The instant I saw the title of this book, The Church Effeminate and Other
Essays (Trinity Foundation, 2001), I was immediately curious.
The cover art quickly gets your attention; it is the painting, Mary Queen of
Heaven, by the unidentified Early Netherlandish painter Master of the
Legend of Saint Lucy (fl. 1480–1510), who worked in Bruges, now a city in
Belgium. When I then read the book description, I was charmed:
This anthology of the best that has been written on the purpose,
structure, and function of the Christian Church in the past five centuries is
an indispensable resource for the 21st-century Christian. The authors
analyze and refute the errors of feminism, popery, clericalism,
Episcopalianism, Erastianism, ecumenism, experientialism, revivalism, aestheticism,
fundamentalism, and irrationalism; and they sketch a revolutionary blueprint
for a Christian church modeled according to the Scriptures.
But when I then started reading this book, I was captivated.
Here is a no holds barred examination of today’s church from some of the
greatest pens in her history.
Several books have been written in the last 20 years or
so that address what their authors feel is the steady decline of the Church.
The “problem” with these (in the minds of critics, that is) is that they are
just coming from the pens of men who are narrow-minded, intolerant,
change-phobic, or just simply curmudgeonly in their old age. Such critics,
however, refuse to take their heads out of the sand long enough to look
honestly at what is happening today, which in turn in the result of the past.
That’s what this book is about. As the back cover describes with unflinching
bravery:
The churches at the dawn of the new millennium bear little
resemblance to the model institution authorized by Jesus Christ and founded by
the Apostles and Prophets. Its doctrine has been corrupted and perverted; its
function, distorted; its government, subverted; so that today’s churches hardly
deserve the name “Christian” at all.
These 39 essays all call the Christian church back to its
pristine purity and power—to be the spotless bride of Christ. The work of the
Reformation was not completed in the Sixteenth Century, and the churches of the
Twenty-first Century require an even more thorough Reformation. Far from being
the Church Militant, today’s church is the Church Effeminate.
Part 1, “The Church Belonging to Jesus Christ,” consists of
three chapters: “The Church” (John W. Robbins); “The Apostolic Church” (Thomas
Witherow); and “The True Church” (J.C. Ryle). While you might disagree with
some points in these chapters because of your denominational distinctives, the
need for such foundation cannot be ignored, and that is the point to glean
here.
Part 2, “The Purpose of the Church,” begins with an article
by my personal hero, Martyn Lloyd-Jones, whose book, Preaching and Preachers,
changed my ministry some 30 years ago; my personal opinion is that no man is
qualified to stand in the pulpit until he has read and absorbed this book. The
article from that work reprinted here is, “The Primacy of Preaching,” a truth
that has all but vanished in our day. Following this article is a wonderful one
by Jay Adams, “Preaching to the Heart,” which examines the false notions of
what “heart” refers to in Scripture and then challenges us to preach to what it
really is. Other articles include “The Fallibility of Ministers” (J.C. Ryle),
“Scripture and the Ordering of Worship (The Geneva Service Book of 1556), and
others.
Part 3, “The Officers of the Church,” was the heart of the
book for me. Its first four chapter—“The Teachers of the Church” (John Calvin);
“The Presbyterian Doctrine of Ordination” (Gordon H. Clark); “Paul on Women
Speaking in Church” (Benjamin B. Warfield); and “The Ordination of Women”
(Gordon H. Clark)—slowly build to the article from which the book title is
taken: “The Church Effeminate,” by the book’s compiler John W. Robbins.
I will warn the reader upfront that this chapter might knock
you for a loop. Most of what it says I had already discovered in my own study,
but I have never read anything that puts it as succinctly and as articulately
than does this essay. Much of my own study would have been rendered repetitive
had I read this first. Robbins first documents the rise of Mary in Catholicism
and the resulting feminizing of the church (not to mention the blasphemy of
Christ). He then goes on to recount that “during the 19th-century, there
were three major movements in American Protestant churches that began the
process of feminizing their leadership” (p. 238): the Sunday School Movement;
the Foreign Missions Movement, and the Deaconess Movement (see TOTT #21). While
Robbin’s discussion will definitely upset some readers, his history and
arguments are unimpeachable. These movements, he insists, blatantly disregarded
the clear biblical precedent of male leadership and have slowly eroded the leadership
of the church.
The last two articles in Part 3 are: “On the Councils and
the Church” (Martin Luther) and “The Relation of Church and State” (Charles
Hodge).
Part 4, “Autocrats in the Church,” includes articles such
as: “The Roman Church-State” (John Calvin); “The New Babylonian Captivity of
the Church” (Godwell A. Chan); “The Reconstructionist Road to Rome” (John W.
Robbins); and others.
Part 5, “The Growth of the Church,” will also rattle some
cages and challenge some of the sacred cows that have been venerated in
supposedly orthodox Christianity. The essence of these articles is again based
on history and Scripture, challenging the so-called idea of “revival” and even
what is biblical evangelism. These articles include: “Ought the Church to Pray
for Revival?” (Herman Hanko); “The Great Revival of Religion, 1740-1745”
(Charles Hodge); “The Power of the Word” (Martin Luther); “What is Evangelism?”
(Gordon H. Clark); and “Art and the Gospel” (Gordon H. Clark). I urge the reader
to read these before jumping to any conclusion, such as, “I already know what they’re going to say.”
The last section, Part 6, “The Purity and Peace of the
Church,” includes the final 10 chapters: “The Necessity of Reforming the
Church” (John Calvin); “Idolatry” (J.C. Ryle); “Pharisees and Sadducees” (J.C.
Ryle); “The Good Fight of Faith” (J. Gresham Machen); “Apostolic Fears” (J.C.
Ryle); “The Seperateness of the Church” (J. Gresham Machen); “The Sin of
Signing Ecumenical Declarations” (John W. Robbins); “Fundamentalism and
Ecumenism” (Thomas M’Crie); “The Unity of the Church” (John Calvin); and “The
Church Irrational” (John W. Robbins). The latter, for example, is another
critical call to discernment, a steadily vanishing attribute of today’s church.
As Robbins writes:
To fail to object when error is being taught and truth denied is
to condone error by treating error and truth as if they were the same. If
Christ is under attack and a Christian keeps silent, he has not maintained
neutrality; he has denied Christ. (p. 660)
I simply cannot recommend this book highly enough. I have
never seen a compendium on the church that equals it. It should be required
reading, if not part of the core curriculum, in every Bible college and seminary
that claims to care about the Church, both its history and its contemporary
meltdown. For those already in ministry, if you care at about our Lord’s
Church, you will get this book and devour it.
