Today a friend sent me a collection of jokes making fun of the ineptitude of men. Here’s one of them:
One day my housework-challenged husband decided to wash his sweatshirt. Seconds after he stepped into the laundry room, he shouted to me, 'What setting do I use on the washing machine?'
'It depends,' I replied. 'What does it say on your shirt?'
He yelled back, 'OHIO STATE!'
And they say blondes are dumb.…
The jokes were funny, and I got a kick out of them, but on the other hand they were depressing, since they are a slander on so many good men. I suppose there are plenty of men like the ones in the jokes, but I don’t know many, and was not raised as one of them. These cartoon characters are not Christians.
Although my mother did the majority of work inside the house, my father cleaned, cooked, changed diapers, and used the household appliances often and with perfect competence, particularly when my mother needed help–and this was long before it became a virtue among enlightened progressives. My father’s boys grew up with a reasonable and flexible attitude on what comprised men’s and women’s work, and with the ability and willingness to do all the things pictured as unthinkable for the brutish nincompoops of the dumb-male joke.
These boys also grew up as secure in their headship over their households as their father was, and as convinced as he that women could no more be pastors than men could be mothers–that as willing as one might be to make exceptions where required and keep the division-of-labor lines light in some areas, there really were such things as men’s and women’s work decreed by God and nature that are the bases of culture and not simply its artifacts.
Men who have been taught, and who believe, that they are to love their wives as Christ loved the Church and gave himself for her, do not refuse to use vacuum cleaners, mops, washing machines, or stoves. They do not leave the discipline of the children to their wives–a cowardly and shameful practice–or insist on being waited on by consorts they treat as idiots or slaves. They seek to marry the kind of women who value them as men, whose opinions are worth listening to, and whom they can trust completely with everything. Then they seek to do the most they can to make their lives happy. Of course they lapse into selfishness from time to time, but these are not the joke-men; these are men who love their wives as their own flesh, make and keep their vows to them, draw close to them and love them. There are many of them in the world, and the Faith teaches that all Christian husbands are to be among them.
Don’t let the feminists tell you that Nice Men was all they really wanted all along. No, feminism wishes to destroy men as men by making them equal to women, to efface every difference between the sexes that it can instead of exult in them. It is the opposite of the love that a woman gives a man that encourages his manhood. It approves the domesticated male because his domestication symbolizes his degradation. It is full of self-consuming and isolating contradiction and self-loathing, defining successful womanhood in terms of its equality to the maleness it seeks at once to possess and destroy; it is demonic, inhumane, wholly un-Christian.
No doubt, though, it is fond of the joke-man–who, over against the woman who needs him like a fish needs a bicycle, is the inferior, the incompetent, the heedless, the foolish, the improvident, the helpless, the selfish, the lazy, and the stupid. But the man who seeks to obey God in his treatment of women, and especially of his wife, is none of these. He exalts her by helping her–which includes increasing his field of competence–while the believing wife gladly lifts him up as the lord of her home, her family, and her self. This is not an impossible ideal. By the grace of God it is lived out every day among millions.
Amen, Dr. Hutchens! I grew up in a household in the 70s where my father loved to cook (still does, and is very good at it!) and my mother loved helping my father rake leaves, plant trees and flowers, and generally fix up the yard. Neither one ever would have thought to deny help to the other in any of these areas, although the running joke was that when I was a baby, I would always wait until my mother left me alone with my father babysitting me at home before I decided to “do my business” and force him to change the diapers! :-) Now as an adult who has lived on my own for many years, I love to cook, can do any household chore that needs to be done, and although I don’t like doing it, I can clean anything in the house that needs to be cleaned, and with the proper chemicals.
It seems to me that many married men (and women, to a lesser extent) who refuse to help their spouses in domestic work are showing selfishness and not thinking in terms of loving their spouses and sacrificing for them. Of course there are men who don’t really cook well or know how to run the washing machine correctly, but they can certainly learn to do the basics and recognize their lack of knowledge, even if it means humbling themselves before their wives. Women can also learn how to cut the grass and trim the shrubs; in fact, I often saw women doing this in Florida, where I grew up. Does this make men less manly or women less feminine? Not necessarily. I’ve seen many men and women in loving marriages do whatever it takes in their marriages to love and help their spouses, and without exception, those have been the most successful and loving marriages I’ve ever known.
“[T]here really were such things as men’s and women’s work decreed by God and nature that are the bases of culture”
Such as … ?
If you’re referring to certain physically-oriented jobs, that might be true, but the line is between the weaker and the stronger, and this line exists within males. A frail man may not end up working the loading docks, but so what? Does this say something about his value as a male?
Beyond that, though, the only strict gender roles in society (in terms of professional life, at least) seem to occur within the framework of religious institutions, no?
“It approves the domesticated male because his domestication symbolizes his degradation.”
So, what does “domesticated” mean in this sentence? Given the context of the post, I assume this refers to a man who does housework, and that therefore doing housework regularly and not simply when his wife is in desparate straits is somehow degraded? If doing domestic work is degrading to men, why is not degrading to women?
This is why I have always rejected complementarianism: despite all your assurances, you really do think women are stupid and that the work women do is degrading. I suppose I should thank you for this sentence. For once you let your honest opinion of women show.
Along with the husband-wife version of this cultural depreciation of manhood, we also have the parent-child inversion, where we’ve gone from “father knows best” to “father knows least.” No wonder boys don’t want to grow up to be men.
My father, complaining about popular culture depictions of men such as Archie Bunker etc., said that too often satire provided a model for negative behavior. Life imitating junk art.
So we have Ralph Cramden, Archie Bunker, Al Bundy, and Peter Griffin each providing a generation with negative models?
Perhaps these can be looked at as anti-models, like much of popular culture.
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
-Robert A. Heinlein
JohnFB and Karen: I highly recommend you read Wendell Berry’s “The Unsettling of America,” esp. the chapter ‘The Body and the Earth.’ He argues, persuasively IMO, that it is modernity which has caused the denigration of women’s work, not traditionalism. The modern post-agrarian understanding of work has separated men’s and women’s work in a way which stands them against each other as separate and in opposition, rather than seeing them as different yet complementary.
In other words, blame modernism, not tradition and religion. If Berry is right, critics of complementarianism are looking in the wrong place for the root of the problem.
Karen,
You haven’t “rejected” complementarianism because you haven’t even bothered to understand it. Much less understanding the simple point of the post.
While SMH doesn’t speak to it in this post, I am fairly certain he could also write of degradation of women, of the feminine in our society.
No complementarian or patriarchal man would ever dismiss women as stupid and their work as degrading. No, that is left for feminists such as yourself. What’s really sad about women like you is that you truly don’t know what you’re missing. Since embracing sexual orthodoxy, I have encountered more respect for my intelligence and more praise for my womanliness than I ever found near the center of the Evangelical Egalitarian world.
You ought to try it some time.
Kamilla
I’d like to echo Rob G’s reference to Wendell Berry’s work on the subject, including his, “Men and Women in Search of Common Ground”.
I am more skilled in the domestic arts than my wife, because I was trained in them, and she was not. When we first got married, I took care of the home during my last year of school, while she worked full time. But I think everyone would agree that it would have been unmanly of me to continue to have my wife work in a difficult environment, so that I could do that which is easy for me. It may take years before she surpasses my domestic skills, but there is no doubt in my mind she possesses feminine qualities that will eventually allow her to be a far better homemaker than I.
Rob G writes: “The modern post-agrarian understanding of work has separated men’s and women’s work in a way which stands them against each other as separate and in opposition, rather than seeing them as different yet complementary.”
So again I must ask, what is proper for “women’s work” in the home and in professional life that reflects this complementary understanding? Give us concrete examples.
For example, are only women supposed to bathe their children, or change diapers? Should they be nurses but not physicians, secretaries but not CEOs? Should they not work at all?
Perhaps the thesis here is that many of society’s ills would be alleviated if we did return to such a way of living in terms of highly rigid gender roles.
Further, perhaps we’re saying that the downside of modernity is that it reduces the actual necessity of these gender-specific roles. After all, because we’re an industrialized and technologically-advanced nation, men and women alike can sit in an office and run businesses instead of shucking corn and hunting for dinner. The former takes intellect, not physical prowess.
I guess I just don’t find some of these generalizations useful. Certainly, some families will thrive in a traditional model where the male is the breadwinner and the woman is occupied with raising their children. There’s nothing shameful about that. However, countless women have proven themselves as indeed “equals” in many areas previously reserved only for men. Not better, maybe, but equal.
So, how, then, is society going to be “better” by insisting these gifts go unused?
Indeed, Karen, if you want anyone to take you seriously, you need to read things before you criticize them. The point here is that feminists, who need to compete with men to prove their worth, regard domestic work as degrading, so that a man’s doing it is a lowering of his status–lowering it to that of the domestic women, the wife and mother whose vocation they despise, the very titles of which suggest thralldom to some man.
Now, your remarks on “assurances” is really irritating. I don’t give any “assurances” to egalitarians, as though I had any interest whatever in appealing to their good will or making them think that I’m really a nice guy. No, I’m the enemy; I hate their works, the elaborate web of lies in which they dangle, will do everything I can to bring it down, and see no reason to pretend otherwise.
You are also wrong on this, dearie: I am far from regarding every woman as stupid.
Oh, yes, to answer John FB, on “such things as men’s and women’s work decreed by God and nature that are the bases of culture.”
It is essentially this: men cannot be women or mothers and women cannot be men or fathers. The religious and sociocultural ramifications of this fact are pervasive and constitutional for humanity. Wherever the propria of sexual differences are misunderstood, perverted, or rejected, however these might express themselves in what is proper and needed in various vocations, the result is chaotic. The scriptures and the tradition that follows them make the pastoral office exclusively male. There are probably few vocations in which this rule applies in such a way that we are not at liberty to alter them or make exceptions.
There are, however, a good many in which reason and wisdom combine to make lesser, more prudential rules, such as would exclude women from combat, or tend to keep them out of firefighting, or favor women in caregiving tasks, or as teachers of young children. These tend not to be absolute, and iron laws surrounding them may be unwise. The problems come wherever the real differences between men and women are set at naught: thus egalitarianism, setting them at naught to the greatest possible extent, creates and sustains as many ideologically inspired artificialities as ever it could accuse patriarchalism of doing.
As a man in a household where both husband and wife have full-time, professional and challenging jobs and all the children are grown, I do all the laundry and grocery shopping, some of the cleaning (inexpertly, but including my own study and bathroom) and none of the cooking. I also handle all the money and pay all the bills, which my wife says pleases her immensely as she regards it as a terrible burden. I have offered to give her the checkbook and the bills and been refused enough times to believe she means it.
I regard none of what either of us does as degrading. I think that a complementarian household can divide chores up a thousand different ways.
What makes it a complementarian household, however, is that the husband is the head of it (the servant-head, but the head), and while only a fool ignores his wife’s views, when there is no agreement, his is the view that prevails. Sometimes that leads to the confession, “Honey, you were right, and I should have done what you recommended.” But even when it does, the decision rests in him.
If he yields a given decision to her (“You drive one car more than I do, what kind should we buy to meet your needs?”), it still is his choice to yield it.
Anything else is simply not a Christian household. And as SMH says, feminists (male and female) who don’t like it can … well, not like it, but that’s hardly a Christian’s concern.
I submit that egalitarianism is sin. Its origin is in the pride that we are (or can be) equal to God. The gnostic error of a divine, utter simplicity, a singularity of essence of God and humanity is the vehicle for this. It is the refusal to see that a property of God will always have complete ‘otherness’.
In this error, we can be driven to believe that all are not just equal, but identical, in purpose and essence. This degrades not only our gender, but our individual natures. We stand before God as mortal individuals, endowed with certain qualities as our birthright, gender being a prominent property. We will be judged on how close we come to fulfilling the qualities of our birthright.
I too am a better cook and cleaner than my wife, probably always will be. How would I be judged if I were to hold our for her doing most, or even half of the cooking and cleaning?
To me, indissolubility is the most important aspect of marriage, not headship. In St. Paul’s time, being submissive was a form of protection for women, who had few rights and protections and could be easily divorced and abandoned by their husbands. The same was true of slaves, whom Paul encouraged to be submissive to their masters. In cultures where we don’t practice either slavery or sexism, there is no need for women or slaves to be submissive in order to preserve their economic or physical safety. Indissolubility requires cooperation and sensitivity between husband and wife, not the dominance of one or the other. Attempts at dominance would be threatening to some marriages. I would be uncomfortable with my wife being submissive to me. I see her as an equal and valued partner. In our marriage, there are times my wife has worked and I’ve taken care of our children. We’ve helped one another in a number of roles. I don’t see child care and housework as degrading. I don’t feel threatened by the fact that my wife is a lot smarter than me. I’m committed to helping her grow and develop in her career. We work together to try to ensure that each of us reaches our potential as far as possible, while doing our best for our children. Since her career potential is far greater than mine, I’m happy to make some career sacrifices for her. My wife is a beautiful and feminine woman, not an angry man-hater as some like to portray women like her who are gifted in every way. As a confident man, I am proud to call myself a feminist. To suggest that we feminists are anti-men or that feminism is somehow not conducive to a happy and fulfilling man-woman relationship is a calumny. In my opinion, the more we each give in a relationship, the more we get out of it.
I’ll keep the calumny if you promise not to light up any matching around all those persons of straw.
Kamilla
>I would be uncomfortable with my wife being submissive to me.
It is always a tragedy to see a husband rebel against the responsibilities God has given him. You can give away your authority, you can’t give away your responsibility.
“We stand before God as mortal individuals, endowed with certain qualities as our birthright, gender being a prominent property. We will be judged on how close we come to fulfilling the qualities of our birthright.”
Mr. O’Leary… THAT was a great comment. I just wanted to reproduce it because it needed some emphasis. I’m going to do some thinking on that… Gender as a responsibility. Wow…
@MATT
Then you’re turning a key Christian doctrine on its head. You do know that it’s not there as some sort of anachronistic relativism? A strange fruit of feminism – the alienation of nature of one person in relationship to another – has caused the dissolution of more marriages than infidelity and abuse combined.
Then you have naively fallen prey not to a mere absence of good, but to a very active evil. Contemporary feminism is not so much anti-male as anti-human. Its post-modern manifestation was planned by Satan, and engineered by those who would profit from a general breakdown of society.
Peter J. O’Leary, so, you believe women should be powerless drudges, denied money and education? Bartered from father to husband with no regard to her wishes? Because if you believe feminism is evil, you’re only choice is to believe in women’s enslavement. Either women are humans, which is the feminist position, or we’re bipedal milch cows who do a pretty good imitation of speaking.
Karen,
I am torn between not answering you according to your folly (saying nothing) while not wanting to let your words stand as if they mean anything sensible.
You’re going to have to do better than tossing out tired old cannards, calumnies and highly flammable straw persons as if no one here knows them for the lies that they are.
And, please, I beg of you, don’t play with matches!
Kamilla
So, Kamilla, please, do you believe that pregnancy and lactation, which is the only difference between men and women, is such a significant difference that there should, for example, be a code of laws for men and another one for women? I have asked over and over and I never get an answer: what do complementarians think women should be permitted to do? Please specifically define women’s role in life.
Karen,
Stop. Just please, stop with the lies. No one is buying it.
Kamilla
“pregnancy and lactation, which is the only difference between men and women”
Oy, vey! Someone’s been drinking the kool-aid. Barrels of it, apparently.
You all need to read Galatians 3:28, stop arguing over non-existent gender roles and go out and preach the Gospel for mankind’s sake!
“I submit that egalitarianism is sin. Its origin is in the pride that we are (or can be) equal to God”
This is wrong, wrong, wrong on so many counts I don’t know where to begin. I submit that a complementarian doctrine, which upholds the idea of male headship in the home and male-only leadership in the church, is the one actually rooted in the sin of pride. The exact same pride that resulted in satan being thrown out of Heaven. You can always tell when pride is at work in a person’s life by how vehemently they try to defend their doctrine of privilege and position – this is an affront to God!
How dare men assume all spiritual leadership and manipulate God’s Word in order to set themselves up as ‘lords’ in their homes. There is only one Lord, Master and Spiritual Head – Jesus Christ. If husbands are still deemed to be the spiritual heads of wives, as many of you on here suppose, then Christ died for nothing.
Why are you so frightened of women and the possibility of who they can become in God? Jesus was never scared of women. In fact, he went out of his way to go against the culture of the day and embraced them. He constantly exhorted them to defy the man-made restrictions put on them, and acknowledged them as more than just someone’s wife or someone’s mother. He never defined them by their gender. It’s time the church followed His example, otherwise it will continue to limp along alienating half of the human race that Jesus died to save.
>I submit that a complementarian doctrine, which upholds the idea of male headship in the home and male-only leadership in the church, is the one actually rooted in the sin of pride.
How is obeying God pride?
>If husbands are still deemed to be the spiritual heads of wives, as many of you on here suppose, then Christ died for nothing.
Accusing God of having his Son die for nothing is wicked.
>Jesus was never scared of women.
Neither are people who obey God.
>>Contemporary feminism is not so much anti-male as anti-human. Its post-modern manifestation was planned by Satan, and engineered by those who would profit from a general breakdown of society.< <
Mr. O'Leary, I believe you are sincere, but can you explain why you believe this? It seems to me that the beliefs about headship and male dominance come from the writings of St. Paul and those who wrote under his name. Please could someone explain to me why we should selectively accept certain of Paul’s writings about women, while overlooking his famous claim that slaves should obey their masters? I cannot personally think of, nor have I ever received, a satisfactory answer that would allow me to reconcile these two claims.
To be honest, I think desires for dominance have their roots in child-raising practices. Degrading punishments sexualize people to find inequalities in power attractive. I think this is something that has played a role in power dynamics in the past. Now that we raise children differently, I think we grow up with healthier notions of equality. Most younger men (say under 30) would no more feel comfortable with dominating a woman than they would ordering about a slave. Older men and women, through no fault of their own, are more likely to be habituated to inequality.
Please define the limits of women’s social roles? How much education should we receive? Should our education include advance math and science? Should we be allowed to attend college? How should the law regard us? Should we be allowed to play sports? Which ones? I never get a straight answer to this question, so I’m going to continue to repeat it until I get an answers.
>>There is only one Lord, Master and Spiritual Head – Jesus Christ.< <
Precisely so, and from this everything else of which we are speaking here came and follows. He is also "the image of the invisible God, the first-born of all creation; for in him all things were created in heaven and in earth . . . in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell" so that whoever has seen him has seen the Father.
You egalitarians, knowing this this full well, must therefore argue that his sex has no universal significance in the ordering of all things that were created in by and for him–that what is important is only that he is human, not a male human, that his maleness has nothing or nearly nothing to do with his headship or lordship, that the incarnation of this member of the Godhead as a male, along with his divine Sonship is arbitrary, or nearly so, that all that obnoxious patriarchalism in the Bible has passed away with the advent of a Son who professed himself Lord and Master, and the Church confesses as the perfect image and likeness of the Father.
Doesn’t seem likely.
In what sense do you people who dismember Christ and worship the pieces you fancy think you’re Christians, forsooth? What is your validating connection to this faith as it has always been understood and practiced? What credence do you expect Christians to give to the novelties you promulgate as gospel, with such disdain for what the churches have always believed and practiced? By what right do you define these strange doctrines of yours as Christianity, and treat those who reject them as sub-Christian?
Thank you, SMH, for finally stating flatly that men are more in the image of God than women are. I have been waiting for years for a complementarian to be honest on this point.
“Thank you, SMH, for finally stating flatly that men are more in the image of God than women are. I have been waiting for years for a complementarian to be honest on this point.”
Where, exactly, did Steve state this, Karen? Your metalwork approach to Scripture (all manner of fancy turnings and twistings done here!) seems to extend to the words of your opponents.
“I submit that egalitarianism is sin. Its origin is in the pride that we are (or can be) equal to God.”
Absolutely — its roots lie in the Enlightenment and are fundamentally tangled up with anti-Christianity and so-called “sexual liberation.”
Please note: no one here is saying that women and men are not equal in the sense that they not are of the same value. It’s like a dollar bill and four quarters. A parking meter won’t take the former but it will take quarters. On the other hand, no sane man carries a wallet full of quarters when he can carry bills. But aren’t a dollar bill and four quarters equal? Of course they are, but their characteristics and roles are different.
Egalitarians are like people who’d say that since a dollar bill and four quarters are equal, parking meters should all necessarily take bills. Here’s an experiment for you: next time you have to park at a meter, instead of putting in quarters, try folding up a dollar bill and putting it in instead. When you get your ticket, you can defend yourself by saying that you didn’t have any quarters, but since a dollar bill equals four of them, you don’t see what the problem is.
In short, you are confusing equality with identity.
Rob,
Excellent reply!
Serendipitously, on an unrelated search, I found this response of mine to Karen from an earlier discussion. To misquote Yogi Bera, “It’s like Deja vu all over again!”:
“”cans”, “rights”, “privileges” — that’s the wrong starting place. The question is not “can” a man lactate. The question is not “can” a woman run a country (or a church). For crying out loud, you can stick a fork in an electrical outlet any time you want. But should you?
If you start with questions like, “What can a woman do?”, “What about my rights?”, “Why can’t I have that privilege?” you are never going to be happy with God’s answers. However, if you recognize that you come before God naked, without any rights or privileges, asking, “What would you have me do?”, “How shall I be in this world?”, saying, “Though you slay me, yet shall I serve you”. Well, then, you might be surprised at the answer but you won’t go away angry.”
Kamilla
What’s education got to do with it? If you’re not getting answers, maybe it’s because people aren’t following your jumping to unrelated topics. If you’ve got enough time and money to afford it, go ahead and get educated. I don’t recall St. Paul ever addressing the specific topic of college course selection.
We shouldn’t, of course. There are a couple of things to keep in mind when we consider Paul’s remarks about slavery. First is that slavery in the Bible differs in certain aspects from our modern conception of “slavery”, or even from other ancient forms, so we have to pay close attention to the context. When Paul instructs slaves to respect their masters, the word “δουλους“ could be translated as “slave” or “servant” (or perhaps “wage slave” would be a good modern term). So he certainly cannot be taken to support some notion that slaves are subhuman in any way. Rather, he is telling workers to respect their bosses, and bosses to respect their workers. (Note that this obviously does mean “equality”, in the sense that employees get to tell the boss what to do. We are to respect our higher-ups in their capacity as bosses, and respect those under us in their capacity as subordinates.) And we certainly must not overlook this teaching.
But there is another very important point: even in the context of an unfair or wicked form of “slavery”, one might be called to submit, despite the wrongful situation. As Christians, we are not here to see that we get what we deserve! (Or else God might give us our truly just deserts.) Thus again we must not overlook the injunction for slaves to obey their masters, though this in no way indicates that the institution of slavery itself is good or just. “Servants [or slaves], be subject to your masters with all reverence; not only to the good and gentle, but also to the perverse. For this is a grace, if a man for conscience toward God endure grief, suffering wrongfully.” (1 Peter 2:18).
Um. Yeah, young men these days never strike a woman or get her pregnant and abandon her, or anything. Not like those old scoundrels with their misogynistic hat-tipping and door-opening! Our notion of entitlement, oops, equality may have changed, but if it really were for the healthier then I would expect to see a healthier society than is apparent.
But before you read 3:28, read 3:27. Read 3:29 too. In this passage, Paul is referring to being baptized into Christ, and sharing in the inheritance of Abraham. In this sense, there is no distinction: no one is excluded from God’s promise because of sex, or ancestry, or anything else; baptism is available to all. But of course this is what God does for us, not what we do for God. What we do does indeed involve roles, because we are different in our abilities. That is, we all have souls capable of receiving God’s grace — but we do not have equal capabilities in all other respects, nor do we all live in equivalent circumstances. That is why in 1 Cor. 12, Paul explains repeatedly that we do have different roles, that while we are equally parts of one Body, we are different parts.
Perhaps, but I’ve rarely if ever seen anyone call for “male-only leadership” in the church. There is much female leadership called for, and practised, with only certain specific roles restricted to males — just as there are only certain specific roles restricted to women.
We all have positions, indeed, individual positions, as mentioned in the passage from Corinthians. And we are all privileged, because God has condescended to call us His children, so that is a doctrine that any Christian must defend vehemently. But from the context, I guess you mean a way in which the speaker is privileged above others. So are you saying that women promote submission only out of pride, because they want to keep their special female-only position? I guess that’s possible, and probably is true in some cases; but that can’t be the real reason, because there are also plenty of husbands who go for the submission thing too.
And it’s further indication that Jesus deliberately chose no women to be “apostles”; it cannot be merely His wishy-washy acceding to the culture of His day, because He clearly did not feel bound by the times when it wasn’t suitable. But there’s no such thing as being “just” a wife or “just” a mother. Those are very important roles; more important than most others in fact, since those are natural roles, i.e. God-given roles, as opposed to most other roles which are just man-made. You can’t get to heaven merely by being a good scholar, no matter how much education you have. You can get to heaven by being a good wife or mother.
I thought that was the “humanist” position…. Well, there’s no trademarked definition of “feminism” so it’s probably not the most useful term in a discussion like this, where people mean quite different things by it. We should all be “feminists” in so far as promoting the feminine virtues; the question though is what constitutes them. Some think femininity is an accidental feature like the colour of your hair, or size of your nose; others of us think it is essential component of both body and soul.
Seriously? And absolutely no other possibility?? Or are you just trying to exaggerate for rhetorical effect?!?
There might be — if that implies that the mother is the only one raising the children. Both parents are obliged to raise their children, though in different ways. Breadwinning isn’t really the issue, nor is changing diapers. Which of course was the point of the original article, right?
First of all, our job as Christians is not to make a better society; it’s to make better souls (starting with our own). The better society is just a happy side-effect of that. Secondly, our job as Christians is not to pick our own jobs, but rather to apply our gifts where God has called us. Different gifts can be applied in different ways, and if you cannot apply some talent in one way, perhaps that is a sign that you are meant to apply it somewhere else. Thirdly, our job as Christians is not to “fulfill” ourselves, but to empty ourselves; everyone has gifts that go unused because this is not a perfect world. We also all have talents that we ought to use, but whatever we do or don’t do is to be carried out with humility and obedience.
>>Thank you, SMH, for finally stating flatly that men are more in the image of God than women are. I have been waiting for years for a complementarian to be honest on this point.<<
What an evasive and muddleheaded lot these complementarians be! (I don’t, by the way, call myself a complementarian: the term’s too weak and equivocal.) All the while believing that men are more in the image of God than women, they’ve been laboring to publish this opinion unintelligibly, and I am the first who has finally said what they mean, at least in your hearing.
Perhaps one might consider the alternative possibility that none of them have said it because none of them believe it. They don’t believe it because they have the notion that men and women are equally in the image of God, but the male is the iconic, defining head, representing the wholeness of their union. It is an egalitarian axiom that this is impossible, a contradiction in terms: in personal relations equality of essence and subordination in relationship cannot co-exist. Their theologians are busy right now proving that this is the case within the Trinity, so that there is no divine basis upon which to rest a human analogy.
Well, the argument, as has been the case with every such argument in the history of the Church, must run its course. Both sides can’t be right.
Karen said: “Thank you, SMH, for finally stating flatly that men are more in the image of God than women are.”
Response from SMH: “I am the first who has finally said what they [complementarians] mean, at least in your hearing.”
Am I interpreting SMH’s response correctly? SMH agrees that he does believe men are more in the image of God than women are, but he is surprised that he was seen by Karen as the first to state it explicitly.
Did I get that right?
Emil,
Get that sarcasm detector checked, stat! Seems yours is malfunctioning rather badly this morning. For further assistance, read the paragraph that follows the sentence you quoted.
David does a good job of setting context and filling in details.
I agree with Dr. Hutchens the that word complementarinism is weak and equivocal, as many -isms are. I prefer Christian, in all its fullness, as both fulfillment of and freedom from the law. Even egalitarianism and feminism are evasive co-options of language. They are better characterized as identical-ism.
Being careful not to construct a strawman, I submit that any good Christian will not argue with women’s leadership. That just goes against nature and all observations. In a properly constituted Christian home, the man is first among equals, for lack of a better term.. Neither identical in substance, essence, or function, it is futile, an error, to calculate equality here.
Scaling up the earthbound Christian organism, the priest is first in his church, endowed and ordained by God with certain talents and functions. It does imply a worldly hierarchy, yet, simultaneously, in the heavenly realm, the priest is seen as worthy or corrupt as anyone else.
Patrick Henry Reardon has unfolded the finest recounting of feminine leadership and wisdom that I can find. In his explication of the beautiful Abagail in 1 Samuel 25, Reardon reminds us that Abagail, in spite of her sottish, offensive, evil-doing husband Nabal, she is the embodiment of the resourceful, energetic, “virtuous wife”. Endowed with energy, and discipline, she promptly prepares an enormous meal for David’s army; with her gentle disposition and pleasant speech, she entreats hot-headed David to spare her household’s destruction. With her wisdom, she eventually becomes King David’s adviser and wife. Ironically, this is another scriptural rejoinder to the question of indissoluble matrimony.
Let’s not forget Mary Magdalene, virtuous and consequently troubled by demons, she prevails to stand witness to something only allowed to men previously – Luke’s recapitulation of freedom from the Law, yet fulfillment of eternal functions of femininity.
What man nowadays wouldn’t lose his temper, maybe his life, or at least be tazed mercilessly when facing a kangaroo court that unjustly accuses, tortures, and murders his son? The Virgin Mary, knowing an eternal purpose in this, mourns and prays, accomplishing something no man could.
To reject these examples of the organic polarity of male and female is to reject Christ himself.
No, Emil. What I have said is that egalitarians, because of their convictions on what can and cannot be, are not equipped to believe orthodox Christians who try to assure them of their belief that men and women are equally created in the image of God.
For Christians also believe that men and women exist in a gender hierarchy of which the man is the principal member. Egalitarians say you can’t have both; you have to have one or the other: hierarchy and equality cancel each other.
Egalitarian doctrine here has the appearance of reason, but what the partisans of sexual equality reject is one of those many impossible things Christianity calls upon the faithful to believe, such as in the existence of a man who is also Almighty God who is himself as perfectly Three as One, of greatness achieved by humbling oneself and becoming like a child, of gaining life by dying, of becoming one’s true self by expending that self in the service of others, of ruling by serving, and many other like impossibilities. All these things are taught in the scriptures and confirmed by long Tradition, and, as Screwtape ruefully noted, “the documents say what they say and cannot be added to.”
The egalitarian has, in the service of his ideal, chosen equality in both God and man to the exclusion of hierarchy. The Christian believes the faith he has received gives him no choice but to affirm them both. He is Chesterton’s ordinary man who, “if he saw two truths that seemed to contradict each other, would take the two truths and the contradiction along with them.”
A little education is a dangerous thing, particularly when its aim is to “make sense” of the Christian faith, and more particularly still when it is administered by those who are willing to overthrow it in the attempt to rid themselves of the parts they don’t like. (Now I am talking about liberals and conservatives.) Better to admit you don’t like them and shut up until you do than to set yourself up as a teacher of Christianity and end up in hell’s short queue.
(It is better for those who reject Christianity for what seems to them good cause, to leave it–for the possibility remains of re-entering at another door–than to redefine it according to the requirements of the cause. There is no door back to a house one believes he already inhabits.)
Dr. Hutchens has just eloquently illustrated what chased me from the church as a very young man, and brought me back to her.
The former, not coincidently, was accompanied by the burgeoning of post-modern feminism. It consisted of my faith’s liberal demystification of something necessarily mysterious; something I could only vaguely recognize, yet strongly detect.
What brought me back to reality was… well, reality. Not simply coincident with women crashing through corporate glass ceilings, leaving shredded families, disaffected girlfriends, and a couple generations of metrosexual, skinny jean-wearing, girly men, these fruits of gender-bending memes were inextricably entangled with the rejection of mystery within the Christian church.
In coming back to reality, I see now how death tramples death, service frees me, that I have responsibilities unique to my gender, and the other mysteries Dr. Hutchens enumerates. Could this be true demystification?
Thanks Dr. Hutchens for a solid lesson, a confirmation in the truth, a clear and unapologetic tone. The Lord, speaking through Saint Paul, requires women to be subject to their husbands, not the other way around. Husbands are required to “love their wives.” But some here posting seem to know better than the Lord. Some here posting seem to despise hierarchy, and the order that God intends to flow from authority. The greatest creature God created was a woman, His Immaculate Mother, a woman who was subject to her husband, even as Christ was to His mother and foster-father. After the finding of the Child in the temple, we read that the God Child obeyed His mother and was “subject to them” both for another eighteen years. She, like all women, learned universal skills, and was the perfect “woman” as praised by God in the Book of Proverbs, chapter 31. Men, by the nature of the masculine soul, tend toward specialization. A mother has to be more universally skilled: a doctor, a cook, a psychiatrist, a disciplinarian, a teacher, a lover. The soul has no gender, of course, but souls are masculine and feminine. There’s a difference, accidental, not essential. What’s it going to be like in heaven? Are the blessed human saints going to aspire to have the gifts of the angelic choirs? After all, aren’t we all equal. Many saints reign higher than the choirs, no doubt. But the majority will not. Our Lady is above all the angels and saints. Why? Her dignity as Mother of God, her sinlessness, her heroism, and her superabundance of virtue. Which virtue do you think pleased God most in Mary? She who said: “He hath regarded the humility of His handmaid,” added “He that is mighty hath done great things to me.” Until we get Mary right, we will never get the dignity of motherhood right, motherhood as a full time vocation. If this is impossible, it is still the ideal.
Brian,
Awesome truths, beautifully expressed. There are lifetimes of contemplation in this without ever considering gender.
Speaking of joke-men, if you want to see men laugh at themselves and have fun while doing it, watch a few episodes of the Canadian TV program, “The Red Green Show.” Good clean fun, mostly at men’s expense.
Example:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6P1kTwHUuU
“The soul has no gender, of course, but souls are masculine and feminine.”
To clarify:
First, gender is a grammatical term, not a biological one. Men and women do not have gender; they have sex. (Whence D. H. Lawrence derived his bastard term — now in universal use, alas — of “having sex” for sexual intercourse.)
Second, the sexing of man and woman is not just biological, but spiritual. Souls are also male and female, and in with their embodying expressing the created ordering principles of the masculine and the feminine. C. S. Lewis knew this clearly, as did the 18th c. French Christian writer (whose name escapes me) who wrote in refutation of latter-day gnostic heresy: “There are those who say that souls have no sex. But of course they do.”
Congratulations Matt, to you and your wife, for portraying a marriage as God truly intended – husband and wife together, as one, under Christ, who is the Head. Because you are secure enough in who you are in Christ, you are enabling your wife to become all she can be in Christ, alongside you. I assume it is reciprocated? – How could it not be! This is what it looks like when a man truly loves his wife and they submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.
“Men and women do not have gender; they have sex.”
Absolutely right. The modern use of ‘gender instead of ‘sex’ is a feminist/modernist invention which confuses the issue and results in such ridiculosities as the belief that people can be “transgendered” (as if sex were not a polarity but a sort of continuum), multiple genders (I had a feminist tell me that there were at least five), etc. This is precisely the kind of nonsense to which egalitarianism leads.
I appreciate the clarification as to the use of the word “gender.” I did not know its origins. I disagree that the soul can be referred to as “male” or “female.” The soul “in-forms” the body. It makes the body what it is. It is immaterial. By saying it is “masculine” or “feminine” one gives greater clarity as to what the form does in making the complete substance, man. I would say that “sex” has to fall under the accident “quality,” even as to the “kind” of human body. Quality is the highest of the nine accidents. Since the soul, separated from the body is an incomplete substance, it is more accurate to use the descriptive adjective, rather than the noun “male”/”female.” Perhaps I am being too technical. “Male/female” is part of individuation that goes with the human person, because man is a composite of matter and form, and the principle of individuation is the matter of the substance not the form.