Oshman Cultural Counterfeits

Confronting 5 Empty Promises of Our Age and How We Were Made for So Much More
1. Auflage 2022
ISBN: 978-1-4335-7635-5
Verlag: Crossway
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 208 Seiten

Jen Oshman Helps Women Reject Idols and Discover God's Good Purpose for Their Lives In today's culture, women and girls are influenced by idols that promise purpose and meaning for their lives-outward beauty and ability, sex, abortion, and gender fluidity. Christian women aren't exempt from these temptations either, and can even elevate good things like marriage and motherhood to the status of idolatry. Women may sense that these idols are hollow and leave them feeling unsettled, but where should they turn instead?  In Cultural Counterfeits, Jen Oshman encourages women to reject the empty, destructive promises these idols offer and embrace something much more satisfying. She casts a vision for women to experience real hope and peace in Jesus, calling them to recognize their unshakable and eternal identities in him. This timely and compelling resource will help women find freedom and joy as they explore God's good design and purpose for their lives.  - Culturally Relevant: Addresses current topics such as the #MeToo movement, LGBTQIA+, social media, and feminism - Explains 'How We Got Here': Gives a brief history of the sexual revolution up to today - Written by Jen Oshman: Author of Enough about Me: Find Lasting Joy in the Age of Self - For Group or Individual Study: Includes discussion questions at the end of each chapter

 Jen Oshman is an author, speaker, church planter's wife, and mom of four teen and young adult daughters. She has served as a missionary and church planter for over two decades on three continents. She currently resides in Colorado, where she is the director of women's ministry at Redemption Parker, which her family planted 9 years ago. You can keep in touch with Jen at jenoshman.com.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Oshman, Jen

Leseproben

2

The Sexual Revolution Meets #MeToo

Red cloaks and white bonnets have made a comeback. The Puritan-era look is now a mainstream public statement for women’s rights. When we see women wearing the cloaks and bonnets and standing in groups on the street or at the Capitol, we know what they’re out there for. They’re donning the costume of The Handmaid’s Tale, a Hulu adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s novel by the same name, and they’ve shown up to, among other things, support Planned Parenthood, denounce sexist policies or politicians, or cry #MeToo.

The television version of The Handmaid’s Tale swept the Emmys and won a couple of Golden Globes in its first season. The plot conveys a dystopian future in the United States in which a theocratic government imposes a sick characterization of a fundamentalist Christian regime on the people. In order to increase the country’s population, fertile women are enslaved—they are made to be handmaids—to bear children. The show has “decidedly biblical overtones”1 and obviously resonates with a significant portion of the American public.

The handmaids’ message is clear: when theology and government mix, women are literally or figuratively enslaved and exploited. Christianity, they proclaim, is bad for women.

Even if the sight of the costumes is jolting, the handmaids’ views are not extreme in today’s context. This narrative is in our water. I remember as a teen mocking a male relative (behind his back) who had joined a Christian men’s group that supported his role as a husband and father. It seemed laughable to me that a Christian group believed they could help him treat his wife better. Didn’t Christian groups do the opposite? I was even a Christian at the time, but somehow the idea that Christianity denigrates women was securely lodged in my mind. Even now I regularly get questions from Christian women who quietly wonder if this is a skeleton in our closet. Does Christianity want to keep us down?

Is the way forward for women in the West to move further away from Christianity? Should we join our American sisters in red cloaks and white bonnets to put down our faith and stand up for ourselves?

The Gender Gap in Christianity

The notion that Christian leaders have always been wealthy white men and they’ve used their faith and position to keep women down is widely assumed and almost unquestioned in the West. Global bestsellers like The DaVinci Code reinforce our suspicion that Christianity has a secret origin wherein men assembled the Bible in such a way as to silence female voices and rid the church of female influence. Never mind that such books and narratives are without a historical basis. The conspiracies are just too enticing and have captured the imaginations of many.

But here’s what’s actually, strikingly true: in the United States, in the West, and around the globe, more women than men are Christian.2 Christianity is predominantly female. And that’s the way it has always been.

Jesus Christ’s life, death, and resurrection initiated a cultural rumble that became a revolution in the Greco-Roman world. In a first-century setting fixated on power, Jesus came on the scene promising blessing, heaven, and inheritance to the poor, to those who mourn, and to the meek. In a culture soaked in violence, Jesus called his followers to love God, to love others, and to love even their enemies.

This care of humanity, this selfless elevation of others, set the early Christians far apart from their pagan contemporaries. Whereas the pagan gods required payment and sacrifice but promised nothing in return, the Christian God—in the person of Jesus—made his love for humans unmistakable and asked them to go and do likewise. Believing that heaven awaits and eternity matters, the first Christians were emboldened to care for the sick during epidemics, welcome the foreigner and the outcast, feed the poor, and comfort the afflicted.

And no one felt this more than women “because within the Christian subculture women enjoyed far higher status than did women in the Greco-Roman world at large.”3 In the early centuries in Rome, female infanticide was widely practiced (discarding baby girls in trash heaps in preference for baby boys), families often gave their girls over to marriage before puberty, girls had no say in who they married and consummation was expected, and once they were married, fidelity was required of the wives, while husbands were encouraged to pursue extramarital sex with both female and male prostitutes.4

Christianity stood in stark contrast, elevating marriage, families, and procreation. Christian families allowed their daughters to have a voice in who they married, and they married at much older ages. In Christianity women and girls enjoyed protection from divorce, incest, infidelity, polygamy, child marriage, abortion, infanticide, and mistreatment at the hands of their husbands. Not only that, but Christian women were respected in the church, welcomed in to serve in various capacities and to collaborate in ministry.5 Following in the footsteps of Jesus, who laid down his life for others, the early Christians gave themselves over to caring for the weak, including babies, women, and all the marginalized.

All of this is not to say that the expression of the Christian church has been faultless throughout history. Healthy church leaders acknowledge the church’s shortcomings and the reality that Christianity has been wrongly used for misogynistic ends at certain times. However, the true expression of Christian faith is clearly and rightly seen in these examples from the early church. Selflessness, service, and the elevation of women marked true Christian doctrine and practice in the first century, and it still does today in the twenty-first century.

This is a key reason Christianity is predominantly female: women are cherished, protected, and elevated beyond secular standards. When that doesn’t happen, it’s a deviation from the true faith.

The Imago Dei

Sociologist and historian Rodney Stark says that what Christianity gave its early converts was their humanity.6 The elevation of human life was a bright light in a dark setting. This flows from the Judeo-Christian doctrine of the imago dei, the image of God, which Christians still believe is intrinsic in every human.

The opening pages of the Bible say, “God created man in his own image, / in the image of God he created him; / male and female he created them” (Gen. 1:27). Right away, in the very first chapter of Scripture, we see what the Christian church, as well as ages of Jews, have believed: there is a God and he made us. Not only that, but he made us in his image, imago dei, and he made us male and female.

For millennia there has been a historic consensus throughout Western civilization that our lives are not accidents or without intention. For ages we have believed we are made in a specific way and for a specific purpose. Up until very recently belief in God has been assumed, respected, and unchallenged. Today, though, we Westerners increasingly reject the idea of a design and a Designer.

They don’t know it, but this rejection of a divine author who has authority is the hidden root of what the handmaids in red cloaks and white bonnets are protesting. Indeed, protesting the mistreatment of women is a worthy endeavor, as women endure real harm in many places in our society. This book is itself a protest, a declaration that all is not well and women deserve better. But what the protestors do not grasp is that it’s our society-wide distancing from God that has led to our devaluing of the imago dei in women and in one another. Protestors feel the devaluing, but they don’t know where it comes from. They don’t know the source of our value in the first place. My hope is that in the pages ahead we can find our way back to that immovable and unshakable source—the God who made us and dignifies us.

First-Wave Feminism

While the handmaids are the most recent iteration in a long line of women who have marched for equality, it would be a mistake to think that they have much in common with the first women who marched. In truth, they see the world very differently than the first feminists.

There’s a wide range of feelings about feminism amongst today’s Christian women, and for good reason. Feminism has a mixed and shady history. So I’ll start by stating where I stand: the genesis of feminism was good and even godly, but the movement took a wrong turn in the 1960s, and since then it has been detrimental, even deadly, to women and girls.

First-wave feminism was, in part, a bold Christian movement that started with, of all things, Prohibition. Starting in the mid-1800s, with the rise of industrialization, long factory hours, inhumane working conditions, and the growth of the urban poor, men turned to strong alcohol for relief. A variety of organizations formed in response, including the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, as women sought to protect one another and their children from the drunkenness sweeping the country.

Historian and author Daniel Okrent...