8. Sex vs gender

Modern culture has redefined sex and gender in relative, individualized terms. While it is true that most sex stereotypes are tiresome and need to be retired, scripture calls us to an ethic of human sexuality that is simple and freeing. Sex and gender can be a difficult topic, because scripture recognizes one but not the other. At the same time, modern culture demands that we view sex and gender as two different things, sometimes coexisting peacefully within a person, sometimes not.

On a related topic, there is considerable disagreement about what roles correspond to our biological sex. Are males and females expected to think, act, and talk in certain ways?

Biological sex in scripture

As we have seen, the Old Testament contains a declaration that God created two sexes (male and female):

So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.

—Genesis 1: 27

Jesus later refers to this passage, reiterating its importance:

“Haven’t you read … that at the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female’?”

—Matthew 19: 4

Beyond serving the obvious function of propagating the human species (Genesis 1: 28), biological sex also symbolizes the relationship between God and His people, whom God sometimes describes in the Old Testament as His bride:

As a young man marries a young woman, so will your Builder marry you; as a bridegroom rejoices over his bride, so will your God rejoice over you.

—Isaiah 62: 5

In the New Testament, John the Baptist refers to Jesus as the “bridegroom.” When questioned about his followers leaving him to follow Jesus, he replies:

“A person can receive only what is given them from heaven. You yourselves can testify that I said, ‘I am not the Messiah but am sent ahead of him.’ The bride belongs to the bridegroom. The friend who attends the bridegroom waits and listens for him, and is full of joy when he hears the bridegroom’s voice. That joy is mine, and it is now complete. He must become greater; I must become less.”

—John 3: 27-30

Jesus refers to himself as the bridegroom when asked why his disciples don't fast in his presence:

“How can the guests of the bridegroom fast while he is with them? They cannot, so long as they have him with them.20 But the time will come when the bridegroom will be taken from them, and on that day they will fast."

—Mark 2: 19

In Revelation, the New Jerusalem (God’s Holy City) is described as the “bride:”

I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband…. One of the seven angels who had the seven bowls full of the seven last plagues came and said to me, “Come, I will show you the bride, the wife of the Lamb.” And he carried me away in the Spirit to a mountain great and high, and showed me the Holy City, Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God.

—Revelation 21: 2; 9-10

The important take-away from this rich symbolism is that sex (male or female) is not arbitrary or accidental, but rather a beautiful and intentional part of God's creation, designed with His future Kingdom in mind.

Sex roles in scripture

In the Bible, we find that roles are occasionally assigned to people of one or the other biological sex. Generally speaking, these roles are suggested rather than explicitly commanded. They include(1):

• Distinct roles before the Fall

  • Adam was created first, then Eve was created as his helper (Genesis 2: 18; 1 Corinthians 11: 9)

  • Adam named Eve (Gen. 2: 19–20);

  • Adam, not Eve, represents the human race (Gen. 3: 6; Rom. 5: 15; 1 Cor. 15: 22)

• Wives submit to husbands (Eph. 5: 22–24; Col. 3: 18–19)

• Husbands and wives submit to each other (Eph. 5: 21)

Beyond these statements about maleness and femaleness, scripture offers one very specific rule for how men and women should behave outwardly, in accordance with their biological sex. The Hebrew interlinear is quoted here to capture the true flavor of the original:

Not shall wear anything that pertains to a man upon a woman. Not shall put on a man [a] garment of a woman, for an abomination to Yahweh your God [are] all who do these [things].

—Deuteronomy 22: 5, Hebrew interlinear

This statement has often been read as a prohibition against men and women wearing specific items of clothing, but that misses the point. The takeaway from Deuteronomy 22: 5 isn’t be that certain types of clothing are prohibited for men and women, but that certain types of clothing are prohibited when they confuse a person's projection of one's biological sex, either to themselves or to others. When someone does this, they obscure the image of God given to them and no one else. It also implicitly questions the goodness and adequacy of God's craftsmanship:

But who are you, a human being, to talk back to God? “Shall what is formed say to the one who formed it, 'Why did you make me like this?'”

—Romans 9: 20

What about gender?

While sex is a biological characteristic given by God, gender is a human self-perception. A biological male may perceive himself as having male gender, and a biological female may see herself as having female gender. But biological sex and gender do not always line up neatly. Sometimes a male or female does not "feel at home" with their God-given sex, and this creates gender dysphoria—a temporary or chronic unhappiness within their own body.

While the Bible makes the facts of biological sex clear, it has virtually nothing to say about gender, at least as gender is widely understood today. This is possibly because God does not care about our mannerisms, demeanor, and dispositions as long as they do not cause us or others to sin. If that is so, it means there is actually a lot of freedom in how men and women (and boys and girls) can think and act. It is why Jacob, for example, was free to be “a quiet man, dwelling in tents” while his brother Esau was free to be “a skillful hunter, a man of the open country” (Genesis 25: 27). Both lifestyles were acceptable, even though they were very different, because neither was inherently sinful.

Over the centuries, society has developed stereotypes (conventionalized views) of how boys and girls, men and women should think, dress, and act. Christians have accepted many of these stereotypes. Here are a few examples:

The problem with stereotypes like these is that they almost never have a strong biblical basis. Most are decidedly modern in that they don't actually reflect the way men and women thought and acted in earlier times. For example, long hair on a male was once considered “feminine” and was common among male prostitutes to signal a willingness to have sex with other men. Today, few would argue that long hair on a man carries such messaging. A clean-shaven face was once considered “feminine,” but today shaving or not shaving is widely seen as an aesthetic choice, and men who shave are seldom viewed as more feminine than men who grow beards. Wealth and material excess were also once considered “feminine,” but in today's society, wealth and material excess are very much "gender neutral," in that the pursuit of wealth is just as socially acceptable for women as it is for men.

On the other hand, virtue (being of high morals) was formerly considered a “masculine” trait; in fact, the Latin word virtūs from which virtue derives is the root of the English word virile. Over the last hundred years or so, virtue—especially Christian virtue—has become increasingly feminine-typed. Almost all names associated with virtue are given to females: Grace, Hope, Faith, Felicity, etc. Modern society holds women to a higher moral standard than men. As recently as the 1800s, however, moral virtue was considered the exclusive domain of males, as evidenced in numerous "instruction manuals" written for young men about clinging to virtue.

A biblical standard

What, then, was the biblical standard for male and female behavior? In a 2023 article in Eikon, Ronald Phillips points out that the first man was called by God to tend to the Garden of Eden (Genesis 2: 15), which means that Adam’s fundamental vocation was that of cultivation and nurturing—tasks that are not stereotypically masculine by modern standards:

It is commonly realized that men were made to be productive. Yet the idea here is not simply labor, but specifically the work of cultivating…. This idea should be extended beyond Adam’s local context to the relationships men are called to serve today. We are intended to “work” whatever field the Lord places us in, investing our energies, ideas, and passions to make good things grow. A biblical man, then, is one who has devoted himself to cultivating, building, and growing.

The biblical man is quite different from the stereotypical man of our modern era—and even from the "Christian man" upheld by many within the Church. This is true also of the "Christian woman." The influential Danvers Statement of 1987 (revised in 2017) opens with an unassailable truth:

Both Adam and Eve were created in God’s image, equal before God as persons and distinct in their manhood and womanhood....

However, the Statement gets bogged down in fast-and-loose usage of the terms masculine and feminine:

Distinctions in masculine and feminine roles are ordained by God as part of the created order, and should find an echo in every human heart.

The difference between manhood and masculinity, and between womanhood and femininity, is not trivial. Male and female roles exist and are spelled out in the Bible. Masculine and feminine roles, however, are determined by a vague sense of "what is manly" or "what is womanly," and are the result of decades, centuries, and even millennia of cultural imagination.

There are numerous examples of men and women in scripture whose lives and testimonies run counter to this cultural imagination, yet are upheld as righteous examples:

The point of these references is not to argue that men and women should take on each other's "traditional" roles or mindsets, but rather that when they do, it is not necessarily the result of "distortions [in] the relationships of men and women" due to the Fall, as the Danvers Statement proclaims. In fact, God overwhelmingly blesses men and women who live and breathe outside culturally stereotypical boxes—a sign that while God declares maleness and femaleness to be good, He is no respecter of the gender stereotypes we have imagined for ourselves.

Too much freedom?

Christians may feel uneasy about having so much freedom in how we live out our biological sex. Many argue that a line must exist, that there are “feminine” things men simply should not do and “masculine” things women simply should not do. Books about "Christian manhood" and "Christian womanhood" abound. These books often contain good advice, but let's be real: the spiritual advice given to Christian men is equally valuable to Christian women, and vice-versa. By focusing exclusively on "biblical manhood" or "biblical womanhood," these materials forfeit opportunities to present men and women with a "big picture" of strength, wisdom, nurturing, and love that transcends cultural gender roles, and as a result men and women miss out.

In her 2016 book No Little Women: Equipping All Women in the Household of God, Christian "housewife theologian" Aimee Byrd sums up the problem this way:

I don’t want to come to God’s Word only as a woman, but rather as a fellow human being made in his image. My main calling is not biblical womanhood but holiness.

(...)

We don’t bear witness to God’s mission to the world by micromanaging male/female relationships, regulating the details of femininity and masculinity when it comes to serving in our vocations, or insisting on some kind of blanket male authority over all women in society. It is a lot more nuanced than “men can do this, and women can do that.” And women are not merely sidekicks in male vocations. We love our neighbors in service together, as men and women.

While scripture makes very specific (though often rejected) claims about what it means to be male and what it means to be female, most of the thinking about what it means to "act male" and "act female" has been tacked on over time, often with good intentions but perhaps just as often with ill intentions, and usually tells us more about how society feels about itself at any given moment than what scripture actually says.

Perhaps Sam Allberry puts it best:

“We don’t need to go further than the Bible when talking about what it means to be male and female."

For discussion:

1. In what ways is it difficult for you to "tease apart" what scripture says about biological sex and what culture says about gender?

2. Why have certain gender stereotypes tended to stick hard over time, especially in the Church?

3. In what ways are you guilty of "going further than the Bible when talking about what it means to be male and female"? When does doing so feel safe? When does it feel awkward or uncomfortable?

Footnote:

(1) – Information about the scriptural bases for male and female roles is cited from Wayne Grudem, 2020, Systematic Theology, 2nd ed., Zondervan, pp. 585–93. Note that most of what we find in scripture about male and female roles is actually about the roles of husbands and wives, not about the roles of men and women generally. The roles surmised for Adam in Genesis relate to him as the male partner in his marriage to Eve and should not be taken as a model for how all men should relate to all women (see Ephesians 5:22).