I first heard about NYCpastor.com when I started seeing an article from the site, detailing what kind of women Christian men should avoid, making its rounds on social media. (Atheist, divorced, career, feminist, and travel-loving women are among those who will doubtless be relieved to know that they didn’t make the cut).

According to the site’s “about” page (no doubt built for the inevitable moment when readers wondered, “who are you, person who is so wise in the ways of women?”), NYC Pastor is the blog of Dr. Stephen Kim, pastor of Mustard Seed Church.

Since writing that illuminating piece, Dr. Kim has addressed a few other burning issues (like, do dead fetuses go to hell?) in a fashion so monstrous that he immediately outs himself as either one of the greatest Internet trolls of all time… or a fairly typical New Calvinist.

For instance, in a post entitled “Where do dead babies go?” Kim first cautions:

(Please pray for the Holy Spirit’s guidance prior to reading this article.)

Which is generally a good warning that what follows is going to be really bad. And the post more than delivers on that promise…

Kim examines three possibilities — that all babies (in which categorization he includes zygotes, embryos and fetuses) go to heaven; some go to heaven and some to hell; or all go to hell. He provides Biblical references for his answer to each possibility, ultimately concluding… can you guess?

That his merciful, loving God condemns all miscarried and aborted fetuses to hell. And they’ll be joined by all the children who were not yet old enough to hear, understand, and proclaim the Gospel.

He uses abortion to explain his logic:

Abortion is a HORRIBLE crime. In aborting a child, you not only commit murder, but you automatically send a soul to eternal hell. (Conversely, one could argue that if all babies go to heaven, then abortion is the BEST gift for a baby because in killing the child, you send him to immediate heaven without giving him an opportunity to grow up and possibly reject the gospel in the future.)

If abortion sent babies to heaven, we’d have to abort even more of them, and that wouldn’t make any sense… so checkmate, atheists!

He also notes that God, in the Old Testament, was supposed to deliberately cause miscarriages to punish wicked parents. Rather than using this as evidence for how the God of the Old Testament is a murderous monster, he writes that, with this understanding, these

… passages make a lot more sense.

He does admit one possible weakness to his idea: the passage in Luke 1:15 where John the Baptist was supposed to receive the Holy Spirit en utero. He sees this as an exception rather than the rule, however — most fetuses are just damned, until they’re old enough to accept Jesus. (Hallelujah!)

Quite possibly realizing that condemning fertilized egg people to eternal suffering wasn’t horrible enough, Dr. Kim returned to the subject of marriage. In a post from Tuesday, he spends some time marveling that “the winds of change” are impacting people’s ideas of gender roles even in faraway places like Africa (“Yes, Africa!” he laments in astonishment).

Then he attempts to define the purposes of marriage. His reasons, in reverse order, are companionship, sex, children, and, “most important[ly],” to reflect the relationship of Christ and the Church. Which, of course, is religispeak for the husband should love, but completely rule, his wife, answering only to his own conscience (and God… in the next life!); and the wife is supposed to submit to her husband, like the Church submits to God.

This is the rather typical master-servant relationship that evangelicals believe marriage should model. According to Kim, married people are required by God to have children naturally if they can — “(no IVF, artificial insemination, etc).”

The piece really goes from bad to worse, however, when he gets to sex:

After cautioning against a list of what he terms sexual immoralities (masturbation, infidelity, and bestiality are all lumped in together), he offers a bit of advice for both men and women in regards to sex. To men, he says:

Generally, we tend to desire sex more frequently than our wives. However, be gracious. Love her as Christ loved the Church. Be patient and understanding — instead of being demanding. If she’s tired, sick, or “not in the mood,” try to graciously serve her. Have self-control and refrain that night. Remember, Jesus came to serve — not to be served. However, kindly (at the right time) have a conversation with her about it. It is not right (and spiritually dangerous) for a wife to continually deprive her husband of sex.

Now, if Dr. Kim thinks that this is an issue that needs addressing in his flock, a shorter and more effective way to say this might be, “And, Christian reader? Don’t ever, ever rape your wife. Ever.”

But this mushy talk of being gracious and patient is not an accident. Because, as he explains to women, the wife doesn’t actually have the right to say “no”; the husband may be benevolent and not force her, but she is wronging him in that case.

But what if you don’t feel like it? What if you’re tired? What if you’re not in a romantic mood? I am going to gently say, “Give it to him any way.” Remember, in marriage, your joy is in his joy. It’s about self-sacrifice. If he’s a godly man, he’ll honor your request and back off. However, as a godly woman, try your best to give it to him every time he asks. Remember, marital sex is commanded by God and you glorify God by having it. Even if the sex doesn’t please you, if he desires it, the Bible says not to defraud him (the literal Greek translation of the word “deprive” in 1 Cor 7:5). Defraud, because within marriage, he has the right to sexually access your body. “The wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does; and likewise also the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does (1 Cor 7:4).”

Put bluntly, this is rape apology. No one “has the right to sexually access” anyone’s body without their permission — not a husband, not a wife, no one. Dr. Kim might exhort men (without ever using the word) not to rape their wives, but he flatly states that they have the right to do it; and a woman does not have the right to say “no.” This is, frankly, a twisted, horrible view of human relationships. (And I’m not even going to speculate on all that’s wrong with a relationship where it’s a matter of “self-sacrifice” for one partner to have sex with the other…)

NYCPastor is practically a study in truly disturbing theology. It’s got it all: torture, murder, rape, all either enacted or justified by a supposedly loving God. None of it is new, but it’s not every day you stumble across so much, so publicly stated, and all in one place. And, if these recent posts are anything to go by, I doubt it’s the last time we’ll hear something really appalling from Dr. Kim.

(Image via NYCPastor)



