Male/Female

In my previous post I addressed the issue of gender relations as if it is merely an in-house theological discussion. Of course this is not the case. The question of differences between the genders and the way in which individuals can best express their masculine and feminine identities is one with which Western culture at large is still contending, with considerable pain and confusion. Kelly Burke, the Sydney Morning Herald religion reporter in early 2000s, noted how ‘laughable, if not downright offensive’ the notion of male headship is to most of her readers (and that Sydney Anglicans haven’t seemed to notice). At the same time, the pages of her own newspaper daily record the anxiety that our community experiences with regard to gender. More than ever before the issue of gender has become bound up with one’s own personal identity. Since the zeitgeist emphasises the freedom of the individual to self-create, especially over against any prefabricated notion of ‘roles’, the discussion of ‘headship’ is always going to jar with our wider cultural sensibilities.

Individual freedom, in other words, brings with it enormous anxiety. If the expression of my maleness or femaleness is not dictated to me by some social order and is something that I have to discover for myself, then an inner resourcefulness and self-awareness is asked of me that I may just not have. That is why, even given the freedom to experiment with how gender is expressed, most men and women conform to contemporary cultural norms of gender. They may not be men like their fathers or women like their mothers, but they are overwhelmingly pretty much the same as their brothers and sisters and friends. The vacuum of anxiety created by individual freedom is quickly filled, that is to say, by social conformity, fashion and self-help books.

Amidst this confusion and anxiety, Holy Scripture is not an embarrassment but a positive asset for Christians – whatever Kelly Burke’s readers might have thought. Evangelical Christians, whatever their view on the role of women in ministry and the home, have in Scripture a way of speaking of the profound and ineradicable sameness and mutuality of the human male and female. Men are not from Mars, and women are not from Venus: they are both very much of the Earth, and together image God. The Bible reminds us that we cannot conceive of maleness-without-femaleness or femaleness-without-maleness (1 Cor 11). Scripture gives an explanation, too, of the tension that exists between the sexes in their quest for power over one another. The Biblical pattern of marriage in terms of sacrificial love and submission is more than a remedy to this condition – it is an emblem of the gospel of Jesus Christ (Eph 5).

But Scripture gives us far less than we want vis-a-vis gender roles. The mistake made in moving from a ‘thin’ to a ‘thick’ complementarianism is to scour Scripture for references to men and women and make them somehow universal prescriptions for patterns of gender behaviours. Often what is adduced is a very culturally conservative version of gender and understood in ‘essentialist’ terms. For example, the directions that Paul gives to wives and younger women in Titus 2:5 that they are to be ‘busy at home’ is taken not as a teaching about the situation that most younger women would have found themselves in at the time, but as reflecting woman’s proper station – at home looking after children. Never mind that women like the business woman Lydia (Acts 16:14-15) and Chloe (1 Cor 11:1) seem to have been household heads.

Like political order, gender is a very human, culturally interpreted and negotiated realisation of the nature of our sexed bodies. This is not, in New Testament terms, some sort of complete gender relativism. Scripture takes very seriously the human arrangement of political and social authority but also shows how these are ultimately subject to divine rule. In 1 Peter 2:13, Peter enjoins Christians to honour and submit to all ‘human institutions’ That is: the political ordering of society is contingent and historical, a realization of delegated human authority. However, this contingence is providential (Rom 13). Unlike the modernist, who sees this historical contingence as an impetus for active subversion, the Christian submits to human orders – and ‘loyally resists’, offering the gospel. It is the gospel that transforms and subverts, not the human will. Thus 1 Corinthians 11 we find Paul upholding social conventions but with a transformed meaning (ie, the radical mutual dependence and constitution of the genders). The cultural development of gender is not absolute, but it is not irrelevant or unauthorized. Neither is it merely arbitrary.

The New Testament does a couple of other things that unsettle a ‘thick’ complementarian reading of gender. First of all, it celebrates singleness as a praiseworthy and even preferable calling for some Christians (1 Cor 7). Not only was Jesus single (though he is of course symbolically married to the Church), but Paul at the time of writing 1 Corinthians at least was advocating it – without lapsing into an anti-marriage asceticism. The single person is of course still gendered, but they are not expressing their gender in the socially conventional way. A single woman is not subject to a husband, and yet functions as full member of the household of God without in some way being a deficient woman. On the contrary, her singleness is to be honoured. The single person is a sign that the gospel of the risen and returning Christ has relativised the ‘natural’ order of things without overturning it.

Second, the New Testament asks men to imagine themselves in the ‘feminine’ position of submitting to and responding to the loving sacrifice of Christ, the head of the Church (Eph 5:22f). This is the analogy from which they are to learn, if they are husbands, to love their wives. Indeed – unless they can grasp what it is to be on the receiving end of the love of Christ and to submit to his headship, they cannot learn what it is to exercise headship. The 17th Century English poet John Donne rather shockingly expressed this gender reversal of faith in his poem ‘Batter my heart, three person’d God’ when, in his final line, he exclaims that he will never be ‘…chaste, unless you ravish me’.

‘Thick’ complementarianism, in my view, is lazy at best and legalistic at worst. It asks for Scripture to prescribe what Christians as redeemed men and women are called on to discern in the middle of history – and so it indulges itself in poor reading of the Bible. It posits a false dichotomy between the universal and the cultural – when the truth is that Scripture speaks a universal in and through the cultural. It is not an accident that, over the passage of time, those societies which have been more influenced by the Christian gospel have tended to embrace a much more egalitarian and companionate version of marriage. This is because the truth at the heart of the gospel that marriage is meant to enact is of power and authority exercised and received in loving sacrificial service for the good of the other. The notion of complementarity is not thereby overthrown. But it does mean that submission and headship will look remarkably different as the power differential between husbands and wives changes – as in fact it does. Amongst complementarian Christians that I know, marriages are remarkably egalitarian.