By Dr. Kristina LaCelle-Peterson
In a culture obsessed with gender differences and gender roles, it’s good to consider how absent these themes are in Scripture. When we look at the Bible, we find the authors virtually unconcerned with how to be a man of God or a woman of God; they consistently invite us simply to be faithful to God. In other words, Scripture pictures us as humans before God, in creation, fall, redemption, as well as in the invitation to participate in God’s work in this world. Biblical writers are apparently uninterested in how a woman develops faithfulness to God as a woman or how a man does it as a man. For followers of Christ, discipleship is discipleship.
But Christians have often read their gender assumptions into the Bible. For instance, some Christians claim that God placed humans in a hierarchy right from the start with men in charge. One reason they think this is their assumption that God is male and therefore men, being more like God, have the responsibility to lead and direct. However, God is not male since God is spirit; God is supremely personal without being limited by the markers that define animal life. In addition, men are not more like God, since Genesis 1 tells us that all humans are made in God’s own image and commissioned together to do God’s work. They are to be fruitful and multiply; they are to have dominion. No one is the boss, while the other follows. No one protects and provides while the other is passive. We see hierarchy introduced only after the Fall, where domination and subjugation are clearly expressions of the brokenness of humanity after sin has entered the system. Hierarchy interrupts the delightful mutuality of God’s design and also seems to suggest that God likes order more than the flourishing of the people involved. This, of course, is a questionable assumption given God’s deep love for all of us and God’s consistent desire for the just treatment of all.
Another unhelpful habit in considering God’s design is to suggest that men and women complement each other and need each other to reflect God. Scholars differ in how they interpret the phrase “image of God” (in terms of capacities, relationality, or function) but generally affirm that all humans are formed in God’s image equally. What it does not say is that men and women together mirror God’s image. In other words, just because male and female are both made in God’s image, it does not follow that the statement can be turned around to mean that it is in our maleness and femaleness that we reflect God. That kind of thinking results in some deeply problematic theological positions.
First, with regard to people, if the marriage of a man and a woman is thought to most fully represent God that would mean that huge swaths of the human race would be somehow less in God’s image, given that they are single or not in hetereosexual relationships. Being made in God’s image is fundamental to our being, and our marital or relational status cannot affect it in any way. Besides, as the biblical scholar NT Wright has observed, our maleness/femaleness is what we share with the created order, not with God. We are like many of the plant and animal kingdoms where male and female bodies are necessary for reproduction. Though some Christians want to spiritualize these categories, the Bible doesn’t.
Furthermore, to say men and women most fully display the image of God together, implies that God is a composite of male and female, with men and women each reflecting one ‘side’ of God. It makes God like the yin and yang, the complementary male and female “energies” of Eastern thought, pasted together. This dualism regarding God’s essence is not biblical. God is I AM—being itself, the source of being, the One who simply is. It would be better to say that God, having no body, transcends the categories of male and female, since these things are linked to earthly life and specifically to reproduction. Even talking about ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ traits in God is a projection of our ideas of masculinity and femininity onto God. God encompasses all human traits, regardless of whether we have labeled them masculine or feminine.
In the second creation narrative, the animals are paraded before the human and are disqualified on the basis of their inferiority. In contrast, the woman is not inferior but corresponds to him and therefore is someone who can offer an antidote to his aloneness. She is not his little helper, however, since the word ‘help’ here is most often used for God in Scripture, offering the help that the other needs to thrive. Significantly, Adam rejoices, not that God has made someone who is different from him to complement him (or follow his lead or do his dishes), but someone who is bone of my bone. She is my very body, he rhapsodizes, someone who shares my fundamental essence—being human.
When we come to the New Testament, we find Jesus calling women and men to be disciples on the same basis – there is not a different set of expectations for female and male disciples. In fact, when Jesus is asked to endorse gender roles or gender valuation, he refuses to do so. For instance, he refuses to devalue women as he was expected to in his culture on the basis of their purported sexual danger. Consider the story in Luke 7 where he welcomes the touch of a woman who washes his feet, though the religious folks present can only see her sexual impropriety. And in the story of Mary and Martha (Luke 10) he refuses to press Mary into the expected gender tasks. Instead, he affirms her choice to sit at his feet, learning like only male disciples generally did in that culture. And when a woman cries out in the crowd, “blessed is the womb that bore you,” he says, “Blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and obey it!” (Luke 11:27). It is discipleship by which people are valued in Jesus’ kingdom, not following gender expectations. When his family members show up, he asks, “Who are my mother and brothers?” Looking at those around him he continues, “Here are my mother and brothers! Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother” (Mark 3:33-35). He is not disrespecting his own mother, rather inviting all those around him and by extension all of us, to be part of his family on the basis of obedience. Whatever differences may exist between men and women (and that’s a huge topic that cannot be addressed here) the call for Christians is not to figure out how a woman is to act or how a man is to act, but how each of us lives into the call of Jesus to lay down our lives for the other and to wash each other’s feet. If there are differences presumably they would come out naturally; we don’t have to force the issue.
Paul, too, celebrates women’s (along with men’s) faithfulness to promote the good news, even calling many women his co-laborers in the Gospel—see especially Romans 16. Some, he notes, risked their lives for him and the sake of evangelism. When he lists gifts in 1 Corinthians 12 there is no segregation of gifts on the basis of sex.
So, if Scripture is not terribly concerned with gender roles and norms, why is the church so caught up in promoting them? People seem to fall back on them because cultural expectations are comfortable and feel ‘right’ in any given moment in history; it’s just easier to go with the grain. If we have heard them justified with Bible verses (taken out of context) they even feel Christian, but we have to remember that our ideas of femininity and masculinity are not biblical. They are products of our culture in this time and place. For instance, the Bible does not require men to provide and protect the people in his family. In Scripture, we have plenty of examples of women’s bodies being used to protect men, for better or worse, and the passage most often trotted out to describe the ideal wife (Proverbs 31) depicts a woman providing for her family. In addition, the texts of Scripture were originally addressed to people primarily in agricultural societies where everyone’s work is necessary; men, women and even children work hard to keep the family economy going. The man as ‘provider’ seems particularly linked to cash economies and to middle class status; in 19th century America, for instance, having a wife who “stayed home” became a symbol of male success, (that is, masculinity). But that doesn’t make it Christian and arguably that cannot be a sign of Christian faithfulness, since it would mean that poor, working class families where everyone has to earn money, would be less pleasing to God.
The Wesleyan tradition has stood for the equality of all people and for each person’s responsibility before God. When it comes to the community of the redeemed, we stand shoulder to shoulder because we are all sinful humans who have been addressed by the grace and love of God. In Scripture, God is said to give gifts and then invite people to use them for God’s glory, without the question about gender roles entering into the equation. Simply, don’t bury your talents in the ground! With regard to marriage, we take seriously the call to “Submit to one another out of reverence to Christ” (Eph 5:21) and believe that it is what we are called to model in our families, in our churches and in the society, rather than cultural ideals of manhood and womanhood. In fact, all the instructions about how Christians should interact—encouraging one another, putting each other’s needs above our own, bearing each other’s burdens, etc.—apply to both people in a marriage. When it comes to parenting, then, both partners are to love their children unconditionally, as far as humanly possible, and both are to model for their children what it means to be a follower of Christ and what it means to lay down one’s life for the other.
Part of the grand adventure of being Christian is living into the full personhood that God created us for. Scripture does not ask us to wedge ourselves into a box of cultural (or church or family) expectations about how a woman should act or how a man should act, but invites us to ask how do I live a life that most fully uses the gifts and passions that God has placed in me? How do I bring my whole self to my relationships and not hide or diminish myself in order to adhere to gender roles or rules? Let’s remember that God doesn’t ask us to tamp down our individuality in order to follow cultural patterns, but invites us to develop our full, unique selves. Let’s live into the lovely diversity with which God has created us. ★