration of biblical fear that the authors seem to be laying down as a matter of course in their search for gravitas.

The less obvious subtext of the authors’ discourse is also at work in the points Foster/Tennant offer that have affinities to Enlightenment and postmodern thinking. Notice that for Foster/Tennant a man must be willing to be confronted and change. A man must also be willing to be made low. A man must capably trust his betters and avoid speaking ill of others. All this in normal discussions of what it means to be a Christian disciple might be appropriate in the right context and with the right qualifications, but Foster/Tennant in the main put this all as a matter of sonship with spiritual fathers, ultimately pastors that guide men in how to be men. Remember that for Foster/Tennant getting gravitas “requires spiritual fathers”. In essence and in context the claims of Foster/Tennant make relationships about power rather than love and as such represent a Foucauldian design I doubt the authors themselves have even considered. Foster/Tennant sing along with Bob Dylan in making the fear of the Lord about how ‘you’re gonna have to serve somebody’. Remember that for Foster/Tennant dominion is driven by sex and implemented as a matter of power. Of course, the authors do state that “to fear God is to love Him and to walk in His ways”. The problem here, however, isn’t about how fear is defined in short form but what they mean in terms of how it is exercised. Note that fearing God for Foster/Tennant is loving God but the only points the authors actually offer in doing so are wrapped up in how a man relates to others via exercises of power and not to God himself.

Here the reductive nature of their postmodern take of the fear of the Lord comes into play because the authors only look at hierarchical power among men in considering the subject. Yet, the Scriptures see the “fear of the Lord” as much more comprehensive, not just a matter of being ready to be rebuked or change when confronted along with the few scant considerations Foster/Tennant bring to bear besides. Instead, the fear of the Lord is a way to reference the laws and commands of the Scriptures (Psalm 19:8-9), ultimately the way God reveals himself and the response of men in return, the way we live for God, what motivates us toward right living, and something that can be taught (Psalm 34:11). The fear of the Lord also includes trust, love, and emotional responses of fear or awe as we might more normally understand these terms all wrapped up together in a manifold and humbling response when we encounter God and his word. In Deuteronomy, love and the fear of the Lord are treated as synonyms but in Foster/Tennant love is only ever mentioned twice in the whole chapter. Bruce Waltke goes through a more complete look at the fear of the Lord in his commentary on Proverbs 1-15 ( p. 100 ff.), where much of what’s presented above can be found.

Discerning the fear of the Lord in Proverbs 2 is not in fact a matter of getting the right spiritual father in play but crying out to God for discernment and lifting your voice in prayer to God for understanding (Proverbs 2:1-5). The Bible tells us to pray for wisdom, not merely meditate on God’s “gravitas” (James 1:5). Notice that the teachers of Proverbs 1 are initially a son’s father and mother but eventually Wisdom herself becomes the teacher because we find out in 8:22 and elsewhere that wisdom is eternal and really the Word himself (Proverbs 1:8, 20). In fact, the identity of Wisdom in Proverbs 8 is one of the key passages the early church used to defend the Trinity. So, as Paul says, “faith comes from hearing, and hearing by the word of Christ” (Romans 10:17).

Had Foster/Tennant presented the fear of the Lord in a more biblical fashion and with God’s “kabod” in play as the driving factor of understanding just who he is and what the Lord has done there would be little to write about in reviewing the chapter. But, Foster/Tennant’s flattened conception of their made up concept of gravitas and the more biblical notion of the fear of the Lord falls short here especially because the fear of the Lord is the start of wisdom for anyone in Christ. There is nothing distinctly masculine about fearing the Lord and the Scriptures don’t delineate a difference between how women meet and deal with God compared to men. In fact, Galatians 3:28 even says there is no male or female when it comes to being in Christ. To say otherwise is to go beyond what the Scriptures make plain.

Foster/Tennant then spend the rest of the chapter talking about the extremes of men who are too serious and men who are too silly. But, all this is a sort of false piety that the Scriptures spend no time talking about in the first place. The Scriptures speak positively about how a Christian should live in the Spirit and what that looks like for all believers that sees no treatment in the book in the first place (Gal. 5:22; 1 Cor. 13). Foster/Tennant’s take enforces a negative dialectic and an apophatic take when they focus on a man that is either too serious or too joking. Another astounding miss, Micah 6:8 remains absent from the book’s pages even though it tells us what is required of a man, ‘to do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with his God’. Instead, Foster/Tennant continue with what shouldn’t be done because they’ve run out of passages that speak to gravitas and they’re really just offering a postmodern reductive take on the Scriptures in service to the gods of masculinity.

Next Review:

Is Jerusalem Burning?

The War Between Patriarchies

The Anti-Technological Stance of It’s Good to Be a Man

Sex and Sexuality

Toxic Sexuality

The Effeminate Church

No Fatherhood, No Manhood – Part 1

No Fatherhood, No Manhood – Part 2

No Gravitas, No Manhood – Part 1

No Gravitas, No Manhood – Part 2

Gravitas Through Duty

How Porn & Video Games Hijack Manhood

Two for One Day – How to Bear the Weight/Manhood Through Mission

The Necessity of Fraternity

The Excellence of Marriage

The ongoing review of Foster/Tennant continues and this one will address the first chapter on gravitas entitled “No Gravitas/No Manhood”. A red flag appears when the authors actually get around to defining a term like “gravitas” while avoiding fundamental definitions elsewhere in their book. Why start defining a word nine chapters in? The reason has to do with the plain fact that the Scriptures don’t really have a concept of gravitas that remains vitally important to masculinity given the scarcity of the term in the Bible. In fact, one might question whether masculinity itself is ever a focus of the New Testament more broadly. The authors know they have to offer some kind of explanation as to what they mean when they invoke gravitas as a result. So, gravitas is defined the way Foster/Tennant want to define it in their focus on masculinity in fine postmodern fashion. The Scriptures, however, use a particular word to speak of dignity or the old KJV translation of “gravity” in just a few places like Titus 2:7 and 1 Timothy 2:2 and 3:4. Foster/Tennant are aware of this connection because they cite Calvin’s commentary on Titus 2 but don’t bother to consider application of these passages in any detail.

Oddly enough, one of the things they don’t mention is that 1 Timothy 2:2 invokes the word in question in reference to the whole church leading a tranquil and quiet life with dignity regardless as to a person’s gender. In fact, of the three times the word “semnotes” is used in the New Testament twice the word is used of men specifically, first of pastors with their children (1 Tim. 3:4) and then of Titus in how he should be an example to others with a life characterized by purity in doctrine and doing good deeds (Titus 2:7). A related word is used of older men in Titus 2:2 but not applied to younger men. The old Roman concept of gravitas though is nowhere to be found in the New Testament, however. Interestingly enough, young men are instructed to be sensible or of a sound mind rather than instructed to be dignified right out of the gate (Titus 2:6). There is likely more here to say about the life of the mind (2:1, “the things fitting for sound doctrine”) that seems conspicuously absent from Foster/Tennant’s blue collar red-pilled treatment of what it means to be a man. Regardless, the word translated dignified for Titus and other pastors means the sort of behavior that entitles one to special respect, dignity, or being honest. While the Greek word has certainly been translated as gravitas in the Latin Vulgate, there is no evidence that it’s to be understood the way Foster/Tennant apply it specifically to men.

Another problem for Foster/Tennant is that Titus is the focus of Titus 2:7 in being dignified and not the younger men the authors write the book for in the first place. Further, the gravitas he displays is not merely to provide an example of right living but also purity in doctrine. The same would be true for pastors in 1 Tim. 3:4 but is related only to childcare and capably making sure children are obedient. Younger men are given different instructions in Titus 2:6 but somehow that isn’t even discussed in the book in the first place. What that really means is that Foster/Tennant’s consideration of what it means to be a young man is at best incomplete and at worst unscriptural. However, there is another problem here. Young men are still men and so while an ideal toward dignity and right living is appropriate young men aren’t anything other than men simply because they’re young or immature. Yet, Foster/Tennant would have us believe that having gravitas is a large part of what makes you a man. The claim they offer in this regard demonstrates a false ontology in terms of what a man is and not just what he may become.

So, instead of framing the case biblically the authors resort to something different. Foster/Tennant refer to the old Roman virtues to speak of gravitas as “a man’s seriousness, his dignity, his weight”. Discussion then moves toward the Hebrew term “kabod” particularly in noting the heaviness of who God is along with men and nations that have some level of glory or honor attached to them. But, Foster/Tennant aren’t satisfied to think the Hebrew term and gravitas are exactly the same as the old Roman gravitas or even what they mean by the term. For the authors, one is a matter of grace (“kabod“) and the other works (gravitas), “something that must be earned” and recognized by others. This distinction, however, is artificial especially when we remember that everything a Christian does in terms of works is a matter of grace by faith also (Eph. 2:8-10). The authors then equivocate and say on the one hand that gravitas is something earned but in the example they provide Jesus somehow has it instantly in appearing before a crowd and speaking with authority. What the authors really mean by gravitas is rather vague, “the result of having settled into your Christian identity as a man”. It’s not the glory or heaviness of “kabod” but “when you become proficient at reflecting the glory you were made to reflect” by “becoming more like Jesus”.

Again, the authors invoke the need for spiritual fathers as part of the process because without them you can’t have gravitas. One is bound to ask, however, what men were the spiritual fathers of Jesus given that he had instant gravitas. Our Lord seems to have bested the religious leaders at twelve years old and his earthly father Joseph is completely out of the picture in the gospels once the public ministry of Jesus moves into focus in the gospels. If spiritual fathers aren’t required for Jesus the Second Adam, are they really required for men to be men? One of the lingering problems with this book is its failure to take seriously the work of the Holy Spirit in guiding Christian men to be who they should be. No doubt the church has a communal focus and men receive equipping from pastors, but priestly fathers is not something we see in the New Testament. Foster/Tennant would like to see gravitas but that particular “virtue” isn’t listed among the fruit of the Spirit in Galatians 5:22 with love, peace, gentleness, kindness, patience, and the like.

Foster/Tennant invoking Jesus in Mark 1:22 as “one having authority” exhibiting an earned gravitas to a crowd that presumably never heard him before is playing fast and loose with Scriptures since the better interpretation via Calvin is seeing the power and work of the Holy Spirit in play as Jesus spoke with the divine authority that accompanied him. So, there was no sense in which Jesus earned this by virtue of what he had done previously that a crowd not familiar with him might recognize. This display of speaking with authority is also reminiscent of the divine encounters of Moses and not really the way someone might carry himself as a matter of gravitas. Oddly enough, the strange thing for Foster/Tennant is that just a few paragraphs after saying gravitas must be earned the authors turn around and say “gravitas comes from God”.

All of this confusion points to the fact that whatever gravitas is for Foster/Tennant their considerations are not from the biblical text alone and carry a highly subjective consideration of the subject that ultimately remains framed by something other than Scripture. A reader can certainly speculate where views about gravitas might come from for Foster/Tennant and there is no lack of commentary on it in the so-called manosphere where “red-pilled” secular men and even some Christians are busy thinking they need to carry gravitas to bed women.

Historically and culturally, more broadly gravitas as framed by Foster/Tennant or considered by the so-called manosphere has more to do with ideas about being a man that have floated down culturally into American blue collar life inspired by a British Empire wishing to impart toughness and dignity in its men around the world. The myth of gravitas is also seen in nineteenth century romantic revivals of Stoicism and Roman culture signified by essays about Marcus Aurelius as told by the likes of Matthew Arnold. Freight has also been carried through the undue romanticism of men like G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc. We can also see it in a British aristocracy eager to hold on to their privileged life among a new and industrialized England in fine Victorian fashion.

The story of gravitas is told a number of ways but there is nothing in the Old or New Testament that looks to gravitas as a significant feature in being a man beyond having a moral character that others respect and what in any other context would just be called right living. Yet, this sort of gravitas is available and required of women as well. The Queen of England has historically displayed both the glory of her royal office and the exemplary behavior of a benevolent sovereign sufficient to be respected around the world. Someone like former First Lady Barbara Bush carried herself similarly. In fact, Titus 2:3 speaks of older women as needing to be reverent or venerable, seen as worthy of great respect, and carrying themselves in that way. So, overall what exactly is uniquely masculine about the sort of gravitas that it seems both men and women enjoy after a well-lived life?

Essentially, Foster/Tennant engage in special pleading to establish the notion that gravitas is what makes a man a man and something to look toward. There is more to say here as the chapter moves beyond definitional territory into things like fearing God while a second chapter on gravitas goes on to address what Foster/Tennant call masculine virtues. I’ll address these things in the next iteration or two of this continuing review.

Next Review:

Is Jerusalem Burning?

The War Between Patriarchies

The Anti-Technological Stance of It’s Good to Be a Man

Sex and Sexuality

Toxic Sexuality

The Effeminate Church

No Fatherhood, No Manhood – Part 1

No Fatherhood, No Manhood – Part 2

No Gravitas, No Manhood – Part 1

No Gravitas, No Manhood – Part 2

Gravitas Through Duty

How Porn & Video Games Hijack Manhood

Two for One Day – How to Bear the Weight/Manhood Through Mission

The Necessity of Fraternity

The Excellence of Marriage

The next iteration of this continuing review is part two in evaluating Foster/Tennant’s chapter on fatherhood in It’s Good to Be a Man. Foster/Tennant seem to present fatherhood as a matter of imparting knowledge and wisdom but for whatever reason don’t consider that God providentially places other people into the lives of men beyond those Foster/Tennant have in mind. While the reader can certainly agree with Foster/Tennant that a teacher can’t replace a father, at the same time that doesn’t make teachers or other mentors that come along the way to help young men entirely useless or somehow inappropriate. Foster/Tennant want to talk about a void that men have in not having fathers that drives them to look elsewhere as if that’s a problem, but again these considerations are mere claims on their part offered without support. Maybe some men have a psychological need for someone to fill the void of fatherhood so-called, something probably considered a given by many in society. However, one wonders what kind of real evidence exists for this aside from the mere claim made by Foster/Tennant or how different this really is than similar Freudian claims rooted in psychoanalysis. Here Foster/Tennant are likely reflecting the zeitgeist of our times in considering psychological needs as a driver for behavior rather than a biblical worldview.

The need for teachers in the lives of men without fathers is more practical and useful than Foster/Tennant consider whether that comes from YouTube or through a professor at a university. The Bible speaks often in Proverbs and elsewhere that counselors and advisors are actually a good thing (1 Kings 12:1-15; Proverbs 11:14; 12:15; 13:10; 15:2; 15:22; 24:6; 27:17). In other words, there is room to consider that men are being wise in seeking help from other sources aside from missing fathers and not merely to fill some void. Foster/Tennant want to knock the influence of teachers so they can point men to pastors as fathers, something the Scriptures don’t advocate. In fact, Jesus himself said to call no man father in Matthew 23:9 and yet Foster/Tennant are leading the reader to the conclusion that the real resource for fatherless men is the pastor.

A pastor, however, is not in fact a replacement father to men but rather a shepherd and brother. In Reformed churches, the biblical requirement is for more than one elder in leading people and not the singular pastor as a father. One of the great weaknesses of the Presbyterian model versus the Dutch Reformed is the notion that an elder or pastor is somehow hierarchically over members and not shoulder to shoulder with them in the same church. In fact, in most Presbyterian environments, elders are not even seen as members of the church but instead function as members of the presbytery where the real decisions are made. This problem can become a further distortion of biblical ministry when Baptists used to the notion of a single pastor guiding a church become Presbyterians in a denomination like the CREC but continue the Baptist ethos as they go even though they technically work with a plurality of elders. Sometimes a plurality of elders is really just the main guy with a bunch of yes men as a result. Bavinck et al. make it clear that ministers in the church are responsible to and report to the collective membership of the church without the need for an additional hierarchy even when a plurality of elders is in play. The elders represent Christ to the church but the people also represent Christ back to the elders so that there is ministerial accountability.

Seeing pastors as fathers has too many parallels to Roman Catholic ministry to ignore and often creates a mediatorial relationship between priest and parishioner that can very quickly become unhealthy and unnecessarily domineering. This problem is compounded when husbands likewise consider themselves a mediator between God and their wives. The sexual abuse scandals of the Roman Catholic Church should be a stern warning for anyone wanting to go beyond what Scripture outlines here. While it’s certainly true that men are to imitate their spiritual leaders in obeying God’s commands more broadly speaking, care has to be taken to avoid simply doing what other men say as a matter of course especially when power is unduly exercised in a fallen world and the relationship is attempting to model fathers and sons. Further, the pastor’s role is not to dictate what men should do but rather to teach and equip them to practice ministry in their own lives (Eph 4:11-12).

Jesus instructed the people to do and observe whatever the Pharisees said as long as it was consistent with the Mosaic law and the commandments of God. But, Jesus also quite clearly told the people not to imitate the way the Pharisees completely disregarded the law (Matt. 23:1-4). Part of the express messianic mission of Jesus was freeing the people from the undue influence of exploitative, domineering, and abusive clergy (Ezekiel 34; Matthew 7:15-20; Luke 4:18-19). While someone like Timothy was viewed as a son by Paul or Paul spoke of himself as a father to the Corinthians, the normal relationship of pastors as fathers has far less biblical support than is typically considered especially when we remember that Foster/Tennant here are claiming that ministers ought to replace the missing fathers of men and not merely help lead them in discipleship to see God as their Father.

What Foster/Tennant are really doing here is over-extending the analogy of fatherhood employed by Paul to speak of Christian discipleship. Christian ministry isn’t a stopgap to missing fathers because discipleship happens in the church whether one has a father or not. Pastors don’t replace fathers for Christians that already have them and asserting that they ought to for those that don’t is saying more than Scripture outlines. Christian discipleship is a matter of bringing men to their Heavenly Father and not taking the place of earthly ones. Additionally, to avoid treating passages like Matthew 23:9 and their implications in Foster/Tennant’s discussion on these points is a huge oversight and shows how prejudicial their case is.

Paul, for example, was not saying he replaced a natural father so men could be men but rather that he was foundational in bringing folks to Christ and modeling what it meant to be Christian. The ‘mature man’ of Ephesian 4:13 is figurative here, speaking of the body of Christ where all members grow into maturity rather than the notion that Paul was ever making men out of fatherless boys. Paul was also speaking covenantally in addressing Christian brothers so his statement expressing himself as a father in places like 1 Corinthians 4 isn’t about men being men but rather discipling the whole church to be mature in the faith. That’s why we see Paul addressing wives, children, slaves, and even apostates in his letters to the churches as part of the body of Christ. Overall, Foster/Tennant miss the mark here in terms of the role of pastors leading a church when they make these passages about fatherhood rather than what Paul was actually saying about ministry and discipleship.

One other thing I’d like to consider in this chapter is some of the commentary on technology because Foster and Tennant talk about participation and the physical presence of a father as it pertains to being a son. For the authors, “sonship is imitative…not something learned from afar, but something learned by participating in another man’s life…sonship involves real life discipling”. Further, the authors claim that sons without fathers “long for [them]..why they idolize…they do it from a distance–disembodied”. Foster and Tennant then say that “God created us as embodied creatures, where the physical and the spiritual are intertwined…we are not living in the Matrix. Embodied existence is the only way for human males to truly participate in the experience of other men”. Last, the authors claim that “love requires a physical connection”. All of this is leading up to their recommendation that men get into a church and follow a pastor as their father.

However, the distinctions Foster/Tennant make here are typical ways Christians often talk about technology as disembodied, lacking a physical connection, and pretending there is a difference between “real life” and the virtual. But, the problem with this from a technological and ontological perspective is that what they say just isn’t relevant or true. There is only one reality and it is the reality we all live in thanks to God. There is also never a time when we are disembodied short of death itself (2 Cor. 5:8). So, a son lacking a father is never really about being disembodied or some kind of alternate reality because experience is always embodied and reality is always one and the same. Furthermore, love in fact does not always require a physical connection and no doubt Foster/Tennant handle this from the standpoint of looking at sex or its outgrowth as the engine of dominion. Foster/Tennant help maintain a materialist worldview in describing sex and its social effects as the primary driver of dominion and in doing so echo the secular masculinity arguments of men like Rollo Tomassi.

The misconstruals Foster/Tennant offer here are not just a lack of precision in saying what they want to say. If all they really meant was the notion that being a father with a son requires face-to-face proximity and presence, I’d have little issue with the claims they make. Furthermore, they confusingly defend a claim about physical connection by referencing trinitarian oneness, something that isn’t physical in the first place and yet contains love. Too bad love for them doesn’t require logic because statements like the ones they make in this section betray the fact that the authors haven’t considered this topic in any depth or provided anything here other than a reflection of common Luddite concerns about technology and its use many Christians regularly express.

Foster/Tennant are just wrong to say that you can’t have “digital onetogetherness” in speaking about being online. At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, most churches met via Zoom or Webex every Sunday when they couldn’t meet in person. Are Foster/Tennant really going to argue that such connections online weren’t really worship on a Sunday because folks weren’t in the same room? We can certainly say churches weren’t worshiping the way they might normally and should if a global pandemic weren’t in play, but that fact is not material to the claim here. Furthermore, worship via Zoom is not in fact a disembodied experience. People are not even physically separate in Zoom, they merely exist with less proximity in play if for the moment we agree for the sake of argument that proximity means nearness. In reality, proximity could also refer to the ability of the church to be one together anywhere by virtue of the Holy Spirit. Foster/Tennant here represents spiritual as non-material but in fact spiritual for a Christian is about the presence and work of the Holy Spirit so the Gnostic dialectic they wind up engaging is a misconstrual of what we really mean by using the term spiritual.

In Zoom, church members are still face-to-face and physical togetherness only represents the Spirit-filled nature of believers together that allows them to transcend time and space. But, even here, the physical nature of a Zoom call is still physical. Monitors streaming atoms of light into eyes to see everyone’s faces retain physicality via electrical signals through computers out to the Internet across and into everyone else’s homes. At no point is the physical nature of worship compromised because a different technology is in play to make it happen. After all, the physical medium of technology isn’t witchcraft. Someone isn’t in a different reality or world because they’re using Zoom instead of sitting next to others in worship. But, forget Zoom for a moment. Is the worship of the universal church on any given Sunday compromised as a whole because local congregations aren’t all in the same room? Such a claim would be absolutely absurd. The work of the Holy Spirit and the technological innovation we have in something like Zoom actually can foster oneness in Christ and has for churches worldwide. After all, technology itself is a gift of the Holy Spirit (Exodus 31:1-11).

Besides, we forget that the common instruments of worship, even the sacraments themselves, are technological. Are we worshiping less if we’re not in a building? Or, is less worship in play if no pews are present and we all stand? Further, if we don’t commune via the Lord’s Supper is Christ not present in his flesh with us or is Colossians 1:27 entirely irrelevant unless and until one is consuming the Body and Blood of our Lord in the Eucharist? That last question would answer yes if one is a Lutheran or Roman Catholic, but the Reformed understanding of Christ’s presence is manifestly spiritual and not directly tied to the physical elements of the Supper themselves or even its use on occasion. Further, are we or are we not seated in the heavenlies with Christ Jesus (Eph. 2:6)? Are Christ’s two natures divisible such that we only experience his presence and love if he is with us physically the way Foster/Tennant talk about physical connections and how they’re required for human love? To say so means going wide of the Definition of Chalcedon and Christian orthodoxy. Last, God is not a man and he is the absolute definition of love. Yet, for us, somehow Foster/Tennant argue that love must be physical.

At best, Foster/Tennant carve out an undue separation between the physical and spiritual that is manifestly a reflection of the false dichotomies of a Gnostic dualism and at worst mere materialism when they claim that love must have a physical connection. All of this serves to allow Foster/Tennant to claim that men without fathers need to find a pastor they can trust and get in a church where they can be physically present and learn from the man God gives them as a sort of pseudo-father.

Of course, men should be in church and churches should be faithful to the gospel. Foster/Tennant know that the world doesn’t always work this way and considers that the “majority of pastors are themselves clueless bastards, weak in constitution and effeminate in conduct”. The dilemma their advice faces is that clueless men are likely going to be clueless about picking the right men to follow and so ultimately they offer advice that can’t be taken seriously or implemented as offered with any level of discernment by already clueless men. After all, fatherhood isn’t something sons choose. So, the whole model they’ve been working up to here falls apart if what they say is true. How is that solved? Foster and Tennant reply that a man should uproot and move to a region in the country where there is a good church or join a church plant where they live.

But, indiscriminately applied this also remains bad advice. Church plants are notoriously unstable. They fold very quickly and often fail. Most folks put church plant fails at or near 80%. Most all of them are gone in ten years or less. Further, church plants today are typically not composed of a normal membership of folks that represent the sort of generational diversity needed to model and exhibit Christian living with wisdom. Most church plants are pastored by very young men but following a young pastor with kids barely out of diapers is likely not going to give one the insight needed that real seasoned men in the faith might provide. But again, how does someone who is clueless clue themselves in about what a good church looks like?

The real solution is doing what we’re called to do as Christians. Trust and obey. Search the Scriptures and learn how to rightly divide the word of truth. Being busy with these things is more than enough to keep one on the straight and narrow even if a man isn’t in a good church. God will providentially move you elsewhere if that’s required, but for most folks standing firm where you are and being obedient to God is the order of the day. Developing a specialized understanding of ministry as a matter of patriarchy is a distraction from our calling to live for God’s glory. Foster/Tennant are just on the wrong track.

Next Review:

Is Jerusalem Burning?

The War Between Patriarchies

The Anti-Technological Stance of It’s Good to Be a Man

Sex and Sexuality

Toxic Sexuality

The Effeminate Church

No Fatherhood, No Manhood – Part 1

No Fatherhood, No Manhood – Part 2

No Gravitas, No Manhood – Part 1

No Gravitas, No Manhood – Part 2

Gravitas Through Duty

How Porn & Video Games Hijack Manhood

Two for One Day – How to Bear the Weight/Manhood Through Mission

The Necessity of Fraternity

The Excellence of Marriage

Foster and Tennant continue with a chapter titled “No Father, No Manhood” and proceed to emphasize the importance of fatherhood for Christian men. I’m not sure we can point to any Christian that would say fatherhood somehow isn’t an essential part of what it means to be Christian. The differences occur where Foster/Tennant adopt a more domineering position about fatherhood and men more generally in line with a strong patriarchal focus.

Some of the language in this chapter is undoubtedly problematic. For example, Foster/Tennant claim that to image God, we must first fear him. Further, they claim that “without fathers, sons remain boys”. The authors also engage in profane speech by calling men without fathers “functional” and “clueless bastards”. What they mean is that men growing up with fathers are “clueless about how to harness and aim their masculine natures”. But, why not just say that and avoid the invocation of a word like bastard? Foster/Tennant use profanity for its jarring effect rather than adding anything new even to their own discussion right along with the postmodern design of the book more broadly. Speech for Foster/Tennant exhibits power, not meaning, otherwise normal words and actual arguments would suffice. The problem also remains that Ephesians 4:29 makes it very clear that our speech ought to be edifying and gracious. Shock jock language shouldn’t have a place in formative Christian writing.

The more troubling language, however, is the idea that we “image God” and failing to recognize that the imago Dei is something that isn’t lost in anyone even when they’re not yet Christian. All men and women have been created in God’s image and their very being reflects that whether their father was present in their life or not. A man may be dead in his trespasses and sin but he’s still a man made in the image of God (Eph. 2:1-10). Foster/Tennant switch to a verbal form to emphasize behavior that is learned rather than stick with the way the Bible speaks about what it means to be made in the image of God. This is a dangerous move that goes well beyond what the Scriptures actually teach.

Of course, we know that “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” (Proverbs 9:10) but how do we know that the fear put forward by Foster/Tennant is actually the same thing we find in Proverbs since they don’t bother to define the term except as it’s related to bodily harm? In contrasting a mother’s nurture to that of a father, Foster/Tennant claim that a father is “a force who brings comfort not by folding us into his body but by subjecting us to his body. He has a fearful power to impose order upon us”. This reads like a passage straight out of Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. All we need to know about our fathers is the extent to which they use their own body to discipline us with force? That’s the point of fatherhood in the main when it comes to “imaging God”? The Bible treats what it means to be a father in an entirely different way and it’s simply wrong to see a mother as nurturing and a father as forcefully punishing. In the Bible, God appears as an intimate Father who expresses steadfast love (chesed, covenant faithfulness, 1 Chron. 7:13) not in terms of punishment but rather in terms of blessing, reward, and inheritance (Matt. 6:6, 8; Rom. 8:15; Gal. 4:6; Ephesians 1:3-12). Part of a father’s love is discipline, but even discipline isn’t primarily a matter of bodily harm. The greater aspect of fatherhood is love, not wrath or fear, because fatherhood itself is based on who God is and what he has done in creating, redeeming, and sustaining us.

Not having an earthly father does not mean that men just remain boys as Foster/Tennant argue. Typically, not having a father means life is a lot harder and lessons take years to learn that would otherwise come more naturally. But, every boy grows up and becomes a man because that is who God providentially makes men to be. Treating grown men like boys is the very thing that handicaps many churches in the first place and introduces a reductive dynamic that makes men out to be something less than they are.

Other mistakes by Foster/Tennant demonstrate their problematic scholarship in this chapter and the rest of the book. Foster/Tennant would have their readers believe that a father’s overall fitness is the best indicator of a child’s future health on the sole basis of a very limited study of 47 prepubescent girls over a 2.7 year period. Body fat in these girls changed anywhere between 2-8 pounds based off the total body fat in a father. But, they neglect to mention that the study itself concludes that until further research is in play no one can know if these slight changes move on past puberty. Further, the claim here by Foster/Tennant is about children and fathers, something the study didn’t address as broadly in the first place.

Foster/Tennant also fail to mention that the study included girls that were siblings (13 of the 47) and used multiple linear regression equations to come to their conclusions. For the non-statistically inclined that means that a lot of assumptions and other variables went into this predictive analysis that can only be described as subject to question without further confirmation and something that only makes a very minimal scholarly claim about a very small group of extremely young girls.

For Foster/Tennant, the actual analysis is really just an endnote in their chapter and is presented as evidence for their claim without discussion, an exceptionally weak way to substantiate their claim. We might see this on a student paper where the student is having a hard time coming up with enough viable sources that back his research or where really weak claims are being made. Instead of researching further or adjusting the paper’s claims, the kid just footnotes something he doesn’t expect his professor to check. True to form, if it was just one footnote among many others the reader might consider this a minor error not worth mentioning. But, the weakness presented in the notes provided by the authors is spread across the book. For example, instead of using well-established Reformed commentary, Foster/Tennant invoke the NET Bible several times as a place to find meaningful interpretations on particular passages in spite of the contradictory Wikipedia-like crowd-sourced problems the project presents in line with its general evangelical/dispensational focus. Strategies like this make the scholarship Foster/Tennant exhibit suspect especially when the reader can easily look up the citation provided and see how it’s not quite the evidence the authors need to establish a point.

One of the most startling things about this book is its lack of emphasis on Jesus Christ as the Second Adam and someone to emulate as a man. In fact, the authors are constantly referring to “natural” this and that in terms of relationships, sex, and many other things like fatherhood that they miss the forest for the trees. Is dominion really about natural fatherhood, sex, and having children alone? Or, is biblical dominion about more than that? Foster/Tennant claim that “the most important aspect of [Adam’s] sonship is becoming a father”. But, where does the Bible actually say this? Jesus Christ, the one who is perfect as Man and also fully God, didn’t become a father or even get married! Yet, we’re told that the most important quality of representing a father in terms of sonship is becoming one. In fact, Christ had no earthly biological father because of the incarnation. Christ learned from Joseph but very early on the Scriptures make it clear that he was about his Heavenly Father’s business (Luke 2:49). However, Christ didn’t become the Father or another father in any sense true to the claims of Foster/Tennant when it comes to him being fully man. There is a sense in which we can speak of Christ as ‘the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace’ and the ‘firstborn of all creation’ but these considerations are not what Foster/Tennant are pointing to in this chapter when talking about sons becoming fathers (Isaiah 9:6-7; Col. 1:15).

There seems to be some level of confusion between ontology and the performative life of a Christian found in obedience here in Foster/Tennant’s thinking. I would suggest that this may come from a more postmodern outlook influencing their consideration than the authors themselves have consciously recognized. Much of the way Foster/Tennant think about things is directly related to what we might call red-pill secular thinking about masculinity in our society as exhibited by figures like Rollo Tomassi and Jack Donovan. A trinitarian view of life is not in play here. A Christocentric perspective is not the focus of this book by Foster/Tennant. Yet, who is the King of Kings and the one that has taken dominion over all? Jesus said, ‘If you love Me, you will keep My commandments’ (John 14:15) not live and take dominion in the main by having children and becoming a father. What is important here as an adopted son of the Father is having faith in God and obeying the full counsel of his word. Christ himself said that his mother and his brothers were those that did his Father’s will (Matt. 12:46-50) and as a result denied the ordinary relevance of the natural family for kingdom obedience as far as his royal messianic calling was concerned.

There is too much in this chapter to analyze in one post, so tomorrow I will be addressing Foster/Tennant’s considerations that teachers are insufficient pseudo-fathers, that pastors ought to be, and also some notes on technology relevant to the chapter in question. Stay tuned!

Next Review:

Is Jerusalem Burning?

The War Between Patriarchies

The Anti-Technological Stance of It’s Good to Be a Man

Sex and Sexuality

Toxic Sexuality

The Effeminate Church

No Fatherhood, No Manhood – Part 1

No Fatherhood, No Manhood – Part 2

No Gravitas, No Manhood – Part 1

No Gravitas, No Manhood – Part 2

Gravitas Through Duty

How Porn & Video Games Hijack Manhood

Two for One Day – How to Bear the Weight/Manhood Through Mission

The Necessity of Fraternity

The Excellence of Marriage

Foster and Tennant continue their social critique of toxic sexuality and extend it to what they call the effeminate church in this next chapter. I actually do agree that some sectors of the church in America remain more feminine than masculine though I would probably disagree as to what that really means, what it looks like, and how to address the problem. The overly aggressive Young Turk syndrome of juvenile Reformed 20/30 somethings in our circles is in fact an effeminacy all its own perpetuated by missing fathers and their celebrity pastoral replacements, but you won’t see Foster/Tennant criticizing that! Foster/Tennant instead quote Podles and his book The Church Impotent (1999), a book I read and largely agreed with originally. After four graduate degrees and nearing the end of a PhD, the way I read now compared to the way I read twenty plus years ago has changed and so I’m finding myself less certain about some of the conclusions in his book and many others. Today I pay much more attention to definitions, presuppositions, implicit assumptions, philosophical considerations, and methodology on the part of authors. While I don’t plan to exhaustively read Podles again, he at least took the time to define terms like “masculine”. Foster/Tennant generally don’t.

The problem here isn’t just a matter of being imprecise. Foster/Tennant use a lot of terms in very special ways that they simply don’t define at all. Rather, the authors expect their readers to know what they’re talking about and and tend to beg the questions they address as a result. So, true to form, the chapter on “the effeminate church” provides an opportunity to talk more broadly about methodology in writing than I might otherwise because effeminacy itself is left to the wayside as yet another term that doesn’t get defined.

A work should be evaluated on its intended purpose and not as something it isn’t. It’s Good to Be a Man was not intended to be a scholarly volume and in fact its authors have very little in the way of academic qualifications. So, no evaluation should think that the work is some kind of scholarly or authoritative tome on the subject that just doesn’t pass muster. If we use moving as a way to say this, Foster and Tennant aren’t the sort of professional movers that come in with a massive truck, box everything up carefully for you, pack it properly, and safely deliver your furniture to the appropriate address. No, Foster and Tennant are more like ‘two guys and a truck’ and their work should be seen as such. Mirrors are going to be broken, wine glasses shattered because heavier boxes were thrown on glassware, and some stuff has to be left behind because they didn’t bring a big enough truck. But, they’ll get the job done! After all, this is just a popular book so they’ve not promised the world. They’re setting this ‘two guys and a truck’ expectation in order to avoid questions about whether they can actually pull off the move in question. And, this is natural given the background of the authors. Foster has a Bachelor’s in Divinity from Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary and an unfinished degree in History from Northern Kentucky University. Bnonn Tennant has no formal academic training at all. Foster has 24 years of what we might call varied ministerial experience both inside and outside Reformed denominations while Tennant has little to no experience in pastoral ministry. Foster pastors a CREC church in Ohio currently but Tennant’s church background is a bit more suspect. Tennant was excommunicated from a Reformed Baptist church over issues of justification and is apparently part of some kind of Reformed church plant at present. Foster has experience counseling as a result of his ministerial work but nothing is on record for Tennant. But, why go here to address the background and education of the authors when this is a popular level work?

The reason for doing so is bound up in the interdisciplinary nature of the work as presented and the problems of method in making the claims they offer. Foster/Tennant don’t just make theological or pastoral claims sufficient for a popular guidebook in understanding how to be a Christian man. They also address or make sociological, psychological, anthropological, cultural and even technological claims among other things. Yet, they do so in a fashion that makes clear that they’re not as familiar with many of the subjects they address or the existing debates more broadly as they let on in putting forward their point of view. To date, I’ve provided a substantial review in detail of various problems with what they’ve presented and will continue to do so into the remaining chapters. So, this is no mere swing at them in order to enforce some kind of credentialism. The problem is that their background demonstrates a general unfamiliarity with the way conclusions are reached and arguments are made more broadly. Foster/Tennant work with a methodology in the book overall that doesn’t speak capably to what they address and how they should address it even at a popular level. Besides, works that purport to be Reformed in doctrine and practice should be better argued and more capably presented for us to consider. Authors that write should be better trained and more fluent with the subjects they’re considering than what’s demonstrated here in It’s Good to Be a Man.

The shotgun approach of the authors force them to make claims they don’t defend while only asserting particular positions on a wide variety of subjects. This can be an effective strategy in dealing with people at the popular level that don’t know any better but it amounts to a manipulative form of argumentation. In reality, the methodology presented here is really just postmodern because it attempts to use the power of words to persuade and critique on an unsuspecting and typically uninformed public without the requisite argumentation that would make a real case. People who are fluent in the various disciplines at a scholarly level typically see through the assertion of mere claims and begging the question that Foster/Tennant engage in over and over both because they have a demonstrated mastery over the subject matter in question and they know an empty claim when they see it.

For example, Foster/Tennant make much of white knighting in talking about the effeminate church but somehow fail to mention that such a syndrome is seen as something both men and women do (Lamla and Krieger, 2015). So, thinking white knighting is a feminine or effeminate trait that men exhibit in church is entirely suspect if we go with the actual consideration of psychology as a discipline. More likely, the authors have developed their point of view from the sort of urban legend definition of white knighting at the popular level on the Internet, where some men defend women in online conversations. Regardless, the authors don’t demonstrate that white knighting exists in the church as a denial of masculinity and only assert it as such. It might be true, for example, that some ministers are “dependent upon female approval for their sense of self-worth” but no evidence is given for such a claim beyond the bare assertion. All we really get is a quote from Spurgeon about foppy ministers that establishes nothing except Spurgeon had an opinion about certain ministers he encountered. But, what does that have to do with the church in the twenty-first century?

Often, Foster/Tennant resort to secular authors if they want to support a particular point but they do so only to put a few bricks at the bottom of a house of cards they then build as if that creates a solid foundation for what they’re claiming. For example, it’s not immediately clear that someone like “secular psychologist Robert Glover” would agree that so-called “white knights” are the very “nice guys” he addresses in his own work, that it remains a phenomenon only men engage in, or even the notion of patriarchy itself as what ought to be the norm. In fact, Glover considers patriarchy as damaging to men and not just women so it’s not even clear that what Glover identifies as “nice” among men is the same as what Foster/Tennant are keying off of here in this chapter. Glover doesn’t mention white knights in the book they reference and yet an equivocation is immediately offered by Foster/Tennant to consider them as the same by building off Glover’s description of the nice guy and applying it to so-called white knights in the church. Now, maybe Glover makes things clear elsewhere that white knights and nice guys are the same but we’re only provided with the one reference they do offer in citing him where he doesn’t address it at all.

Foster/Tennant then take something like their bare claim regarding white knights and move into further assertions without evidence. Women in churches, according to the authors, “strive to include anyone agreeable, regardless of error” and “strive to exclude anyone disagreeable, regardless of orthodoxy”. No evidence or argumentation is given to support this claim. Things like this ring a bit as if Foster/Tennant are speaking to their own experiences more than anything since no real evidence is offered. The problem with experience as a guide (yet another postmodern problem) is that others have different experiences. I’ve met a lot of women in churches that are entirely disagreeable and in fact foster it (no pun intended). The only way to move past what experience teaches is to engage in sociological and cultural analysis that is likely both quantitative and qualitative but Foster/Tennant don’t seem to know about more formal research considerations like this or even consider it relevant. Further, the authors also haven’t considered that cultural considerations weigh in here as well. Women and men do not behave or think the same in various cultures whether that’s the broadly reserved and Swiss-German culture of rural Pennsylvania, the refined culture of Southern gentility, or the more casual culture of the American Southwest. Foster/Tennant then go on to talk about women in a misogynist way similar to the way racists talk about a minority they don’t like, “Women will always be tempted to remove discomfort. This happens even with the best women, out of a well-intentioned concern for the emotional well-being of others”. Is evidence offered here for this claim? No, the authors just continue to build the house of cards and offer stereotypical nonsense. Further, like the previous example, we can point to other experiential claims that blow away the stereotype presented by Foster/Tennant. Next they claim, “A church in which the influence of women is not checked by masculine rule–where, indeed, it is instead elevated and amplified–will always descend into mystical emotional chaos.” This wide-ranging claim is also suspect in the extreme when we consider entire branches of Christianity that are exclusively male-led, such as the Eastern Orthodox, and delve regularly into mystical apophatic expressions of Christian teaching and practice that have existed for more than a thousand years. What makes “mystical emotional chaos” the province of feminine expressions of Christianity except the naked claim Foster/Tennant offer without evidence?

When Foster/Tennant do get around to talking about men and their plight in today’s church they offer false dichotomies. Either men must “check in their testicles” or they are “escorted to the door” by those white knighting for the women in the church. Either they “lay aside their masculinity” or they “lay aside their Christianity”. Again, this back and forth between two extremes is really just a false dichotomy and a reductive consideration that forces a postmodern dialectic that’s not actually in play. More likely, men exhibit a range of behaviors on several fronts that we may or may not consider effeminate in our churches. Adding the outstanding scholarship of Peter Jones as cited as a plank to support the notion that the American church is fostering androgyny as a return to a more pagan norm is just groundless because Jones isn’t even addressing what’s going on in today’s churches in the article in question that they cite. The research Jones puts forward that Foster/Tennant cite is on the pagan past and not a postmodern present. Jones is doing religious history while Foster/Tennant are attempting to do sociology. While Jones in other work no doubt goes where Foster/Tennant would like, what’s provided in citation does not in fact treat what they lay claim to in any detail.

Graduate study in methodology is relevant here, what Foster and Tennant don’t have or seem to be familiar with, because it helps us see where assumptions and presuppositions are operative, even ones the authors might not be aware of–what we might call blind spots. Further, more study in how we get to a particular conclusion helps weed out bad methodologies where claims are made but no real evidence is offered for them. The problem is that the two options for men in today’s churches as described by Foster/Tennant aren’t the only ones and in fact preclude the actual solution to any sort of problems in this vein. The New Testament tells us to stand firm and fight where we are rather than move on to what we might consider more fruitful ground (Eph. 6:10-17; 1 Cor. 16:13). No doubt Foster/Tennant want to advocate men to be men and stand firm, but what they’re saying here is that it’s impossible in today’s churches mainly because of women. But, that’s just not true nor is it helpful to say so by disparaging women in the process.

In short, Foster/Tennant display methodological problems in this chapter and elsewhere throughout the book. The authors do not define their terms, their scope is too broad, as a result they make wide-ranging claims without support, they implicitly support a postmodern approach, they are seemingly unaware of the underlying assumptions they bring to their treatment of the subjects in question, and they offer extended commentary on subjects that they don’t demonstrate any mastery over.

Next Review:

Is Jerusalem Burning?

The War Between Patriarchies

The Anti-Technological Stance of It’s Good to Be a Man

Sex and Sexuality

Toxic Sexuality

The Effeminate Church

No Fatherhood, No Manhood – Part 1

No Fatherhood, No Manhood – Part 2

No Gravitas, No Manhood – Part 1

No Gravitas, No Manhood – Part 2

Gravitas Through Duty

How Porn & Video Games Hijack Manhood

Two for One Day – How to Bear the Weight/Manhood Through Mission

The Necessity of Fraternity

The Excellence of Marriage

The next chapter on sex by Foster and Tennant in It’s Good to Be a Man is entitled “Toxic Sexuality”, a term they employ but never really define. Sexuality normally refers to things like how a person feels about sex, their sexual identity, or sexual practices. Instead of offering a definition and detailing what toxic sexuality is the chapter takes a brief look at what they call “evil patriarchy” in the early Genesis narrative starting with Cain’s genealogy and then the reader gets to go on a roller coaster ride of a rather misogynistic look at certain women in the rest of the chapter. The authors do say “as sin grows, society under an evil patriarchy rapidly deteriorates into what we can rightly call “toxic sexuality” but in saying so the actual definition isn’t offered. All the reader really gets is a brief comment on polygamy in the genealogy of Cain and is then introduced to toxic sexuality as a result. Since Genesis 4-6 doesn’t really focus on sexuality in the first place, the consideration of Foster/Tennant here remains suspect. More normal looks at what the Bible might consider toxic sexuality are things like pornography, fornication, adultery, homosexual behavior, and the like. But, none of these words are mentioned more than 3-4 times each in the entire book and none of them even make it in this chapter on toxic sexuality in the first place.

Foster/Tennant offer a reductive dialectic of good versus evil patriarchy in the early narrative of Genesis that isn’t exactly telling the whole story. One might consider that the passages aren’t really about patriarchy in the first place, but rather focused in the main on the redemptive arc of salvation that winds its way through mankind’s early existence prior to the flood. There is such a thing as an antithesis that is working between good and evil but more subtle and necessary considerations are entirely lost on Foster/Tennant and their miss here forces them to say things like cities are built in the main as monuments to evil men practically without qualification. They even claim that Cain himself built a city to make a name for himself but they miss the fact that the city itself was not in fact named after Cain but rather his son Enoch. Doing so isn’t providing a name for Cain but rather a heritage for his children. Regardless, Foster/Tennant seem unaware that there is something more in mind here with cities than the immediate narrative lets on in their mention. The culmination of salvation history is found in the heavenly city of the New Jerusalem (Revelation 21:10-27). The Bible begins with a garden and ends with a city, but for Foster/Tennant the reader is supposed to think about patriarchy and its apparent enemy toxic sexuality.

Foster/Tennant also claim that “genealogies exist in Scripture to show how God is moving forward His [redemptive] purpose in a specific family line”. Of course, saying so makes sense to men who believe sex is the engine of dominion. The problem is that the authors then have to explain why the first genealogy in Genesis is about Cain’s line instead of the righteous son of Adam. For Foster/Tennant, Cain’s genealogy exists to show how far man strayed early on by building cities, exercising tyranny, and corrupting marriage and sex. But, is that really what these genealogies are about in sum? What the authors neglect to mention is that there are other genealogies and lists in the Scriptures that are detailed that are not in fact directly about the coming of the Messiah. The fact is that genealogies in Scripture do more than show how God is moving through a physical family tree to accomplish his purposes. What Foster/Tennant present is reductive because genealogies in Scripture also imply a what and why as much as they describe how. Genealogies demonstrate the faithfulness, love, and grace of God through specific peoples as it pertains to the establishment of his providential design.

So, the picture is much bigger than merely demonstrating that God used a particular family to bring salvation to the world or win some Wrestlemania patriarchal contest of the ages. This is why we see the original genealogy of Cain in Genesis 4 addressing technological innovation and the creation of the arts (Gen. 4:19-22). These skills and inventions are an important part of the dominion mandate when we have later commentary in the law mentioning things like copper mining for use in the land he promises to Israel (Deut. 8:9) to say nothing of the fact that the Lord is our Shepherd (Psalm 23). Further, technological innovation and things like music are gifts the Holy Spirit provides to men who are made in the image of God and reflect it through their creativity even while sin remains in play (Exo. 31:1-11). Interestingly enough, Foster/Tennant also skip over the fact that technological innovation, music, and animal husbandry are all the product of the wives of Lamech through the sons they had. We can certainly speculate as to why this is but what we can’t do is simply gloss over these details in order to enforce a focus that simply isn’t in the text, that somehow toxic sexuality is one of the main focal points here as Foster/Tennant claim.

The authors state that Genesis 6 is shown to be toxic sexuality in the main and the reason for the eventual destruction of mankind via the Flood. The problem is that the text just doesn’t display this emphasis and instead says something far more problematic. If anything, the first part of Genesis 6 is about the daughters of men marrying the sons of God. The passage itself and the mention of the Nephilim (Gen. 6:1-4) is quite controversial and few claim to know exactly what is being said. Yet again, however, the reader is presented with a matter-of-fact rendition and the real problem here for Foster/Tennant is deviant sex given their claim that sex is the engine of dominion. But, this is a forced read.

The passage in verse five tells us the actual problem, “the wickedness of man was great on the earth, and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually”. The problem wasn’t toxic sexuality per se but rather that their corruption was total and complete. In fact, when something specific is said about the wickedness of mankind in verse eleven we see violence, not sexuality, emphasized. Nothing is said about cities, about tyranny, or anything directly about sexuality. No doubt total corruption meant sexual corruption as much as anything else but the text of Genesis 6 simply isn’t focusing on it the way Foster/Tennant would like. Curiously enough, however, the narrative of Genesis goes on to speak of the patriarchs in very frank terms regarding their infidelities, but somehow that’s just not relevant for a chapter on toxic sexuality. Instead, Foster and Tennant move to discuss what they call toxic femininity. Now, let’s remember the book purports to be on what it means to be a man. The authors mention toxic masculinity as a speed bump just before but the next section drives on and on about problematic women in a way that can only be described as misogynistic. “Yoga pants, short skirts, Daisy Dukes, low-cut tops, caked-on makeup, and the like” are all invoked to tell us how immoral women are “in the Church today”. I don’t know about your church, but I don’t see that kind of dress in mine!

Curiously, for Foster/Tennant the charge against avoiding harlots in Proverbs and elsewhere becomes a charge against immoral women as women to avoid. The postmodern sleight of hand and redefinition should be apparent to the careful reader when harlotry is replaced with the adjective immoral and then talk proceeds to the problems of how some women might dress themselves. The discussion then moves to the lack of modesty as yet another problem among these women even while Foster/Tennant spend no time telling us what modesty actually means or why the Bible might find it important. Further, they also fail to note that one can be too modest in appearance and cultures like the Hasidic Jews, the Amish, and certain Muslim communities all have issues with infidelity and abuse as a result of their overly modest culture. These details and considerations are once again left out of the discussion so that the chapter can move on to the real problem: loud women. Of course, Foster/Tennant immediately explain that they’re not talking about women who engage “with too much volume” but in saying so it’s like a left-handed compliment, “that is only the most crude kind of loudness”. No, for Foster/Tennant they mean women with a loud heart. I have a sneaking suspicion they’d also not tolerate the voice of women they can hear either though given the way they disparage that “crude kind of loudness”.

The Scriptures do speak of certain women that are restless and whose heart results in contempt for a husband in committing adultery and being disagreeable. The context of Proverbs 7 is about adulterous married women and not women who don’t dress the way some think they should or are just too loud for certain men. A massive equivocation is eventually revealed here because Foster/Tennant directly contrast the harlotry of Proverbs 7 with the quiet submission of women in churches in terms of how they read 1 Timothy 2:9-15.

The authors go so far to say:

“…women in the Church are not to draw attention to themselves in any way. They are not to seek to stand over others, whether through their clothing or their speech or their will. Rather, they are to remain meek and modest, quiet and self-restrained, “entirely submissive.”

We find out all along that in fact Foster/Tennant are not in fact just talking about a loud heart. They expect complete silence on the part of women in the church. That’s simply misogynistic and unbiblical.

When we look at the Scriptures we find Miriam “the prophetess” publicly leading the women in spontaneous song after Israel passes through the Red Sea (Exo. 15:20-21). We still sing her celebratory words today. Elizabeth “filled with the Holy Spirit” cries out a blessing “with a loud voice” on hearing the news of the Messiah to come (Luke 1:41-42). Mary herself exclaims the Magnificat in reply (Luke 1:46-55). Priscilla and Aquila together corrected Apollos in regards to the errors he had made in his own public ministry (Acts 18:18-28). Other women in the New Testament church were called prophetesses and one was likely called an apostle (Luke 2:36-38; Acts 21:8-19; Romans 16:7). Lydia ran her own business, was likely the first convert in Europe, and “prevailed upon” Paul to stay at her home (Acts 16:15). Further, older women have a direct teaching role in guiding younger women in the church (Titus 2:3-5). The broader admonitions in the New Testament to speak in an edifying way are just as applicable to women as they are to men (Eph. 4:29-32). The only real limitation we see with women in the New Testament church is that the office of elder is reserved for married men of good character and reputation (1 Tim. 3:1). So, the notion that women must be ‘entirely submissive’ and quiet without regard to their calling and vocation in their own lives and in the church is just manifestly false.

In essence, Foster/Tennant go too far in attempting to tell men to stay away from women that aren’t serving God. 1 Timothy 2:9-15 is really just saying that women should receive proper instruction as the truth of the matter and remain modest in how they comport themselves. Quiet doesn’t mean absolutely silent in this passage but instead means to take God’s proclaimed word for the truth that it is. Incidentally, men are required to receive the proclamation of God’s word in the same way. In any case, what Foster/Tennant provide goes far beyond what the Scriptures actually say and ignore a lot more of what they say in the process.

Next Review:

Is Jerusalem Burning?

The War Between Patriarchies

The Anti-Technological Stance of It’s Good to Be a Man

Sex and Sexuality

Toxic Sexuality

The Effeminate Church

No Fatherhood, No Manhood – Part 1

No Fatherhood, No Manhood – Part 2

No Gravitas, No Manhood – Part 1

No Gravitas, No Manhood – Part 2

Gravitas Through Duty

How Porn & Video Games Hijack Manhood

Two for One Day – How to Bear the Weight/Manhood Through Mission

The Necessity of Fraternity

The Excellence of Marriage

The next four chapters of Foster and Tennant’s It’s Good to Be a Man focus in the main on sex and sexuality. I’ll be addressing problems with the first three and save the last for tomorrow. The problem here is that the chapters are short but the amount of criticism needed is much longer. So, I’m going to do my best to keep it short (fail!) in this section and maybe I’ll add other posts later on for things I just don’t get to in this first pass.

Foster and Tennant are working with a definition of dominion as “fruitfully ordering the world in God’s stead”. The problem with this definition is manifold. For one thing, God isn’t absent from the world and we’re not really acting in his place per se. He is present everywhere, sees all, and is all-powerful to both support and implement his dominion and ours in the earth both with us and through us. We don’t act in God’s stead, we act on his behalf in cooperation with his ongoing work. This is an important point we can’t miss because it helps us avoid the sort of rank error that sex in the main is what drives dominion rather than the many other things our Lord involves us in seeing the mandate come to fruition. God’s dominion and the dominion he offers mankind is not premised even in the main on physical procreation and saying sex is the engine of dominion is yet again reducing the variegated nature of what God has given us in dominion.

Foster and Tennant would have us believe that sex is the “union of male and female in one flesh” that “drives man forward in their created purpose of bringing heaven to earth by establishing God’s rule”. No biblical Christian denies the legitimate role of sexual union and having children as it pertains to the dominion mandate, but is sex itself really the engine that drives this car? How then does sex figure into the expansive dominion mandate we have in Christ to see all the nations come to him and live as they should?

No, the real engine of dominion is love expressed in God’s grace. ‘God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son’ who then worked to save it and establish Christ as King over all. We love him because he first loved us and that love expresses itself in everything we do. We shouldn’t even have to say this, but no sex was in play between Mary and her husband for the incarnation to occur and yet the Second Adam both established dominion for mankind in a way that the original Adam couldn’t and extended it far beyond the natural physical relationships of households and families. We’re seated in the heavenlies in Christ ruling with him already and not because sex drove us there.

Thirty percent of this book is on sex in one way or another and that’s probably a conservative estimate. But, does sex make up 30% of any man’s life? Does sex make up the primary focus of dominion sufficient to call libido the engine driving it? Here also is where Foster and Tennant remain thoroughly postmodern, perhaps even Freudian, because it’s the very lever of sexuality that Marcuse et al. use to corrupt our society in an effort to tear it down.

Further, for Foster and Tennant, sex is a matter of exercising power given their definition of what dominion actually is in establishing a household. For the authors, sex and more specifically the sex drive of men establishes households which establishes cities and eventually nations. Anyone who has read Foucault ought to be hearing alarm bells going off right about now! This isn’t Christian as much as it is a Foucauldian merry-go-round and only plays into a mindset that looks at power and relationships in a systemic way absent other pressing concerns. Foucault addressed how power works and not really the what or the why of it. Foster and Tennant are doing much the same with a very similar reductive approach and it’s no accident that both Foucault and Foster/Tennant find themselves concentrating in the main on sex.

Note that Foster and Tennant state that “union is not the end goal: it is the means to fruitfulness and productivity”. The instrumental view of union via sex Foster and Tennant hold here even excises love (what they call sentimentality) out of the equation. The word love between these chapters on sex only appears eleven times and six of them refer to what Satan loves! But, what does the Bible teach? The Scriptures speak about marital union in places like Genesis 2, Matthew 19, and Ephesians 5 and most certainly do not consider it merely a means to an end nor is love absent from its pages. A man is to love his own wife as he loves his own body, not divorce her, giving himself up entirely for her as they become one together. This is so much the case that Paul in Ephesians 5 invokes the language of marital union in reference to the church as Christ’s Bride. Are we really going to say that union with Christ is somehow only the means and not the telos of the church in coming to him? That doesn’t make any sense but that’s ultimately the conclusion Foster/Tennant would have to provide if they were consistent in how they look at this.

One of the most curious aspects of this book is all the Satan talk by Foster and Tennant. Satan is introduced as a foil to what they consider to be the right way to proceed especially when sex is being discussed. This too is a bit of a postmodern hat trick, ultimately providing an opposing dialectic rather than an actual biblical argument. Most of this talk about Satan, however, is speculation as to what Satan feels, thinks, and does and has very little in the way of biblical support. Foster and Tennant more than once claim that Satan’s chief desire is his own dominion and that his strategy is an attempt to tear down God’s hierarchy. Satan’s desire is set against man’s sexual desire here and that’s why it’s important to see the dialectic in play rather than an actual biblical argument. So, for Foster/Tennant, Satan presents androgyny as his key target and ideal whereas men’s libido is natural and desirable.

But, is this what we really find in the Scriptures about Satan? Was Satan after God’s hierarchy or redrawing gender lines in afflicting Job? There is a kernel of truth in the basic notion that Satan works against God and what he has established, but we’re dealing with a large movie popcorn here, complete with loads of butter and salt, and all of it cooked up for you to eat while you watch their version of the battle of the ages on Foster and Tennant’s big screen. Satan according to Foster/Tennant hates sex and “hates the whole system of biological sex…He is an enemy of male and female…He hates God’s kingdom, and the millions of atoms it is built up from: households”. But, the Bible doesn’t teach this about Satan or speak of him in this way.

Notice how a household for Foster/Tennant is ultimately something built physically. The chapter after this quote then proceeds to tell the reader that the war between patriarchies is ultimately spiritual. Foster/Tennant enforce a dualism here that is problematic and ultimately Gnostic. They then attempt to demonstrate that Satan’s plan and paganism’s original project was about establishing androgyny while God’s plan has been dominating power via proper sex all along. The problem with invoking paganism as a witness here is twofold. First, paganism was much more diverse, complex, and all-encompassing in the ancient world than whatever it wrongly did with sexuality. Really, the amateur level anthropological and sociological claims being made remain one of the worst features of this book.

The crowning sacrament of paganism as Foster/Tennant claim was not in fact misguided sexuality or blurring those lines but rather human sacrifice. So, again, Foster/Tennant are merely dealing in reductive glosses invoked to argue for something that is less than biblical. Secondly, Romans 1:28-32 makes it very clear that God gives men over to a depraved mind as a result of their sinfulness and not by virtue of some cosmic near deity working against him as the great villain of all things sexually pure.

Don’t get me wrong. Satan exists, paganism was bad, and there is real spiritual evil at work in this world. I’d submit, however, that Satan’s work is bigger and more widely felt than what one man might experience in his life. Yet, Satan also isn’t omniscient or omnipresent nor is he the master villain behind every corner. He’s not God and we shouldn’t pretend he’s only just short of being so. He roams about looking for people to devour, but in a planet of 2.5 billion Christians his influence has to be something different than individually directing each of us especially after the victory Christ has secured.

One of the clearest signs of a narcissistic American church and the sort of men’s movement that plays into it is making villains that take the blame for sin rather than dealing with the truth of the matter–the clear sinful actions of men that we accomplish all by ourselves quite without the help of some evil super villain. We’re not Minions and Satan simply isn’t the Felonius Gru. We need to get back to biblical religion and Foster/Tennant just don’t take us there.

Next Review:

Is Jerusalem Burning?

The War Between Patriarchies

The Anti-Technological Stance of It’s Good to Be a Man

Sex and Sexuality

Toxic Sexuality

The Effeminate Church

No Fatherhood, No Manhood – Part 1

No Fatherhood, No Manhood – Part 2

No Gravitas, No Manhood – Part 1

No Gravitas, No Manhood – Part 2

Gravitas Through Duty

How Porn & Video Games Hijack Manhood

Two for One Day – How to Bear the Weight/Manhood Through Mission

The Necessity of Fraternity

The Excellence of Marriage

We are living in a world of fatherless males who don’t know how to rebuild the walls of society. They have become clueless bastards. They know how to build, explore, and conquer—in video games. They must turn to YouTube to learn how to jump-start a car, tie a half-Windsor knot, and do a push-up. Social skills are even harder for them. They scour the internet to learn how to stand up for themselves, make friends, and talk to women. The knowledge that is normally transmitted from father to son has been lost. They have to rediscover it for themselves.

Foster/Tennant

There is an anti-technological focus in It’s Good to Be a Man that is problematic. I have a separate Foster video I’ll review where I’ll be critiquing this trend at length. We can certainly say that fractured homes and divorce has resulted in many problems for men in terms of knowledge transfer between the generations and lacking fathers. But, as usual, Foster and Tennant overstate the case and take a swing at technology and our innovative society in the process. Going to YouTube to figure out how to do things is actually a great good and not every father was some kind of blue collar mentor that knew how to fix everything.

One of the problems of this book is the perspective of the authors themselves and their own socioeconomic background in its writing as it colors their analysis. You can see it with the profanity they invoke to describe men as “clueless bastards” while Ephesians 4:29 tells us to avoid such speech and the WLC encourages us to preserve the good name of our neighbors. Imagine, though, what this book would have looked like had someone who is so busy with his vocation in play that he pays people to jumpstart his car were that ever needed instead of doing it himself? What’s more important, transferring actual generational knowledge or knowing how to fix a car? Or, what about the Dad that teaches his children to manage entire economies by allowing them to play civilizational video games? None of these potential lessons are possible because the blue collar nature of the authors bleed into their perspective and their arguments.

Next Review:

Is Jerusalem Burning?

The War Between Patriarchies

The Anti-Technological Stance of It’s Good to Be a Man

Sex and Sexuality

Toxic Sexuality

The Effeminate Church

No Fatherhood, No Manhood – Part 1

No Fatherhood, No Manhood – Part 2

No Gravitas, No Manhood – Part 1

No Gravitas, No Manhood – Part 2

Gravitas Through Duty

How Porn & Video Games Hijack Manhood

Two for One Day – How to Bear the Weight/Manhood Through Mission

The Necessity of Fraternity

The Excellence of Marriage

You can’t lay claim to a biblical argument when you’re really just echoing evolutionary science and modern sociology. Foster and Tennant’s It’s Good to Be a Man starts with Cicero just as Goldberg (1973) does originally and then quotes Goldberg (1993) a few paragraphs later to support patriarchy as “the natural and inevitable state of the world”. So, the book relies on 20th century evolutionary science and anthropology to make a sociological claim that is at best only partially true signified by the careful qualifications Goldberg offers in revising his original 1970s theory that was poorly received by the academic community at the time. Further, Goldberg is working with different definitions in terms of what patriarchy means than Foster and Tennant offer. Goldberg’s (1973) treatment is about society and “suprafamilial” (above the family, 30-31), while Foster and Tennant see patriarchy as simply universal, “the natural rulership of men”.

Goldberg offers his theory as a careful academic exercise, but Foster and Tennant reduce it to the fact of the matter. Of course, their claim is interspersed with reference to the Bible and redemptive history and who would expect otherwise in a book by Christians? They even claim that patriarchy is “built into the fabric of the cosmos” whatever that means. But, is that really true? Is there something patriarchal about Mars and Jupiter orbiting the Sun that we missed? The point here is not whether men rule the home, but how wide and universal the claim Foster and Tennant are making in their interpretive maximalism in recasting Goldberg. Here is the quote they offer from Goldberg:

In no society, anywhere or at any time, have these realities been absent . . . In every society that has ever existed one finds patriarchy (males fill the overwhelming percentage of upper hierarchical positions and all other hierarchies), male attainment (males attain the high-status roles, whatever these may be in any given society), and male dominance (both males and females feel that dominance in male-female encounters and relationships resides in the male, and society and authority systems reflect this).

Goldberg, Why Men Rule, 1993

Foster and Tennant then matter-of-fact conclude, “So, patriarchy is the natural and inevitable state of the world” neglecting to let their readers know that Goldberg in fact is not working with the same universality in mind.

But, the appearance of an obscure quote from Cicero in the opening sentences of the first chapter of It’s Good to Be a Man without attribution to Goldberg is concerning and likely means that there is some level of plagiarism attached to this text, a sign that the authors are working off of a compendium of various sources but not always giving credit where credit is due or offering anything original that adds to the current melee of arguments and positions on what it means to be a man.

Next Review:

Is Jerusalem Burning?

The War Between Patriarchies

The Anti-Technological Stance of It’s Good to Be a Man

Sex and Sexuality

Toxic Sexuality

The Effeminate Church

No Fatherhood, No Manhood – Part 1

No Fatherhood, No Manhood – Part 2

No Gravitas, No Manhood – Part 1

No Gravitas, No Manhood – Part 2

Gravitas Through Duty

How Porn & Video Games Hijack Manhood

Two for One Day – How to Bear the Weight/Manhood Through Mission

The Necessity of Fraternity

The Excellence of Marriage

Is Jerusalem burning? I get the power of an analogy and I have no issue with calling men to faithfulness. But, our cities and our churches are not in fact burning the way they would had an empire like Babylon visited them. We use words in ways that betray their actual meaning and participate as a result in the deconstruction of our own ability to speak to our actual situation. The sort of alarmism these words perpetuate is part and parcel of the sort of postmodern crisis that is employed to manipulate a reader. What follows will undoubtedly be a lack of sound argumentation, from Foster and Tennant’s It’s Good To Be A Man.

Next Review:

The War Between Patriarchies

The Anti-Technological Stance of It’s Good to Be a Man

Sex and Sexuality

Toxic Sexuality

The Effeminate Church

No Fatherhood, No Manhood – Part 1

No Fatherhood, No Manhood – Part 2

No Gravitas, No Manhood – Part 1

No Gravitas, No Manhood – Part 2

Gravitas Through Duty

How Porn & Video Games Hijack Manhood

Two for One Day – How to Bear the Weight/Manhood Through Mission

The Necessity of Fraternity

The Excellence of Marriage