So there I was, contentedly complementarian, when suddenly (so it seemed) my friends started talking of the patriarchy, offering me pills of various hues, and charging that complementarianism is compromise with feminism. I learned about the manosphere several years after it petered out. I’ve been blessed in the churches I’ve attended and pastored over the years, and have never felt besieged because I am a man. Besides, I’m a dinosaur who grew up in the 60s and 70s, shielded from the cultural revolution of those decades by parents who grew up in the 20s and 30s. Self-consciousness about masculinity wasn’t part of my upbringing, though, for good or ill, one of the lessons my father (implicitly) taught me is that one of the marks of a man is reticence about his own manhood. All that to say, I’m a late-comer to this conversation.
The conversation is necessary. Some of Aaron Renn’s claims need elaboration. Women initiate most divorces, but that doesn’t mean women are to blame for divorce. There are long and messy stories behind every divorce, typically more than enough blame to spread around. The focus on male sins may be a sign not of feminization but of a certain kind of masculine emphasis in a church; if a man is considered the head of his wife and family, he bears responsibility for what happens.
Still, I agree with the charge that the church has capitulated to egalitarian feminism. As he notes, it’s been going on for a long time,[1] but has certainly intensified over the past several decades. You can see it in hymnody, from the nineteenth century to the present. You can see it in the near-universal practice of women’s ordination. You can see it in the absence or apathy of men in many churches. You can see it in the persistence of Victorian femininity as the norm of piety. A rebalance is long overdue.
In my limited exposure to the manosphere, I haven’t found much of value; friends I trust tell me there’s substance there, and I believe them. Still, I’m not convinced a Christian masculinity movement is the answer. It’s reactionary, and risks devolving into yet another species of identity politics. Worse, I fear a masculinity movement will lose track of central truths of the Christian faith. My essay is a warning label, because red pills may have harmful side effects.
1. Neither Aaron nor Alastair Roberts use the word “patriarchy,” but other friends do, so I’ll start there. It’s a theologically infelicitous term. The arche of patri-archy means “source” or “beginning.” The Father (pater) is, one can say, the beginning or source (arche) of Godhead, but Trinitarian thought complicates this one-directional hierarchy. In the Trinity, there is no arche without completion in a Second by means of a Third. Source and product, sun and rays, are co-equal and co-eternal; the original is immediately and forever fulfilled in the image. In fact, the Second Person makes the First what He is, for there is no Father without the Son. As for humanity: The male Adam was the literal patriarch of the human race, but, as Paul writes, every man since Adam has been born of a woman. Paul stresses mutual dependence and envisions a co-archy, of male and female (1 Corinthians 11:8-12).
Pater shades into “male” and arche into “rule,” so that “patriarchy” takes on the sense of “rule by men.” Here too “patriarchy” doesn’t capture the biblical picture. God didn’t create the world to be ruled by men or fathers, but by ‘adam, whom He created male and female (Genesis 1:26-28).[2] At a minimum, Adam couldn’t complete the “Adamic vocation” by himself because he couldn’t “fill” the earth without a sexual partner. The human story doesn’t end in male rule either, since Jesus the Last Adam reigns with His Eve, the church. We might say the Father rules the eternal kingdom, but the Father never rules alone, but everywhere and always by His two hands, the Son and Spirit. As for creation, it has a bridal future (Revelation 21:1-8). The church anticipates the new heavens and earth precisely because she is now the bride that creation will one day become. Femininity is an ontological reality, we might say the reality of the world, the telos of creation.
2. From the beginning, Christianity elevated women. When Jesus’ disciples abandoned Him, women followed Him to the cross and the tomb. Women were the first witnesses of His resurrection. The apostles became eyewitnesses and leaders of the church because of news they first heard from Mary, Mary Magdalene, and the other Mary.
Women found the early church attractive because, Rodney Stark says, Christian women enjoyed “considerably greater status and power than did pagan women,” both in the home and the church. The church prohibited infanticide, and so prohibited female infanticide. Christian teachers condemned divorce and sexual sins, and destroyed the pagan double standard by demanding that men as well as women be chaste before marriage and faithful in marriage. Pagan widows were pressured to remarry, but in the church “widowhood was highly respected.” Wealthy widows kept their husbands’ estates, and the church cared for poor widows; Christian widows had more options than their pagan counterparts. Within the church, women served as deaconesses. In all these ways, “the Christian woman enjoyed far greater marital security and equality than did her pagan neighbor.”[3] So many women joined the church that “in 370 the emperor Valentinian issued a written order to Pope Damasus I requiring that Christian missionaries cease calling at the homes of pagan women.”[4]
3. The elevated status of women was Christologically rooted. As Paul wrote to the Galatians, “there is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free man, neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28). As many as are baptized into Christ are clothed with Christ, and that common clothing gives every member of the church a common identity and common privileges. This is a sexual equality undreamt by ancient pagans.
Paul doesn’t erase created, social, or religious differences. Jewish believers continued to live as Jews, though they didn’t impose Jewish customs on Gentiles. We know there were slaves in the church because Paul exhorted them to serve their masters. Paul distinguished the roles of men and women in church and family. But the church is a communion where these differences are harmonized into a complex unity. The binary contrasts are transformed into relations of mutual deference and service. Jews give Gentiles spiritual goods, so it’s fitting that Gentiles give the return gift of material goods. Every slave should consider himself the Lord’s freedman, and every free man or master is the Lord’s slave. Within marriage, husbands serve their wives, even to the point of death, as Christ served the church, and wives mimic the church who submits to Christ in all things. The mutuality is asymmetrical in various ways, but it is mutuality, reflecting the mutual submission and glorification of Father and Son in the Spirit.
There are obvious complexities here, but we can say this: A church should have the atmosphere of a community where “there is neither male nor female,” just as it should be a harmony of social classes and ethnic groups. A masculinized church is as much a perversion as a feminized one.
4. Jesus is true man, the measure of manhood. Not everyone in His day would recognize Him as such. In certain respects, even pagans would have regarded Jesus as a manly man. He does works of power, easily disposes of a Legion of demons, acts forcefully in the temple, firmly resists Satan’s temptations, has daring outdoor adventures with his male companions. He is victorious in public debate, courageous in His relentless truth-telling, unfazed by hatred and opposition. Yet He also tells His followers to become like children, commands them to turn the other cheek instead of retaliating against insults, shows compassion for the weak, commends those who emasculate themselves for the kingdom.
Pagans might have seen His death as analogous to the self-immolations of Roman heroes. In most respects, Jesus’ death subverts ancient masculinity. Aristotle lined up the binary “male-female” with the binary “active-passive,” but Jesus becomes so passive He is nearly reduced to an object as He’s passed from one enemy to another. Instead of facing His death with Stoic resolution, He pleads with His Father to remove His cup. He bows to His Father’s will, but “it is questionable whether such a submissive posture, even it if involves self-restraint, would be understood by a man in the Greco-Roman world as a masculine deportment.”[5]
He is shamed, mocked, beaten, whipped, spit on, then nailed naked to a cross in full public view. Cicero reluctantly conceded that a brave man might groan in pain, provided it was like the groan of an athlete straining for victory (Tusculan Disputations 2.22.55). But Jesus cries out in anguish to the Father who has forsaken Him. For Romans, men are made to penetrate, not be penetrated, sexually or in combat. A man who can’t protect his body from assault is, at best, low-status, no longer a vir but a pathicus. On the cross, though, Jesus is pierced with a spear, which makes him appear unmanly. Romans would acknowledge a real man might be captured, tortured, humiliated, but Jesus appears unwilling or unable to defend His honor at the point of its greatest threat. Romans would have echoed the Jewish taunt: “He saved others; Himself He cannot save.”[6]
Christian discussions of masculinity today sometimes appeal to the scientific and social-scientific evidence of sexual difference. I don’t dispute the evidence, though determining what normative conclusions we can draw is a different matter. My concern is more basic: It would be a travesty if manhood were left unevangelized, unchallenged and untested by the masculinity of Jesus. It would be more than tragic if a social-scientific portrait of masculinity displaced Jesus as the measure of Man.
5. No pill of any color can dispel sexual mystery, and those who think they’ve discovered the truth about sexual dynamics need to be cautious. They don’t have women figured out – or men, for that matter. I hope no one wants to dispel the mystery. Dispelling sexual mystery would rob the world of much else besides. Bereft of sexual mystery, creation and human life would be bereft of mystery as such.
[1] Anne Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1998). I don’t think “feminization” is the best description of what Douglas describes. Miriam and Deborah were women, but I don’t think any man would be embarrassed to sing battle hymns with them (Exodus 15; Judges 5). “Sentimentalization” may be a better description of the phenomenon, but that’s hardly interchangeable with “feminization.” Some of the least sentimental people I know are women.
The early church already faced the challenge of making Christianity appealing to men. Pagan men were sometimes resistant to the gospel because it interfered with their conceptions of manhood. Early Christian writers masculinized Christianity by, for example, teaching that martyrdom is a form of combat and a supreme act of courage, and by defining apparently passive, feminine virtues in masculine terms. Tertullian, for instance, spoke of patientia, the submissive endurance of suffering and wrong, as “the height of virtue and manliness” (Mathew Kuefler, The Manly Eunuch [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001] 109).
[2] Alastair Roberts contradicts himself on this point. He initially says that men are oriented toward the “forming” dimension of ruling the world, and women to “filling.” That’s a neat distinction, but later Alastair writes that men are pre-eminent in “those tasks that relate to human dominion,” which implicitly equates “dominion” with “forming.” But isn’t filling as crucial to dominion as forming? He misrepresents the creation account when he says dominion was given to the man before the creation of woman. Genesis 1:26-28 is the only creation text to speak of dominion, and it is addressed to “man, male and female.” Genesis 2 makes clear there are sexually differentiated tasks, but those pertain more directly to Adam’s priestly role in the sanctuary-garden than to his kingly rule in the world. I agree that dominion is a sexually-differentiated task, but nothing in Genesis suggests Adam’s vocation to dominion pre-existed Eve’s.
[3] Stark, Rise of Christianity (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1996) 103-111.
[4] Stark, Rise of Christianity, 95.
[5] Colleen Conway, Behold the Man: Jesus and Greco-Roman Masculinity (Oxford: OUP, 2008) 101.
[6] I could extend my point by looking at the activities and experience of the early church. The people of Lyon, for instance, mocked martyrs as lowborn and unmanly (anandroi); the military martyr, Martin of Tours, was called a coward when he refused to fight (Manly Eunuch, 111).
So there I was, contentedly complementarian, when suddenly (so it seemed) my friends started talking of the patriarchy, offering me pills of various hues, and charging that complementarianism is compromise with feminism. I learned about the manosphere several years after it petered out. I’ve been blessed in the churches I’ve attended and pastored over the years, and have never felt besieged because I am a man. Besides, I’m a dinosaur who grew up in the 60s and 70s, shielded from the cultural revolution of those decades by parents who grew up in the 20s and 30s. Self-consciousness about masculinity wasn’t part of my upbringing, though, for good or ill, one of the lessons my father (implicitly) taught me is that one of the marks of a man is reticence about his own manhood. All that to say, I’m a late-comer to this conversation.
The conversation is necessary. Some of Aaron Renn’s claims need elaboration. Women initiate most divorces, but that doesn’t mean women are to blame for divorce. There are long and messy stories behind every divorce, typically more than enough blame to spread around. The focus on male sins may be a sign not of feminization but of a certain kind of masculine emphasis in a church; if a man is considered the head of his wife and family, he bears responsibility for what happens.
Still, I agree with the charge that the church has capitulated to egalitarian feminism. As he notes, it’s been going on for a long time,[1] but has certainly intensified over the past several decades. You can see it in hymnody, from the nineteenth century to the present. You can see it in the near-universal practice of women’s ordination. You can see it in the absence or apathy of men in many churches. You can see it in the persistence of Victorian femininity as the norm of piety. A rebalance is long overdue.
In my limited exposure to the manosphere, I haven’t found much of value; friends I trust tell me there’s substance there, and I believe them. Still, I’m not convinced a Christian masculinity movement is the answer. It’s reactionary, and risks devolving into yet another species of identity politics. Worse, I fear a masculinity movement will lose track of central truths of the Christian faith. My essay is a warning label, because red pills may have harmful side effects.
1. Neither Aaron nor Alastair Roberts use the word “patriarchy,” but other friends do, so I’ll start there. It’s a theologically infelicitous term. The arche of patri-archy means “source” or “beginning.” The Father (pater) is, one can say, the beginning or source (arche) of Godhead, but Trinitarian thought complicates this one-directional hierarchy. In the Trinity, there is no arche without completion in a Second by means of a Third. Source and product, sun and rays, are co-equal and co-eternal; the original is immediately and forever fulfilled in the image. In fact, the Second Person makes the First what He is, for there is no Father without the Son. As for humanity: The male Adam was the literal patriarch of the human race, but, as Paul writes, every man since Adam has been born of a woman. Paul stresses mutual dependence and envisions a co-archy, of male and female (1 Corinthians 11:8-12).
Pater shades into “male” and arche into “rule,” so that “patriarchy” takes on the sense of “rule by men.” Here too “patriarchy” doesn’t capture the biblical picture. God didn’t create the world to be ruled by men or fathers, but by ‘adam, whom He created male and female (Genesis 1:26-28).[2] At a minimum, Adam couldn’t complete the “Adamic vocation” by himself because he couldn’t “fill” the earth without a sexual partner. The human story doesn’t end in male rule either, since Jesus the Last Adam reigns with His Eve, the church. We might say the Father rules the eternal kingdom, but the Father never rules alone, but everywhere and always by His two hands, the Son and Spirit. As for creation, it has a bridal future (Revelation 21:1-8). The church anticipates the new heavens and earth precisely because she is now the bride that creation will one day become. Femininity is an ontological reality, we might say the reality of the world, the telos of creation.
2. From the beginning, Christianity elevated women. When Jesus’ disciples abandoned Him, women followed Him to the cross and the tomb. Women were the first witnesses of His resurrection. The apostles became eyewitnesses and leaders of the church because of news they first heard from Mary, Mary Magdalene, and the other Mary.
Women found the early church attractive because, Rodney Stark says, Christian women enjoyed “considerably greater status and power than did pagan women,” both in the home and the church. The church prohibited infanticide, and so prohibited female infanticide. Christian teachers condemned divorce and sexual sins, and destroyed the pagan double standard by demanding that men as well as women be chaste before marriage and faithful in marriage. Pagan widows were pressured to remarry, but in the church “widowhood was highly respected.” Wealthy widows kept their husbands’ estates, and the church cared for poor widows; Christian widows had more options than their pagan counterparts. Within the church, women served as deaconesses. In all these ways, “the Christian woman enjoyed far greater marital security and equality than did her pagan neighbor.”[3] So many women joined the church that “in 370 the emperor Valentinian issued a written order to Pope Damasus I requiring that Christian missionaries cease calling at the homes of pagan women.”[4]
3. The elevated status of women was Christologically rooted. As Paul wrote to the Galatians, “there is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free man, neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28). As many as are baptized into Christ are clothed with Christ, and that common clothing gives every member of the church a common identity and common privileges. This is a sexual equality undreamt by ancient pagans.
Paul doesn’t erase created, social, or religious differences. Jewish believers continued to live as Jews, though they didn’t impose Jewish customs on Gentiles. We know there were slaves in the church because Paul exhorted them to serve their masters. Paul distinguished the roles of men and women in church and family. But the church is a communion where these differences are harmonized into a complex unity. The binary contrasts are transformed into relations of mutual deference and service. Jews give Gentiles spiritual goods, so it’s fitting that Gentiles give the return gift of material goods. Every slave should consider himself the Lord’s freedman, and every free man or master is the Lord’s slave. Within marriage, husbands serve their wives, even to the point of death, as Christ served the church, and wives mimic the church who submits to Christ in all things. The mutuality is asymmetrical in various ways, but it is mutuality, reflecting the mutual submission and glorification of Father and Son in the Spirit.
There are obvious complexities here, but we can say this: A church should have the atmosphere of a community where “there is neither male nor female,” just as it should be a harmony of social classes and ethnic groups. A masculinized church is as much a perversion as a feminized one.
4. Jesus is true man, the measure of manhood. Not everyone in His day would recognize Him as such. In certain respects, even pagans would have regarded Jesus as a manly man. He does works of power, easily disposes of a Legion of demons, acts forcefully in the temple, firmly resists Satan’s temptations, has daring outdoor adventures with his male companions. He is victorious in public debate, courageous in His relentless truth-telling, unfazed by hatred and opposition. Yet He also tells His followers to become like children, commands them to turn the other cheek instead of retaliating against insults, shows compassion for the weak, commends those who emasculate themselves for the kingdom.
Pagans might have seen His death as analogous to the self-immolations of Roman heroes. In most respects, Jesus’ death subverts ancient masculinity. Aristotle lined up the binary “male-female” with the binary “active-passive,” but Jesus becomes so passive He is nearly reduced to an object as He’s passed from one enemy to another. Instead of facing His death with Stoic resolution, He pleads with His Father to remove His cup. He bows to His Father’s will, but “it is questionable whether such a submissive posture, even it if involves self-restraint, would be understood by a man in the Greco-Roman world as a masculine deportment.”[5]
He is shamed, mocked, beaten, whipped, spit on, then nailed naked to a cross in full public view. Cicero reluctantly conceded that a brave man might groan in pain, provided it was like the groan of an athlete straining for victory (Tusculan Disputations 2.22.55). But Jesus cries out in anguish to the Father who has forsaken Him. For Romans, men are made to penetrate, not be penetrated, sexually or in combat. A man who can’t protect his body from assault is, at best, low-status, no longer a vir but a pathicus. On the cross, though, Jesus is pierced with a spear, which makes him appear unmanly. Romans would acknowledge a real man might be captured, tortured, humiliated, but Jesus appears unwilling or unable to defend His honor at the point of its greatest threat. Romans would have echoed the Jewish taunt: “He saved others; Himself He cannot save.”[6]
Christian discussions of masculinity today sometimes appeal to the scientific and social-scientific evidence of sexual difference. I don’t dispute the evidence, though determining what normative conclusions we can draw is a different matter. My concern is more basic: It would be a travesty if manhood were left unevangelized, unchallenged and untested by the masculinity of Jesus. It would be more than tragic if a social-scientific portrait of masculinity displaced Jesus as the measure of Man.
5. No pill of any color can dispel sexual mystery, and those who think they’ve discovered the truth about sexual dynamics need to be cautious. They don’t have women figured out – or men, for that matter. I hope no one wants to dispel the mystery. Dispelling sexual mystery would rob the world of much else besides. Bereft of sexual mystery, creation and human life would be bereft of mystery as such.
[1] Anne Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1998). I don’t think “feminization” is the best description of what Douglas describes. Miriam and Deborah were women, but I don’t think any man would be embarrassed to sing battle hymns with them (Exodus 15; Judges 5). “Sentimentalization” may be a better description of the phenomenon, but that’s hardly interchangeable with “feminization.” Some of the least sentimental people I know are women.
The early church already faced the challenge of making Christianity appealing to men. Pagan men were sometimes resistant to the gospel because it interfered with their conceptions of manhood. Early Christian writers masculinized Christianity by, for example, teaching that martyrdom is a form of combat and a supreme act of courage, and by defining apparently passive, feminine virtues in masculine terms. Tertullian, for instance, spoke of patientia, the submissive endurance of suffering and wrong, as “the height of virtue and manliness” (Mathew Kuefler, The Manly Eunuch [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001] 109).
[2] Alastair Roberts contradicts himself on this point. He initially says that men are oriented toward the “forming” dimension of ruling the world, and women to “filling.” That’s a neat distinction, but later Alastair writes that men are pre-eminent in “those tasks that relate to human dominion,” which implicitly equates “dominion” with “forming.” But isn’t filling as crucial to dominion as forming? He misrepresents the creation account when he says dominion was given to the man before the creation of woman. Genesis 1:26-28 is the only creation text to speak of dominion, and it is addressed to “man, male and female.” Genesis 2 makes clear there are sexually differentiated tasks, but those pertain more directly to Adam’s priestly role in the sanctuary-garden than to his kingly rule in the world. I agree that dominion is a sexually-differentiated task, but nothing in Genesis suggests Adam’s vocation to dominion pre-existed Eve’s.
[3] Stark, Rise of Christianity (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1996) 103-111.
[4] Stark, Rise of Christianity, 95.
[5] Colleen Conway, Behold the Man: Jesus and Greco-Roman Masculinity (Oxford: OUP, 2008) 101.
[6] I could extend my point by looking at the activities and experience of the early church. The people of Lyon, for instance, mocked martyrs as lowborn and unmanly (anandroi); the military martyr, Martin of Tours, was called a coward when he refused to fight (Manly Eunuch, 111).
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