Hannah Colley Giselbach is a 25-year-old preacher’s wife from Kentucky who is also a stay-at-home mom. Nothing wrong with that. I respect her choice, just as I respect the choice of parents (not just moms) who have a full-time job. (Someone‘s got to ensure the family is kitted out with diapers, baby formula, and healthcare coverage.)
Giselbach, though, doesn’t share my thumbs-up to either option, she writes on her blog. Only stay-at-home moms have picked the correct path. Married women who work? They’re just cursing God’s word.
If I’m unloving, indiscreet, unchaste, disobedient to my husband… and if I’m not a homemaker, I, by my own actions, may cause the Word to be blasphemed. Directly or indirectly, I partake in this sad and sinful scenario.
Other versions of this text [Titus 2:3-5] use the words “working at home,” “keepers at home,” and “busy at home,” in the place of “homemaker.” But, according to the Liddell-Scott-Jones Greek Lexicon, in the original Greek in which this passage was written, the word is “oikourous,” which, translated, literally means “keeper of the home, mistress of the house, housekeeper, stay-at-home a domestic.” This word was even sometimes used to contemptuously describe a cowardly man who stayed at home instead of going to war with the other men. But in reference to women, it was “used in praise of a good wife.”
In Deuteronomy 6:4-7, God offers specific child-rearing advice, Giselbach reminds us:
He is saying that teaching your children about the Word is to be a daily, all-day long effort. Just as we are to be a people who “prays without ceasing” (I Thessalonians 5:17), we are to teach our children about God without ceasing, constantly taking advantage of every opportunity to show them how to love and obey Him in everything.
Deuteronomy, eh? I’m always happy to encounter Christians who are consistent enough to believe the whole Bible, rather than attempting to sweep the Old Testament part under the rug. If Giselbach is serious about scriptural integrity, she also supports killing adulterers (22:22); destroying the altars and places of worship of people with different religions (7:5); and, per 22:28-29, insisting that a rapist buy his victim from her father for 50 shekels (MSRP).
Her heart “aches” for “those sweet babies” who are all but being abandoned — and for “our culture as a whole,” whose married working women are so misguided as to earn food and shelter for their children while serving as independent-minded role models who show girls what humans-with-lady-parts are capable of achieving. How dare they, right?
Concludes Giselbach (caution, brain-frying lack of self-awareness ahead):
I’m not writing this to be harsh or judgmental in any way. I’m writing it to give you a little food for thought and to encourage you moms to reject the stigmas, as I have done.
So apparently, in order to cast off a stigma, you must stigmatize as “blasphemers” and “sinners” the people who have chosen to do things differently from you.
Biblical logic… isn’t.
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