Pastor Joel Webbin interviews Non Tennant and Michael Foster regarding their ministry to rebuild biblical patriarchy, defining it as "father rule" distinct from modern complementarianism. They critique the androgynous spirit world as heretical, asserting gender identity persists after death, while contrasting Reformed Baptist polity with household-based voting models. Foster highlights men seeking female validation as a marriage crisis driver, and Tennant argues feminine conditioning prioritizes social harmony over orthodoxy, stifling debate. Ultimately, their discussion frames restoring male leadership as essential for correcting ecclesiological decay and cultural confusion. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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Origins of Complementarianism00:15:02
Applying God's Word to every aspect of life.
This is Theology Applied.
This is Pastor Joel Webbin with Right Response Ministries.
We're coming at you with another episode of Theology Applied today.
I'm privileged and honored to have as our guests, we've got Non Tennant and we have Michael Foster.
They are co hosts of a podcast called It's Good to Be a Man.
I have been a listener to that podcast for a while now.
I've been blessed by Their ministry and the ways that they directly address men in the church and really even just in culture in general from the word of God today.
So I'm blessed to have you guys.
Could you take a moment and just introduce yourselves to our listeners?
I will go first because I was mentioned first.
I am non tenant.
I live in New Zealand.
I am a Reformed Christian and I do web design and copywriting for a living.
So that's where my expertise lies.
That's how I primarily contribute to our ministry through writing and designing stuff, the website and so on.
It's funny to hear you describe us as a podcast because.
It's always interesting hearing how people think of us.
Like, I don't think of us as a podcast.
I think of the podcast as one thing that we do, and it's actually kind of a minor thing in some ways.
What we're working on really hard at the moment is actually a book.
So that's where I see all of our effort at the moment.
Go, Michael.
Sure.
I'm Michael Foster.
I am a pastor.
I live here in Cincinnati, Ohio.
I'm prepping to move where my church is, which is in Batavia, Ohio, which is about 30 minutes from where I'm currently at, just outside of Cincinnati.
Cool.
And I tweet and talk and speak and write with none.
And we both have lovely wives and children, best anyone forget.
That's right.
Praise God for that.
Your ministry in general.
So apparently, you guys do more than just a podcast, which I assumed you did because I hear you talk about it on the podcast.
But that's been my main exposure to your ministry and to your teaching, which I've appreciated.
So could you tell us just about the podcast or your ministry in general or a little bit about the book?
Really, what's the big idea?
What's the big mission, the big purpose behind your ministry to men?
Sure.
So I started with this idea that we needed a podcast that was reaching groups of men that seemed like the church, they were falling through the cracks of the church, or they were being neglected, or their issues weren't being spoken to.
And that came through just a lot of study on my own, just trying to be helpful.
As a pastor in a church, and a lot of the questions that were coming my way weren't questions that I even really dealt with.
I'm 40 years old, you know, so I grew up right before the internet took over, right?
So I experienced some of it in high school, but not in any way that most millennials did.
I'm a really old millennial or really young Gen X, whatever you want to call it.
So as those questions were coming up, I went to YouTube and looked where these young men were going besides the church because they weren't finding answers in the church.
And to be frank, I wasn't able to give him a lot of good answers at times.
So I discovered Jordan Peterson and the Red Pill movement, which is Red Pill is just a metaphor that comes from the movie The Matrix.
It's having your eyes open.
So it's having your eyes open to the real nature of sexuality.
And that's a movement largely dominated by pagan men who apply evolutionary psychology to intersexual relationships.
But a lot of times what they're identifying is really this God's design for the world.
Right, the way creation works, and so there's some truth there.
Plus, they don't deny the goodness of the human body.
They actually probably go the opposite direction, where in a lot of churches, it tends towards a Gnostic take on things.
So, as I started to play around with the idea, seriously, like within several weeks, I realized Nan, who we had been online friends and read and interacted here and there, I somehow figured out that Nan, I don't even remember how, was reading and thinking through a lot of the same things, which if you were to talk about that, About those books and topics and blog posts and polite, you know, or mixed company, people would really raise their eyebrows.
So I didn't really know who to work through these issues with.
And so I was blessed to find Don.
And we started on a project to create a practical theology for men.
And it turned into a podcast and a website.
And that's kind of my side to it.
I don't know.
What do you want to add, Don?
Well, I came at it.
My story is, my perspective is quite different to Michael's.
I came at it from a study perspective.
Stumbled onto Red Pill in the process of studying the relationship between kingdom theology and, well, a number of things were going on in my head that made me think, you know, how does gender roles fit into everything that I'm currently doing in theology, which was mostly unrelated to gender roles?
And stumbled onto the L Rock and Rational Male and spent a lot of time reading those and then went through a cage stage from which I would say Michael rescued me.
But it's nice that he sees things in such a rosy light.
And we started, he started, it's good to be a man.
And I kind of joined him, is how I see it.
But what particularly attracted me to it was the desire to have a positive doctrine of manhood.
What is it that men are supposed to do?
Because so much of the red pill, like one of the things that really bothered me, even in my cage stage, I was like, I know that these things are wrong and I want everyone to know about them.
And ranting and raving about everything that's wrong with the world and not having any actual answers or solutions except to just kind of yell at men that they need to do better.
You know, that's not helpful.
So, The idea of having a practical doctrine of masculinity that we could actually flesh out what does it mean to be a man and what are the key principles that scripture talks about and the virtues and the duties and all that kind of thing was very helpful to me.
And I believe it's been very helpful to lots of other men as well.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I'm one of them.
Cool.
Well, one word that people are bothered by, of course, especially in our culture today and sadly in the church as well, is the word patriarchy.
And so you guys use that word a lot.
And so I wanted to.
Give you an opportunity to define biblical patriarchy and perhaps flesh out maybe some of the distinctions between patriarchy and what often we would refer to as complementarianism that we find in the average evangelical church today.
What would you see as being the primary differences between what the Bible describes and what you might find in your average Calvinistic complementarian evangelical church today?
Do we use the word patriarchy a lot, Michael?
We use the word patriarchy that much.
I think we're associated with people that use it a lot.
I think I've done some speeches or lectures and I use the word a bunch.
That might be.
I mean, what it means is it means father rule, right?
And so, what we mean by it is that God, so when we use the word cosmos, we're talking about the structure of existence, right?
So, it's not just the Carl Sagan cosmos where it's like, you know, The Oort cloud and rings around Saturn, but it's the whole way everything is made, and God has built the cosmos in such a way that men are rulers.
So that's called patriarchy.
So men are the rulers in the home and they're the rulers in the church, but they're also the rulers in society because society is a collection of households, right?
So it would make no sense to have men be the heads of their household and not be the heads of society.
The problem with patriarchy is that there are virtuous manifestations of it and wicked manifestations of it.
And the easiest example of that would be the devil is called a father.
Jesus says, You're sons of the devil.
So that's clearly patriarchy can be evil.
Just like heterosexuality is natural, but it can also have evil manifestations.
So it is with patriarchy.
So a lot of people get triggered by it because they first want to say sexuality or the sexual nature that God's given us, masculinity, is evil.
Those people are wrong.
Those people are being evil.
But then some people that are trying to compensate for that make a mistake.
Where they act like all forms of patriarchy are somehow good or unquestioned, you know, which is just silly, clearly or not.
So that's what patriarchy is.
I think Nod can explain to you the difference between patriarchy and complementarian, at least broadly speaking.
Yeah.
Well, the reason that I asked about how often we use the word patriarchy is because we don't actually try to shy away from it, but we do recognize that it triggers a lot of people.
And to receive a wide audience, we tend to speak rather of gendered piety.
We see patriarchy as very much the idea that.
Uh, men represent God's rule, which is not really all there is to being a man or to being a woman for that matter.
So, we're quite concerned not just to affirm that men represent God's rule, which is true, but also to say what are the other aspects of being a man, what are the duties of being a man, what do men have to do, what do women have to do.
So, we call that gendered piety.
But in terms of the distinction between that and what complementarianism teaches, it fundamentally comes down to whether or not there is actually a purpose to the design for the sexes.
So, complementarians.
Are eager to affirm things like men need to be pastors, you can't have female pastors.
Depending on how soft they are, they get pretty close to that line.
They'll have women acting in pastoral ways without technically having the name.
But they want to say that men should be heads of the church and heads of the family, but they don't want to say that men should be heads of the society because that's obviously terrible and that would exclude women from being presidents.
They also don't want to say things like women shouldn't vote and they don't want to say things like women shouldn't be police officers or work in the military.
The reason for that is that they don't actually have an ordering principle around which gender duties are designed.
They don't have some kind of fundamental baseline that says the reason that men exist is for this, and the reason that women exist is for this.
They just have isolated verses that they've taken from scripture, and they can see clearly the scripture says this.
So you have to believe this.
But it's almost like it's just an arbitrary command that God gave.
There's no particular reason he said that women can't be pastors.
It's just that he said that.
It's not rooted in their nature.
So it's a question of what is the nature of man and the nature of woman and complementarianism.
I think because it has lost, it started as a response to feminism and it was always highly conditioned by feminism.
It's kind of a shame theology.
It's a theology that is ashamed of scripture and tries to retrieve as much of scripture as is impossible to deny exegetically while eliminating all of the other things that could be cool shame by the culture, such as the idea that women actually have different natures to men.
Right.
That's the history of complementarianism, which is helpful to understand is that Wayne Grudem and the guys that are working on it during the Evangelical Theological Society in the creation of the Danvers Statement was working towards a coalition, working towards a compromise consensus statement.
And so the idea was to try to pull people together and then work towards greater reform on the topic.
And that's why some complementarians, we would not really differ from them in our understanding of sexuality, where other complementarians like are.
Really, they treat sexuality based on roles as opposed to nature, right?
And that's why I will say that complementarianism, modern, the broadly accepted stuff that you see at this moment on like a gospel coalition website or preached by like Matt Chandler or kind of these well known evangelicals, it presupposes a sort of androgyny where more or less men and women are human, right?
They're just humans and the roles are interchangeable.
Right.
And so androgyny has kind of two understandings.
One is there's a mixing of the sexes, right?
So you can think of like David Bowie back in the 80s.
He was kind of pushing that idea.
Where is it a guy?
Is it a girl?
Michael Jackson.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Michael Jackson.
A lot of those pop stars, especially in the 70s and 80s, were doing that.
But the other aspect of it is just simply to say that maleness and femaleness is somehow interchangeable.
Between the sexes, which is really a logical insanity.
So, and that's what we're trying to push back is say, like, look, if there's a female nature and there's a male nature, that nature extends to all of life, and you got to work it out.
And that's why complementarianism was doomed.
It was doomed the moment they didn't root it in nature, not because those guys all were bad people or they didn't have good intentions, they weren't working towards things like many of them were.
When I listen to a lot of the things that John Piper says, I think.
He's one of the better complementarians now.
As he gets old, he should probably maybe stop talking, but um, right, but uh, right, so that's where we fall at least about politics.
Uh, John, God bless him forever, but with politics, he needs to just go ahead and sit a play out or two.
You've shown a good way to be a pastor, uh, but maybe stay in your lane.
So, yeah, no, that's super helpful, guys.
I, um, everything you're saying is encouraging because I've been listening to your podcast and reading other guys.
I preached through Genesis about a year and a half ago at my church in San Diego.
I'm now in Texas.
But when I was pastoring there in San Diego, we preached through Genesis.
And I remember when I was in chapter one and chapter two, my big preacher line was that it's not male and female roles, He assigned them, but male and female natures, He designed them.
It rhymes, it had to be true.
And so, but anyways, but just helping people see that it's not just that God calls.
Birds to fly and calls fish to swim.
Well, he also gives fish gills and fins, and he gives birds wings and a hollow bone structure.
Androgynous Souls and Resurrection Bodies00:07:15
It's not just that, hey, they're exactly the same and they just have two different roles.
It's no, they're ontologically two distinct creatures designed for their roles, and they're differently designed for those different roles.
And I think male and female, you guys are absolutely right.
It's really become like just this duty and role on the surface that's interchangeable.
And it's like, I don't know.
It's almost like an ice cream, you know, like you have a chocolate shell around the vanilla ice cream.
And one is, you know, it's a dark chocolate, and another one's like maybe it's a strawberry, you know, but on the center, it's both just that creamy vanilla goodness, you know.
And we think of men and women in those terms, like it's just on the surface and it doesn't go all the way down.
It relates back to what Michael mentioned about the Gnosticism that we have in evangelicalism, where the body is downplayed.
And there's a kind of general consensus that everyone has that.
Really, we're all kind of androgynous spirits, and the bodies are just incidental.
God happens to give us a male or a female body, but deep down inside, the soul, the spirit is androgynous.
And when we die, we won't really be male or female.
That's not necessarily how they think about it, but that's kind of how it works out if you actually take it to its logical extreme.
Yeah, I used to think that.
I mean, you're describing the view that I can't remember how long ago it was, but there was a time where I thought, and part of the reason was because it's good to be a man.
Well, it's also good to be a woman if you're a woman.
A biological woman.
And part of me just didn't think it was good to be a woman.
And so I literally thought, like, you know, if you're a Christian faithfully serving Jesus, then you'll be rewarded as a Christian woman at the end of your life that you'll no longer have to be a woman, you know, that men and women, you know, just gender will cease to exist.
And, you know, and I still thought, you know, I knew we would have a physical body because I believe in a bodily resurrection.
But I remember thinking, like, we'll have a physical body, but gender won't be a part of it.
On that note, just a kind of a side question for you guys.
Until the resurrection, a day of a resurrection, to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord.
So I know that both of you, as Orthodox believers, believe that if we died tonight, we would be with the Lord Jesus, but there's a physical bodily resurrection that we're awaiting.
So, what about that intermediate period?
I have some thoughts, but I'm curious what do you see as that intermediate period where we're present with the Lord, but we're awaiting this bodily resurrection?
What is that like?
And how does gender work into that?
What weird thoughts do you have on that?
What trouble will you get us up to?
It's so interesting that you ask that question.
I don't have much in the way of thoughts.
I don't have a very strongly held opinion on what kind of dualism is correct.
So I can't give you any ideas there.
But I do think that you will still be a male when you are in the spirit with the Lord.
You will have a male spirit that will be in some way identifiable as a male spirit in the spirit realm.
You'll be able to tell men.
From women, and you'll be able to tell angels from humans.
I like that.
That's great.
I guess what I would say is that the intermediate state is not a denial of your human nature, right?
Whatever it is, like we will be reunited to our body, so we'll be fully glorified in the sense that the fullness of resurrection has been consummated, right?
But my spirit isn't like, to be human is to be spirit.
And body, it's a spirit body composite, right?
And so, I'm not something other, I'm just without my body.
And the fact that that existence can happen is very strange, right?
Yeah, but the reality is that heaven is not going to be a rejection to the goodness of God's design with the intermediate, it's not whatever it is.
And uh, in sexuality, binary sexuality is part of the goodness of God's design.
And this is the idea of an androgynous spirit world is rooted in Greek mythology.
And paganism, which is almost always androgynous, right?
Right.
And so if someone holds that, and we hear that in some of our critics that even claim to be complementarian, especially the female ones, that there is a real sense, I think, that they believe in the afterlife that we're just going to be androgynous spirits.
And that is actually on the verge of rank heresy, right?
That's because it attacks the nature of man, but more importantly, the nature, as you said at the beginning of this segment, of Jesus, right?
Mm hmm.
That's right.
Yep.
I so for me, because of that, I tend to think, and I don't know, it's I don't have a lot of strong biblical support, but I just tend to think that you know, because I'm not Gnostic, I just can't even comprehend the existence of a human being apart from the body.
It's just that body spirit connection is just so strong.
So I tend to think that we will have a physical body, it just won't be the one here from earth.
This one will be waiting in a tomb, like a loader, still have.
A fleshly male body for the three of us, and women will have spirit and a female body, just an intermediate state where you're solely spirit, but an intermediate state with an intermediate fleshly body because there is no human existence apart from spirit and body.
And then you'll be reunited with a better body, namely your previous body, but now glorified.
I don't know if that holds up theologically, but that's that's kind of where I'm at.
So, well, I'm not sure it holds up theologically either, but I would say that I can meet you halfway.
I think that we will.
We need to have bodies.
God will accommodate our fleshly nature in the spiritual world by making it, by essentially, I see the spirit world as kind of like a shared dream.
And in a dream, you still have a body, even though it's not really your body because it's a dream.
Okay.
Even the nature of the angelic is weird because they're non corporeal entities that can interact with the physical realm.
Right.
And so a lot of our problems come from how we conceive of spirit.
A lot of times, like so many of our theological issues, is that what we have to realize is how much we've absorbed from Non-christian sources.
Right, and even cartoons and stuff and movies or whatever.
But the spirit is like um, it's like a white shadow that you can put your hand through, like these are how people imagine, or you know like, and is that even correct?
Well, we know that um, the god is a spirit.
He doesn't have a body, um at all, and yet he can interact with the physical realm.
So how this all shakes out Will be an interesting experience, you know.
Cool.
Well, let me bring you guys back to something you said earlier because I know some of our listeners are going to be like, well, non said that very non said it in a nonchalant manner.
Theonomic Logic and Male Sacrifice00:03:10
But did he say women shouldn't vote?
So let me bring us back there real quick and let me kind of frame it for a moment real quick.
Michael gives me the stank eye.
And people are going to want to know.
So for me, because I agree with you guys and And it's the same kind of thing.
It's not just male and female roles, he assigned them, but male and female natures, he designed them.
And I love what you said, Michael, just because it's so basic and so logical.
I think it's easier for people to grab onto.
But this idea that if husband is head of wife and society is made up of households and families, then I mean, you just do the basic logic math and you wind up with men being not just heads of households, but heads of society.
And we, I think, all through, Three of us would agree that there's, you know, three primary spheres.
I like Schaefer and I like his seven mountains and media, you know, and the marketplace and stuff, but three primary divinely instituted spheres of human society the home, the church, and the state.
And a lot of the complementarian guys, it seems like they're always addressing the home and the church, and the home and the church, and the home and the church.
But I completely agree with you guys.
I think that with the state, certainly, military and combat, I think, should be men because the husband lays down his life for his wife.
But we know it's beyond that.
Right.
So I think that's part of the problem is that men have zero authority outside of just a husband with his wife.
But what's chivalry then?
Chivalry is that even that woman that I'm not married to, if we're on the Titanic and it's going down, women and children first, that I have this male obligation that's beyond merely my household, that there's a priority to my household.
But there's just something about being a man, even with a woman that I'm not wed to, that my life is expendable, that men can be replaced, and that I should die for her as Christ dies.
For the church.
And so, even with military and combat, but even with the president of the United States and things like that, I completely agree.
I think that that's commander in chief is very clearly a male headship, leadership role.
But in terms of voting, because you said that, and I just thought it was interesting, and I just kind of wanted to press a little bit and hear some more thoughts.
What do you think about women voting?
I would let Lydia vote.
Okay.
All right.
And could you explain why?
Sure.
She's the head of a household.
I think the church meeting in her home, yeah.
Yeah, so, well, she appears to be a wealthy widow is how a lot of commentators think, and that's suggested.
What I would say with the voting issues, so these are litmus tests.
And everyone, like I had a young guy reach out to me and ask me if I was post-millennial or theonomic.
And I said, I don't know.
What do you mean by post-millennial or theonomic?
Right.
And that's not me being a smart aleck.
That's the fact that people grab these labels and throw them around.
They have no understanding of it.
Right, and I was like, asked him what books he had read.
He hadn't read any books, and I was like well, maybe start with three views on the Millennium, right?
Just like, start wrapping your head around these topics.
Church Governance and Baptismal Age00:13:03
And you know um, because i'm not gonna, i'm not gonna do it.
So voting is a lot like that.
Suffrage is where the feminist movement really uh, took off in our country, you know um, and therefore, it's like this um untouchable thing and a litmus test on whether you're just a monster um uh, right now.
What I would say though, is that I I don't think uh, I probably don't think that landowners or non landowners should be voting.
So I don't, i'm not, i'm not a big believer in universal suffrage for men or women but, to me, like this is one of those things kind of like why are we talking about this?
Like where are we at in culture?
Like we gonna, we gonna stop women from voting?
Is that?
What is that?
What's on the um, the agenda right now, and are we and?
So, When people have these conversations, you have to recognize it for what it is.
One, if it's hashtag out among friends, that's fine.
But if it's happening in a public space, yeah, public forum like space, and I take you obviously to be a friend, but it's usually us just like trying to decide who's broken the rules of orthodoxy and who's a terrible person and not actually getting work done.
And that's why I personally shy away from it because I'm like, I don't care and I don't care if you care.
Right.
But I will tell you in our church, to the shame of all my patriarchal listeners, we do allow female members to vote.
I assume it gives two votes.
Are you Baptist?
Yeah.
No, that's a good point.
Are you Baptist Presbyterian?
I'm Pauline, so Presbyterian.
Nice.
Okay.
Non, are you Presbyterian?
I am unclear.
I'm more Presbyterian in my polity, and I'm Presbyterian in my covenant theology, but I am not Presbyterian in terms of baptizing infants.
So that's another rabbit trail that we could go down.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So I'm 1689, and so I'm Reformed Baptist, but.
Not a Calvinistic Baptist, a Reformed Baptist.
So I'm confessional and Sabbatarian and covenantal in terms of a 1689 federalism.
So not truly covenantal to the Presbyterian.
You guys wouldn't recognize that.
But anyway, so yeah, I'm as close as you can get to being truly Reformed without being Presbyterian.
So that being said, a lot of my friends, you know, most of my friends, I tend to have more in common with my Presbyterian pastor friends than the Baptist guys because Baptist is just, who knows what you're going to get?
It's just so broad.
I mean, the Southern Baptist convention, and you just have no clue.
But with that, a decent amount of my friends and some of my Reformed Baptist friends, they have, when it comes to voting, so I'm congregational.
That's one of the big differences, as you guys know, between Westminster and 1689 is that the chapter on the church.
We have 16 paragraphs in the 1689 all about the church, and then you got synods and councils, and it's just blank because we're Baptists.
So we're going to rebel and protest everything.
And we believe in local church autonomy, no ecclesiastical authority outside of the local church.
So, that being said, you know, I'm congregational, and we believe the highest authority, earthly authority, the highest authority is the Bible, but the question is who gets to say what the Bible says.
So, the highest earthly authority, we believe, is the congregation.
So, the congregation would have a vote over primary matters like our statement of faith when it comes to ordaining elders and deacons or church discipline, removing someone from the Lord's table.
That would be a congregational matter.
Secondary and tertiary matters would go to the elders and deacons, and we do hold to a male diaconate.
We believe that deacons are not male and female, but just like elders and men.
A guy that's going to be, I'm just curious as we're talking about.
Yeah, yeah.
So, a guy that's like going to be excommunicated or removed from the table for a time, does that go to a vote?
Like, do people get to vote whether or not he's going to be removed from the table?
No, it's the Baptist way.
51% or what?
Like, how did you arrive at the percentage?
Right.
That's a great question.
So, you know, we have our bylaws, but I know what you're asking.
You don't care about my bylaws.
You want to know, like, no, no, no.
What bylaws?
You know, it tells you a percentage.
Super majority, yeah.
So for us, it is a simple majority.
Um, with elders, 49% of the people can, like, be like, that dude, that dude should not be communing with the Lord Jesus through the Lord's table in a Baptist church, at least theoretically.
And he could do it, yeah, yeah.
And he could keep Michael, you're such a troublemaker.
Well, I'm just thinking about it.
Doesn't that sound miserable?
It does, it sounds intense, man.
And that's why, so but think of it like this in a nutshell, I would say that's why Baptist local Baptist churches split.
Is because of our polity.
And that's why you Presbyterians, your denomination split because a whole denomination goes liberal.
And the only way you can have guys who are faithful to the Bible is you get, you know, PCUSA and then it's PCA and then it's got to be PC and then it's got to be P. Split P is what they call it, man.
That's right.
So it's basically, you know, you have Presbyterians splitting at a denominational level and then you have Baptists kind of splitting at local.
So either way you slice it, I think both polities have their strengths and their weaknesses.
But, anyways, all that being said, when it comes to a congregational vote, we have.
You know, they would have to be a baptized believer, and we believe, you know, we're credo Baptists, and so they would have to be baptized.
But that's where it gets wacky, you know, and I'll at least say difficult for Reformed Baptists.
Is, you know, if I'm going to baptize, for instance, a 12 year old because they've made a credible profession of faith before the church, and it's not just on the basis of mom and dad and their testimony, but he's met with the elders and sat before them, and we're saying, yeah, we can't withhold the Lord's Supper from him any longer, but we're not going to give him the Lord's Supper without what we believe is the initiating oath sign, which is baptism.
And then the renewing oath sign is a renewal of the covenant when we come together.
And take the Lord's Supper is the way that we would view that.
So we got to baptize this guy.
Now he's a baptized believer.
And for me, and trying to be consistent in my polity, I don't believe in what I think many Baptists do believe in, which I would call partial membership, where they're ministering baptism and the supper, but they're technically a congregational church, but they're not giving him voting rights.
So he's a partial member of the church, right?
He can take the supper, he can get baptized, but he doesn't have.
So, anyway, so that being said, we would see the child, The wife, right?
So the female, so it's not just men and women, but it's also children.
If we're going to baptize them, all of a sudden, you know, that 12 year old could be voting to remove me as his pastor if things go really, really bad in a members' meeting.
And so, all that being said, I don't know how to get away from, and the big one is, and maybe you guys can help me, but Galatians, I think of Galatians 3, you know, there is neither male nor female.
And I know that gets taken out of context, but I feel like at the Lord's table, male and female, Slave or free, you know, Jew or Greek.
And so the way I see it is like the one area, so that doesn't mean because we still have Ephesians 5, right?
So there's neither male nor female, husband, head of the wife, wife submit in everything to her husband.
And so we know that doesn't just whitewash everything when Paul's, you know, writing in Galatians, but I feel like the one area where women have that equal voice is through their vote as a regenerate church member.
And so for me, I would really have a hard time.
I would have an easier time not allowing women to vote in a presidential election than not allowing Christian women, baptized Christian women, to vote in my Baptist church.
Does that make sense?
I think it's a question.
I just love to hear your thoughts.
I mean, I think people's ecclesiology is, I think people's political understanding almost always reflects their ecclesiology.
So you're not surprised that the Church of England, right, is modeled on a monarchy and America was at least originally largely modeled on Presbyterianism.
With a healthy dose of very reform-leaning Congregationalism, right?
So you go back to what's happening in Virginia and South Carolina in the 1700s leading up to that.
The fact is, the only guy signed was a Presbyterian minister, right?
Witherspoon.
But so I think I don't know how you get around it.
I believe in representative government.
And I think that.
But then again, I allow women to vote in our church.
And that's more of just because we're working towards reform.
I think of it as a long line of dominoes.
Just imagine that a lot of the things people want to talk about is the domino at the very end of the line.
And when they're like that, I take them not to be serious people because it.
Like, I want to get there, friend.
We'll talk about it.
But there's all these things towards the front.
Like, we got to flip those dominoes first to get down there.
And so, for me, that might not be a reform that happens underneath me.
Someone could say that you could just do it right away.
And I would say, well, yeah, but you limit the number of people you can reach.
And then they would say that's pragmatism.
And I'd say, haha, true, it is.
We're all pragmatists, right?
Like, let me enter your life for five seconds and I'll dissect you, right?
And you dissect me, and then we'll all like realize, like, it's very difficult to work these things out right now.
Right.
I think the theonomy question goes the same direction.
It's like, how do you work out the particulars of these?
It's very difficult.
Like, I think a 12 year old voting whether someone should be a pastor is asinine and insane.
But then what you do as a Baptist is you just don't baptize a 12 year old.
But it gets difficult because then you have to have some legitimate reason besides just the fact that he's 12.
See, I think that's more consistent if you're a Baptist.
I don't think you should baptize them.
If you're a Baptist until like they're 20 or something, when they truly individuated from the parents and they know that their faith is their own and they're not just doing it because daddy's a Christian, that would make more sense to me, I think.
Don, what's your thoughts, brother?
I think the question is very simple.
Democracy is the rulership of the people.
So, who is allowed to rule in the people?
Democracy, the only people who should vote in a democracy are people who are qualified to rule.
Yeah, I get you.
I think that's good.
I like the household vote.
So, I'm theologically not there, but I like it because what you kind of described earlier, Michael, I see actually the harm being on the other end of the aisle, other side of the aisle.
That if, um, in the Baptist world, congregational vote, every you know baptized believer is a member of that church and has one vote.
I see it as like that guy who's a super faithful church member, and him and his wife, and he has six kids.
Let's say his youngest at this point, and it's this multi generational still in the church.
Let's say he's in his 60s, his oldest is you know 35, and his youngest is 18.
And uh, well, that wouldn't work.
Let's say they're still in the home.
I'm ruining my analogy, but let's say they're all in the home, there's six children.
From 12 to 18 years old, that doesn't work, but the math, but you get the twins.
You know, 10, yeah, 10 to 18, six children, all baptized, him and his wife baptized, a household of eight.
If it's a household vote, then those eight regenerate church members and my Baptist framework, they get one vote.
And that single woman who's 23 years old and a liberal who is getting close to being put underneath church discipline because she's just, her views are horrible and she's outspoken and being divisive.
And we've already got a household vote.
An electoral college.
Yeah, but we'll see.
And so now this 23 year old single woman is getting an equal amount of voting power, if with the household vote, to my rock star lay elder, you know, for instance, and his wife and six baptized children.
So that's part of, you know, we all need to return to aristocracy.
And the first step in that process is returning to the idea of having a free and transparent election.
Until we can do that, there's not much point having any further discussion about who should be ruling.
Free and transparent election.
We nailed that.
I thought we just nailed that.
I think we got that down.
Okay, all right, I'll move us along.
So, what's I'll just ask these two together and we'll start to wrap up.
And we've got a bonus question for our listeners who are club members.
Fear of God and Fatherless Men00:04:48
So, these two questions I'll ask together What's one of your biggest concerns for Christian men today?
So, men in the church, not the pagan, but the one who professes Christ.
And also, what do you think is one of the most severe, harmful effects of feminism on the church today?
I think Michael should take that first question because he's a pastor and I'm not.
Okay.
Greg?
I mean, my biggest concern is that men don't fear God.
I mean, I don't have any special answer that men don't fear God and that they don't live a life to glorify him.
And if I want to tie that into feminism, I would say that we live in a culture where men have been conditioned to be validated by women.
And those particular men will live their life to get feminine approval andor they'll kind of react against that, and then they'll tend to look for some sort of like guru like guy, like an expert, a father figure that might not be a good father figure.
So, I think men that have that haven't had good godly men as fathers, whether they're biological or men that have discipled them and mentored them in some way, those guys are very vulnerable and easy to manipulate and control.
So, I think we live in a society.
That is full of men that are fearful, seeking validation, and easy to manipulate.
And that's true of the church.
And that's why we can't call a spade a spade nowadays.
That's why pastors have to look over their shoulder if they preach something, because they know that in their congregation and often on their elders' board or sessions, that there's men that if their wife or daughter get offended, that those men are going to throw you under the bus to keep the peace at home.
So now you could say that that's a concern about feminism, right?
But ultimately, it's a concern about fearing God, right?
Like, back off, woman.
Like, I believe God's word.
I think that what the pastor said was right.
And sometimes that hurts our feelings.
And it's good that our pride is hurt.
That's what that really usually means, right?
Which feeling was hurt is a lot of times what I like to ask people.
Like, what was the categorized feeling for me?
Because I think it's your pride.
So I think that's the biggest problem we have right now men that aren't.
Masculine and the masculinity, Nan and I are working on a chapter right now that's all around this is that no fraternity, no masculinity, and that fraternity starts with the fatherhood of God.
And if guys don't fear God as a father and see and identify themselves as a son of God, they are going to be manipulated by the ton of grifters out there.
You know, I see some of these guys selling masculinity courses in the church, and I'm like, dude, there's nothing masculine about you.
You look like a dirty, worthless hipster.
Trying to take advantage of these young men out here that are hungry.
These men, we don't do a course.
We thought about it, everyone does like these manhood courses.
We got bills to pay too.
We thought maybe that's a way to monetize it.
Oh, we couldn't do it, we couldn't bring ourselves to do it, um.
And so I see a lot of guys taking advantage of these men.
And then these men are fools to often marry brassy, loud mouth, ungodly women um, who have went out there and ran around and got themselves in all sorts of trouble.
The very women and i'm using words and concepts directly from Proverbs, chapter seven And these guys are getting these terrible marriages, and then we have to counsel them, right?
And so, this is not a good scenario for those men, but especially for the children, right?
For the covenant children, for the future of the church.
And so, those are probably the issues that I see practically played out.
So, I'm trying to get men to fear God.
I'm not trying to get them to make their wife submit more, right?
Like, I want that, I want there to be a healthy relationship in the home.
But again, the first domino to drop there.
Is a proper understanding of the nature of our God, who's a father, right?
And we relate to him through the Son, and the Spirit empowers us to live bold lives.
That's good.
Nam, any thoughts?
I think that in terms of the effect that feminism has had both on society and the church, the effect is the same for both.
And that is primarily that it has kind of through conditioning and kind of through men.
Feminine Thinking and Orthodoxy Risks00:02:22
Just not wanting to fight with women, it has resulted in a way of thinking that is a default female way of thinking.
Now, a female way of thinking is a great thing in the right place, but when you put it into the wrong place, it becomes essentially a conduit for ensuring that orthodoxy is gradually undermined and any kind of heterodoxy that can be smuggled in under a certain sentiment is.
Raised up and lionized.
And the reason that that happens is because people who defend orthodoxy tend to be somewhat abrasive and will ruffle people's feathers because they tell them that they're wrong.
Whereas heterodoxy tends to be brought in by false teachers who are by nature flatterers and they use smooth speech.
And women are, their entire mode of existence is based around establishing social bonds.
It's based around.
Ensuring that there is kind of this conciliation between people, no one's left out.
And what that results in practically is that women aren't able to fight without splitting.
There has to be ostracization going on.
If there's some kind of a threat, it needs to be put out in order to protect the harmony of the whole.
And that means that anyone who brings in any kind of masculine, it doesn't even have to be ideas.
It can just be someone who thinks that there ought to be a debate about something.
If you're willing to debate something and you think that it's important to debate something, that makes you threatening and scary.
And so you get put out, and the people that are willing to tow the line and not rock the boat, they're the ones that are kind of the order there is preserved.
And so they're raised up as being models of how to live in society.
And this happens, I've seen this happen both in the church and in society at large.
It's very difficult.
We always walk on eggshells these days because we don't want to offend people.
This is where cancel culture comes from.
And this is the idea that you can essentially, it's a sin to offend people now.
The 11th commandment, thou shalt be nice.
Is where this idea comes from as well.
So it's all a result of feminine conditioning and not placing feminine ways of thinking underneath the rulership of masculine ways of thinking, which is how God designed it.
Addressing Doubts Through Newsletter00:04:10
That's really good.
Maybe one way to tie that back to our subject that we had earlier, take subjects like suffrage.
Because it's so inflammatory to some people, and I don't want to deal with the emails, and I don't want to deal with the argument, and I don't want to deal with the tweets and all that stuff.
I don't want to talk about it.
Right to some degree, and uh, that's not a good place to be in a society where we can't, there needs to be a space where people can talk about ideas and think out loud and work through them and not be punished for it.
Or like us guys, we can sit around in a non-recorded place and talk about whatever we want.
Like a good group of guys that know each other and we'll throw out crazy ideas.
And I've got a lot of crazy ideas on Genesis, you know, in particular that I've worked through with friends.
And some of them are like, no, that's a little too wild.
But at least I could put them out there and think through it with people.
When you're in an environment like that, everything gets reduced down more and more and more.
And so it's mere Christianity, mere sexuality, mere everything.
And even what's mere is shrinking.
And so I think people are in churches that can't have these conversations.
And we're now at a time where it all is starting to matter in dire ways.
And they weren't allowed to have those conversations and the people aren't prepared.
And they're looking at their pastor saying, why didn't you prepare me?
Right.
And that's like the moment we live in right now.
Yep.
I completely agree.
All right.
Well, that's.
Been very interesting, very helpful.
I think our listeners are going to really enjoy this episode.
Before we go, let me go ahead and just kind of whet the appetite for our club members and those who are not yet a club member.
If you're not, please become a responder and support Right Response Ministries.
If you do, you get access to the bonus portion of each of our interviews on Theology Applied.
And the bonus question for Michael and Non that they're going to stay on and answer here in just a moment is this What do you see as one of the clear sins with Christian women today that pastors should be willing to address from the pulpit?
So, if you're not a club member, if you're not a responder, we encourage you to join our team, help support us, and check out some of the bonus footage with Michael and Non.
The question again What do you see as one of the clearest sins with Christian women today that pastors should be willing to address from the pulpit?
So, as we go ahead and conclude the episode, Michael and Non, could you just let our listeners know how they could follow you, keep up with what you're doing, and be praying for you?
I can be found.
Uh, on Gab, that's kind of exclusively where I am at non tenant, and the non is has a silent b b n o n n.
I also have a website non.com, but the main thing to look for is our website it's good to be man.com, and you can find our podcasts.
You can find our content, a fair amount of our content is on the website.
Some of the best content we have is on there, and especially at the website, you can sign up for our newsletter, which is probably the better, the best way of getting content from us is the newsletter because it's high quality.
Notes every Saturday.
And a lot of that stuff is what we create all of our other content from.
So you get to see it early.
Cool.
Awesome.
Yeah, that's what I would say.
I would say go to the website.
It's good to be a man and sign up for the newsletter.
That's where a lot of the stuff that we create across multiple platforms is tabulated and made more useful.
I'm on Twitter for the moment at This is Foster and on Gab at This is Foster.
And those are the two best places to find me.
Great.
Thanks, guys, for coming on the show.
Yeah, thank you.
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