But justice requires more than a certain kind of legal procedure.
Consider, for instance, wrongful convictions: it’s possible to follow all the appropriate procedures in arresting, investigating and convicting a defendant who is in fact innocent.
So it’s possible to satisfy the demands of procedural justice while at the same time achieving a result that is substantively unjust—namely, the conviction of an innocent person.
If justice were reducible to procedure then it would be impossible for a just process to produce an unjust result. But clearly it is possible, as we’ve just established. So justice isn’t reducible to procedure.
Similarly, it’s possible that some heinous act isn’t technically illegal—and thus that a defendant might be innocent of having violated any existing law—simply because our existing laws fail to conform to the truth about what we are due and what we owe to each other.
In other words, it’s possible that our legal system produces unjust results in some cases, even when everyone follows the law, simply because we have unjust laws.
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According to Scripture, false teachers dwell in the political or religious establishment. They misrepresent God to the people of God in order to fortify their own position of power or influence, often at the expense of vulnerable people.
So the notion that those who expose oppression are false teachers isn’t just wrong.
It lacks a basic grasp of the currency in which it trades, not unlike the sentence: “The quarterback of the Yankees scored a hat trick in the Final Four.”
Since men are equally capable of performing ≥99% of the tasks that “biblical patriarchy” reserves for women, the term ‘redundancy’ is undoubtedly a more accurate euphemism for the view than ‘complementarity’.
The ideology revolves around the notion that life is about marriage, and marriage is about a man doubling the labor capacity he commands—at which point he’s free to apply his labor as he pleases and instruct his wife to carry out basic adult tasks he’d rather not bother with.
Men and women are equally capable of doing laundry, cooking, parenting and earning a living.
So the capacities that patriarchists ascribe to men and women, respectively, are not in fact complementary—they’re redundant.
There are men of influence in evangelical circles who’ve made a whole career of improving upon God’s Word with their own opinions, and then excommunicating anyone who questions their pet tertiary doctrines.
Such men are accustomed to silencing dissent within their spheres of influence by threatening the employment, professional standing or institutional status of anyone who interrogates the status quo.
But a growing number of professionals from outside the institutional settings in which these men exercise control—journalists, academics, clergy and so on—have taken an interest in critiquing the ideological commitments behind conservative evangelical theology and politics.
People aren’t leaving the church because they think “The World” is a safe place.
They’re leaving the church like someone runs out of a burning building—or jumps out of a 30 story window in a burning building, not because they have an overwhelming desire to jump to their death, but because the alternative is unbearable.
If you’ve been hurt really badly in a church, or if you’ve seen behind the curtain, it can be overwhelmingly to try to start over—especially if it’s happened several times.
“Biblical manhood” (whatever that may be) isn’t the same thing as “being a Christ-follower.”
They’re two different things—they must be, otherwise it wouldn’t be possible for women to be Christ-followers.
(“But wait!” you may say, “that’s what biblical womanhood is for—Christianity for women is biblical womanhood; and Christianity for men is biblical manhood.”
But that would mean there are two different Christianities: one for men and another for women. And that can’t be right.)
So Christianity and “biblical manhood” are two different things.
Which takes priority—being a Christ-follower, or being a “biblical man”?
It cannot be that both objectives are equally important, since that would be tantamount to serving two masters:
In the context of a theological or philosophical disagreement among fellow believers, appeals to a ‘Christian worldview’ are either irrelevant or hopelessly question-begging.
The thrust of the appeal to a Christian worldview is this:
“These ideas are incompatible with the kind of worldview that a Christian should have. So Christians, as such, should reject these ideas as inconsistent with their Christian faith.”
Here’s why that reasoning just doesn’t work.
Suppose that ‘Christian worldview’ refers to an epistemic framework (or some feature thereof) which corresponds to the truth claims of Christianity.