Playing Footsie with the Devil

The purest of hearts can be undone by the weakest of boundaries. Fill your life with sin-disincentivizing external boundaries.

Feb 18, 2022

Dear friends and supporters:

One example of the moral turpitude soft-core feminism inflicts on the church is the reduction or abandonment of traditional, biblical standards and boundaries of decency and propriety between the sexes, even (perhaps particularly) within church leadership. Popular evangelical counselor and spokesman Kyle J. Howard, for example, suggests that when Jesus confronted the sexually profligate Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well (John 4), he was meeting her alone, and in excluding any sexual accountability, he exhibited his own purity and thereby treated her with uncommon dignity (perhaps Jesus was a proto-feminist). This is a paradigm for male Christian leaders everywhere. Meeting women alone is a testimony to their dignity — and our purity.

Howard declares:

(1) What if the real measure of a married man’s maturity, piety, & character is not found in his refusal to be alone with a woman but in his ability to be alone with a woman — one he would even consider to be beautiful — and yet not lust after her but treat her w/ dignity & honor?
(2) What if the rules men establish to “guard themselves” from falling into temptation are actually rules to protect [the] world from seeing what truly lurks in their heart, pollutes their character, & stunts their piety? What if the walls erected by men to protect them from temptation
(3) are actually erected to protect their public image & brand? What if the shock disciples had when seeing Jesus alone w/ the woman at the well was the disciples projecting the insecurity they had in their own piety & character onto Christ who dignified her via interaction?
(4) Maybe, to this day, Christian men still don’t get it. They still don’t understand what actually happened at that well. They don’t understand the spiritual, emotional, & psychological healing Jesus brought the woman thru his counter-cultural act of humanizing & dignifying her.

This is a textbook example of sin-inviting pious gush pressed into service for evangelical feminism.

First, the scenario is exegetical irresponsible. The Bible doesn’t say that Jesus was alone with this woman, though he might’ve been, and that’s not the point of the passage anyway.

Ideological Imposition

Howard is no doubt correct that Jesus humanized this woman, but there is nothing sexually distinctive about that humanization. Jesus as the mediator of creation humanized everybody he met, since every individual is created in God’s image. Jesus was not a proto-feminist evangelical. He treated women (and men) with grace and dignity, but he was unafraid to charge any human with sin and call for repentance, as he did in the case of this Samaritan woman.

The pressing issue in John 4, in fact, isn’t sexual, but racial. As the woman acknowledged, Jews didn’t have dealings with the Samaritans. It wasn’t Jesus’ treatment of this woman as a woman, but his treatment of her as a Samaritan that startled her.

Our Lord had begun to activate his Father’s global kingdom plan, which extended God’s covenant people beyond Israel. Importing contemporary feminist concerns into the passage isn’t an example merely of eisegesis (smuggling into the text an alien interpretation). More broadly, it’s an example of the imposition of an ideology on the biblical text. It’s an attempt to alter not just the meaning of the text, but also the meaning of the Bible, turning it into a feminist book.

Gnosticizing Sin

What is by far most objectionable to Howard’s interpretation, however, is its perilous accommodation to the sinful human heart, and the potentially wrecked marriages and lives in the wake of refusing to guard against sin. No man who always refused to be alone with a woman not his wife ever committed adultery.

The reason devout Christian leaders have historically established boundaries around pastors’ meeting alone with women (other than their wife) is that they don’t have an unrealistic, naïve view of human nature, including the nature of Christian leaders. That nature includes a sin nature, which is being reversed by the power of the Spirit through the cross, but cannot be eliminated in this life. The apostle John writes that “if we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us” (1 John 1:8). Even the most devout Christians sin, and this includes Christian leaders — and it also includes Christian leaders when they’re meeting alone with attractive women other than their wife.

Howard’s argument is that if a male Christian leader’s heart is sufficiently pure, if he values women and wishes to humanize them, he need not establish boundaries to prevent lust and adultery.

At the root of this proposal is a Gnostic view of sin. Gnosticism is the view that creation and the material world are irredeemable, but the immaterial world, pure spirit, represents a higher existence and can achieve perfection. (See my “Easter Against the Gnostics”).

For Gnostics, the inner, immaterial man is (or can become) immaculately pure; the outer, material part of man, however, is irredeemable, and fit only for worm food.

Inward and Outward

The argument is superficially plausible. After all, Jesus castigated the Pharisees for obsessing with outward matters when their heart was depraved:

“But those things which proceed out of the mouth come from the heart, and they defile a man. For out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies. These are the things which defile a man, but to eat with unwashed hands does not defile a man.” (Matthew 15:18–20)

External, material moral purity is secondary to internal, immaterial purity.

But the Bible is far from discounting outward, external purity. In fact, Matthew 15 itself records Jesus’ reprimand of the Pharisees precisely for a very material matter: refusing material provision for their parents on the allegedly pious grounds that this money should be devoted to God. That’s an external, material code of conduct if there ever was one.

Moreover, if a pure heart alone suffices to protect from sin, we have to wonder why the Bible lays down so many external ethical requirements, for even the most devout. Think only of man and woman at creation. God didn’t instruct Adam and Eve: “Obsess on me with a pure heart, and you’ll fulfill my desires for you.”

No, he specifically prohibited eating fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. If a pure heart alone would’ve sufficed, this commandment to external conformity would’ve been superfluous. And the pre-fall Adam and Eve, along with our Lord, are the only impeccably pure-hearted people who ever lived.

Christian Phariseeism limits purity and sin to the external; Christian Gnosticism limits them to the internal. Both are wrong. Sin and purity are both internal and external.

(continued below)

We sometimes hear the well-meaning exhortation, “Christianity doesn’t start with the Bible, but with Jesus Christ.” This might very well be true, but Christians must embrace biblical truth anterior to Christianity, and that is creation as the Bible describes it. Put another way: the Bible is bigger than Christianity. We will not understand his person and work in their greater depths if we bypass creation. This is a small book about not bypassing creation. It’s a book about thinking in creational categories, and purging contra-creational categories that infect our culture and, in too many cases, our churches.

Get the paperback and e-book here.

(continued)

Holistic Sin, Holistic Purity

The Gnostic impulse of Howard’s suggestion is disclosed in another way. Lust begins in the human heart, but if unchecked, it doesn’t end there (James 1:13–15). More significantly for our purpose, the agency for lust often doesn’t begin in the heart. Man is a holistic being. One of his deepest impulses is sexual, a physical (though not only physical) impulse. Because man and woman are required from creation to populate the earth, that impulse is an implied creational norm. The desire for sexual intercourse, therefore, is a pure, creational desire.

Of course, to a heart [!] turned away from God, this creationally pure physical impulse degenerates into lust for sexual promiscuity — and worse. In a fallen world, it doesn’t matter how pure your heart is, it must compete with other aspects of the human person — the physical, emotional, intuitive, and intellectual. An impeccably pure heart should prevent physical lust (though it didn’t in Eden), but an impure heart infects every part of man, including his sexual impulses.

Boundaries Are Vital

This is why boundaries in a fallen world are so vital. Pastors and other Christian leaders should not meet alone with women other than their wives even if their heart is pure, because physical (and for that matter emotional) attraction not originating in the heart is still a reality.

This is the truth behind the wise adage: “Sin is 5% intent and 95% opportunity.” Therefore, don’t trust a pure heart or righteous intentions. Establish boundaries that disincentive external sinful behavior.

It’s true that if we lust after a woman in our heart, we’ve already committed adultery with her in the eyes of God (Matthew 5:27–28). But in the course of human history, a lustful heart is less injurious than an adulterous act.

At the final judgment, each of us will stand before God and give account of his thoughts and actions. God alone will judge, because he alone can read the heart (Hebrews 4:12—13).

Until then, boundaries that largely prevent and disincentive external sin aren’t only wise — they’re essential.

Conclusion

Contrary to Howard’s counsel, if you’re a pastor or church leader (or any other Christian man, for that matter), never meet with a woman alone besides your wife. At the very least, keep your office door wide open or install a window and assure a witness can observe the conversation from a distance. On occasion I must talk to women without others eavesdropping, and I always do that by meeting in a very public place or in a restaurant, and I always inform my wife and friends where I’ll be.1

To rely on the (alleged) purity of one’s heart to protect against adultery and fornication is to play footsie with the Devil — no matter how pious our intentions may be. Always remember that the Devil has more experience tempting humans than you and I have resisting his temptations. He’s been doing it a very long time.

The purest of hearts can be undone by the weakest of boundaries. Just ask King David, the man after God’s own heart. (And a “pure” man can be just as undone by an impure, entrapping woman. Just ask Potiphar’s wife, or Delilah.)

Fill your life with sin-disincentivizing external boundaries. The prevention of sin is no less righteous than a pure heart — and leads to it.

Personal

Sharon and I just returned from our month-long Texas speaking tour, on the Corpus Christi leg of which my CCL colleague Brian Mattson joined us. God mightily answered our prayers, and the venture exceeded all our expectations. We generated a plethora of content from these events. You can find lots of it here.

God is blessing CCL abundantly, but with abundant blessing comes new challenges. The travel schedule and weekly writing and seemingly unavoidable administrative tasks are starting to overwhelm me, so please pray that God grants me wisdom on what and how to delegate, which speaking engagements to take and which to decline, and which writing projects to undertake.

And donate to CCL if you can.

For the King, and with much gratitude,

Founder & President,

Center for Cultural Leadership