Word-Filled Women's Ministry (eBook)

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The Word on Women

Enjoying Distinction

Claire Smith

The same day the invitation to contribute to this volume arrived in my in-box, a Sydney newspaper reported an online campaign to stop Australian toy manufacturers and retailers from targeting products as for girls or boys. They want toys grouped by themes, not “gender stereotypes.”1

In one sense, this makes sense. Many boys enjoy dolls and playing kitchen; and girls (like me) enjoy model planes and cricket bats. But the campaigners’ agenda is not just the removal of gender stereotypes. They want to stop gender being a major part of who a child is—who we are. They want a world in which a person’s identity is not shaped by the first label we receive at birth: “It’s a girl!” or “It’s a boy!”2

They are not alone. Facebook has stopped offering only two genders for users’ profiles. As of this writing, it offers fifty-six different gender identities.3

These are just two examples of a growing trend that sees gender as a social construct: a phenomenon that is the product of social forces and the language we use to talk about life rather than something that is part of biologically determined reality. For an increasingly noisy, growing minority, it is a construct that has had its day.

Yet here we are writing, and here you are reading, a book about women: a book that claims not only that women exist but also that gender is an intrinsic and essential good and God-given part of who we are. So before we consider further the questions about ministry among women, we need first to understand what it is to be a woman (or a man) in God’s purposes.

GOD CREATED MAN MALE AND FEMALE

As we saw in chapter 1, God’s Word alone provides the foundation for faith and life, and the best place to begin to explore gender-related questions is the Bible’s first three chapters, where (among other things) God gives us a lesson in biblical anthropology: an introduction to who we are.

Genesis begins not with one creation account but with two complementary accounts (Gen. 1:1–2:3; 2:4–25). Both deal with God’s creation of all things, but they give different views and focus on complementary truths. They’re not conflicting accounts, but they’re not carbon copies either. Each teaches the same and different truths about God, creation, and humankind.

Both accounts reveal God as sovereign creator, loving ruler and lawgiver. He is there before anything else. He sees all things, knows all things, and creates all things. He is generous and good. He is over creation, speaking it into existence (Genesis 1), and he is present in it, forming, planting, and giving life (Genesis 2).

In both accounts, chaos and formlessness are replaced by order, distinction, purpose, and productivity. God is always separate and distinct from creation. He rules over it and is present in it, but he is not in or part of anything that is made.

Yet remarkably, when we come to the pinnacle of his creative work—“man” or humankind—we find that the Creator shares his divine image with his creatures (Gen. 1:26–27; Gen. 9:5–6). They correspond to him and so relate to him as no other creature does. They are his face to his creation, made in his image to tend and govern as his representatives.

But they are not genderless humans; they are male or female humans. One humanity in two kinds, both equally made and delighted in by God. Both equally bear the divine image. Both are charged with filling the earth and subduing it as God’s representatives. But they are decidedly different: male or female.4

Now, you don’t need me to tell you that God made the birds and bees and most other creatures male and female too, but in Genesis we’re left to assume that. Not so for humans! Our sexual differentiation is mentioned because it is significant. For one thing, it leads into God’s command that humans must be fruitful and multiply and make more image bearers to extend God’s rule throughout all creation (Gen. 1:28).

But our sexual differences also help tell us who we are, as human beings created in God’s image. We have to take care how we understand this. I once heard someone say that God made humanity male and female because God is male and female. This is not what the Bible teaches. Being made in the image of God has something to do with humans being male and female, but it is not because God is male and female.

God is spirit (John 4:24) and does not have gender as we have gender. Scripture sometimes uses feminine imagery to describe God,5 but God has revealed himself as Father, Son (who became the man, Jesus Christ), and Spirit (who is the Spirit of the Father and the Son), and we can know God only as he has revealed himself. It is right, then, to use male pronouns and titles for God and not to ignore his self-revelation.6 At the same time, though, God is not male as men and boys are male.

Nevertheless, Genesis tells us that whatever else being made in God’s image means for humanity—our role as his representatives; our capacity for moral judgment, relationships, creativity, and so on—it also involves being created male and female. We get a hint of how this is so when God says, “Let us make man in our image” (Gen. 1:26), and then the writer adds: “in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them” (v. 27). The apostle Paul does a similar thing when he links gender differences with our creation in God’s image and places his discussion in the theological context of the ordered relations within the Godhead (1 Cor. 11:3, cf. 11:7–8, 12).7 Being made in God’s image and being male and female are connected.

The relationship of male and female—a relationship of unity and differentiation of the nonidentical but equal parts of the one humanity—in some way reflects the perfect unity and differentiation of the eternal persons of the triune God: one God in three persons, equal in divinity and personhood, who love and act and relate in perfect unity.

Yet despite this equality and unity, the divine persons are not interchangeable; neither are their relations or functions. The Father is the Father and not the Son or the Spirit. The Son is the Son, not the Father, and so on. Moreover, the Father sends the Son, not the Son the Father. The Son is begotten of the Father, not the Father of the Son. The Son was incarnate, not the Father or the Spirit. Unity and differentiation. Sameness and difference. And order without inequality. All these are true of the triune God.

Likewise, male and female are equal in humanity, dignity, worth, and purpose but not identical, and, whether or not we are married, our differences work together to create relationships of unity and complementarity. We are not simply persons. We are male or female persons made for human society, built through relationships with people of both genders.

Current trends about human sexuality should not surprise us. Just as our face or image doesn’t remain on the mirror when we turn away, modern notions of gender diversity and plasticity, and the same-sex/queer agenda are simply expressions of our society’s turning away from the one in whose image we are made. As we forget God, we lose our identity. But the fact remains: God made us with binary gender polarity, and it is a good and God-given part of our identity.

NEITHER MALE NOR FEMALE BUT ALL ONE IN CHRIST JESUS

Yet some Christians—even some evangelicals—have come to see the biblical differences between men and women as a consequence of sin rather than as part of God’s original design. These differences then belong to fallen humanity and are overcome or reversed in Christ. The text typically used is Galatians 3:28, where Paul writes: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”

The argument goes something like this: the gospel challenges and overturns those things that create divisions and hierarchies in fallen human society. Therefore, while biological differences remain, all role distinctions between men and women are removed in Christ, and men and women without distinction can take on the same roles and do the same things in society, church, and marriage.

This sounds reasonable to some because it contains an element of truth. In Christ, the deep divisions in human society have been overcome. But Paul’s point, in context, is not that these distinctions of Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female have ceased to exist. His point is that in Christ Jesus we believers are one, whoever we are. We all share a common relationship with him, and we are all equally “sons” of God.8 The divisions have gone, but not the distinctions.

Moreover, as we shall see, there are (at least) two more problems with trying to use this Galatians text to reject biblical gender-based role distinctions, namely, that these distinctions predate the fall and that elsewhere Paul clearly urges different roles and responsibilities for redeemed men and women.

MAN AND WOMAN IN THE GARDEN

It is certainly true that in the fall, and ever since, men and women have been...