Working out Salvation with Fear and Trembling

John Piper recently had an excellent piece titled “Over my dead body, son: Wrestling without a handicap is no virtue” over at World Magazine (April 11, 2009, p. 56).

The issue is that on March 4 Elissa Reinsma became the first female to compete in the Minnesota state high-school wrestling tournament. For the first time female wrested male. Piper is not amused. He writes “It was not a step forward. Some cultures spend a thousand years unlearning the brutality of men toward women. This is an odd way to make history. Relive prehistory maybe.”

He concludes, “Be a leader dad. Your sons need you. The peer pressure is huge. They need manly restraints. They know this is wrong. But then they look around, and the groundswell conformity seems irresistible. It will take a real man, a real father, to say to his son. ‘Not on my watch, son. We don’t fight women. I have not raised you that way.'”