Tim,

Love the name of your website! Thanks for allowing us to feature your excellent work.

My daughter and I happened to read the Maranatha Owen story this weekend. It actually talks about how, once they were engaged (she was 14? at that point), they were allowed to begin sharing their hearts and building on a years-long relationship as brother and sister in Christ. They language used definitely implied that the “relationship” had had romantic overtones since the earliest days.

Maranatha was 10 when they met.

Thanks, Tim–makes me glad that I married an 'older' woman (while in my late 20's). We did not have a daughter but cannot imagine how creepy I would feel if a 20-something male expressed interest in a daughter that young.

It’s all just so creepy. Would they feel the same if a 20 yr old woman was interested in a 13yr old boy…or would it have to be the 13yr old approaching the older woman.

Where does female consent come in? Where is the time for the kind of unstructured relating- rather than prescribed steps – that will let a couple know if they have enough in common to really want to think about marriage. It’s so mechanical rather than human.

Excellent post, Tim, and I’m glad Deb and Dee have hosted it. 🙂

As to Strachan’s view that marriage is not happening because of a lack of a father in the home or whatever.

What a crock. I came from a very traditional home. I have a father. My mother was a traditional, Christian lady, and having this 1950s CBMW-approved type of nuclear family did not help me to marry. I’m still single past 40.

Re:

He suggests things like going for coffee, playing Frisbee with friends, and listening to a sermon together and discussing it.

What, no ping pong or Jenga on the list?

Anyway, that’s all funny because a large amount of other conservative (evangelical) Christian commentary about how to date or how the genders should get along, warn men to stay away from women, even from giving them a car ride home alone, or meeting them for a cup of coffee.

Because car trips and coffee dates always end in sex! I am always seeing couples performing coitus at Star Bucks, how about the rest of you? 🙄

I can just imagine how scandalous those Christians would find it for a man and woman to *gasp* play frisbee together!!

But seriously, yeah, a lot of Christian teaching on men, women, and dating boils down to this view: women are a temptation, men cannot control themselves, and all women are hot for men and will give it up, so men should flee from them or avoid.

Re

to go on a second date and if the father says no then that’s the end of the relationship. This mean the father tells the daughter which man she can and can’t spend time with.

Counter me if you wish anyone, but seems to me most husbands/fathers I’ve met, known, seen post online, and my own father, were not interested in parenting, so I fail to see how his idea there would work.

My mother did all the parenting. My dad would not have taken the time or been interested in interviewing any potential boyfriends I brought by, had I had any (in my teens).

I just do not see many American fathers getting all that involved with their kid’s dating life. Most dads want to lean back in their recliner, crack open another beer, and watch football, not keep tabs on who their daughter is dating.

Under the #3 part. So the woman’s wishes and what she wants is of no consequence?

Had any guy asked my father for my dad’s permission to pursue me / date me, my dad would have found that pretty weird, and my dad is a pretty traditional guy… But even my father would find this stuffy excessive and nutty.

Tim’s comment:

The Bible doesn’t prescribe any path to marriage.

True. There was a prophet in the Old Testament whom God commanded to marry a literal prostitute, and she cheat on the guy constantly. At least I think that’s how the story went.

That is so bad. We have to save young adolescent females from themselves until they at least get an ounce of sense for a start. When I was in the seventh grade ( 13?? ) I had the biggest ole crush on one of the teachers. Maybe you all never did, but what can I say. Anyhow, nothing bad happened, but I, at 13, was just nutzo. Then at 18 I met “the love of my life” and would have run off to california given the chance. But we were both hoping to go to med school, so nothing came of it. But at 18 I was still nutzo.

I just know somewhere the bible says that God made men and women and children, but the devil made adolescence. If anybody can give me chapter and verse on that I would appreciate it.

Former CLC’er wrote:

I can’t get past the girl’s name: “Maranatha” Who names their child that?!!!

Exactly. I had to read it twice because I assumed the “Maranatha” part had something to do with Maranatha Ministries (i.e., the Maranatha/Owen story). But then I remembered certain, uh, “tendencies” among said crowd. Increase Mather, anyone? . . . oh, wait, I’m sorry, I meant his brother, Stimulus Mather.

@ Nancy:

“what” not “was”

As in, what would life have been like if I had learned to slow down and be more careful at the keyboard?

I don’t think Owen Strachan is old enough to have children who have gone through this “method.” Frankly, I think he should keep his thoughts to himself until he goes through that experience.

In any case, I see Strachan’s method as simply going back to the good old days where women were simply chattel property. No.Thanks.

Sergius Martin-George wrote:

oh, wait, I’m sorry, I meant his brother, Stimulus Mather

Don’t forget Wool Mather.

@ JeffT:
And even if it does ‘work out’ (and I know one [creepy imo] case exactly like this with the marriage probably 15 years down the track now), at what stage does she find her voice, if at all?

Daisy wrote:

Counter me if you wish anyone, but seems to me most husbands/fathers I’ve met, known, seen post online, and my own father, were not interested in parenting.

I’m really sorry that that’s the impression you’ve gotten. That is not at all reflective of my personal experience with my own father or generally what I’ve seen in the lives of many of my friends and family. Goodness knows there are some deadbeats but I don’t think it’s reasonable to extrapolate from them to say that fathers in general don’t care about raising their children.

I am sorry, there is something wrong with a 24-26 year old man being interested in a 13-14-15 year old girl….and there is something wrong with dad allowing them to date or whatever you want to call it.
Letting you daughter marry at this age without education, without a trade other than homemaker is child-abuse.
My son is 26, if I found out he was dating a 14 year old girl, I’d personally kick his rear….

@ Haitch:

Boyce College is relatively new and is associated with Southern Baptist Theological Seminary ( Louisville KY) and is not only baptist but very baptist and conservative.

Baylor U. is much older, bigger and richer, is historically baptist (Texas) but has not been a hotbed of calvinism as far as I can determine. Texas style baptist-dom is complicated with more than one (how many?) associations and state conventions variously based somewhere on the liberal to fundamentalist scale. There are some Texans here who can explain it, but I can not.

Nancy wrote:

@ Haitch:

Baylor U. is much older, bigger and richer, is historically baptist (Texas) but has not been a hotbed of calvinism as far as I can determine. Texas style baptist-dom is complicated with more than one (how many?) associations and state conventions variously based somewhere on the liberal to fundamentalist scale. There are some Texans here who can explain it, but I can not.

Baylor has all kinds going there. It has been fairly moderate as of late in the SBC World, but there have been some really odd-balls come out of there….one of the biggest cults in East Texas is in Wells, TX and is lead by a young pastoral major from Baylor. ( the story on Wells can be found in Texas Monthly magazine.)

Former CLC’er wrote:

I can’t get past the girl’s name: “Maranatha” Who names their child that?!!!

Actually, one of my classmates in seminary had that name.

srs wrote:

Just read the Maranatha story linked to above. That is just beyond wrong. It almost sounds like the people involved were racing to get the daughters good and married before they could gain any sort of perspective on life.

Yes, it does. And they passed the favor along to their daughter, Lauren, who was married “shortly after her 16th birthday – to another creeper in his 20s. When Mom Maranatha got married, Texas allowed marriage at 14 with parental permission. They’ve changed the law since then (2008?) to raise e age to 16.

In my mind, all of these formulas on how to date and mate correctly are simply a way of pretending you’ve got magical answers and for exerting control on young people. It’s a setup for failure in many cases.

The formulas don’t always work. You can do every step right and still marry someone who shouldn’t ever marry…anyone.

@ Daisy:

I agree that many people do what you've described, but a lot of guys are very involved in their kids' lives and take care of them from infancy onward. Two of the nicest young men (in their early 30s) that I've gotten to know through taking W. African percussion classes are, basically, househusbands w/young kids. (They also work from home.) Another acquaintance of mine feels that her husband is much more tuned in to their little girl than she is, if only because he makes care of her a lot… and because the two of them are on the same wavelength.

Please don't judge all men by the behavior of *some.*

@ Persephone:
Ten???!!! I cannot write what I’m thinking at the moment, as Deebs would have to delete my comment.

As for that Phil Robertson video, oh how I wish his “hick daddy” act would just stop.right.now. I also wonder if he gets his “history” from David Barton.

The only reason to marry off a daughter at that age is control, pure and simple. A daughter who has been trained to obey her father from the very beginning, is now asked to transfer the same level of obedience to her much older husband. This scenario is ripe for abuse. The girl basically is dependent on her husband for everything, having no other skills but homemaking, which as I think most will agree is hard work, but does not bring in a paycheck. This whole scenario is wrong on so many levels, but this is what happens when you add extrabiblical laws to the bible. And lest I forget, we need to out breed the heathens!

@ Persephone:
It already had an incest vibe, but what you’re saying – aaaggghhh!!!

More specificially, are they still married? How long have they been married?

numo wrote:

Please don’t judge all men by the behavior of *some.*

I never said “all.” But I do stand by my impression that it is most – most American born, American raised men.

Most men I am familiar with, who I have known personally, or female friends who tell me about their marriages, and from what I see online (based on married women who complain in forums that their husbands don’t help out with parenting – really, visit child free forums that link to stuff like “secret confessions of mothers who regret becoming mothers” and such), and with various news articles and surveys that women still do the lion’s share of household duties/childcare… and it looks to me like the majority of fathers in America leave most of the child care up to the ladies.

I find it repugnant that at an age when these girls cannot give legal consent to sex with men that much older than they, their patriarch is allowed to give it for them.

Only it’s actually worse, because they sell their daughter off to potentially a lifetime of bondage they were never mature enough to understand, much less agree to.

“Dateship” is just another form of legalism, pure and simple. That’s the last thing the church needs.

As for the story about Maranatha Owen Chapman, I’m shaking my head in disbelief. I find it bizarre that she could legally marry at 15 while Jack Schaap got a 12-year prison sentence for his affair with a 16-year-old girl. Yes, her marriage took place in 1988 and the laws may have changed since then, but still…

Here’s a link to the story of the Maranatha’s courtship. It doesn’t get much creepier and surreal than this. http://lifeandlibertyministries.com/archives/000151.php

Tim – cool to “see” you here. One thing, though . . . where do you stand on Patriarchy? 😉

K.D. wrote:

I am sorry, there is something wrong with a 24-26 year old man being interested in a 13-14-15 year old girl….and there is something wrong with dad allowing them to date or whatever you want to call it.
Letting you daughter marry at this age without education, without a trade other than homemaker is child-abuse.
My son is 26, if I found out he was dating a 14 year old girl, I’d personally kick his rear….

And be quite right in doing so.
Honestly, these people would be right at home living in caves & sucking on velocirapter bones.

JeffT wrote:

On the contrary, I’d say when a 26 year-old guy first expresses interest in a 13 year-old girl and marries her 2 years later, the overwhelming odds are that it’s more like pedophilia and the results will be rather ugly.

Particularly when she physically matures & begins to look more like an adult woman than a barely pubescent one. At that point does he lose sexual interest? Or does he (stop me if you’ve heard this before) inculcate a very ‘girly’ presentation in his rapidly maturing wife – must have long hair, must wear very feminine clothes, must be sweetly acquiescent & softly spoken…just a bigger version of a little girl. An actual adult woman would scare this type of man to death, & don’t even get me started on the potential danger he would be to his own daughters, who he would do the whole daddy/daughter date thing, because it’s Biblical, of course.

Some of you who are professionals in this field address this issue that I have.

Looks to me like there are two issues here. One is the issue of dateship/ patriarchy/ intra-family relationships as related to control. That is a separate issue. I am not going to talk about that specifically, though I think that a father in the home can be a really good thing. Unless he is a #$%@ and then it is not a good thing.

The other issue is age, and that is divided into two parts. The youth of the girl is one part and the age difference between the two marital partners is the other part.

Now around hereabouts (that would be the area in general but for my specific knowledge the high school where my daughter teaches) two of the largest ethnic groups have large numbers (apparently) who approve of and expect sexual activity including pregnancy in teen girls at least down to the age of 15 (the quinceria being a mile marker for “growing up”) apparently. There are babies born to unmarried teens, and the school system even has adjustments and accommodations for these young mothers to continue in school. This would all be without benefit of marriage, I am talking about. The two groups do not seem to have the same level of actual acceptance of unwed pregnancy, but the practice goes on none the less.

Let me be clear. Not everybody in each of these two major ethnic groups does this, but the behavior is common, and there are even teachers at this specific school who have followed this pattern in their own lives. Yes, you read that correctly. Many of these finish high school but some do not. Some go on to vocational training, and there is a program for that. Some even go on to professional levels of education, but most do not. Some eventually marry and some do not. Some have their children by multiple men and some do not.

The young mothers do not seem to be a criminal underclass, but the unattached young males (not all) gravitate to gangs and our prisons are packed with all sorts, including those who start out young with no “roots and responsibilities” so to speak.

So, are we saying that young marriage is wrong? Or that if there is young marriage then both the marital partners should be young and incapable of earning a living? Or that any and all marriage of the young is wrong, never mind who had whose babies? Or that everybody should be middle class and aspire to middle class ideals? That would be in an economy where the factories and mills have disappeared and jobs are few and far between for a lot of people, where there is little hope of economic success at any level (often not even a “McDonalds” job) for many after high school. Are we saying that under those circumstances marriage is to be shunned (unless it meets certain rather rigid criteria) and other patterns of life are to be accepted under the heading of what-can-you-do?

I am not making a case for the destruction of high ideals. I am trying to say that life is hard enough for you and me, but it is tragically hopeless for a lot of our fellow people, and the issue of how high do ideals need to be is right at the top of the list for a lot of people. Personally, I had rather see a 15 year old high school girl “married off” to an employed man than making babies alone and without any help except for the 30 something grandmother who herself is still having babies of her own. I had rather see the men committed to wife and kids than not. And if they don’t do it exactly the way I would have, well I did not face their challenges in life either.

Celibacy is good, but how many do that? Commitment to upward social mobility can be good (or can become an idol at some point) but that is not too reasonable a goal for everybody in the current and apparently future economy. Then there is the idea of family and one hopes some social stability.

So what exactly are we saying?

In other news, India’s Mars Orbiter spacecraft completed its final trajectory correction yesterday, firing its main engine for “3.968 seconds”. I will take their word for it that it is possible to measure the firing time of a rocket engine to within a millisecond. Be which as it may, by around 3:30 am tomorrow Blighty Standard Time, the spacecraft should have completed its orbital insertion and Mars will have gained a small extra moon. (Sort of.)

Beakerj wrote:

& don’t even get me started on the potential danger he would be to his own daughters

There have been cultural “ideals” in which men married much later and married much younger girls. Dietrich Bonhoeffer came from such a upper class society in Germany, and both he and his friend were following that pattern. In Eric Metaxis’ book on Bonhoeffer he gets into some of the details of the courtship between Bonhoeffer and the really much younger object of his affection. His friend married but Bonhoeffer was executed before he did. An older aristocratic woman was monitoring the relationship between the young girl and the older B in ways that sound somewhat similar to the case in point in this post. I gather from the book that such was the pattern among that social class in Germany at that time.

I am saying that perhaps there were a lot of sexual perverts among that class at that time, but more likely the men established themselves in “relationships” variously but simply followed the social expectations of the day when it came to marriage. Think St. Augustine and his mother’s expectations of a proper marriage, and that did not hinder his sex life nor turn him into a pervert, much as the pattern was different from ours today. ( I have no idea of any age differences for St. A but it does relate to delayed actual legal marriage for an adult male.)

I am not so sure that sexual attraction to any sexually mature person is necessarily a perversion, and I note a recent article about the age of menarche and in boys the age of change of voice as reported by choir directors in a certain study shows earlier onset of puberty than previously, and we are talking more like 12 nowadays. Time was, that females were expected to be start reproducing (getting pregnant) approximately one year after menarche. Back then that would have been about sixteen or so, but today that gets scary young. We don’t do that any more, thank goodness. There have been articles (I wish I had a link here, but anybody who is interested can check this out) saying that this might account for some of the obstetrical complications from back in the day. If we just get down to biology (as opposed to cultural expectations) things get complicated. But actual perversion, I am thinking, has to be pathology, not just breaking the social rules. And those adhering to the social rules of their class, religion, social standing and era were not even breaking the rules, at least not their rules. This does not sound like pathology when it is culture bound like that.

What I am saying is, the young have to be protected from the predators but not all predators are necessarily perverts. Not all criminals are mentally ill. At the same time, we see tremendous variation in the religious (think Islam) and cultural/ historical expectations of appropriate age for various sexual activities, and we see our own society saying one thing and doing another as long as it is “them” and not “us.” That does not sound like we are talking about biologically determined sexual pathology to me, but rather social constructs as applied to various groups.

@ Arce:

Thank for the info.

Boyce college (at least the buildings where they are) was preceded by Carver School of Missions and Social Work, where I went to school summers while in med school at U of L during the rest of the year. Mohler trashed Carver School and set up Boyce. I do not know the exact date when he did that. I have some negative feelings about how that went down.

My former husband was a history major at Baylor and “song leader” with a student missions team while a pre-ministerial student at said university, way back in the day before all those schools (Baylor, Wake Forest, Furman et al) separated themselves from the control of the SBC packed boards of trustees.

I have not kept up with the details, never lived in Texas (though my mother grew up in Texas) am not now a baptist, am not still married to the Baylor guy, and am disappointed at what has happened in the foofaw of recent decades in baptistdom. And I am not a calvinist–just did not want to miss the opportunity to say that. Oh, and am not a heretic or apostate, just said that for a certain person who lurks here occasionally before he started humming “just as I am ” under his breath.

I am not mad at you. I am not shooting the messenger, just letting off steam.

@ Arce:

Yeah, becoming somebody’s baby daddy for a teen girl who wants to work the system is tragic. I am so sorry, because now he has that plus this crappy economy. And her, I gather, not taking the opportunities available to her for federally assisted child care and voc rehab educational opportunities or such. Bummer. So sorry.

@ Nancy:

Just some evidence of the moderate Baptist climate at Baylor: The dean of the Baylor School of Social Work was on the social work faculty at Southern Seminary when that ax fell. Her husband has been the dean of the seminary at Baylor, and has served as interim president of Baylor and now is interim provost. Both are brilliant academicians and effective administrators. Baylor also has a large research and development facility in east (across the river) Waco in a former tire plant, modeled after RTP and other university affiliated research/development centers.

Peace From The Fringes wrote:

“If Isaac had a been a teenager, it wouldn’t have been a sacrifice.”

I love that.

Is some of this a reaction to the ‘fatherless’ society? A society where dad is thought of as out of touch and shouldn’t be or doesn’t get involved at all in whom his children go out with? The butt of the sitcom jokes.

It strikes me as an extreme reaction to this, going from legitimate concern parents might have to outright control freakery by just one of them.

In my day in the UK generally if the church had anything to say on this (dating) at all, and it didn’t always, it was in the form of advice, rather than strict rules. For example, go out in mixed groups generally before getting too serious with one person. Take time to get to know each other, and limit how physical you get. Avoid unnecessary temptation. There was no ridiculous expectation that the first kiss had to wait until marriage, but it is reasonable and possible to wait for sex until then.

If the CBWM has gone overboard on this issue, rather than attacking them, it would be better to put forward an alternative. This is easier said than done, the whole thing requires wisdom to avoid the extremes of indifference on one hand and domination on the other. In the end, couples who marry have got to live with each other, the parents don’t have to. You can only hope and pray they (the children) make a wise decision.

Where, incidentally, is a wife’s voice in all of this? I would reckon a wife has at least a good an instinct for a loser her daughter might be going out with as dad!

On a personal note, I had next to no input about whom I should marry, I just fell in love, and last Sunday marked 29 years! We both came from stable families, perhaps that was best preparation rather than books, conferences and DVD’s.

@ dee:

And, oh, I just remember. That one year when I too was a public health nurse (sometime on a previous post I think I said that public health nurses have seen it all) one of my jobs included stopping by an elementary school to check for lice once a week. So I found lice and sent two or three (I forget the exact number) of girls on required absence for one week to get treated. Week, passed, lice still there. Another week out of school Another week passed, still lice. So the “front office” had a jolly time laughing at me for getting suckered in on this. The girls were sixth graders and working as prostitutes being pimped to high school boys and I was writing them out of school to do it. Talk about bamboozled.

Anyhow, there is a lot of mess out there for sure. And the pimping of Maranatha starting at age 10 or 12 or whenever the thing actually started is basically on the same level. But these two things, extreme patriarchy and professional prostitution are merely two relatively thin slices of a much larger pie that I was trying to address. There is also the working the system that ar spoke about. And there is also the fact that the second largest monotheistic religion on the planet has other religious ideas in this area, at least historically, and in fact christianity has a history of some ideas not currently our ideas in this area.

But, yes, this Maranatha thing looks really ugly to me too.

It is important to understand that The Council of Biblical Manhood and Womanhood is rather enamored of Duck Dynasty.

“It’s the beards…”

Peace From The Fringes wrote:

“If Isaac had a been a teenager, it wouldn’t have been a sacrifice.”

bwhaha!

By the way, Boundless is currently featuring Owen Strachan’s “Dateship” article on their homepage. Boundless is a young adults-oriented web site affiliated with Focus on the Family.

Please forgive me if someone else has previously noted that in another comment. I’ve had a lot on my plate recently and haven’t been able to keep up with the discussions.

Arce wrote:

One I saw recently I helped out several years ago when he was 15 and a father wanting to be involved in his child’s life, was ordered to pay child support, etc. And the mom was trying to get him to make another baby with her. He is out of school, out of work, and his once bright future as a college Bball candidate where he could get a scholarship education has disappeared into flipping burgers.

Another recruit for the MRA, Manosphere, or ISIL…

If I remember correctly, Mr. Chapman was also advocating other young men doing what he did in part because a teenage girl that much younger would be more submissive and likely to look up to him. Apparently this is less likely for a woman around his own age. 😛 You’d think you were reading something out of the FLDS or radical Muslim worlds. It’s totally about control, because any form of patriarchy cannot succeed without females. Preferably willing ones, but they’ll take them unwilling and/or manipulated if necessary.

Lydia wrote:

Nowadays, more and more are actually avoiding SBTS grads for ministry jobs.

That is good news. SBTS was once a good school. I would like to see it so again.

Now Daisy, if your father was not going to follow your lead and do the Biblical(TM) thing of overseeing your relationships with guys, then you should have found a nice Christian Patriarch to do the job for him. Then you could have somebody film it for a video promoting the same and make sure clips wind up on Youtube.

Off Topic. Ran across this article in my twitter feed. Distressing article about another extreme misogynistic pastor. Pastor Heath Mooneyham wants to “kick you in the nuts” with Christ. His rapidly growing church, Ignite, promises red-blooded young men that it will never be boring—plus free assault rifles.

http://www.vocativ.com/culture/religion/heath-mooneyham-ignite/2/

And while we’re on the topic of urban legends about marriage trends, it may also be of historical interest how Appalachia got an unfair reputation for inbreeding, despite famously freakish occurrences like the Blue Fugates.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/2008/06/west_virginia_incest_virginia.html

http://www.indiana.edu/~oso/lessons/Blues/TheBlues.htm

singleman wrote:

By the way, Boundless is currently featuring Owen Strachan’s “Dateship” article on their homepage

Thanks, singleman. I had linked to Strachan’s article in the original version of this post.

Tim

P.S. Perhaps Deebs or admin can add it back into the sentence toward the top of the post reading “Owen Strachan says dateship is the answer to the problems men and women face in trying to get married.”

@ Hester:

Good graph. I wish they had shown us the range and not just the median. Maybe that is where the idea of teen marriage got started. And I wish they had broken it down as to social class, and whether urban or frontier society and such. I am thinking that people got the idea from something or other.

In NC one can marry at 16 with parental consent but at 15 the court has to sign off on it, last time I checked. Some people go down to SC to get married at 14, I think, or used to. We don’t do 14 in NC, and pregnancies at 14 are not the norm at the high school were my daughter teaches. Usually, or so I hear, the girl is a senior or at earliest a junior which would be somewhere between 16 and 18. By the way, for somebody who does not or cannot get a job right out of high school this would result in some income to the mother including court ordered child support as well as various government financial assistance in specific programs. Not saying that is the reason, just noting some realities. I never heard anybody propose early adolescent sexual anything as a good idea.

My son did get a letter of protest from a methodist pastor in a large city near hear after the pastor heard on the news about a case that young son had prosecuted which included a marriage at some age where they had to go to SC to do it, but I am not specific about the age. They married so that the girl in question could not be required to testify against the accused. The pastor was indignant that anybody should object to marriage at a young age. Young son wrote back, “here is what the jury heard” about drugs and prostitution in this case, and the pastor apologized since the case was not based on age at time of marriage but rather on drugs and prostitution. So I do think you are correct that there are those who think certain ways about this that may not be what some other folks think.

However, I think you may be confusing “back in the day” as to when they are talking about. I “hear” back in the day as “little house on the prairie” days, but I would have to hear some quote of who actually said what about that. As to what I reported about what was going on when I was young, these were age peers obviously. And nobody thought you were a child or teen or whatever once you got out of high school, which ranged from 17 to 19 but was mostly 18. At that age you could vote, could and would be drafted and could marry at 18 without needing anybody’s permission. And going off to Korea to fight and maybe die may have been part of the reason so many married right out of high school. There would have been no deferment for college in that particular crowd. I don’t know. I just know they did it. And I do remember that some people felt that getting married and getting your wife pregnant before they sent you off to war was a good thing to do in case you did not come home from the war. The terminology of having something (a child) “to remember him by” was sometimes expressed. Lots of variables here.

May I say, however, that to think that everybody cares one way or the other what the law says about anything at all is pretty much a waste of time. The thieves and robbers do not care that what they are doing is illegal. Those in illegal gambling do not care what the law says. The druggies and pushers are not swayed by the law. And right now some people are going out on early release precisely because it is costing so much to house and feed so many (and justified by the fact that sentencing guidelines have changed for some things.) Anyhow. none of these “care” what the law says, in the meaning of respecting the law just because it is the law, and our jails and prisons are packed with such people who do not care. And people mostly do not let the law determine what they do or do not do sexually. I am not saying this is good, but that is how it is.

I would love to stay and talk but I have to go run errands. People are coming tomorrow to put in a new water heater, and then again Friday to put in a new heating system. WhatI I have is still functional but is old and beginning to give problems. I am trying to get the house in really good shape before I die, because young daughter will keep the house and will not have the time or money to do any of this. So I am busy for a few days here. See you all next week.

@ Nancy:

I haven’t actually heard Owen and Chapman make the argument from “back in the day,” I was just generally addressing an argument others have made to justify child marriage. I first learned about those statistics after hearing how some Mormons excuse Joseph Smith’s marriage to a 14yo girl in the 1840s. They used the argument of “everybody got married at 14 back then,” even though everyone surrounding the situation at the time understood how unusual it was.

And yeah, you’re right that most people don’t look at the law to determine what they can/should and can’t/shouldn’t do sexually. However, I find it disturbing that Christians who are told to obey the laws of the land, find it so easy to disregard the age of consent whenever they feel like it. (You didn’t do this, I’m talking about others who do.) It’s like they don’t even think it’s a thing. Well, it is, and since most of these people take OT law so literally, disregard for law is a weird attitude for them to cultivate. Of course some in this crowd will also tell their followers to lie to the authorities about how they spank their children (I believe it was Kevin Swanson who did that?), so I’m betting regard for the law isn’t high up on their priorities list.

I believe Dee said she once had a pastor tell her that Christian colleges should have married students as the norm, because “the Bible says” most people should be married by 18? Dee will have to confirm if my memory is correct.

JeffT wrote:

To make stuff like this up and claim it’s ‘biblical’ is blasphemy!

Thank you for getting to the heart of this.

@ dee:

It looks great, Dee! And thanks again for letting me be such an honored guest here at TWW. I feel like I’ve hit the big time!

And you can game the “dateship” system.

Just offer $20 grand in bride-price cash on the barrelhead and throw in becoming the Patriarch’s vassal and bannerman and you got his daughter.

Hester wrote:

Maranatha was even only just past the medieval marriageable age of 12 for females.

And even in Medieval times, you only saw brides that young among the Highborn, for POLITICAL ALLIANCE reasons. Binding Lannister to Baratheon, et al.

Emmaline wrote:

http://www.vocativ.com/culture/religion/heath-mooneyham-ignite/2/

Clicked on the link, Emmaline.

Guy looks & mouths off like he’s trying to out-Driscoll Driscoll.

Like Glenn Beck trying to out-Rush Rush Limbaugh.

Headless Unicorn Guy wrote:

Just offer $20 grand in bride-price cash on the barrelhead …

I thought the same thing, HUG. These folks aren’t that far from making money – cash money – from this. I sincerely fear there will be competing suitors who will be asked how much they can afford to give the bride’s family (meaning the father) in exchange for winning her for life (or until she wakes up and smells the patriarchal coffee).

Tim wrote:

Dateship is malignant. It hurts girls, it hurts women, it hurts boys, it hurts men, it hurts families, it hurts singles, it hurts the church.

Including, on occasion, the young lady’s father. A patriarchal “father figure” steps in when the real father isn’t considered a proper patriarch. I read one website where they glowingly described moving a girl (with living parents) in with them so they could properly supervise her courtship/dateship.
Speaking of glowingly, have you ever read Jonathan Edwards’ glowing description of the glowingly spiritual Sarah Pierpont (future Mrs E) when she was 13 and he was 20-something?

Not to mention the daughter who is planning to go away for college! How would date-ship work for her? Oh, that’s right, all part of the plan to keep the girl under daddy’s roof until she is married. Ugh!

@ NJ:

Even if they believe in Romans 13, it’s probably qualified by how much secular law lines up with Old Covenant jurisprudence.

That’s my guess. Even though Jesus told people to keep paying taxes that were going directly to state-sponsored pagan temple and/or emperor worship.

@ Beakerj:

I read the Maranatha article. It appears to me Matthew and Maranatha are still together despite having married in 1988. That was the year I married my wife. This is our 26th year together.

Neither Maranatha nor her daughter Lauren appear to be traumatized by their family arrangements, and no laws have been broken.

As has been pointed out here before, the rules are all in flux. There’s no way college can teach everybody to be Mark Zuckerberg (who maintains all his billions with only 7000 employees) so all the pious posturing about kollidge on this board makes me want to vahr.

I’ll put my money on a smart, tough, morally ambiguous little t*rdroller with a young, sexy wife to support before I’ll put it on a debt-ridden 26 year old trying to elbow 13,000 other applicants out of the way for a shot at an internship that might, just might lead, to being the “head of the U.S. delegation to the economic summit” by the time she was 43.

Its obvious were in a place where we have to throw a lot of DNA at the wall and see what will stick. Let ’em toss it however they want.

You Puritans make me ill.

Marsha wrote:

I agree with you that economics are at the root of the problem. Every year there are fewer good blue collar jobs left on which one can support a family. Tax policies support companies exporting jobs overseas. Every year the gap between the wealthy and the poor gets larger and the middle class shrinks more. Our national rhetoric focuses on the shortcomings of the poor instead of on diminishing opportunity and a threatened middle class is encouraged to demonize immigrants instead of demanding responsible government policies and to obsess over terrorism rather than possible economic collapse.

You’re speaking of my country also (recently humorously referred to as a “US client”).

Hester wrote:

Speaking of marriage, my next Botkin/SAHD post is up.

Good post, Hester, really good stuff.

In late breaking news, the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary is promoting Owen Strachan’s “Dateship” article: https://twitter.com/SBTS/status/514502716245413889

I tweeted back, saying it’s a mistake to support his ideas.

@ Mule Chewing Briars:
Oh man… Mule and his MRA-ness is in the house.

Dont expect kid-gloves treatment here, dude.

@ Nancy:
I think theres a gamut here, per how 15 is perceived by both Mexicans and other Latinos who have adopted the custom of giving quinceaneras. And it seems to have a great deal to do with social class, whether parents have had a good education and/or are 1st generation immigrants and lots more.

I think all of that has to be taken into consideration.

dee wrote:

We are no fan of the Prutans here

But I am rather fond of prunes, Dee.

Tim wrote:

I sincerely fear there will be competing suitors who will be asked how much they can afford to give the bride’s family (meaning the father) in exchange for winning her for life (or until she wakes up and smells the patriarchal coffee).

Do you also hear the voice of the auctioneer at the auction block?
(As in the interlude of “Molasses to Rum” from the 1776 soundtrack…)

@ srs:
hmm, does he give “Pastor style” tips?

@ Haitch:
Don’t know. We’ll see when the More Info comes I guess.

@ numo:

Doubtless many Latinos find our whole “sweet 16″ deal either similar or confusing, depending on how long theyve been here plus acculturation.

I find it a little confusing and I’m basically a WASP. I apparently didn’t inherit a big dose of romanticism about rites of passage, etc. I think it may be because I’m on the autism spectrum and such things tend to look arbitrary to me.

Ken wrote:

In my house-church days, it was a tradition for the women to wear headscarves as their covering (and I suspect a sign of submission to their husbands as their ‘covering’, which is heretical claptrap). I have no problem with this as a freewill decision, but I didn’t like it being imposed, and in our own church no-one did.

I’m from the era when men wore hats to church. There were even “clips” so they could remove them and keep them from getting mussed up or out-of-shape.

Wonder what their hats signified….

Sergius Martin-George wrote:

And I love croutons. There. I said it.

You are such.a.rebel.

So, in these situations, does the dude’s Dad (or Mom) have veto power over who his son dates? Or is all that “protection” allotted only to the gal. In these cultures, what kind of guidance is given to the male suitor (other than the gal’s father showing him the shotgun if he gets out of line)?

ar wrote:

And while we’re at it, let’s bring back laws that prevent us from having credit or owning property because stuff like that is letting us “do” whatever we want to “do”.

Yep! And women definitely shouldn’t vote because their vote might cancel out their husbands! 🙁

Reminds me of arranged marriage in fundamental Islamic and other cultures. It seems this adding of ideas among “conservative” ideologues may not be so conservative after all. Stranger ideas may come about with the next generation of this. Who is there to hold this craziness in check? Next thing hijab like dress standards for women and women not being able to drive automobiles may become an idea?

@ Persephone: aren’t 13 year ods suppossed to be in school?!

Headless Unicorn Guy wrote:

Does he wear red speedos and black hooker boots and nothing else in the pulpit?
“FOR ZARDOZ YOUR GOD GAVE YOU THE GIFT OF THE GUN!
THE GUN IS GOOD!”

You forgot the bandoliers and the hair pulled back in a braid. I bust up laughing whenever I think of Zardoz.

Tim wrote:

Beakerj wrote:

unstructured relating

I’m betting that Mr. Strachan would say unstructured relating is not found in the Bible. Neither is dateship, of course, but the inconsistency might be lost on him.

Amen.

Daisy wrote:

I just do not see many American fathers getting all that involved with their kid’s dating life. Most dads want to lean back in their recliner, crack open another beer, and watch football, not keep tabs on who their daughter is dating.

Actually you’d be surprised at the number of girls in our circles (coming out of patriarchy, and threads at something of a loss as to how to father in a positive, affirming way) who wish their dads would take less interest…

You know I live a celibate life style as a single Christian, which of course I am not, at least that is what I have been told, almost always. More accurately Jesus hates me as does God and I will burn in an eternal hell because I hate God, even though I dont. All that nonsense aside, these people are sick, as Mark Driscoll believes in blessed subtraction I believe in blessed litigation. Not one of these clowns / “real men ” would last ten minutes at a deposition you would see that I have to use the restroom dance real quick. They need to be sued on a massive level and with holy vengeance. I read it and I cried, wept and howled at the moon, my neighbors think I am a nut, but this stuff kills me.

My mother was a moderate Catholic and my father loathed organized religion, I thank God daily for my father he instilled in me a rather accurate BS meter, my mother instilled in me a love for faith taken with a huge grain of salt. I am trying to be honest, I think, by His grace I would die for God, but I would never kill for Him, He can do that on His own, and a grown adult male should not have attractions for a young girl. Personally I dont date people from work, or people I do business with, I think one should wait until marriage to engage in relations, thats just me, and most of all. Women have been treated like trash in this country and still are. This is not ok, it is sin and all need to repent if they hold to such ideas.

What’s wrong with teaching your kids (and that DOES include girls – just to be sure the fans of patriarchy get this) good principles, living those principles yourself (and that includes admitting when you’ve failed), trusting your kids that they will do the right thing, and God that things will turn out all right?

That doesn’t mean that there will be no conversations about situations and decisions where you will have to give a little guidance or advice, but only if you trust your kids will they trust you in return and come to you with their problems.

So far, that’s what we’ve been doing with ours and it’s worked out well.

The problem these fundamentalists (and I would of course include Strachan here) is that they trust neither their own kids nor God.

Gus wrote:

That doesn’t mean that there will be no conversations about situations and decisions where you will have to give a little guidance or advice

Yes! 🙂

We need to disentangle patriarchy as described here (which I reckon barely exists in the UK) from responsible fatherhood. The younger children are, and therefore immature, the more protection they need from the outside world. Conversely, as they grow older and gain maturity, ‘telling them what do do’ will be replaced with discussion and advice, but they have to learn to make decisions (and mistakes!) and live with the consequences. You cannot and should not seek to protect them from all the knocks they will get, tempting as it sometimes is.

I would say though that girls in particular need protecting (by both parents) from boys who play at love to get sex.

It’s a difficult walk between abdicating responsibility (and this is a big problem in the UK) and exercising a control-freak type responsibility that can’t let go, and I doubt if anyone gets it right all of the time.

@ Gus

Gus, are you implying that should trust with your child breaks down, to rely on God to remedy the situation?

Dee, 

  Suppose dad asks the teen daughter to avoid a certain teen, who happens not to be a nice guy, and she refuses? Then what? What is the remedy? Let the toxic relationship run it’s course, and pick up the pieces?

ar wrote:

linda wrote:
But if I have to choose, I’d rather see some sort of courtship arrangement thus postponing sex and motherhood for our girls than the frequent liberated woman mentality that she can “do” whoever she wants to “do” whenever she wants to do so.
Yes. Absolutely. We can’t have women with their weak little minds out there making their own decisions about anything. Especially not marriage and parenthood. We have fathers and husbands to decide that for us. And while we’re at it, let’s bring back laws that prevent us from having credit or owning property because stuff like that is letting us “do” whatever we want to “do”.

And of course we must bear in mind the powerfully corrosive effect on a woman’s spirit of choosing to have sex with someone she’s not married to, as well as the physical effects which are almost as bad as leprosy I hear. The damage that does to her value & inherent worth is immeasurable, & only the most charitable man would ever consider marrying her after that. She’s just not worthy, & should be reminded constantly. Lord save us from the plague of female choice 😉

Mule Chewing Briars wrote:

You Puritans make me ill

Describing me as a Puritan just made me laugh. I’m out in our toxic world, helping 14 yr old pregnant teenagers, as well as working with those (normally from the travelling community) whose girls get married as 16 yr old virgins & spend their lives cleaning their blinged-up vans & being ‘apart’ from the rest of the world. I spent 15 years as a church youthworker in a culture that resulted in many balanced, intelligent allowed-to-make-choices-after-being-taught-how-to-think-critically young men & women who have not had sex before marriage, have gotten their university level educations first, & then settled down. It can be done.

I’ve seen & experienced the effects of many different cultural ideas on teenage girls, & some of them have terribly detrimental effects on these young women, in different ways. It’s all the extremes that cause most of the issues, extremes of youth, of blindly making decisions without any input, of being allowed to make no decisions at all…Those (& they may or may not be Christian derived)that factor in teaching young people to think, make decisions, suffer consequences, have a variety of friends & pursuits, allow learning form mistakes, discover & fulfil a range of gifts from academic to relational to musical & so on seem to produce those who have more ‘successful’ relationships. We may just have a different definition of successful though – I don’t believe that the longevity of a marriage is necessarily a marker of success, I believe the quality of the relationship – truly loving ( I mean non-selfish, mutual love & service of the other)- is.

@ dee:
Yah, it’s amazing what gifts the Holy Spirit confers on the adolescent male while at the same time arresting spiritual/mental development in the female.

Well, except for the female s*xual organs which continue to mature (and ultra-fast too!), an obvious distress that creates powerful temptation for males for the rest of their spiritually-gifted lives.

So, of course, females should be married as soon as those organs appear because otherwise our courageous strong godly males will inevitably and repeatedly sin. Oh noes!

And consider the even greater burden the male must carry, teaching and enforcing the perpetually immature females to the scutt work. Because they don’t have that extry-speshul Holy-Spirit sauce for anything else.

Our men are beset!

/s

  __

Caitlin,

“…good advice only reveals itself after you didn’t take it and telling a teenager not to do something is the surefire way to get them to do it. ”

Correct. Defiance and disobedience may very well continue. Discipline can be brought to bear, but with questionable results. In the end parents can not always protect their teen (13-17) children from wrong dating decisions, wrong courses of relational actions. They can try. But how long can they protect their teen from themselves? That was my point.

—

dee wrote:

The question is “What is right?”

In the context of my comment, ‘getting it right’ meant balancing the need to exercise parental control on one hand and not being a control-freak on the other. I think everyone who is a partent would agree that this is easier said than done. It’s a tad easier for maiden aunts!

I don’t think the analogy with Adam and Eve works here – they were created adult, and didn’t have a teenage rebellious phase. Human parents are fallen and not perfect like God. But I still take your point about allowing children freedom. It’s judging how much freedom at any one time that is the problem.

I absolutely don’t get the patriarchal (as described here) need for a kind of absolute control over children. I mean God himself has decreed where you live and who you marry to be decisions we have to make.

Caitlin wrote:

What about protecting our boys from the impulse to play at love to get sex?

Thank you. This is sorely missing in most of these discussions. What do we do with the predator Christian teen male?

Beakerj wrote:

Those (& they may or may not be Christian derived)that factor in teaching young people to think, make decisions, suffer consequences, have a variety of friends & pursuits, allow learning form mistakes, discover & fulfil a range of gifts from academic to relational to musical & so on seem to produce those who have more ‘successful’ relationships.

Yes!

Gus wrote:

True. Nobody gets it right all the time. But neither do the control freaks.

This patriarchal nonsense is pure legalism – the control freak aspect you mention – and has no place under the New Covenant.

@ Nick Bulbeck:

Further update, and apologies for the delay – I’ve been out since 5:30 this morning and I’m only just back in. Anyway, the Mars Orbiter did successfully complete its orbital insertion manoeuvre this morning, making India the fourth nation to send a space probe to Mars, but the first to get it right first time.

Nick Bulbeck wrote:

but the first to get it right first time.

A few years back, so many Mars probes were failing that I started thinking Martians were shooting them down.
Crazed Driscoll fans, perhaps?

Dave A A wrote:

A few years back, so many Mars probes were failing

I wouldn’t stake too much on the latest one either. They’ll find him fit for ministry just as he told them to.

Nick Bulbeck wrote:

Incidentally, is it only me who strongly believes we should make “Seattle” rhyme with “beetle”?

Actually, it should rhyme with “Beatle”.

Nick Bulbeck wrote:

They’ll find him fit for ministry just as he told them to.

And it may well be too late for a’ that, with ever-increasing empty seetles and offering platles.

Patrice wrote:

Our men are beset!

You didn’t need the 4th “e” in that sentence, you know.

I was raised in the southern Baptist wife beating convention.
Growing up we learned a wife is never allowed to deny her husband sex, there is no such thing as wife rape, a wife is not allowed to divorce her husband for raping her.

I was sexually abused as a child, these are my thoughts.

1)Can fifteen year old wife deny her husband sex?
2)Does fifteen year old have to get pregnant against her will?
3)What if fifteen year old decides she does not want her husband looking at or touching her underage breast?
4)What if fifteen year old decides she does not want to have sex again?
5)What if fifteen year old decides she wants a divorce, can she get one?
6)What if fifteen year old decides she wants her mother, and wants to go home to her mother?

Is it forcing underage girl to be married against her will?
Is it forcing underage girl to be pregnant against her will?
Is it forcing underage girl to have sex against her will?
Is it forcing underage girl to live with creepy man against her will?

The women in my family got married at fifteen, seventeen, and eighteen. We were to put on a joyous disposition, or be condemned by God. Really it was just creepy fathers and husbands wanting us to go along with their fetishes. These father do not want to hear or care what their wives and daughters think and feel. All that matters is wives and daughters go along with daddies and husbands fetishes, so what if it causes wives and daughters physical and emotional pain.

Please, please tell me that Strachan’s views are fringe stuff. I can’t believe that more than a small minority of Christendom follows this nonsense. These guys are nutcases. The bare fact that his system condones a twenty-something guy dating a 13-year-old girl should disqualify it forever from any serious consideration.

My wife and I are both believers and were when we met. We didn’t follow anything close to a rule book. It was pretty much love at first sight for both of us. I think we both knew we were serious when I asked her to trust me, get up at 4 a.m. and drive to the desert without knowing why, and she did (it was for a hot air balloon ride). Our wedding cost $500. None of our parents had enough money to help with it. I never asked her father’s permission, and he never expected me to. She was an adult woman and made her own decision.

There’s no love in this system of “dateship” or whatever they want to call it, no spontaneity, and God knows, no real joy. It’s absolute nonsense and drivel.

BTW, this December will be our 27th anniversary and we couldn’t be happier.

@ Nick Bulbeck:
the closest you’ll get in real life is the airport, Seattle-Tacoma, abbreviated as Sea-Tac.

John wrote:

Please, please tell me that Strachan’s views are fringe stuff. I can’t believe that more than a small minority of Christendom follows this nonsense. These guys are nutcases.

They’re nutcases, that’s true, and they are a minority among Christians. But their influence is larger than their numbers. The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (one of the largest pastoral training institutions in America) is promoting Strachan’s article.

That’s Joe2 wrote:

@ Tim:
Tim I think you may have misunderstood the significance of Steps 1 and 2 when you wrote,
So in Mr. Strachan’s plan, after the first date the man asks the woman’s father for permission to go on a second date and if the father says no then that’s the end of the relationship. This mean the father tells the daughter which man she can and can’t spend time with.
I didn’t read the plan as the father telling the daughter what to do. The woman does discuss the first date with her father. The woman may very well want to end the relationship, but can avoid the messiness of doing so by telling her father she doesn’t want the relationship to continue. The plan is a “safety valve” for the daughter because it provides the daughter an “easy way out” and the father takes the heat for being an unreasonable “mean guy” to the man.

No, no, no…..I think you’re reading this all wrong.
So, let me get this right, if the girl is 25, daddy is suppose to help her get rid of her dates? Unless he’s a stalker, dad needs to stay out of who a girl dates, unless the guy is older, much older….and she’s 13-16…
No, this is all about father being in control over the girl’s life. I can see the next thing being pushed is a dowry….pay enough, and you get to marry / date my daughter….talk about a step back…

Deb wrote:

the Presbyterian Church in America

Happily, prominent PCA academic and writer Carl Trueman has called them out on their patriarchal nonsense: http://www.reformation21.org/blog/2014/09/the-problem-for-complementaria.php

Tim wrote:

And if she wants to continue it but the father says no? She’s out of luck, the relationship is over, and the guy is sent packing. Don’t spin this as being at all for her benefit, because it’s not. It’s sad and hurtful, but it’s not beneficial.

Our experience agrees with you, Tim. I was sent packing by my wife’s dad 26 years ago after a 3 years of dating and 6 months of engagement (her parent’s supported). My wife’s excommunication and subsequent branding of being a “so-called Christian” (for not listening to her father) involved three churches and a ton of ignorant people who blindly did what they were told by their “leaders”.

The hurt and pain is life-long, and sadly extends to our children. But God, thankfully, has used it for our good in Christ. So thanks for taking a stand against the patriarchal mindset!

Has the dating scene (ages: 13-17) become so toxic in the U.S. as to require such extreme ‘rules’ and ‘safeguards’?

Okay, using Sopwith’s statement as a jumping-off point here.

Maranatha Owen Chapman was 15yo when she got married. Have we conflated this with Strachan’s dateship? Meaning, are we assuming that Strachan is talking about 13-17yos and thus the level of parental control is applied because the teenagers is question are so young? I wonder if some commenters upthread have done this. But if Strachan didn’t specify teenagers, then “dateship” could apply to any Christian girl seeking a significant other, no matter the age. Perhaps this is what is causing all the consternation? Are the people who look at it and say “it’s not that bad” assuming Strachan is talking about 14yos, while the people who look at it say “it’s horrible and abusive” assuming Strachan is including 28yos too?

If anyone upthread is assuming that Strachan only meant teenagers, they may want to go back and reread the post. At least in what Dee excerpted, I didn’t see anything indicating that Strachan limited dateship to teenagers. In fact he repeatedly uses the word “woman.” Strictly speaking, legally, “women” are 18 or older. Thus, 13-17yos are not “women.” They’re either girls, or young adults. (Personally, I’d say 15-17yo is young adults, 13-14yos are girls, but that’s just me.) So Strachan did leave the door open for this “dateship” procedure to be used on adult women.

Another good question: how are we defining “dating”? Because there is no way I would ever have applied the word “dating scene” to anybody under 15-16. In my mind, dating = seeking a romantic/sexual partner. What mainly comes to mind when I think of that is people in their 20s. How are other people defining “dating” here?

To be honest, I’m really not in favor of 13-14yos being allowed to date (using my definition given above). Dating and courtship both imply at least the potential for sexual contact, whether inside marriage or out of it. And 13-14yos are, straight up, too young and immature for that in my book.

Ken wrote:

the text itself says the ‘covering’ is a sign of authority, not submission.

The ESV and other English *translations* have inserted “sign of” before “authority over/on her head” which is what the Greek texts say.

So, you have been misled by the translators who could not/cannot conceive of a woman having the authority over her own head regarding whether or not to wear a headcovering. Therefore, it seemed to the translators, as well a the CBMW types that adding “sign of” was a clarification of a “confusing” verse when their insertion of “sign of” is actually an obfuscation of the actual Greek text.

The editing of Scripture betrays their insistence on the “plain meaning” of the text ruling. They are hypocritical and ideological, not faithful to the actual text. In short, they are intentionally misleading many to serve their own purposes.

I’ve commented here before extensively about the shame/honor meaning of a headcovering in the Middle Eastern and particularly Jewish historical context of 1 Corinthians 11.

Apologies to any who have responded already to this. I’ve not reached the end of the comments, but could not let this pass without correction.

Dave A A wrote:

Strachan, the wearer of many hats

Owen (not John) mainly wears hats as a sign of his father-in-law’s authority over him. No one would have ever heard of Owen (not John) were it not for Bruce Ware, formulator of the doctrine of women being the glory of men and being made for the purpose of being a man’s assistant.

Are OS and CBMW attempting to put the modern American woman, ‘back in the box’ ™ ?

Gram3 wrote:

Dave A A wrote:
Strachan, the wearer of many hats
Owen (not John) mainly wears hats as a sign of his father-in-law’s authority over him. No one would have ever heard of Owen (not John) were it not for Bruce Ware, formulator of the doctrine of women being the glory of men and being made for the purpose of being a man’s assistant.

So Owen (not John) has a lot in common with Dr Patterson (not Paige) when it comes to hats! Except his are many mainly manly hats. Otherwise he’d be a man-fail. And Jesus wears many mainly manly hats because he was *made* for the purpose of being god’s assistant, just like the Watchtower people teach! 🙁

@ Gram3:

Owen (not John) mainly wears hats as a sign of his father-in-law’s authority over him.

…this was sarcasm, right? Please say yes.

@ Hester:
Yes — and it’s true, as well. He has 4 official titles through which he seeks to fulfill his father-in-law’s vision.
Former-aPostle Dave writes:
“Owen, you’re an assistant professor at both Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and Boyce College. You’re the director of the Carl F. H. Henry Institute at SBTS. You’re also the president of the Council On Biblical Manhood And Womanhood. Above all that, you’re married and have three children. At what point of any day do you do things like sleeping, eating, personal hygiene, etc.?”
In today’s Part 2, we discover Owen (not john) is also a rap artist. http://amicalled.com/the-blog/
Back in Part 1 he says, “I am determined, above all, to be known not simply as a public advocate for God’s vision of the family, but to live it out.”
IMO, the vision is Ware’s, Grudem’s, Piper’s, and Mohler’s, with a bit of God’s thrown in.

“My Favorite Passage That’s Not in the Bible”
https://bible.org/article/my-favorite-passage-that%E2%80%99s-not-bible

“Scripture Twisting”
https://bible.org/topics/360/Scripture%20Twisting

“Inerrancy”

https://bible.org/topics/418/Inerrancy

Hester wrote:

@ Gram3:
Owen (not John) mainly wears hats as a sign of his father-in-law’s authority over him.
…this was sarcasm, right? Please say yes.

Not sarcasm exactly. More like outright mockery which they have manifestly earned. :o)

Ken wrote:

In this particular passage in 1 Cor 11, the RSV is not at its best by using the word ‘veil’ instead of the less specific ‘covering’. When it gets to verse 10 it reads “That is why a woman ought to have a veil on her head, because of the angels” with a margin note ‘Greek: authority, the veil being a symbol of this’. The ESV is here an improvement imo.

I’m not sure I follow your reasoning here. The actual Greek text says that a woman should have authority on/over her own head. The words added to the text in the ESV–“symbol of”–totally change the meaning of Paul’s entire argument.

The idea that a woman should have an outward symbol of her husband’s authority presupposes an authority which has merely been implicitly asserted by the translators. It has not been demonstrated. That supposed authority of male over female goes entirely against the summation of Paul’s argument in the following verses. Sometimes, it is helpful to examine Paul’s reasoning by starting at his conclusion because a premise cannot be valid if it is contradicted by the conclusion.

The translators translate within a context, and the social context of those translators has to be considered. By what authority do they add to the Greek text?

Further, they demonstrate profound ignorance (which I assume is willful because they claim to be scholars) of the actual significance of headcoverings for males in Judaism and of females in both Judaism and the broader Middle Eastern social and religious context. The short version is that the man should not bring shame on his head, Christ, who removed the shame which men covered during worship by the tallit. The woman should not bring shame on her own head by appearing with her hair uncovered, a shameful act in that culture.

If I have misunderstood your point, please elaborate. I don’t think I’m being out of line by asserting theological bias in translation. Why should they be given a pass on bad behavior by not setting off their additions to the text without any indication that it is an addition by either using italics or a textual note. The best interpretation of this is intellectually dishonesty.

In fact, it may be something very much worse–a desire of men to advance an agenda at the cost of altering the words of the Holy Spirit (or at least our best evidence of the original texts.) I’m a very conservative person when it comes to the text–possibly the most conservative person posting here. These men are rebels just like the ones the Lord called out for nullifying the word of God by adding their own “helpful and clarifying interpretations.” I don’t know how to put a better spin on this.

Ken wrote:

I’m still a reader of the RSV on which the ESV is based.

And, of course, the RSV is in the public domain, so the ESV translators just needed to update it and slap a copyright on it to make big bucks by having the “gospel” Glitterati promote it as essentially literal, unlike the liberal TNIV which recognized the difference between physical gender and gender in gendered languages.

@ Ken: btw, I still have a soft spot for the RSV. The very 1st Bible I bought for myself was an RSV, back in 1973.

Still, I’ve always read other translations and in the 70s, was especially fond of the Oxford U. translation and the Jerusalem Bible, which was pretty much the standard among th Catholic charismatics I hung out with.

@ linda:
Asking someone close to you for their opinion is orders of magnitude different than “dateship.” For one thing, it’s up to the woman to make the decision to ask in the 1st place. The agency is with you, *not* with some man who’s related to you. Nor were your father or brother micromanaging your relationship(s?), at least, I get the sense that they weren’t.

I thought duennas (Spanish female chaperones who always were present when a young man and woman spent time together) went out of style by 1915, but apparently not.

@ numo:
Agree numo. Add to the language difficulty approx. 2,000 yrs. of a very different culture and you have a recipe for doing the best we can in translating the author’s intent.

Also of importance imo is the discovery of manuscripts (dead sea scrolls) that aid somewhat in confirming the more recent translations may be more accurate.

What bugs me is these guys like Strachan have replaced wisdom with rules. It’s a good thing for young people to be open with their parents about who they’re dating. That’s wise. But needing permission? Dumb. And debilitating, IMO.

@ Gram3:
Bowdoin a hotbed of purple prose?!!! (If you hear crazed laughter, it’s only me, rolling on the floor at the thought.)

It certainly has the most severe-looking campus i’ve ever seen – a rarefied, Maine-ish version of what an Ivy League school should actually look like. 😉 i just cannot imagine anyone there tolerating such sophmoric writing; the place has quite a reputation for academic rigor. (I guess there’s not much else to do during those long, snowy winters except study, and indulge in skiing and alcohol on weekends.)

@ Gram3:
I agree that theological bias can creep into a translation, but would beware of accusing translators of this without specific evidence. The vast range of translations is a pretty good guarantee that this can be avoided, all the more so as the ‘net means you can look at twenty at once! Numo – I bought my first RSV in 1974, and I’ve still got it, somewhat worse for wear. I regularly used GNB and NASB as well.

As for 1 Cor 11, the woodenly literal ‘a women ought to have an authority on her head’ is strange English, and changing this to ‘veil’ on her head as RSV does is an attempt to convey the meaning using words different from the literal source text is not intentionally deceiving, and adding a footnote confirms this. The question is what does ‘authority’ mean here and adding ‘symbol of’ does not influence how you understand this. One view is that the covering signifies her submission to her husband’s authority, but if so, why not use the word submission here? My view is it signifies her authority, that is, as both men and women receive the Spirit and can pray and prophesy etc., on an equal footing, this is a sign of her being authorised by God to do this. God wants the differences between the sexes maintained, that women do not aspire to being like the men, but prophesy as women (if you see what I mean). They are ‘in order’ to do so.

The complexity of the chapter is due to Paul dealing with a church made up of both Jews and Greeks with differing social backgrounds and customs.

The reference to angels seems to be an area where commentators fear to tread. Going by memory from a series on this by Roger Price in the UK, he noted that angels are clearly involved in the activities of the church, and should not see anything disorderly in church meetings, and the head covering was a visible outward sign of a woman acting under the authority of God. Think of the difference between how you regard a policman – or woman – when wearing their uniform and when not wearing their uniform. It’s not the clothing but what it symbolises. I’ll have to listen to it again though.

I think the modern outworking of this is that the women should look and act like women in the church. I think the ‘long hair given to her as a covering (Gk: instead of a veil) is sufficient unless she freely chooses to wear a hat or headscarf as a covering. The rejoinder to this is that this could be understood to mean only bald men can pray or prophesy, but whatever my many faults and foibles, you cannot accuse me of not practicing what I preach on this one. 🙂

Nancy wrote:

In NC one can marry at 16 with parental consent but at 15 the court has to sign off on it, last time I checked. Some people go down to SC to get married at 14, I think, or used to. We don’t do 14 in NC, and pregnancies at 14 are not the norm at the high school were my daughter teaches. U

I read about a young man who at the age of 14 married a young woman who was 17. That was his first marriage. That marriage didn’t last. His third marriage was at the age 22 and he married his cousin who was 13 at the time. All of this was perfectly legal in the late 1950’s somewhere in the South.

Ken wrote:

I agree that theological bias can creep into a translation, but would beware of accusing translators of this without specific evidence. The vast range of translations is a pretty good guarantee that this can be avoided

For evidence of bias, consider the fact that the RSV translators translated “power/authority” as “veil.” Those words are not remotely related *except* that “veil” symbolizes “authority of a male over the female” so it seemed reasonable to the RSV translators to do what they did, given that they were living in a culture of male supremacy. That is not good scholarship nor is it good translation practice, so I ask myself what a reasonable explanation might be for this odd behavior by scholars. I don’t have a reasonable hypothesis for this other than bias due to presuppositions about males and females.

For evidence of bias in the ESV, I have already cited the addition of “symbol of” to the text without italics or notes. Even with italics and a note, one still must ask the question why translators saw the need to add “clarification” to the actual words unless the actual words did not convey what the translators presupposed to be true. Again, I have no alternate reasonable hypothesis other than the fact that Wayne Grudem, the editor of the ESV, has made his entire career and fortune on the subjugation of women.

So, he must not be impeded by the actual words inspired by the Holy Spirit. If he wants to say that he does not believe that the Bible is the inspired Word of God, then fine, he can edit it to his heart’s content. But he can’t do that while still maintaining that the actual words of the texts we have matter.

Gram3 wrote:

they sound bibleish and pious, so they are swallowed uncritically

And more’s the pity, Gram, more’s the pity.

@ mirele:

Such an interesting article on Baylor. thank you so much for that. I had no idea and I am a Baylor grad -class of 2000.

I don’t know if this has been posted already as I have not kept up very well with the comments but I think I found Maranatha’s website and there are two very interesting posts filed under the “growing up” category. http://www.livinglifeloudly.com/category/my-stories/growing-up/
Based on these posts it sounds like she had a very difficult childhood. It almost would seem that she might have been looking for a way out of her family situation and perhaps that is why she was so eager to get married at such a young age.

Gram3 wrote:

So courtship becomes dateship. I call bullship on the whole thing.

Comment of the decade!

@ Gram3: Through the High Middle Ages and Renaissance, most married European women wore head coverings in public *all the time.* To be bareheaded was a sign of wantonness (underage, unmarried girls were the exception). Hats/head coverings went in and out of style from the 17th c. onward, but during the Victorian era through the mid-60s, women generally wore hats, as did men. It was cultural, it was fashion, but it was also about “a woman’s place.”

The kinds of head coverings and veils worn in medieval and Renaissance Europe were often as severe as the very strict kind of hijab worn by some Muslim women today, and are the origin of old-style nuns’ wimples and veils.

Fashion changes, attitudes and mores change, cultures change. I don’t think we even really *know* much about how most women dressed in the ancient world, because there aren’t that many representations of them in art, and when goddesses are shown, they have no headcoverings of any kind.

Me, I wear a modified cricket-style cap on bad hair days (to run errands and such), and I like comfy, warm winter hats that pull down over my ears. Not sure that has anything to do with being “as a woman” in church or out – it’s just my preference. My hair is short, too – in a pixie cut.

@ Gram3: In their cultural setting, their reasoning makes a lot of sense. It’s just very different from what we’re used to.

As for all the people who look askance at the veiling (etc.) in many countries, they have NO idea of the lovely outfits and dresses many of those women are wearing under the drapery and that are freely displayed in the home, to relatives and friends.

numo wrote:

@ Gram3: Fact on the ground: Corinth was a Greek port city, and was not at all the same as Jerusalem or Antioch or Tarsus or…. so Paul went with the local customs in his writing, I’m thinking.

Yes, it’s a little complicated culturally during the first century Mediterranean/Middle East. Jews were widely dispersed, so many Jews would be living in cities outside of the territory of Israel. It is my theory that the idea or custom of covering a woman’s hair is independent of religion, though it is/was practiced by Jews, Muslims, and Gentiles.

The nature of the headcovering may vary for women, it seems, since Jewish women can wear fashionable wigs as acceptable covering of their hair. It is all about maintaining modesty and reserving the enjoyment of the parts of her body which are considered sexual for her husband. We don’t quite consider a woman’s hair that way–as particularly sexual.

As far as I have been able to determine, and contrary to Wayne Grudem’s dogmatism, the issue in all of these cultures is modesty, not authority. A woman is not to shame her husband, family, and God by behaving immodestly. This fits well with Paul’s other instructions that the body of the husband belongs to the wife and vice-versa. So don’t offer to others what belongs rightfully to one’s spouse.

As you say, it is striking how similar the whole-body covering of conservative Muslims is to the habits of the nuns of my childhood. I’m not aware of Gentiles requiring men to have their hair/head covered during worship at any time. Do you have any info on that?

@ Gram3:
Yes, some Orthodox sects require women to wear long sleeves, long skirts and wigs in public – but the latter are required of married women only. I don’t think this is eady or pleasant for most, especially in places like Brooklyn, with its hot, humid summers. But then, chief rabbis and other higher-ups in Hasidic sects wear the caftans and fur hats favored by Polish nobility during the 17th-18th centuries for weddings and other festive occasions, so i think they’re about 300 years behind the times in many ways.

As for the patriarchal culture of the Hasidim and other ultra-Orthodox, oh man… so much of what they say and do is pretty much identical to Quiverfull and other “xtian” patriarchal practices. Includes women producing lots and lots of kids.

Of course, most Orthodox don’t live this way, but those who do are highly visible.

As for gentile men and hats or other head coverings, well, thats pretty much de rigeur for Muslims, and also for Sikhs.

numo wrote:

My hair is short, too – in a pixie cut.

Well, then, you obviously have a Jezebel spirit and desire to confuse the genders. 😉

Thanks for the info. No one has ever accused me of knowing anything about fashion, whether current or historical, so I appreciate your insight. Mine comes from observing local Orthodox women and talking to my Muslim friends. And from the comments made by our Jewish tour guide in Israel about the Orthodox and ultras.