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This is the fifth and final post to a short series on the nature of gender. Click here to see the other posts in the series


We’ve covered a fair bit of ground in our last four posts. We’ve discovered the two origins of gender. We’ve seen why it was made, its consummation, and its ultimate significance. We’ve seen how the coming of Christ both enriches our understanding of its meaning and relativises it.

What does it mean for Christians to live gendered lives in the light of these things? Although this wasn’t the objective of this series—that was to try to define gender and describe its place in God’s story—it might be a good place to finish. Here are a handful of observations and suggestions about gender and the Christian life. Some are recaps, some new.

1. Gendered living draws from the patterns of creation and Christ

To live a gendered life in a biblical perspective means living out the patterns of creation in light of—and in tension with—the higher reality revealed in Christ.

For men that includes:

  • Accepting the particular responsibilities given to them through their first father, Adam.
  • Living-out those responsibilities in a Christ-like way—primarily through taking initiative in service
  • Looking out for the good of others—especially women.
  • Putting Christ’s own purposes ahead of their own desires.
  • Gratefully acknowledging women as necessary companions and seeking to honour them and promote their labours.
  • Recognising women as equals before Christ—neither belittling their gifts, nor obscuring their distinct responsibilities.

Note that it categorically does not mean seeking dominance with regard to women or compelling other people to submit.

For women it includes:

  • Honouring the particular responsibility given to men. It means seeking to join with men in serving Christ, and encouraging men to discharge their calling faithfully.
  • Exemplifying the humility and service enjoined on every believer—drawing on the example of Christ himself who, in submission, entrusted himself to God who judges justly.

Note that it does not mean passivity, or putting men in the place of God—as if women were only to relate to God through men. Nor does it ever means yielding to sin or abuse from men—both of which represent betrayals of Christ.

2. Faithful expressions of gender are spiritually significant

When we express, or enact our gender, we honour the God who made us male and female and join with creation’s witness to Christ and his redemption. This is an important aspect of our spiritual life—part of what it means to be filled with the Spirit (c.f. Eph 5:18ff). It can also be:

  • a powerful witness to the gospel (1Pet 3:1-2);
  • pleasing to God (1Pet 3:4-5);
  • a way of being like Christ (for both men and women: Eph 5:25-33; 1Pet 2:21-3:2)
  • an assistance to prayer (1Pet 3:7);
  • significant in the eyes of heavenly powers (1Cor 11:10);

3. Gender isn’t just for marriage

Gender finds particular expression in marriage. But this doesn’t mean that Christians are meant to relate to each other as neuter outside of marriage. The specific patterns that emerge from Genesis 2, 1Corinthians 11 and Ephesians 5 can also be expressed in general styles of interaction.[1]

Thus Paul invokes the order and structure of creation—man was created first (1Tim 2)—to explain why men should have primary responsibility for teaching in the church. Thus too the apostle makes woman’s creation “from man” and “for man” the reason why a woman should pray and prophesy veiled (1Cor 11:3-10).[2]

The New Testament gives examples from the male side too.

  • We see Ephesians 5 type principles of service and sacrifice in Jesus willingness to associate with, and speak-up for, vulnerable women (John 4:1-26; 8:1-11; Mark 5:25-35; Luke 7:36-50).
  • We see Genesis 2 type principles of need reflected in the way Jesus and Paul include and honour women as vital supports for their ministries (e.g. Matt 27:55, c.f. Luke 8:3; Phil 4:1-3; Rom 16).
  • Paul gives men a particular responsibility of loving their wives in a self-sacrificial way (Eph 5:25-33). But it is also true that all Christians are called on to lay down their interests and lives for one another (e.g. John 13:14-16; Phil 2:3-8).
  • Paul wants men to take primary responsibility for teaching in the church, but it’s also true that he wants older women to be teachers of younger women (Tit 2:3-4), and every Christian to “let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom” (Col 3:16).
  • Genesis shows us that man needs woman, but it’s also true that all Christians need each other, and belong to each other as members of Christ’s body (e.g. 1Cor 12:12-27; Eph 4:25).
  • Wives should submit to their husbands (Col 3:18), but all believers are called to submit—to church leaders (2Thess 3:14; Heb 13:17), to secular authorities (Rom 13:1; 1Pet 2:13), and, perhaps, even to each other.[3]
  • Supremely, as we saw in our last post, all Christians must submit to Christ. He is our true bridegroom and we take our lives from him and for him.

4. Gender norms intersect with general Christian expectations

Our challenge is to maintain the tensions of the Bible: the individual as well as the corporate; the equal as well as the ordered; the general as well as the specific.

Gender is an important part of both human and Christian life. But it isn’t the only factor. Many of the things that we should do as men and women overlap with the things we should do as Christians. Sometimes these general responsibilities soften the sharp lines of distinction. Thus:

In none of these examples should we use the general principle to contradict the specific—that would be a willful and ham-fisted way to handle Scripture. For example, if Paul commands everyone to submit (Eph 5:21) that shouldn’t be taken as a reason to avoid the more specific commands which follow within households.

Yet neither must we reactively allow the specific to overrule the general. The general patterns that apply to male and female mustn’t be tortured to make every woman treat every man like her husband. That too would be a clumsy (and creepy) way to apply the Bible.

Rather, as we have seen repeatedly in this series, the challenge for both egalitarians and complementarians is to maintain the tensions that we find in the Bible: the individual as well as the corporate; the equal as well as the ordered; the general as well as the specific.

5. Biblical perspectives on gender might help with gender-struggles

And it may be that these different currents in Christian life might also be helpful for those struggling with gender identity issues. For the biological male who struggles with the idea of being a man, there is the deeper truth that his deepest identity can be found in belonging to Christ, the true bridegroom. Perhaps the woman who feels estranged from her femininity might find a proper expression of her “masculine” feelings by following the example of Christ—taking sacrificial responsibility for other people’s welfare.

I am not suggesting that either of these is a fix for deep-seated gender issues. Nor am I offering these as ways for people a way to avoid their biological sex. But I am suggesting that there should be a complexity and richness to the way Christians think about gender, and that this complexity might help people who feel alienated from stereotypical versions of manhood or womanhood. The Bible shows that both masculinity and femininity impinge on our lives in different ways, and acknowledging these might help relieve some of the pressures that we experience in our gender-confused age.

Conclusion

Critics sometimes accuse Christians of being obsessed with sex because we refuse to sign-off on their revisions to gender and sexuality.

If we are tempted by such a preoccupation we shouldn’t be—the Bible tells us that there is a much greater and more permanent reality behind sex. Life, at its deepest level, is about Jesus Christ who loved and gave his life for us. We find our truest identities in Christ, not in our chromosomes.

Yet gender and sexuality are important. They are part of creation’s witness to Christ; part of the grammar through which God speaks to us about his Son. If we change that grammar—if we lose the distinctiveness of what it means to be man and woman—we should expect it to become harder for us to receive that message.

God has made us men and women.

Some of us struggle with that. Many of us struggle with knowing what that means. But the Bible tells us more than we often realise. It tells us about the origins, structure and ultimate meaning of our gender. It tells us where it came from and where it is going. It helps us discover ourselves in God’s world, and in the story of his Son.


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Images: Detail from Peter Brueghal the Younger, ‘Peasant Wedding’ [head]; Facsimile of detail from manuscript of ‘Piers Plowman’

[1] A template for the kind of thing I mean occurs 1Timothy 5:1 where Paul tells Timothy to “[treat] …older women as mothers.” Clearly Paul is not telling Timothy here that he must now take responsibility for every widow in the congregation—though that’s what Paul expects of children in verse 4. What he’s calling for is a general style of relating which is like, but different from, a literal mother-son relationship.

For the purposes of this discussion, the point of the example is that we might draw general principles from what Paul says to married people without implying that every woman she has to treat every man like her husband.

[2] There isn’t space to explore all the vexed issues associated with these verses, but see Claire Smith’s helpful exploration of the passage here.

[3] I am thinking here of more general exhortations to submit to other believers in 1Cor 16:16 and Eph 5:21. The scope of the latter, is difficult to ascertain. It might be a general charge (akin to Phil 2:3)—yet verse 21 presents as a superordinate clause that governs a number of specific examples: wives-husbands, children-parents, slaves-masters. Again, in each of these examples, it might be that both sides of the pair submit in different ways, though it is noteworthy that the subordinate (wife, child, slave) is presented first—as if verse 21 applies most directly to these.

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