Monthly Archives: August 2021

August 30, 2021

The Rise and Fall of Summer 2021

By Clarke Morledge

Now that the last days of summer are waning, I am writing a post to reflect on some spiritual matters that I have been considering lately.

As we near the end of August, 2021, aside from Hurricane Ida bearing down on Louisiana, what is on the minds of many is the deteriorating situation in Kabul, Afghanistan. The obvious quandary is that the Taliban has not had a very stellar record in the area of upholding basic human rights, to say the least. The situation is particularly precarious for women and young girls, due to the strict Taliban interpretation of Islamic Sharia law. Critics of the Christian faith have for years sought to fault the Bible for promoting misogyny, but those claims pale in comparison to the strict, Taliban readings of the Koran, regarding the treatment of women.

A friend of mine who served in the U.S. military recently sought to help an Afghan interpreter and his family leave the country. A few days ago that interpreter and his family arrived safely in Virginia, but the status of others left behind in Afghanistan is unknown. Furthermore, we must remember that there is a small, yet vibrant Christian community in Afghanistan, who have endured persecution under previous Taliban rule. We must pray for all who are facing extremely difficult circumstances, that God might deliver them from this crisis.

Please, Lord, protect the weak and powerless, and deliver them from danger. Let your loving Truth be made known to these people.

The famous 1975 Hugh Van Es photo, that sticks in the minds of many people, who lived through the 1970s, that recalls the tragic Fall of Saigon, after an extremely controversial and highly destructive war in Southeast Asia.

Reflections on a Meme: An Iconic Photo Examined

As an American, I particularly feel the angst of the loss of American prestige, following after the speedy fall of the Afghan government to the Taliban, after America’s longest active military involvement, in another country, during the entire history of the United States. More than a century ago, the British had to learn their lesson about how difficult it is to achieve military success in Afghanistan. In the 1980s, it was the Soviet Russians who faced the futility of gaining the upper hand in that country. Now, it is the turn of the United States to face the same scenario. When I saw the first video reports of people falling off of C17 planes, trying to leave Kabul, it made me think immediately of the Fall of Saigon, in 1975. I vividly remember the television reports, back when I was in middle school.
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August 20, 2021

Judaism Before Jesus: Exploring the History Between the Old and New Testaments

By Clarke Morledge

What happened in Israel between the time of the end of the Old Testament, and the coming of John the Baptist in the New Testament?

Many Christians, primarily of an evangelical Protestant conviction, know very little about the so-called “time between the testaments,” the 400-ish-year period after the Book of Malachi and before the beginning of the Gospel of Matthew. Sometimes this period is also called “the silent years,” in that we have no recognized biblical prophet speaking for those roughly 400 years, before John the Baptist.

By the end of our Old Testament, the Jews were back in their homeland, after being sent into exile in Babylon in the 6th century BCE. They were struggling to rebuild their temple in Jerusalem, along with the city itself, as we learn from Ezra and Nehemiah, but things finally came together. The narrative of Jewish history pretty much stops at this point.

Then all of the sudden, we get to the New Testament, and we run into groups like the Pharisees and Sadducees, and King Herod, and an occupation by the Romans. It seems like all of these people just come from out of nowhere!

Author Anthony J. Tomasino, in his Judaism Before Jesus, gives us a helpful analogy: Imagine you are watching a thrilling movie one night. Then you get a phone call, let us say, from your boss, a baby-sitter, or whomever, and you need to deal with a situation right away, so you step out from watching the movie. You get the issue resolved, and then 20-30 minutes later walk back in and watch the rest of the movie.

But you have missed at least 20 minutes from a story told over a 2-hour period! All of these new characters pop up out of nowhere. You struggle with trying to figure out what is going on, as you have lost the continuity of the story line.

That is pretty much what happens to most Christians when they try to study the Bible, and yet completely ignore the story of what happened between the times of the Old and New Testaments, what others call the “intertestamental period.”

Were the 400 years after Malachi and before the New Testament really “silent?” While Protestant Christians recognize that there were no canonical prophetic writings directly associated with this time period, the extraordinary history that God was working through the nation of Israel was anything but “silent.” But what do we know about those years, and does that knowledge help us to read our New Testament better? (credit: excelnetwork.org)

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August 5, 2021

Reviewing The Making of Biblical Womanhood: In What Sense Does Gender Really Matter?

By Clarke Morledge

Historian Beth Allison Barr has written a book with a most provocative title, The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth. Readers have much to learn from Barr’s book about her emotionally riveting, painful experience as a woman in her branch of evangelicalism, as well as her perspective on the history of Bible translation and women in the church. But along the way readers might want to question if she has thrown out the baby with the bathwater in her examination of an issue dividing evangelical churches today.

As in more than a few of my book reviews, this will be a long read for some, yet it is such an important topic, that it requires careful attention, instead of sound-bite responses.

Ever since Rachel Held Evans’ 2012 blockbuster A Year of Biblical Womanhood, a whole spate of provocative titles have been written by thoughtful evangelical women seeking to navigate the issue between complementarian and egalitarian views regarding the relationship between men and women. Before her untimely death, Evans’ eventual embrace of same-sex marriage, as permissible within a life of Christian faithfulness, surely signaled a red flag for many readers, but Evans’ examination of “Biblical Womanhood” still sparks a lot of conversation among many evangelicals. The phrase “Biblical Womanhood” was popularized by an influential evangelical organization, the Council for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, that authored the 1988 Danvers Statement, followed by the 2017 Nashville Statement, that addressed important topics related to gender and sexuality.

So, what is “complementarian” and “egalitarian” all about, anyway? In a nutshell, complementarian theology affirms an essential equality between men and women, while suggesting that the church urgently needs to affirm an often neglected truth, that male and female are not interchangeable characteristics of being created in the image of God. Egalitarian theology affirms to some degree that men and women are indeed different, but that the church has wrongly bought into the false idea that women are somehow “second-class” citizens in the Body of Christ, where women are subjugated under men. Aside from Rachel Held Evan’s book, there is Wendy Alsup’s Is the Bible Good for Women?: Seeking Clarity and Confidence Through a Jesus-Centered Understanding of Scripture, which tops my list of the best of the genre. Other books like Rachel Green Miller’s Beyond Authority and Submission: Women and Men in Marriage, Church, and Society and Aimee Byrd’s Recovering from Biblical Manhood and Womanhood: How the Church Needs to Rediscover Her Purpose offer important supplemental perspectives.

Beth Allison Barr’s The Making of Biblical Womanhood strongly critiques abusive applications of complementarian theology, but she tends toward throwing out the baby with the bathwater in making her critique.

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