Gender roles/Doc's Gender Roles Catechism
From Neoredemptive
Like the rest of us, I'm trying to get a handle on gender roles and gender language issues and to keep my ideas firmly moored to Biblical pilings. So here are some of my conclusions and musings, presented catechismically (with thanks, or perhaps apologies, to Frederica Mathewes-Green's contribution to Church in Emerging Culture).
Does gender belong to our humanity, or only to our humanity in the present age?
There is no Biblical warrant for expecting that we will cease to be male and female after the Resurrection. While Jesus makes clear that we will not be given in marriage in the age to come (which seemingly implies that our sexuality will, in some sense, pass away), this can only mean that gender as such will pass away if sexuality is the only defining property of gender.
Was Adam created as a male man or as an asexual human being?
There is no textual warrant for asserting that Adam was asexual or androgynous prior to the creation of Eve. Such a theory has everything to do with Greek and Persian mythologies and nothing to do with the Scriptural creation account. Adam/man is called Adam/man both before and after the creation of Eve, both before and after the fall. The closest thing to an attestation is the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Old Testament) which translates Genesis 2:18 as "it is not good for the person (anthros) to be alone"; however, a single textual ambiguity in a translation does not warrant a rejection of the clear content of the context, that Adam was neither asexual nor androgynous but rather a fully male man.
Is gender (maleness and femaleness) functional or ontological?
Hyper-egalitarianism asserts that gender is purely functional, that the only true male-female distinction has to do with roles in biological reproduction, that all other gender distinctions are "socially constructed". This position is scripturally indefensible -- "male and female He created them", and from Proverbs to the Prophets to the Gospels to Paul to Revelation, husbands are exhorted to husbandly virtues, wives exhorted to wifely virtues, men to masculine virtues, women to feminine virtues, each as a distinct yet congruent expression of the imitation of Christ, and we have no textual warrant for believing that these exhortations were conditional or are to be culturally tempered.
What is masculinity, biblically?
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What is femininity, biblically?
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What is fatherhood, biblically?
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What are we to make of God's Fatherhood?
- ... /todo/ ...
- Those aspects of God's relationship with us which are specifically fatherly are to encourage, exhort, convict, and instruct earthly fathers as to the right way to exercise their own ministry as "fathers".
- .../todo/...
- See Fatherhood of God
May we address God as our "Mother"?
There is absolutely no Biblical warrant for addressing God as "our Mother", or referring to Him using feminine pronouns ("She"/"Her").
This is not to say that God does not describe Himself with feminine images, or that we are not to find the model for the feminine Imago Dei in Him. However, even the Apostle Paul (the New Testament's most difficult author from the point of view of egalitarianism) occasionally described himself using distinctly feminine imagery:
My children, with whom I am again in labor until Christ is formed in you-- (Galatians 4:19)
But we proved to be gentle among you, as a nursing [mother] tenderly cares for her own children. (1 Thessalonians 2:7)
Clearly this does not in any way imply that Paul was a woman, or a hermaphrodite, or a neuter, or androgynous, or in any other way not a man, or suggest that it would be proper to refer to Paul as "her" or "our sister in Christ". As such, it is unreasonable for us to discard the complete uniformity of the scriptural revelation in referring to our God and the Lord Jesus Christ using masculine nouns ("father", "son", "king") and pronouns ("he", "him") when He is the direct referent on the basis of passages which illustrate or describe Him qualitatively by way of feminine metaphors and images.
- C. S. Lewis, Priestesses in the Church? in God in the Dock: "[A] child who has been taught to pray to a Mother in Heaven would have a religious life radically different from that of a Christian child."
- Unapologetic Apologetics, Jesus' Paradigm for Relating Human Experience & Language About God
Could Jesus have (hypothetically, of course) been born as a woman?
Many of the messianic prophecies fulfilled by the person and ministry of Jesus are specific that they would be filled by a man (a "son" and not a "daughter", a "king" and not a "queen", a "man" and not a "woman").
/TODO/ references
- C. S. Lewis, Priestesses in the Church?, God in the Dock: "Suppose the reformer stops saying that a good woman may be like God and begins saying that God is like a good woman. Suppose he says that we might just as well pray to “Our Mother which art in heaven” as to “Our Father”. Suppose he suggests that the Incarnation might just as well have taken a female as a male form, and the Second Person of the Trinity be as well called the Daughter as the Son. Suppose, finally, that the mystical marriage were reversed, that the Church were the Bridegroom and Christ the Bride. [...] Now it is surely the case that if all these supposals were ever carried into effect we should be embarked on a different religion."
Can a male Savior save women?
Gregory's Formula tells us "that which is not assumed is not healed". Because Jesus was incarnated as a man and not as a woman, some feminist thinkers have suggested that Jesus is therefore incapable of saving women, and they must therefore find their own savior. However, this is more of a trick of wordplay than a legitimate criticism; Jesus became a human person to save human people, and his maleness no more precludes his saving women than his Hebrew ethnicity precludes him saving a Norwegian or an Aborigine. The objection only holds up if we hold that there is no such thing in God's economy of salvation as a common humanity between men and women.
Why was the person and ministry of Christ prophesied in such a way as to necessitate the Christ be a man?
Because God, in His infinite wisdom and according to His divine prerogative, chose to do so. No more reason than this is necessary.
However, we may ponder whether and what we might learn from this exercise of the divine prerogative.
Is Jesus still a man, or did he become a neuter or an androgynous person in His resurrection?
Jesus retains His humanity now and into eternity. See e.g. 1 Timothy 2:5, which calls Him "the human Christ Jesus". That this text uses the neuter word ("anthropos" instead of "andros") is not textual basis for believing that He is somehow in possession of humanity devoid of gender, or that He has somehow lost His maleness. Such a concept finds its roots in egalitarian speculation, not anything affirmative in the text itself; indeed, it bears far more resemblance to pseudo-gnostic "doctrines of demons" than to anything stated anywhere in scripture.
Is every husband the "head" of his wife?
Yes. There can be no debate about this if we are taking Scripture seriously.
There is an open question about what, exactly, "head" means. While Sarah Sumner makes an excellent point in Men and Women in the Church that we cannot reduce "head" to simply mean "leader", neither do we do justice to the text if we exclude "leader" as one aspect of the meaning of "head".
