The human calling is not a gender-neutral one. By the very nature of the way that God created man and woman, the weight of the fivefold human commission—to be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, subdue it, and exercise dominion over all of its creatures—would, though collaborative, fall very differently upon each sex’s shoulders.
In part this can be witnessed in the different ways that God creates the man and the woman in Genesis 2. The man is created in response to the need of the earth for a man to till it, while the woman is created as a helper to the man in their common human vocation, as one who will bring what he initiates to glorious completion. The man is created out of the earth for a task of mastery that chiefly moves out into it; the woman is later created from the side of the man for a task that principally focuses upon the bearing of human life and developing the realm of human community. The contrasting foci of their callings is further witnessed by their respective judgments after the Fall.
Relating Genesis 2 to Genesis 1, we might observe that the task of the man chiefly focuses upon the forming tasks that we find on the first three days: the tasks of taming, naming, structuring, ordering, dividing, and ruling. The task of the woman, by contrast, chiefly focuses upon the filling tasks that we find on the second three days: the tasks of filling, establishing life and communion, making possible succession and delegation of rule to children, glorifying, and perfecting. While both clearly assist the other in their respective callings, and neither is exclusively concerned with their own more immediate tasks, there are manifest differences of focus.
Modern Christians, accustomed to thinking in terms of abstractions and ideologies and assuming that social reality flows chiefly down from ideas and rules, tend to be unmindful of the degree to which our social reality is determined by material conditions—by bodies, by geography, by resources, by technologies, by economic conditions, and many other such things that constitute the under-considered material fabric of our reality. The sexual order of society largely flows ‘up’ from such realities, rather than ‘down’ from abstract ideas.
When considering God’s purpose in creation, we should consider not only his explicit commands or commissions, but also what he built into our natures—natural law—not least because Scripture itself often appeals to it. As the Apostle Peter observes, women are the ‘weaker vessel’: men were created considerably stronger, not merely in terms of their typical raw physical strength as individuals, but also in their ability to create and exert social and material power in male groups. The biblical teaching principally concerns a divinely established empirical reality that must be honored and upheld; it was never simply chosen or even divinely commanded—man is the head. The prescriptive teaching of Scripture is grounded upon a descriptive account of difference.
While it may be impolite to dwell overmuch on the fact (and contemporary society deems it pathological), men create, possess, and symbolize power much more directly in the world than women (women themselves exercise very considerable power and influence, albeit different and typically less direct modes of it). This is a reality that, though ideologized, institutionally enforced, and socially inculcated in various ways, is a stubborn fact of the world as God created it, replicated across countless cultures in different times. In those tasks that relate to human dominion—in gaining mastery over our physical environment, in the task of invention, in the establishment and exercise of political power, etc.—men’s pre-eminence is everywhere self-evident.
Take a moment to look around you right now and consider the degree to which you live in an immediate environment, and in a world more generally, that has been created by men’s exertion of dominion over nature in all of its aspects, as well as by fundamentally male power structures and endeavors in human society—in politics, resource extraction, trade, infrastructure, construction, invention, science, technology, and a host of other areas. While much is said about the ‘empowerment’ of women, it is important to note that empowerment typically presupposes a party with more immediate possession of power authorizing the empowered party to wield some of it.
In the essay that opens this conversation, Aaron Renn addresses the glaring disconnect between the church and men, describing the way that many young men have hungrily turned to the manosphere and to figures like Jordan Peterson for life counsel, while finding little of the teaching of the church concerning masculinity true to their experience or helpful in their lives. Indeed, many men feel quite alienated by the ways that churches place heavy burdens upon men’s shoulders and routinely blame them for their failings, while women—and especially mothers—are perceived to be held in the highest of honor and are not subject to the sort of scolding that men often receive from the pulpit.
I think women’s place in churches is rather more complicated than Renn’s account suggests. While women are placed on a pedestal, not every woman is placed on such a pedestal. Many women’s experience in churches is one of the loneliness and the self-alienation involved in struggling to maintain the façade of having it all together that the pedestal requires, of the unpleasant ways in which women jockey for the limited space on that pedestal, of the painful experience of falling from it, or of the experience of being conspicuously denied a place upon the pedestal by virtue of being unmarried, divorced, or childless. The grass is not necessarily greener on the other side.
Where the church has particularly failed is in effectively addressing man as the head. For many Christians, the concept of male headship is a culturally embarrassing biblical teaching that needs either to be rejected (the more popular egalitarian option) or qualified to virtual extinction (which is more common among complementarians). Concepts such as that of the ‘servant leader’ have been employed to soften the teaching. Where the concept is most emphasized, it can be attended more by blame than by honor.
While it can be an inhospitable place for many women, contemporary evangelical church life is nonetheless chiefly ordered around the women at its heart. The good man in such a context must greatly tone down his manliness. Headship is mostly characterized as a beholden-ness to the women and children in men’s lives. Men are to be the obliging mall cops upholding this domesticated realm and taming other men for operation within it. The man is much more figurehead than actual head.
What the manosphere and others of the teachers that Renn identifies recognize is the importance of manliness, of the traits that make a man apt for the exercise of dominion in various spheres of his life. A man who can act with mastery, competence, assertion, confidence, honor, courage, strength, nerve, and the like—especially if he acts as a skilled possessor of a behavioral repertoire, which he can deploy with discrimination, discernment, and self-mastery—compels respect as a man. Such traits, well-exercised, are manifestly attractive to women. Yet churches provide little training in, contexts for the formation or exercise of such traits, or purpose for their employment. This neglect results from and perpetuates a neglect of the broader, outward-oriented task of dominion. It also means that many Christian young men will turn to pagans to learn manly virtues, often picking up perverse notions of masculinity that glorify lording over others, or despising the weak, in the process.
The pre-eminent dominion given to the man in creation pre-existed the creation of the woman. The purpose of man’s dominion includes yet greatly exceeds the end of serving and building up the woman. To exercise such dominion effectively and appropriately, man needs to grow into various forms of mature manliness, requiring developing a constellation of qualities and virtues beyond the narrowly moral. A man who is kind, yet lacks strength of will and character is deficient in virtue—which limits even his capacity for true kindness.
The failures of the church in this area are related to dysfunctions in the way that its own life is ordered. If the church largely neglects the task of dominion and the development of truly Christian forms of power and mission in the wider society and mostly focuses on the internal concerns of its communities, it is unlikely that it will be a place that produces mature Christian manliness. In such communities, ‘male headship’ loses its outward orientation and tends to become either oppressive or pathetic. The man functions chiefly as the helper of the woman, rather than vice versa, as God established things in creation.
While women may favor manly traits in their partners, they generally do not favor such traits in the men in their immediate groups as individuals. It is one thing for a woman to have a strong and virile man in her corner (that can represent an increase in her agency); it is quite another to have to compete against such men. Nevertheless, because male groups are powerful and good at creating power, women desire empowerment from them. Contemporary politics between the sexes have much to do with the breakdown of marriage as the means by which male power served and empowered women and the rise of political and corporate structures for independent female empowerment and the limiting or discouragement of pronounced male agency.
The modern gender integration of society and of the church has tended to produce a situation where manliness is discouraged, where ‘good men’ are the docile and obliging men who can operate best on women’s terms. Changing this situation will require a reordering of the church’s life, where men’s virility and greater spiritedness are no longer treated as things to be house-trained, but as strengths to be developed and harnessed in the service of a newly prioritized outward church mission.
This would require a sharply counter-cultural posture towards men as agents of dominion, encouraging men to lean into and develop their aptitudes in this area, rather than stifling them in order to secure a more domesticated and equalized gender-neutralized society. It would also require the establishment of a very different settlement between the sexes, wherein men’s strength was not—as it has so often been—exercised at the expense of, without regard for, as a diminishment of, or as a lording over women, but where women more generally were strengthened by men’s greater exertion of their strength in the world. The manosphere will offer us little aid in that.
Alastair Roberts (PhD, Durham) is adjunct Senior Fellow at Theopolis and is one of the participants in the Mere Fidelity podcast. He is also the contributing editor of the Politics of Scripture series on the Political Theology Today blog. He blogs at Alastair’s Adversaria and tweets using @zugzwanged.
The human calling is not a gender-neutral one. By the very nature of the way that God created man and woman, the weight of the fivefold human commission—to be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, subdue it, and exercise dominion over all of its creatures—would, though collaborative, fall very differently upon each sex’s shoulders.
In part this can be witnessed in the different ways that God creates the man and the woman in Genesis 2. The man is created in response to the need of the earth for a man to till it, while the woman is created as a helper to the man in their common human vocation, as one who will bring what he initiates to glorious completion. The man is created out of the earth for a task of mastery that chiefly moves out into it; the woman is later created from the side of the man for a task that principally focuses upon the bearing of human life and developing the realm of human community. The contrasting foci of their callings is further witnessed by their respective judgments after the Fall.
Relating Genesis 2 to Genesis 1, we might observe that the task of the man chiefly focuses upon the forming tasks that we find on the first three days: the tasks of taming, naming, structuring, ordering, dividing, and ruling. The task of the woman, by contrast, chiefly focuses upon the filling tasks that we find on the second three days: the tasks of filling, establishing life and communion, making possible succession and delegation of rule to children, glorifying, and perfecting. While both clearly assist the other in their respective callings, and neither is exclusively concerned with their own more immediate tasks, there are manifest differences of focus.
Modern Christians, accustomed to thinking in terms of abstractions and ideologies and assuming that social reality flows chiefly down from ideas and rules, tend to be unmindful of the degree to which our social reality is determined by material conditions—by bodies, by geography, by resources, by technologies, by economic conditions, and many other such things that constitute the under-considered material fabric of our reality. The sexual order of society largely flows ‘up’ from such realities, rather than ‘down’ from abstract ideas.
When considering God’s purpose in creation, we should consider not only his explicit commands or commissions, but also what he built into our natures—natural law—not least because Scripture itself often appeals to it. As the Apostle Peter observes, women are the ‘weaker vessel’: men were created considerably stronger, not merely in terms of their typical raw physical strength as individuals, but also in their ability to create and exert social and material power in male groups. The biblical teaching principally concerns a divinely established empirical reality that must be honored and upheld; it was never simply chosen or even divinely commanded—man is the head. The prescriptive teaching of Scripture is grounded upon a descriptive account of difference.
While it may be impolite to dwell overmuch on the fact (and contemporary society deems it pathological), men create, possess, and symbolize power much more directly in the world than women (women themselves exercise very considerable power and influence, albeit different and typically less direct modes of it). This is a reality that, though ideologized, institutionally enforced, and socially inculcated in various ways, is a stubborn fact of the world as God created it, replicated across countless cultures in different times. In those tasks that relate to human dominion—in gaining mastery over our physical environment, in the task of invention, in the establishment and exercise of political power, etc.—men’s pre-eminence is everywhere self-evident.
Take a moment to look around you right now and consider the degree to which you live in an immediate environment, and in a world more generally, that has been created by men’s exertion of dominion over nature in all of its aspects, as well as by fundamentally male power structures and endeavors in human society—in politics, resource extraction, trade, infrastructure, construction, invention, science, technology, and a host of other areas. While much is said about the ‘empowerment’ of women, it is important to note that empowerment typically presupposes a party with more immediate possession of power authorizing the empowered party to wield some of it.
In the essay that opens this conversation, Aaron Renn addresses the glaring disconnect between the church and men, describing the way that many young men have hungrily turned to the manosphere and to figures like Jordan Peterson for life counsel, while finding little of the teaching of the church concerning masculinity true to their experience or helpful in their lives. Indeed, many men feel quite alienated by the ways that churches place heavy burdens upon men’s shoulders and routinely blame them for their failings, while women—and especially mothers—are perceived to be held in the highest of honor and are not subject to the sort of scolding that men often receive from the pulpit.
I think women’s place in churches is rather more complicated than Renn’s account suggests. While women are placed on a pedestal, not every woman is placed on such a pedestal. Many women’s experience in churches is one of the loneliness and the self-alienation involved in struggling to maintain the façade of having it all together that the pedestal requires, of the unpleasant ways in which women jockey for the limited space on that pedestal, of the painful experience of falling from it, or of the experience of being conspicuously denied a place upon the pedestal by virtue of being unmarried, divorced, or childless. The grass is not necessarily greener on the other side.
Where the church has particularly failed is in effectively addressing man as the head. For many Christians, the concept of male headship is a culturally embarrassing biblical teaching that needs either to be rejected (the more popular egalitarian option) or qualified to virtual extinction (which is more common among complementarians). Concepts such as that of the ‘servant leader’ have been employed to soften the teaching. Where the concept is most emphasized, it can be attended more by blame than by honor.
While it can be an inhospitable place for many women, contemporary evangelical church life is nonetheless chiefly ordered around the women at its heart. The good man in such a context must greatly tone down his manliness. Headship is mostly characterized as a beholden-ness to the women and children in men’s lives. Men are to be the obliging mall cops upholding this domesticated realm and taming other men for operation within it. The man is much more figurehead than actual head.
What the manosphere and others of the teachers that Renn identifies recognize is the importance of manliness, of the traits that make a man apt for the exercise of dominion in various spheres of his life. A man who can act with mastery, competence, assertion, confidence, honor, courage, strength, nerve, and the like—especially if he acts as a skilled possessor of a behavioral repertoire, which he can deploy with discrimination, discernment, and self-mastery—compels respect as a man. Such traits, well-exercised, are manifestly attractive to women. Yet churches provide little training in, contexts for the formation or exercise of such traits, or purpose for their employment. This neglect results from and perpetuates a neglect of the broader, outward-oriented task of dominion. It also means that many Christian young men will turn to pagans to learn manly virtues, often picking up perverse notions of masculinity that glorify lording over others, or despising the weak, in the process.
The pre-eminent dominion given to the man in creation pre-existed the creation of the woman. The purpose of man’s dominion includes yet greatly exceeds the end of serving and building up the woman. To exercise such dominion effectively and appropriately, man needs to grow into various forms of mature manliness, requiring developing a constellation of qualities and virtues beyond the narrowly moral. A man who is kind, yet lacks strength of will and character is deficient in virtue—which limits even his capacity for true kindness.
The failures of the church in this area are related to dysfunctions in the way that its own life is ordered. If the church largely neglects the task of dominion and the development of truly Christian forms of power and mission in the wider society and mostly focuses on the internal concerns of its communities, it is unlikely that it will be a place that produces mature Christian manliness. In such communities, ‘male headship’ loses its outward orientation and tends to become either oppressive or pathetic. The man functions chiefly as the helper of the woman, rather than vice versa, as God established things in creation.
While women may favor manly traits in their partners, they generally do not favor such traits in the men in their immediate groups as individuals. It is one thing for a woman to have a strong and virile man in her corner (that can represent an increase in her agency); it is quite another to have to compete against such men. Nevertheless, because male groups are powerful and good at creating power, women desire empowerment from them. Contemporary politics between the sexes have much to do with the breakdown of marriage as the means by which male power served and empowered women and the rise of political and corporate structures for independent female empowerment and the limiting or discouragement of pronounced male agency.
The modern gender integration of society and of the church has tended to produce a situation where manliness is discouraged, where ‘good men’ are the docile and obliging men who can operate best on women’s terms. Changing this situation will require a reordering of the church’s life, where men’s virility and greater spiritedness are no longer treated as things to be house-trained, but as strengths to be developed and harnessed in the service of a newly prioritized outward church mission.
This would require a sharply counter-cultural posture towards men as agents of dominion, encouraging men to lean into and develop their aptitudes in this area, rather than stifling them in order to secure a more domesticated and equalized gender-neutralized society. It would also require the establishment of a very different settlement between the sexes, wherein men’s strength was not—as it has so often been—exercised at the expense of, without regard for, as a diminishment of, or as a lording over women, but where women more generally were strengthened by men’s greater exertion of their strength in the world. The manosphere will offer us little aid in that.
Alastair Roberts (PhD, Durham) is adjunct Senior Fellow at Theopolis and is one of the participants in the Mere Fidelity podcast. He is also the contributing editor of the Politics of Scripture series on the Political Theology Today blog. He blogs at Alastair’s Adversaria and tweets using @zugzwanged.
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