Eerdman’s has decided to publish a book in October 2022 which if it accurately delivers what it promises in its advertising copy will immediately serve feminism and multiculturalism while laying the groundwork for further false teachers to promote sodomy and transgenderism.
Here are the words they are using to sell the book with some comments added.
The first line:
A robust theological argument against the assumption that God is male.
God is masculine. That is no mere assumption, but the declaration of any one who can read grammar. In Hebrew, the word “God” is masculine from the first verse of Genesis. God’s final act of creation was “man” not persons because Adam stood for Eve before they were even dignified with names. “He” is used exclusively throughout the entire Bible to describe God or any of the divine persons because the Holy Spirit wanted to use “He” and never “she.” God has chosen His pronouns as “He”, “Him”, and “Us.”
There are no robust arguments against God’s Word. And God’s revelation is never merely an assumption. Wrong on both parts of this subtitle.
God values women.
While many Christians would readily affirm this truth, the widely held assumption that the Bible depicts a male God persists—as it has for centuries.
First, the author might have skipped a couple sessions in her gender studies class and tried to catch up on basic logic. Or perhaps Eerdman’s thinks its readers can’t spot a false dilemma. But as the copy reminds us, “many Christians” have readily affirmed “for centuries” that the church has taught both that God values women and that God is masculine. If their advertising reflects the content, then we should expect logical fallacies like false dilemmas and begging the question (3rd paragraph, “God is never sexualized by biblical writers…”) along with other related fallacies.
Second, the author is opposing the way all exegetes of any note from the early church, the Reformation, the Puritans, the Missionary movement, and the Methodist revivals have always understood the Bible until 1950 or so. But what is a little thing like thousands of years of church tradition which lines up with the clear statement of Scripture when we have a politically correct, Satanic, ideology to promote?
Through a deep reading of the incarnation narratives of the New Testament and other relevant scriptural texts, Amy Peeler shows how the Bible depicts a God beyond gender and a savior who, while embodied as a man, is the unification in one person of the image of God that resides in both male and female.
The argument comes from a “deep reading” and it “goes beneath the surface” (3rd paragraph) to attack “the destructive idolatry of masculinity.” In the reviews it is called daring, controversial, and a work that dismantles the patriarchy. These are some of the terms—along with others in this brief collection of oozing words—that smell like people who see errors in Scripture, prefer churches with topical homilies rather than verse by verse teaching, and are in lock step with the Cultural Marxists permeating evangelicalism. The Biblical truth has been firmly believed for centuries as the first paragraph states, but another review writes that the Bible’s plain teaching which has been held up by the entire church is “absurd.”
The table of contents reveals that the author is trying desperately to disconnect masculinity from its clear source in the Godhead: Chapter 1 “The Father Who is Not Male” and chapter 4 “God is Not Masculine.” If someone hated Biblical manhood, if he wanted to overthrow male headship, if he despised Paul’s words in 1 Tim. 2:11-15, if he secretly loved feminism, and if he also wanted to infiltrate the church, these are the kinds of words he would use.
Seven reviewers are included below, but Eerdmans thought it best not to let John MacArthur or Voddie Baucham or Doug Wilson have a say. “What do these men know? They have only taught the Bible, and evangelized sinners, and led local churches where angels gathered to watch every seven days. Let us put up reviewers who sit in the chairs of the academy! The altered state we feel when PhD’s praise us is our wine of choice.” Were the 6 out of 7 reviewer women chosen because they have raised godly children and persevered in faith, love, and holiness (1 Tim. 2:15) or because they have done such a superlative job keeping the home (Tit. 2:5)? They would be insulted if they even read this paragraph, and yet the Holy Spirit says those are the marks of great women. These kinds of people do not like those kinds of words.
And that is why it is hard to imagine Peeler or the reviewers or the publishers as members in John Bunyan’s church or Spurgeon’s or Wesley’s or Lloyd-Jones’ or any God-fearing assembly that breathes after the fear of God and revival.
The advertising copy and the reviews make this work look like another man-hating, feminist-promoting, CNN-approved attempt to distance the church from the word of Scripture and its historic faith. Charles Templeton, Joshua Harris, and Abraham Piper will probably see this book as a step in the right direction.
