In order to access this page, you had to click on a photograph which is sinful to view, according to the radio talk show New Life Live!, a "born again" version of the counseling programs hosted by Dr. Laura and Dr. Phil. New Life Live! promotes a series of books on sexuality from a "Christian" perspective, the original volume of which is called Every Man's Battle. The book series and the workshops based on it which are occasionally held around the country, while narrower in focus than the men's fellowship gatherings known as "Promise Keepers" or the congregational revival programs based on Rick Warren's The Purpose Driven Life, well illustrate the basic errors of "evangelical" Protestantism, from which the real Gospel of Jesus Christ exists to set us free.
In Scripture, the Spirit is the word of God (Eph. 6:17), which can definitely be found only in the words and writings of certain credentialed individuals, namely the prophetic and apostolic authors of Scripture (Eph. 2:20; 2 Pet. 1:21). By contrast, the flesh (the soft tissues of the body, and their sensory inputs and emotional responses) is a place in which "no morally good thing dwells" (Rom. 7:18). But in Protestantism, the entailment of these key terms has been almost completely reversed. Individual Protestants have long been encouraged to covet the gifts possessed by their fellows; it is especially intolerable to them that only some Christians might publicly preach or receive authoritative revelations from God. The error known as the "priesthood of all believers" was thus created to erase the distinctions between the biblical offices. According to this view, not merely pastors, but all Christians are to engage in preaching and teaching (often euphemized as "witnessing" to avoid overtly contradicting such texts as 1 Tim. 3:2b or Jas. 3:1). Most today would go further and assert that anyone may gain the ability to perform miracles (if not by the prestidigitations of faith healers, then by the "power of prayer" allegedly available to each believer) and receive gifts of revelation and inspiration, which the New Testament reserved to the apostles (Matt. 10:5-8; John 17:12-20; Acts 1:21-22).
Since the external events of revelation which dominate the Scriptures (e.g. the Lord and the messengers at the oak of Mamre with Abraham, Gen. 18:1-2; God, the Lord, and the angel of the Lord at the burning bush with Moses, Ex. 3:2-4; Jesus, Moses, and Elijah at the Transfiguration, Mark 9:2-4) do not obviously occur today, those who demand to receive them anyway must resort to private experiences, which conveniently cannot be critically evaluated by anyone other than the lone individual who receives them. Protestants are thus taught that their internal emotional states are vehicles of divine revelation, evidences of God's will for their lives, and lenses through which they may interpret the Scriptures. By making their fleshly emotions a guide to faith and life, they have unwittingly joined Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy in overthrowing the authority of the word of God by claiming the presence of the Holy Spirit where he is not. (In the case of Rome and Constantinople, this is accomplished by the allegedly infallible pronouncements of a "teaching magisterium" whose members, according to the theory known as "apostolic succession," are endowed with the Spirit in a richer measure than other clergy or laity.)
The authors of Every Man's Battle employed their fleshly emotional states to conclude first of all that their relationship with God was inadequate, and secondly that their approach to sexuality was sinful. Note how the word "feel" and its synonyms dominate their initial description of the sexual battle every man allegedly faces (pp. 11-12):
By contrast, biblical Christians turn to God's word, not internal emotions, to determine their relationship to God. For example, "God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself" (2 Cor. 5:19) remains true no matter what anyone feels or senses. When Christians are tempted to walk by sight or feelings rather than by faith, and to judge morality by superficial sensory reactions rather than by God's word, the doctrine known as universal justification is of the greatest comfort. But when God's gracious declaration that mankind is loved, pardoned, and approved in Christ is conditioned upon some prerequisite human response (such as "evangelical" Protestantism's unbiblical "decision for Jesus," and the parallel decision for "purity" prescribed by Every Man's Battle, pp. 83ff.), nothing less than the original sin has been recapitulated, whereby God's word was set aside in favor of human sensory judgments (Gen. 3:6). The apostle Paul linked the general overthrow of the Creator's truth in favor of creaturely opinion (Rom. 1:25) to a specific rejection of "the natural use of the female" (Rom. 1:27), resulting in people being given up to a depraved mind (Rom. 1:28). It must be asked whether Paul's principle is not being illustrated when Every Man's Battle assumes the most irrational and unsubstantiated connections between its primary author's alleged sexual sin and his business' unsuccessful sales activity, his spouse's nightmares, and his congregation's supposedly hindered ministry ("Of course, my prayers were no more effective in God's house than anywhere else," p. 18).
But doesn't God's word teach that virtually all sexual activity is sinful? That indeed is the assertion of the initial paragraph in Every Man's Battle (p. 9):
"But among you there must not be even a hint of sexual immorality, or of any kind of impurity" (Ephesians 5:3). If there's a single Bible verse that captures God's standard for sexual purity, this is it.
The mistranslation of porneia, "prostitution," as a hazily entailed "sexual immorality" in the New International Version of the Bible is the key to the entire program of Every Man's Battle. The above cited author who felt such "distance" from God hypothesized that violations of Ephesians 5:3 were the cause: "The true reason for that distance slowly dawned on me: There was a hint of sexual immorality in my life" (pp. 12-13). In an imposing list of nineteen boldface-type Bible quotations on sexuality (pp. 45-47), seventeen are prohibitions of "sexual immorality" or "sexual sin" (the latter being an inconsistent NIV rendering of porneia in 2 Cor. 12:21). The authors did not even note the shift from the King James Version's translation of this term as "fornication" (from the Latin fornix, "archway," under which prostitutes congregated in ancient cities), must less did they inquire as to the proper definition of either rendering. In Scripture, porneia means coercing sex on pain of material harm (rape, Gen. 34:31) or selling sex in return for material goods (prostitution, Deut. 23:17-18). By contrast, Every Man's Battle deduces prohibitions against all manner of common activities, several of which would not have been regarded as immoral even by otherwise puritanical Roman Catholic and Protestant theologians of the past:
Not surprisingly, the erroneous translation of the cognates of epithumeó, "covet," as "lust" in Matthew 5:28 and 1 Peter 4:3 (the other two passages in the aforementioned list of nineteen sexual prohibitions) plays a significant role in condemning the above activities. A less familiar text, "I made a covenant with my eyes, and did not gaze upon a virgin" (Job 31:1), becomes the basis for one of the book's most distinctive, not to say bizarre, prescriptions: training males to "bounce the eyes" away from women immediately upon perceiving that continuing to gaze might lead to "impurity" (pp. 125ff.). The context of Job 31:1, however, makes clear that Job's "covenant" was a result not of faith or godly self-discipline, but of depression and ungodly self-loathing (Job 30:16-31).
The preceding misreadings of Scripture go hand in hand with a misjudgment of creation and human nature. In Scripture, man by nature is totally deprived of spiritual aptitudes and godly life (Eph. 2:1). By contrast, the ancient teacher Pelagius held that man is only partially deprived spiritually, to which the ancient teacher Augustine overreacted in asserting that man is totally depraved, cursed by the presence of evil as well as the absence of good. Schizophrenic as it may seem, most modern Protestants teach both of these erroneous views at the same time: their "decision for Jesus" conversion doctrine presupposes Pelagius' view of free will, but their denigration of the creation and the physical body reflects Augustine's notion that, following the sin of Adam, an evil presence resides in all humans, even after they become believers. Contrary to the latter theory, "God saw that it was very good" (Gen. 1:31), which remains God's own verdict concerning his creation to this day. The Roman Catholic monastic program which eschews the things of the body and the earth, and the derivative Protestant moral systems which condemn sexuality and other physical and earthly pleasures as "carnal" and "worldly" (note how even the moderate use of alcoholic beverages is a major reason why people get "left behind" in the eschatological fiction series of that title), far from promoting true purity or spirituality, are in fact worthless in dealing with the flesh and its ever changing perceptions and emotions (Col. 2:20-23).
It comes as little surprise that those who find a positive example in Eve's use of her own senses for moral guidance would also seek role models among her descendants. Feminism's claim that women are the victims of a long tradition of degradation is difficult to reconcile with the ancient worship of goddesses (Acts 19:35), the medieval exaggeration of the blessed virgin Mary (whose alleged inherent holiness, unlike that of her Son, required no virgin birth), and the modern theory of marriage as the means by which women civilize "barbarian males" (promoted by, among others, Ronald Reagan's economic advisor, George Gilder). From the premise that women are morally superior to men, conservative feminists hold that women have the office of supervising and assisting men (a sort of "white woman's burden," similar to the "benevolent" racism once advocated in the British Empire), whereas liberal feminists deduce that women should jettison men ("A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle" according to Gloria Steinem). Thus conservatives support childrearing, which assists a man's desire for heirs, whereas liberals encourage abortion, which eliminates a man's heirs, and indeed the most obvious evidence of his past intimacies. Yet both with equal fervor denigrate male oriented sexual literature as "pornography" (a term which is never directed at female oriented romance novels and "soap operas," regardless of content). The impact of such feminist thinking on the church is seen in the all but universal acceptance of women clergy, even by those who call themselves "conservative" and "Bible believing." Among those who still condemn the idea of female pastors, some have defended the thesis that the wife is "the theologian of the home."
Every Man's Battle takes for granted that female expressions of sexuality are for the most part godly in comparison with those of men. It is never considered that such a presupposition as "You are sexually pure when no sexual gratification comes from anyone or anything but your wife" (p. 104) might constitute a reversal of scriptural teaching (by implying that men are to obey women, imitating the sin of Adam, Gen. 3:17, and submit to them, contrary to Eph. 5:22). Before this book was published, several women were invited to react to each chapter's discussions; their statements of contempt for male behavior are breathtaking, even in comparison with the "male bashing" of liberal feminists and lesbians. The wife of the book's principal author apparently speaks for many "Christian" women in reacting to male sexual fantasies (p. 183):
Men seem like untrustworthy pigs whose minds and thoughts just go wherever they want. Is nothing sacred to them? As women, do we trust men after reading this? You can't even trust a pastor to be a pure person. I feel that if anything ever happened to Fred, I'd never remarry because I would have very little trust in men.
The scandal of "Christian" women making the latter statement is exceeded by the fact that "Christian" men, indeed clergymen, would enable it. The scandal of both is in turn exceeded by the tragedy that their way of thinking and behaving is leading them to exactly the opposite destination which they claim to desire. Jesus taught, in connection with a Roman centurion's expression of faith, that the heavenly kingdom involves a dinner with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, which sadly will exclude "the sons of the kingdom" who end up in "outer darkness" (Matt. 8:11-12). How, one may ask, do "evangelical" Protestants imagine that they will avoid the latter estate? According to their moral system, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were all sexual perverts. None of the latter were "married" (they took no vows of any description, neither did any clergyman or politician pronounce them man and wife, even though Melchizedek, an exemplary occupant of both offices, was available to them), two of the three had more than one sexual partner, and one (Abraham) was in addition involved in incest (Sarah being his half-sister). It is thus long overdue that visible Christianity should step out of its outer darkness of carnal private revelations and creation denigrating goddess worship, and return to that original provision which the ancient fathers received from their gracious heavenly Father.
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