The CBE Scroll

A missionary friend spoke with me this last week about beauty and the cosmetic industry. While on sabbatical at the University in Winnipeg, he wrote about this topic for one of his courses. I was intrigued and quite provoked to think about this a lot more. He spoke with me about various psychological and emotional phenomena that often accompany various aspects of cosmetic surgery [specifically breast enhancement, tummy tucks, facial uplifts, botox injections etc.] I moved from thinking about psychology and emotions to thinking about the Scriptures.

Another missionary friend from Asia was in on the discussion. He mentioned that people in Asia are now doing many breast enhancements and they are having surgery on their eyelids so their eyes look bigger.

I came away thinking that we have discussed this cosmetic phenomenon very little in either scholarly Christian or popular Christian literature in the last ten or fifteen years. My missionary friend confirmed this by stating that secular literature addresses this much more than we do. Ask yourself a few questions: 1. When was the last time I heard a popular radio preacher focus on this topic-really focus on it? My answer was “never” [and I listen to a few good radio preachers]. 2. When was the last time you saw something about this in a good Christian magazine? 3. When was the last time you heard your own pastor preach about this? The answer for me for all three of these questions is “Never”. I think we, Christians, need to have a voice here.

Our conversation stimulated a lot of discussion and thoughts. I’m not really sure what to think.

When the messiah comes, says the Old Testament, he will “proclaim freedom for the captives.” (Is. 61:1 TNIV) Jesus the Messiah came, but he brought something better than the expected freedom from foreign domination: instead, he was interested in making people’s spirits free. Jesus himself said, “Very truly I tell you, everyone who sins is a slave to sin. Now a slave has no permanent place in the family, but a son belongs to it forever. So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed.” (Jn. 8:34-36 TNIV)

Of all the authors of the Old and New Testaments, Paul speaks most often about freedom. Christ, he says, brings freedom from sin (Rom. 6:18-22; 7:14), freedom from death (Rom. 7:24-25; 8:2, 10-11) and especially freedom from the bondage of the [Jewish] Law (Rom. 7; Gal. 3), all things which enslave us and quench our spirits.

Thanks be to God that He saves our spirits, our souls, that which is the real, essential us. In I Cor. 7:22 he addresses slaves and makes a wonderful play on words when he says that in becoming Christians they have become free persons in Christ, while those who are externally free have become slaves for Christ. In other words, external social status is not as decisive as true (internal) freedom and certainly not decisive for salvation. Christ is the liberator of Christians from the slavery of social status and public opinion, as in this verse, and also in I Cor. 9:19, 10:29; Gal. 3:28, Col. 3:11, and Eph. 6:8. In Gal. 2:4-5 Paul relates how false believers tried to infiltrate “our ranks to spy on the freedom we have in Christ Jesus and to make us slaves.” (TNIV) Come back, they said, to the old ways of the Law and legalism. Come and get bound up again.

But II Cor. 3:17 says: “Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.” So anything that kills our spirits, is not freedom, and can’t be of the Spirit of the Lord.

Sexism, enforced subservient roles based on gender, whether sociologically modeled or religiously imposed, kills women’s spirits. How can it be, then, of the Holy Spirit? Be of God?

How should we then interpret Paul when he seems to be restricting the freedom of women during his time in some of his churches? Paul, the champion of freedom in Christ, lessening basic freedoms that came with salvation!

I believe that it is the height of intellectual arrogance, and perhaps spiritual as well, to assume that one can figure out exactly what specific problems Paul was faced with in his cultures, in his churches and exactly what shading of meaning he meant by this word or that, particularly Greek words that are only used once or twice in the New Testament. Instead, two thousand years later, we should be asking, How is the Spirit freeing us here and now to do His work?

A well-known and respected evangelical theologian I admire, F.F. Bruce, says our hermeneutic principle should be as follows.

“Whatever in Paul’s teaching promotes true freedom is of universal and permanent validity; whatever seems to impose restrictions on true freedom has regard to local and temporary conditions.”

“Our application of the [Biblical] text,” Bruce says, “should avoid treating the New Testament as a book of rules…. We should not turn what were meant as guiding lines for worshippers in one situation into laws binding for all time…. It is an ironical paradox when Paul, who was so concerned to free his converts from bondage of law, is treated as a law-giver for later generations. The freedom of the Spirit, which can be safeguarded by one set of guiding lines in a particular situation, may call for a different procedure in a new situation.” ["Women in the Church: A Biblical Survey" Christian Brethren Review, 33 (Dec. 1982): 7-14.]

Amen to that.

Let’s look at our generation from the view of church historians. I think they will simultaneously wince and praise us. I think they will wince as they consider evangelical theologians holding to a subordinationist view of the Trinity and receiving a broad complementarian audience. I think they will further wince as they think of process theologians, in the name of evangelicalism, telling us that God does not absolutely know the future. I think they will wince as they consider our waffling on life issues such as abortion, on sexual moral/ethical issues such as homosexual ordination. I actually believe there will be more wincing than this.

With all of the wincing, I also think there will be at least two places where they will praise our generation. I think that church historians will rejoice over the emphasis on missions in our era. There are more people becoming Christians in Africa and in mainland China than there are people physically being born in those areas. I think the historians will look back and rejoice over this wonderful circumstance. I also believe that they will look back and rejoice over the progress that the evangelical church made relative to the rights of women in the church – the right to preach, the right to pastor and the right to lead in even broader capacities. I think historians will write that the majority of evangelicalism began to take Galatians 3:28 seriously, “In Christ, there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female”. The church historians will probably contrast the positive strides made on male/female issues in the evangelical church at large with what the evangelical radio and television media usually espouses – namely Victorian leadership ethics. Historians will simultaneously wince and praise.

In 1996 the inexplicable occurred: Lourdes Maria Ciccone, the daughter of the pop-singer/hedonist Madonna, was born. It was inexplicable because Mindy and I were married for two years and for all of our trying, we were unable to have children. We wondered why, of all the people in the world, would God give Madonna a child but not us?

When you have no children and you want them, you tend to notice (and covet) the children of others everywhere. Walking down the streets of Chicago, I’ve seen crack addicts use their kids as selling points for donations from passersby. We’d hear of every tragic family relationship—women tossing children in dumpsters for one—and wonder if even Social Services had better judgment than God when it came to deciding who gets a child.

These feelings were only compounded by books that suggested that childlessness was a curse from God. In one face-to-face confrontation, someone suggested that we were disobeying God’s mandate to be fruitful and multiply. Is it really the best policy to accuse a struggling young couple, who have been told they have fertility problems, and who have suffered shots, pokings and proddings, that they are the sinful ones?

While we were under that sort of scrutiny, I’m not sure we treated ourselves any better. I only have one brother and he is not married, so I felt a certain burden to carry on the family name. For Mindy it was different. She is the oldest of five children raised on a farm. She more than expected that same life for herself, wanting a large home-schooled family like her mother. And being first born, she felt it was her duty to set that example. God satisfied neither of us in our plans.

For a long while, every comment, no matter the intention, stood out to us.

“You look tired Brandon,” said a friend one day.

“I’m spending some long nights working on my Masters thesis,” I replied.

“You think you’re tired now, just wait until you have children.” He slapped me on the back and walked off with a chuckle.

Wait until I have children? I heard that line several times, as if no one was ever exhausted unless they had children. But I knew that it was just one of those things people say and mean no more than when they say, “some weather we’re having here.” He had no idea we had issues with infertility. The real problem was that I couldn’t stop thinking about children. Children had become an idol.

For years we lived our lives in anticipation of that child. We put many opportunities to serve God on hold, after all, the next treatment could change everything. Mindy worked every year, but never worked on a career. She simply took the next available job in whatever city we lived. I worked on my career, but my vision of being a husband never fully considered Mindy’s overall satisfaction with life.

It is often assumed by those with my theological background that much of the identity of a woman should be found in her children. But when there are no children, who is she? Added to that, I believed that I eventually had to finish my schooling and become the sole provider for a spouse whose identity was mostly to be found in children. It was my duty, I thought. But now things were different and being a husband for me no longer included children, it was only the two of us.

Now understanding it as a gender issue, we had to reassess our identities in Christ. In doing so, I discovered that we lived under many false assumptions. We lived as if we were under “Plan B.” Plan A was interrupted by infertility, or so we felt. We believed we were to suffer under Plan B until God saw it fit to give us children. What we did had little significance for our future, it was what we were doing “in the meantime.”

We needed a course correction. We needed to understand that Plan B, was not Plan B, it was Plan A. Our infertility was not a problem, it was God’s way of guiding our lives through Plan A—the real Plan A. There was no Plan B. God intended us to take what we were experiencing and redirect our energies toward serving him fruitfully. We were to end our wallowing and give our attention to the service of the gospel. Our identities were not to be found in our procreation.

Mindy found the freedom to explore her gifts—which are without a doubt in writing and editing—and in discoveries like these we found fruitfulness in new ways. Children could no longer be our idols. That which was a source of despair, became an opportunity for service and a special journey. We were no longer to waste our infertility.

John Piper’s article, “Don’t Waste Your Cancer”—the obvious inspiration for the title of this post—reminds us that God brings these things into our lives to redirect our energies in service to him. Written at the news of his prostate cancer, there are some points that resonate with me and concur with the lessons I’ve learned. To paraphrase Piper, we waste our infertility if we “do not believe it is designed for us by God.” We waste our infertility if we “believe it is a curse and not a gift.” We waste our infertility if we “spend too much time reading about infertility and not enough time reading about God.” And we definitely waste our infertility when we “fail to use it as a means of witness to the truth and glory of Christ.” This last point is only now hitting home with me; after all, infertility problems aren’t the kind of conversation one enjoys having or even writing about publicly. But with 1 in 6 couples struggling with infertility—a problem evenly divided down gender lines—I’m sure there are plenty of others who are going through what we’ve already experienced and who are seeking spiritual help.

Without a doubt, children are a blessing from God. Our eight (with another on the way) nieces and nephews are a joy from God in our life. And because children are a blessing, Mindy and I have worked hard to have a positive impact in their lives, even writing a church history series for children, called History Lives. We hope that they will learn to love the church and find inspiration in those that made Christ their identities. We hope that they too will ask those important questions such as, who am I as a servant of Christ? What is my purpose in life? More importantly, whatever adversity comes their way, we hope that they will not waste it, but will find the path laid out before them as an opportunity to serve and love God.

Hailing from Kansas, Maude Cary went to Morocco in 1901 and worked as a single missionary for 50 years there. How was 50 years of sacrificial living rewarded at her funeral? Ruth Tucker writes that her obituary read, “a small handful of people, seven of whom were ministers, attended the funeral. There were only two sprays of flowers and hardly any tears.” We now see in hindsight that God himself was and is her reward. Many female missionaries of today are honored in the same way — that is, primarily by God himself and only with a “handful” of others to applaud. Then, of course, there are those who would not applaud her at all — they would accuse Maude Cary of “Moral Rebellion” for her 50 years of preaching without the “covering” of a male leader.