[See the Introduction to this series “On Being Human: A Theological Anthropology” here.]
[WARNING: The material below addresses sex, gender, and sexuality and may be difficult or even triggering to readers who have experienced sexual and/or spiritual abuse.]
The Argument in Outline:
Humanity was created by God in God’s Image, determining our nature, identity, purpose, and destiny.
There are only two ways or modes of being human, male and female, and these modes of being human are grounded in our sexed bodies.
Sex norms much but not all of human life.
Conclusion: Our sex (m/f) sets limits on and directs the life we should live, and this is for the blessed life of the world.
Introduction:
In this first post, I aim to lay out a Christian vision of what it means to be human in contrast to the modern conception of the detached, self-determined individual. In the West, we’re told a person’s true identity rests inside, hidden from the eyes of those around us, waiting to be discovered and disclosed, and then boldly and creatively expressed against the confines of society’s expectations, rules, or constraints. This conception of the self ignores or downplays the role of the body and the community in determining individual, human identity. It makes our parents, our community, and even our very bodies arbitrary if not hostile to our sense of self and the identity and life we feel we must live.
The Christian vision of being human is grounded in our origin as creatures made by the Triune God who subsequently redeems and sanctifies humanity for His glory and our good. As living souls, composed of spirit and body, we are defined by the one who made us, whose purposes and good future shape and direct what our lives are to be. Rather than discovering some hidden identity or creating a unique self, our identity is received as a calling from God to be embraced and faithfully stewarded to God’s glory in the place and among the people that God places us. It is here that true life and joy are found.
Humanity, then, should be considered in three ways. First, what is common to all people. Second, the sexed nature of humanity. Third, the individuality of each person.
1. Common: Created in God’s Image
Christians believe God, as the creator of all things and of humanity “in his own image” (Genesis 1:27), determines what it means to be human and what being human is for. Our nature, identity, purpose, and destiny were built into the design of God’s world at creation. Unlike the rest of creation, humanity was designed to live in relationship to God in knowledge and joy as conscious, rational, moral, and willful creatures that represent and reflect God in God’s world as we live out our purpose to demonstrate the beauty of God in filling the earth and in exercising dominion over it (Genesis 1:28). In other words, humanity was designed to build a beautiful, good, and true society to God’s glory. To accomplish this mission, humanity was created in two modes, or rather, with two different kinds of human bodies: male and female (more on this below). Both of these types of bodies, when partnered, can together faithfully carry out God’s mission.
However, Christians also believe that God’s design and purposes have been distorted by humanity’s rejection of fellowship with God. This rebellion caused humanity to fall from God’s blessedness, and as a result, our bodies, desires, thoughts, wills, and actions have all become distorted, bent, or twisted so that God’s purposes for life are not achieved and death reigns. Humanity now lives under a curse. This does not mean God’s original designs are lost. The structure of God’s creation remains intact even though humanity lives in misdirected ways. We still have male and female bodies, but we no longer live into this design and purpose as we should. Our bodies also experience corruption and confusion. We develop improperly, get sick, and experience injury. We use our bodies in the wrong ways. We harm others, work on the wrong things, and indulge our bodily desires in ways that undercut our God-given mission. Because of this distortion, humanity and society as a whole have not developed into maturity as God intended. Instead, we’ve created broken societies. There is still goodness in God’s creation and the cultures throughout the world, but there’s corruption throughout every aspect of creation.
The good news is that God refuses to leave his good creation to dissolve into chaos and death. As Herman Bavinck says, “Although history shows us so much disorder and regress, it still moves toward Christ’s future.” God redeems his world by sending His Son, Jesus Christ, to take away the sins of the world and to reconcile the world to God. As a gift of grace, God renews all things. God sets the world right again in Jesus who died to bear the death our sin incurs and to rise again to bring new life. God restores the original design of creation and takes it to God’s intended destiny: restored mission in God’s world in communion with God. Jesus brings the kingdom of God as a gift to all those who believe in Him. The grace of God in redemption restores creation and takes it to its intended goal. So redeemed men and women remain male and female. Humanity is not lifted beyond its original design, nor is it transcended or transformed into something else. In the new creation, we remain men and women but mature.
The Relationship Between Created Nature and Grace
This story of creation, fall, and redemption is critical to understanding the Christian vision for humanity. So many of the discussions about what it means to be human fail to account for the three chapters of the human story and the perspectives they each bring on our experience: 1) created nature, 2) fallen nature, and 3) redeemed nature. Let me highlight some of these failures and try to show how they hinder our ability to gain clarity about what it means to be human.
Reducing Humanity to Our Created Nature
Some Christians focus on our created nature and overlook the way Jesus and His redemptive work serves as the climactic revelation of what it means to be human. Traditionalist Christians tend to confuse cultural stereotypes with created nature by conflating what can be observed in humanity’s fallen state with the created design. Others, especially those in the Roman Church, believe that redemption adds something to our humanity not fundamental to our created nature.1 In this view, redemption in Christ lifts humanity beyond our created nature to something greater, namely, the beautiful vision of God, which is not perceived by our creaturely bodies but by our immaterial souls. The effect of this view is that our understanding of what it means to be human as male and female gets reduced to the level of mere reproduction and animal desire. Communion with God is an add-on to human nature such that human nature can be understood rationally apart from our spiritual end or goal, namely, communion with God.
Reducing Humanity to Our Redeemed Nature
Other Christians, especially Progressive, post-evangelical, Baptist, and Neo-Anabaptist types, focus on our redeemed nature and believe that 1) redemption takes us beyond or counter to our created nature, or 2) we don’t have any ability to know about our created nature because the distortion sin obscures it. Consequently, these Christians often look to Jesus and the New Testament alone to learn what it means to be human and reject the idea that our bodies obligate us in particular ways. Redemption is understood to bring about a wholly other type of society than what God’s original design established. Rather than seeing continuity in creation and redemption, redemption brings a break with the created order. The effect of this view is that our understanding of what it means to be human as male and female tends to deny or ignore the structure of our bodies, erasing the distinctions between men and women, and undercutting any rationale for the sexual moral codes given in the Old and New Testaments Scriptures.
Reducing Humanity to Our Fallen Nature
Secular people reduce humanity to our fallen nature and believe that humans are just advanced animals. We have no purpose or design. Nothing about our bodies is normative, not genetics, bodily structure, or reproductive potential. We are free to alter our bodies and determine our own purpose in life. This view rejects God as creator and denies humanity has any other purpose beyond what we decide or any destiny beyond death. The effect of this view is that secular people must borrow morals from Christianity (so that society doesn’t collapse into the law of the jungle) or must deny there is any right and wrong altogether (embracing nihilism).
Contrary to these errors, historic Christianity keeps all three of these chapters of the human story together in continuity. We have a created nature that structures our lives and determines our purpose and destiny. We have a fallen nature that explains why we experience brokenness, confusion, divergence from our design, and death. We can be redeemed through faith in Christ who enables us to be renewed creatures that return to God’s purposes for our lives and that will one day live in glory in communion with God.
To summarize this first point, Christians believe humanity was created by God in God’s image as male and female, which determines our nature, purpose, and destiny despite the distortion of humanity’s fall and through the completion brought about in redemption.
2. Sexed: Two Human Bodies and Two Ways of Being Human
Now that we know our created nature is not transcended or left behind and that we are more than advanced animals, we need to explore it further if we’re going to understand what it means to be human. There are only two ways or modes of being human, male and female, and these modes of being human are grounded in our distinctly sexed bodies. Men and women are more similar (as humans) than they are different (as males and females), but they both bring something to the mission that the other lacks. While the mission is a joint venture, each sex plays a more dominant role in one part of the mission to be fruitful and to exercise dominion than the other. Men play a larger role in the latter (dominion) while women play a larger role in the former (fruitfulness). This is one reason why God declared that it is not good for man to be alone and created woman as a helper, that is, as one who brings strengths that man lacks (Genesis 2:18). The two sexes supplement one another. Like a duet, the two sing the same song, sometimes joining together in the melody, sometimes harmonizing, but always blending their male and female voices. So both types of human bodies are needed in our mission as image bearers of God.
Reproductive Potential
To put this differently, there are two sexes with different powers and potencies. This is a biological reality, and we don’t need the Bible to tell us what every society for all of history and all scientists until very recently have observed. Humanity is a sexually dimorphic species, which means it takes a male body and a female body to reproduce. The male physiological structure is organized in a way that facilitates the production of small gametes. Men have the potential to fertilize but do not have the potential to get pregnant. The physiological structure of a female is organized in a way that facilitates the production of large gametes. Women have the potential to gestate but do not have the potential to fertilize. Our entire bodies are organized toward reproductive potential. This is the created nature of humanity as male and female.
However, due to the fall, our bodies are broken, which means that sometimes our development goes wrong, whether in the womb or afterward. This disordered development produces variations of the male or female body and sometimes causes infertility. While reproductive organs usually play a central role in identifying a person’s sex at birth, disrupted and distorted development in the womb may produce intersex conditions (situations where a person exhibits a combination of male and female traits). But this doesn’t disprove the sex binary, it only makes it harder, in some very rare cases, for us to discern if a person is a male or female.2 Just as it’d be incorrect to claim that humans don’t have 10 fingers just because some people have 9 or 11, intersex conditions don’t disprove that there are only male and female humans.
This also means that failures to develop typically and injuries do not alter a person’s sex. A man without a penis or missing a testicle is still a man. A woman without breasts is still a woman. The differences between a male and female body go all the way down into every aspect of the body, so aberrations in the secondary sexual characteristics do not alter or diminish the primary sexual characteristics. Furthermore, even though our entire physiology is organized toward reproductive potential, the inability to contribute to reproduction does not negate a person’s sex. A male who is not able to fertilize is infertile but is still a man. A female that is not able to gestate is infertile but still a woman. This is because we can distinguish between what a male or female body is ordered to (the potential) and the ability (act) of a male or female to reproduce. For example, a watch is ordered toward telling time, but a broken watch might have a worn down gear that prevents the watch from achieving its designed purpose. This distinction between potential and act is important because sometimes people claim that since, for example, some women cannot get pregnant, being a woman has nothing to do with getting pregnant. But God made humanity male and female (Genesis 1:27), and this means, among other things, that all humans have the potential to contribute to reproduction in their respective ways even if they lack the ability.
Those that face the hardships of intersex, deformity, injury, or infertility may experience deep shame, anger, and/or grief, but the solution is not to deny the sex binary altogether but to put their hope in God as members of His kingdom, for He will surely heal and glorify their body in the new creation (cf. Matthew 19:12).
Beyond Reproductive Potential
The two sexes have different powers and potencies that extend beyond reproduction. God commanded our first parents to bear children, but He also told them to subdue and exercise dominion over the earth (Genesis 1:27-28). So God’s design of humanity as male and female aimed not only at reproduction but at cultural production in the building of society generally with men and women contributing to this work as partners with both distinct and shared powers.
As humanity engages in procreation and cultural productivity, men and women bring different physical, emotional, psychological, and relational strengths to our joint mission because we have different bodies. These different strengths are not spelled out in Scripture, but they’re often alluded to or assumed. But that doesn’t leave us in the dark as to what these different strengths entail. Not only do experience and history teach us about these differences, but we can learn much from both the hard and social sciences, which continue to show that, generally speaking, the differences between our brains, bone density and structure, pelvic shape, muscle mass, body fat, hormones, reproductive potential, metabolism, etc., produce different ways of being in the world. Men and women are not interchangeable.
No doubt, when we focus on one trait, preference, or ability, there are outliers. For example, we can find small numbers of women excelling in physical strength such that they surpass many men in that one power. Likewise, we might find small numbers of men that exceed some women in relational bonding. But in the aggregate, men are stronger than women and women are better are forming and keeping community bonds. Our bodily differences account for why men and women tend to differ in: levels of aggression and agreeableness, interests and preferences, attachment and relational styles, social roles, and much more. While we tend to resist generalizations these days, there is no reason to deny that, in aggregate and recognizing outliers and exceptions, men possess different strengths and powers than women.
Many today get nervous about acknowledging these biological differences because they fear doing so will justify oppression and discrimination against women. This is an understandable concern given the way science has sometimes been used. Naming these differences does not require us to prescribe limits on what individuals can do, and it simply isn’t correct to suggest that men are superior to women wholesale. On the contrary, men and women (in the aggregate) excel in different things because we have different bodies. It’s fair to say men are superior to women in some things and inferior in others. So, for example, when the Apostle Peter states that women are the “weaker vessel,” he is not claiming that women are weaker than men in every way but that they are, in general, not as physically strong as men (1 Peter 3:7). This is hardly disputable and need not be offensive. In fact given the inherent vulnerability of women generally, it’s important that men are exhorted amidst this difference in strength to honor women and treat them with gentleness, protection, and care.
So not only do men and women bring different potencies to reproduction, but they bring different powers to the broader mission God has given to humanity to build societies to the glory of God. This should be obvious to us, but we have to acknowledge that the Modern world, in its social structure, technology, and ideology, obscures these bodily differences. Before the Industrial Era, the bodily differences between men and women resulted in clear (though often overly restrictive) but ofter mutually interdependent roles and rules in households for men and women. Life was harder. Many women died in childbirth. Male physical strength dominated production, warfare, and labor. Women lived with a greater awareness of their vulnerability to violence and of the need for male protection. Women naturally bore a disproportionate role in the bearing and rearing of children. Certainly, some of this was due to unjust social arrangements, but much of this was due to the natural realities of our bodies. As Modern people, we have technology that reduces the need for physical strength. We have medical practices that drastically reduce the number of mothers who die giving birth. We have an economy with a specialized labor force. We have laws that ensure access to participation in the job market and financial independence. We have weapons, police, and forensic technology that deters women from facing sexual assault when traveling alone. I could go on listing differences in our social landscape, but I hope the point is clear. The differences between male and female bodies are more hidden to us than those in the past, and our blindness to these differences has led most to believe men and women are interchangeable or even that men and women can choose to change their sex by altering secondary sex characteristics.
Despite our Modern technology, the bodily differences remain because they run down deep. Women are safer than in the past, yet they still feel their vulnerability and experience new forms of oppression. Men have less daily need for their higher levels of aggression, but they still find themselves longing for some sort of battle. The Modern world obscures but does not eliminate the fact that men and women are not interchangeable.
In summary, there are two ways to be human. Both men and women are essential to God’s mission for humanity to fill the earth and exercise dominion over it to God’s glory.
3. Sexed Individuals: Sex Norms Much But Not All of Human Life
Because God gives each person a male or female body, each should live in a way that properly stewards their sexed body. Sex norms our lives, placing an obligation on us to live in a particular way that is gendered. To say it differently: men should be masculine and women should be feminine.
Gender: the way of being in the world as a man or woman, namely, masculinity or femininity
Just as there are only two sexes, there are only two genders, and they refer, broadly, to the way male and female bodies shape our way of being in the world. Gender is not a subjective sense of self. It’s not a matter of how we identify. It refers to how we should live because of the body we have.
Gender Identity: the gender that matches a person’s sex
The idea that sex is normative and determines our gender identity is controversial and runs counter to the transgender ideology of today. In the West, the secularizing culture tells us that sex is “assigned” at birth, that gender is one’s own, personal sense of self apart from “assigned” sex, that a gender expression has to do with the style or presentation one adopts, and that sexual orientation is a person’s experience of emotional, romantic, and/or sexual attraction to others. This transgender ideology divides what God has united. We’re born a particular sex, either male or female. Our sex determines our gender which should be expressed in the form of the particular time and place in which we live. So our gender identity and expression must match our sex and be shaped by the cultural context. And whether we feel attracted to the opposite sex or not, our sexual behavior must be oriented toward a member of the opposite sex in marriage, which will be the subject of the next post.
Gender Expression: the way masculinity or femininity is expressed in a particular social/cultural context
In today’s climate, it’s common for people to suggest that gender is merely a cultural construction. In other words, gender is not a biological reality but one that arises from social arrangements. There’s nothing biological, for instance, about the color blue being preferred by boys and pink by girls. That’s true, but it’s a mistake to separate gender and sex altogether as if the different ways men and women behave in society are arbitrary and merely the result of culture rather than underlying biological differences.
It’s important to distinguish between cultural stereotypes about men and women and the assigned symbols of gender given in each culture that recognize the underlying bodily differences between men and women. This symbolic assignment has happened in every society throughout history and around the world because societies have rightly expected men and women to embody different roles and ways of being. While this can and often has become oppressive (particularly to women), it isn’t inherently oppressive. Rather it’s a way people have taken seriously the difference between male and female bodies. Ignoring our different bodies and setting no expectations for men and women will actually lead to worse and more hidden forms of oppression.
For example, in her recent book The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, author and columnist Louise Perry argues that the ethic of “sexual consent” intended to liberate women hides the asymmetrical nature of male-female relationships and the cultural background makes consent much more complicated and oppressive to women than modern, secular people care to admit. A society that doesn’t place any gendered expectations upon men and women will not liberate or produce human flourishing.
That’s not to say all gendered expectations are good. It is, of course, silly to suggest that, “Girls should like pink and boys should like blue.” But it’s perfectly normal and healthy for societies to assign symbols for how gender is manifested. Colors, clothing, mannerisms, etc. all signal to others who a person is and what we can and should expect from them as a man or a woman. Masculine or feminine characteristics will look different at each time and in each place, and so the manifestation or expression of gender is a cultural construct. But gender isn’t constructed out of thin air. Gender is rooted in sex differentiation and therefore has similarities across cultures.
Why Sex Norms Gender
But why should sex determine how we should live? What if a man wants to live like a woman or a woman like a man? There are three main reasons why Christians believe sex should determine how we should live.
First, we should embrace our sex and gender because that is what is best for us individually. No matter how conflicted, alienated, or disgusted one feels about his or her own body, we cannot escape our bodies and change our sex or our gender. We can mutilate ourselves, take hormone therapy, and dress up differently, but at the end of the day, our sex permeates every part of our body. When people experience gender dysphoria–the condition of feeling one's emotional and psychological identity to be at variance with one's birth sex–the solution isn’t surgery but therapy. Since ending the practice of lobotomies, gender dysphoria is the only psychological disorder being treated with surgery. Many people who have undergone dramatic “sex change” operations and hormone therapies have deeply regretted their decisions, and the incredibly high numbers of suicides among transgendered persons indicate these measures are not bringing people the happiness they expect.
Secondly, we must receive and faithfully steward the life God gives us. Scripture teaches that all of us live before God in the circumstances in which he places us, and one of these circumstances is the body we’re given. There’s a givenness to our lives in that we don’t choose how, where, or to whom we’re born, with particular parents, neighbors, opportunities, and so forth. We receive an identity that is not in our control, and we’re obligated to live in accordance with the life God gives us. The fundamental posture of life is that of receptivity and gratitude leading to fidelity in the lot God has given us.
Thirdly, there’s an even greater reason why men and women should be masculine and feminine, and it’s rooted in what the Christian story tells us about the way our bodies point to the deep communion and life the Triune God intends humanity to experience. We don’t just have male and female bodies for reproduction and cultural production. Our bodies are living symbols of transcendent realities. They communicate and signify the union of God and His people. When God created humanity, He placed them in a Garden that served as a temple, that is, as a sacred and distinct place on earth where humanity would dwell with God who intended to fill it with His beautiful presence. In this temple, God placed His image, both male and female, and he designed their bodies to symbolize this sacred communion. The woman symbolizes the temple which opens and receives the filling presence of God. The man symbolizes God who initiates and fills. The Apostle Paul alludes to this symbolic meaning when he references the creation of marriage at the beginning and then explains that it’s a picture of Christ and the church (Ephesians 5:31-32). Women signify the church that lives in submission to the Lord and receives his life-giving presence. Men signify Christ who sacrificially laid his life down in love to rescue the church. So because our bodies are given to symbolize transcendent realities, our gender expression should match our sex and gender.
Therefore, sex determines gender and norms gender expression because our bodies are 1) good, 2) given to us by God to steward, and 3) intended to symbolize God and his people.
For these reasons, men and women should seek to live faithfully into the given powers of their bodies in a way that conforms broadly to the expectations of their culture or the society they inhabit. Our gender should match our sex and we should grow into the design and natural powers of our bodies. Men should be masculine and women should be feminine. Again, that will look different in every culture and society around the world, but our social location is also an aspect of the givenness of our lives which shapes how we are called to live. Even so, while cultural location will influence gender expression, the underlying reality of sex will produce similarities across societies. To learn then what it means to be masculine, we must not merely look at our cultural context but at the underlying design of our bodies and what’s common in gender expressions across cultures.
Here again, we must look both to Scripture and to history, experience, and science. When we do so, we learn that masculinity and femininity have to do with 1) embracing and directing the natural powers of the sexed body, 2) developing the virtues and characteristics especially relevant to the sexed body, 3) and embracing the roles of the body for the good of others around them. Allow me to unpack these in a different order.
Five Social Roles for Men and Women
In order to develop a rich and full account of gender, we need to recognize the social roles men and women are each called to embody.3 Men are called to be sons, brothers, husbands, fathers, and kings. Women are called to be daughters, sisters, wives, mothers, and queens. Each of these roles corresponds to the other but bears distinct differences because of the body involved. For example, a sister brings something to a sibling that a brother does not. Likewise, a father brings something to reproduction and parenting that differs from a mother. Families, churches, and society as a whole benefit from these different roles. Furthermore, each of these roles bears a particular relation to others. Sons/daughters live in submission to parents. Brothers/sisters share a certain mutuality and fellowship. Husbands/wives partner, produce, and commune. Fathers/mothers nurture, teach, discipline, and guide. Kings/queens rule and extend dominion.
Men and women should embrace these distinct roles except in two cases. First, not everyone needs to get married, for while marriage and parenting is the general and normal calling for most people, Scripture clearly teaches that some are called to be or will remain single. Second, given that some couples experience infertility or serious medical conditions, not everyone will have children. However, all males are called to mature into becoming fathers and all females into becoming mothers in the sense that they are to act as mature humans that guide and nurture others into maturity while offering protection and provision. Fatherhood and motherhood are not merely about having children but about possessing mature character, skill, wisdom, and influence. Everyone was created to belong to a household, that is, a community like an extended family that includes non-biological and/or distant relations.
Embracing and Directing Our Natural Powers
As I’ve argued above, male and female bodies have distinct powers, orientations, and strengths. To embrace these roles is to be attentive to how our bodies shape our social relations so that we can live in ways that benefit others. Just as men and women each bring something different to reproduction, so also do men and women bring different strengths to all these relationships.
So here we must return to some of the generalities highlighted previously, and interestingly, we’ll find that what men and women bring physically to reproduction has parallels to their embodiment in social life more broadly. For example, in reproduction, the male initiates and plants in the woman his seed, which she receives and then nurtures into new life. In our broader social mission, the male body is designed to be directed outward, to generate and form, to protect and provide. Men exercise dominion by breaking new ground, exerting force on the earth, building, and even battling. They bear the risks of extending and defending society. The female body is designed to be directed inward, to nurture and fill, to receive and beautify. Women fruitfully strengthen the social bonds of society as they make society safe, pleasant, beautiful, and joy-filled. These designs are not intended to rigidly dictate what men and women are allowed to do, but rather they describe the design and general tendencies of men and women to be embraced as they partner together.
Because both men and women image God in distinct ways, we are supposed to learn from one another. Growing into maturity involves both growing into the powers of one’s own body and learning to appreciate and develop that which is more natural to the other. For example, men generally will be more comfortable with taking risks, and women generally will have to learn to take risks. Women generally will be more comfortable with nurturing social bonds, and men generally have to learn to attend to social bonds.
These generalizations might frustrate or even discourage some that don’t feel they fit these molds. Others may consider these generalizations to be backward and oppressive. These are understandable concerns given that many in the past and many today do appeal to bodily differences in order to draw very tight lines around what men and women should be like. There is a way to emphasize sex differences in an overly determined way and in a way that ignores how the brokenness of the world sometimes prevents us from living into every aspect of our gender. As I said above, this is the tendency of “traditionalist” Christians. But it isn’t necessary to apply these observations so rigidly. The general point is that men and women do need to embody different social roles that are determined by their bodies, but these social roles need to be understood as mutually enriching and diverse in expression rather than rigidly applied rules.
Masculine and Feminine Virtue
Given our different bodies and our different social and symbolic roles, men and women must pursue the virtues especially relevant to their respective bodies. Before I say more about that, I want to be very clear that Christians believe in the unity of virtues, so there is a sense in which we cannot have any one virtue unless we possess them all. Or to say it differently, all virtue is organically united in love. So men and women need to pursue all the virtues. However, we can speak of pursuing the various virtues with different priorities. Men should pursue the virtues especially relevant to the male body and social roles. Likewise, women should pursue the virtues especially relevant to the female body and social roles.
For example, since men are designed to generate and form, to protect and provide, they should develop their strength and direct their aggression by pursuing diligence, perseverance, and resilience (1 Corinthians 16:13). There’s a reason why weakness is considered unmanly. But in order to avoid letting their strength and aggression become destructive, men must pursue temperance, chastity, and gentleness (Titus 2:6-8). Male agression and strength must never be used to abuse or oppress.
Likewise, since women are designed to receive and nurture, to develop, multiply, and beautify, they should develop their agreeableness and direct their nurturing ability by pursuing kindness, gentleness, and joy (1 Peter 3:3-6). There’s a reason why cold pettiness or aggression is considered unfeminine. But in order to avoid letting their nurture and social bonding ability become dysfunctional, women must pursue courage, faithfulness, and peace (Titus 2:3-5). Additionally, none of these virtues should ever be promoted in such a way that justifies, overlooks, tolerates, or surrenders to abuse. No woman is called by God to be agreeable to abuse or evil of any kind.
Again, I’m not saying men and women only need some virtues and not others. I’m suggesting that it’s especially important for men and women to pursue the virtues and characteristics especially needed for their particular powers and social roles and then secondarily to pursue the other virtues and characteristics that will round them out as a person. Men need to be assertive and then cultivate gentleness. If they’re gentle but not assertive, they won’t be the sons, kings, husbands, fathers, and brothers they need to be. Women need to be gentle and then cultivate assertiveness. If they’re assertive but not gentle, they won’t be the daughters, queens, wives, mothers, and sisters they need to be.
To be sure, each individual person will find particular virtues or characteristics more or less “natural” to them. Some women find themselves naturally aggressive and drawn to many things we typically consider masculine and then feel unfeminine as a result. Similarly, some men find themselves drawn to things we typically consider feminine and then feel unmasculine as a result. This can be especially confusing if that happens to run against the emphasis of their particular culture. This is part of the reason why people sometimes experience gender dysphoria. But each individual has his or her own challenges to growing into their masculinity or femininity. We need not be discouraged, for none of us is fully mature, all of us have a degree of disassociation with our bodies, and each of us can develop by learning from older men and women as we embrace the bodies and callings God gives us.
Gender Roles
While men and women share much in common with other members of their sex, it remains true that every individual must discern his or her particular callings. These callings are determined by their birth, family, community, and so forth, but they are also shaped by their individual gifts, interests, and opportunities. One mistake many “traditionalist” Christians make is to overly determine the degree to which our lives are normed by our sex. While our bodies do bind us to certain ways of living, there is great freedom, diversity, and flexibility in how our individual lives and different households may look.
However, one of the most controversial aspects of Christianity has to do with the fact that the Bible does teach that our sex places limits on our social roles, specifically regarding marriage and church office. The Bible doesn’t give many rules here, and we actually have very little explanation as to why these rules are in place. I hope that the exploration thus far has provided a fuller account of why they do. In a later post, I will look at the question of the ordination of women to the pastoral office. But for now, I want to briefly explore why Scripture calls wives to be submissive to their husbands as the “head” (Ephesians 5:22-24; Colossians 3:18; Titus 2:5; 1 Peter 3:1ff).4
I’ve explained above that God made man and woman in his image to carry out His mission together, with each bringing their unique and equally important contribution to the mission. This suggests that the primary relationship between husband and wife is that of partnership. They are to walk side by side, shoulder to shoulder, working in cooperation and interdependence. But in marriage, like in all partnerships, teams, and communities, there is a need for leadership. No group of people can move forward together in unity of action unless there is leadership, and with leadership comes authority. So there are times when a husband must step out in front to lead the way. Throughout the Bible, husbands are the assumed leaders or “heads” of families (1 Corinthians 11:3; Ephesians 5:23). This pattern was established at creation when God created Adam first and then Eve as the “helper.”5 This is not a derogatory description, as if she is merely there to support and work for him. In fact, the same word is used to describe God (see Exodus 18:4). As I said before, the woman brings to the mission what the man does not have. However, she is joining him in the mission that was first assigned to him. He has a responsibility to carry out this mission, and his wife joins him in it.
Evidence for the leadership of the husband in marriage throughout the Bible can be seen in 1) the representation of the whole family by husbands, 2) the judgments that hold husbands responsible for what happens in a family or clan, 3) the explicit naming of husbands as head,6 and 4) the mention of the man’s creation prior to woman. Men are the leaders of their families, but a husband must work in mutual partnership with his wife rather than domination or privilege. Leadership in the family must imitate the sacrificial service of Christ’s leadership in the church. Despite the claims of many “traditionalist” Christians, Scripture does not teach that all women are to submit to all men but a wife must submit to her husband.
But why are husbands the leaders of their families? Is this an arbitrary choice? Could God have chosen differently such that wives could have been named the leaders of their families? Male headship or leadership is grounded in God’s creation design of the male body which is both built to lead the family and to symbolize God’s leadership over creation.
First, God created the male body for family leadership. That which is needed to be a father, husband, and pastor is built into the male body. In the aggregate, men are characterized by the types of things that are needed to lead a family by generating, forming, protecting, and providing. While our industrialized world often makes it difficult to see this, it remains true no matter how technologically advanced we become.
Second, male leadership in the home symbolizes Christ’s headship over the church. As I said earlier, the male and female bodies represent the God-humanity relationship. Men represent God’s generative and initiating relationship with humanity. Women represent humanity’s receptivity and submission to God.
Again, I want to make clear that male headship need not overly determine how families divide up labor or make decisions. One mistake “traditionalist” Christians often make is to draw a straight line between male headship and a sort of military or autocratic command approach to the family. But there are a variety of ways authority is exercised in teams: collaborative, exemplary, instructive, commanding, or various combinations of all of these approaches.
Regardless of the approach, a husband must never lead in a way that degrades his wife and children. Husbands are to lead in a way that imitates Christ and empowers each member of the family to contribute to the mission of God, cultivating the gifts of each, and cherishing each member as he does his own life.
Conclusion
In the above, I’ve tried to outline a Christian anthropology, to explain what it means to be human. I’ve argued that our nature, identity, purpose, and destiny are determined by God who is the Creator and the Redeemer. I’ve argued that there are only two ways or modes of being human, male and female, and that these modes of being are grounded in our bodies. Finally, I’ve argued that sex norms our lives. Along the way, I’ve suggested that this understanding of what it means to be human leads to human flourishing. In other words, God’s design is for the blessed life of the world.
This last idea–that sex norms our lives for our good–is perhaps the most controversial part of the argument, for we live in a day where most people believe our lives belong to us and therefore, nothing could be more oppressive than for us to have limits or restrictions on the life we choose for ourselves. “You only have one life to live,” or so it is said, “and you better make the most of the life you have even if that means rejecting all the conventions and expectations of society. Be true to yourself!”
From a Christian perspective, these are evil, demonic lies. As a society, it’s as if we’re living with a collective amnesia about what it means to be human. We’ve come out of a coma, but no one will tell us who we are. Rather than it being liberating, nothing could be more terrifying, anxiety-inducing, and harmful than to be given no direction or structure to our lives. “You can be anything you want!” may sound liberating to people who have been unjustly restricted or dominated or to elites whose bodies enjoy high levels of ease and safety, but most parents know that children need guidance and boundaries in order to develop the freedom to flourish and most working-class people understand the importance of knowing the limits of our bodies. Without boundaries, structure, and assigned meaning and purpose, without a recognition that our bodies work in certain ways, we live in ways that do damage to our bodies and our relational, emotional, psychological, and spiritual health and to the world around us.
Christians believe God made us to flourish in His good world in communion with Him. His designs are good. The identity he assigns each of us is good, despite the brokenness we experience because of sin. Redemption in Christ not only sets us right with God again but enables us to be renewed in true humanity as sons and daughters of God.
My next post will explore God’s design for human sexuality by exploring marriage and celibacy. Everything I argue there will depend on the arguments made here.
Jump to…
Introduction to On Being Human: A Theological Anthropology
Part 2 On Being Human: Sexuality
Part 3 On Being Human: Ordination
Rome argues that, at creation, humanity was made with a human nature and was given a super-nature that enabled communion with God, which was lost at the fall. Redemption involves the infusion of this grace or super-nature back into humanity so that we are, once again, lifted beyond our creaturely nature to be able to see God.
Intersex conditions are not new. The ancient world recognized people whose genitals weren’t normal from birth and called them eunuchs. Kings sometimes took young boys and made them eunuchs in order to bring them into royal service so they wouldn’t have to worry about servants being sexually involved with royal household members. Jesus even references such persons in Matthew 19:12, noting that some are eunuchs from birth and others make themselves eunuchs for kingdom service.
Here I’m depending heavily on but adapting the insights of theologian Scott Swain. He observes that humans exist in two modes with four gender roles and requires three social concepts.
Note that none of the New Testaments passages that call wives to submit to their husbands refer to the curse of Genesis 3 but point back to creation before sin entered the world. The created order apart from sin entails partnership between husband and wife with subordination. Something that is basically good became burdensome and painful in the distortion of sin.
In his important tome Man and Woman in Christ: An Examination of the Roles of Men and Women in Light of Scripture and the Social Sciences (Ann Arbor: Servant Books, 1980), Stephen B. Clark demonstrates that while the central focus of Genesis 2 is the partnership between man and woman, the story also portrays subordination in their relationship through three narratival elements: 1) the centrality of the man in the narrative, 2) the fact that humanity is represented by the man/Adam, and 3) the creation of man first, 4) the man’s naming of the animals and the woman, 5) God addressing the man with His law with the expectation to pass it on to the woman, and 6) several of these elements remain intact and are confirmed again after the rebellion of humanity in the Garden. (See pages 25ff.)
See Dr. Preston Sprinkle’s exploration of the meaning of the Greek word “kephalē” translated as “head” and Paul’s rhetorical use of the word in overturning the oppressive hierarchy of his day. The article rightfully points out that kephalē generally conveys the idea of authority and only rarely should be reduced to the notion of source (which is what most that argue against male-only-ordination often claim), or, if it conveys some sense of source, it’s conceptially linked to the idea of authority. Sprinkle helpfully shows that the Apostle Paul’s rhetoric in Ephesians challenges the Greco-Roman understand of patriarchy by arguing that “heads” exercise authority by laying their lives down for others in love as Christ did. In my view, recognizing Paul’s subversive argument can be taken too far to suggest “headship” is *redefined* and does not, therefore in Christ, involve authority but service. Rather, it’s best to understand Paul to be arguing for a renewed understanding of authority that imitates Christ and returns to what creational authority was intended to be.