Appeal to the Church of Jesus Christ: No more gender gospel, please

I stumbled upon this Catholic theology of masculinity explanation on my Facebook news feed this morning and thought it was a good example of the new gender gospel that seems to be sweeping through our churches like mad fire. Since it is pretty much based on the same tired assumptions about gender, I thought it would be worth picking through it all. Because frankly, I'm sick of it.

Where to even start? This is much too vague to make any earthly sense. It talks a lot about "leaving the feminine," but it never actually does define what is the feminine, does it? So "the feminine" is the standard (but we can't actually define what really that standard is), and masculinity then is defined in distinction to that.

Does anyone else echo my sentiments when I say...   Hu?

And I will say it again as I have before, becoming less like a woman is not the equivalent of acting more like a man. One can act less like a woman, for example, by acting like a pig.
But let's move on, shall we?

Does the feminine not sacrifice through blood and hardships? I think so...otherwise there would be no masculine in the first place. And seriously - if masculinity can be defined as the willingness to sacrifice for the other, then the inescapable implication of that statement is that femininity is the unwillingness to sacrifice for the other. (Remember? Masculinity can only be defined in distinction to femininity.)
Maybe it wasn't intended, and maybe it's not reflected in the hearts of the people who believe this ideology, but this is very demeaning to the feminine "kind."
And while we're on that note, I think it's also important to point out something else before we skip ahead to our next point.

Women, just as well as men, are intended to leave the safety of their homes and cleave to their spouses, to protect, fight for, and defend their old and new families and communities. Women aren't intended to be passive about their families, communities, or their faith any more than men are. 
Now, to our next point.

What is this about Christianity appealing more to women than to men? What church pew have you hit your head on? What Bible have you been reading?




Let's do a very quick re-cap on Christianity.

1. God identifies himself using male terms (Father, Son)
2. All the writers of the Bible were male
3. Virtually all the canonized prophecies were prophesied by males
4. All of Jesus' inner-circle of disciples were male
5. Jesus is male
6. There seem to be tasks within the church that only men can fill - and these happen to be the tasks that involve leadership and real tangible influence over the church.

Overall, I think it's fair to say the religion of Christianity is actually more appealing to the masculine since it has a history and tendency to exalt men over women.

Moving on...

Are we seriously considering "masculinizing" the church to manipulate more men in, or worse, to keep them in? Do we really have to resort to this in church to make men feel strong and "manly?" If we do, this is not because the church has been feminized, it is because these men are not being caught up in the very real spiritual battle that they are, incidentally, goofing off right smack in the middle of. But instead of looking at things through spiritual eyes that the Holy Spirit gives us, these men are too busy fooling around like children to get out there and wage war against the enemy. These kinds of movements in the church are merely compensations for a lack of spiritual war.

That is not the fault of the church...and it is definitely not the fault of the women who are engaging in the real battles that actually change things that matter.

The reality is that both men and women enter a spiritual war zone upon conversion. And both men and women are commanded to be armed and suited up with our Armour so we can fight the powers that come against us, so we can defend and protect all those who the Lord sees fit to place in our circle of influence. If men are bored with Christianity it is only because they are not engaged in the battle with the rest of the men who are fighting alongside those women prayer-warriors, justice seekers, and evangelists and missionaries.

Lastly but definitely not the least, the only reason many men associate Christianity with femininity is b/c they have a warped conception of what masculinity actually is since the only models they have are these hyper-masculinized (violent, aggressive) examples of 'men' through the media. So we work to change that and expose boys and girls to healthier, more balanced men who are not so insecure in their own masculinity that they can't be dependent on others (even God), or cry, or feel, or show weakness, or ask another for help (ie pray). Jesus did every one of these things. But we are not told as Christians to be conformed to the pattern of this world, we are told to be transformed by the renewing of our minds - and we do this not by setting up these little systems and pressing people into them, but we do this by seeking the face of God - the God who has created both masculinity and femininity (these are creation of God, not attributes of God Himself) in His own image to reflect something of His own nature. God is not masculine because "masculinity" is a human attribute. We cannot and should not minimize God in this way.

I believe that if a person focuses on seeking the face of God and becoming more Christ-like, his masculinity, or her femininity, respectively, will flow naturally from that. Constructing these artificial sex-roles is, on the other hand, hypocrisy and an unhealthy distortion of gender. Why do I say this? Well, throughout the entire Bible we see no evidence of the Lord ascribing any gender-specific roles or any other kind of roles to Christ-indewelled believers. In fact, the closest biblical reference to "role" that we can find is the Greek 'hupokritēs', which translates into the English "an actor, stage player, pretender, hypocrite."
Jesus never used this word in a positive light, for sure. He doesn't want his people to "act" in a "role" at all. He is not glorified when we are disingenuous in the ministries we undertake in His name. He made us exactly the way we are so these ministries will flow naturally from a regenerate person who is walking closely with the Lord. He gave us gifts and personalities so that we will have a genuine desire to fulfill whatever particular task we have been called to.

So I'm asking this of the church of Jesus Christ: Please. Just stop.

We are turning aside from the path of freedom and life. We are taking our eyes off Jesus in order to focus on gender-roles. This is a perversion. This is not the Gospel. This is not from God. This is hurting people and crippling them. This is hurting the church and our testimony. 

When we all come to the unity of the faith - when we all fix our eyes on Jesus Christ alone - women will submit to their husbands. Husbands will also submit to their wives. Both men and women will take care of their homes, children, and one another. Both men and women will respect one another. Both husbands and wives will love one another with self-sacrificial love, just like Jesus, since it is the character of Jesus that is being cultivated in each of us. There is no female version Jesus as head for us women to all grow up into - so our duties, and how we live out our faith, is not any different than those of the men.

Stop perverting the simplicity and freedom that is in Christ. No more gender gospel. The world needs the Lord Jesus Christ. The Church needs the Lord Jesus Christ.

Back to the Foundations of Community and Marriage

Although it is true that there are some passages in the Bible that seem to teach a one-way submission of wives to the authority of their husbands, and, some claim, this is patterned after the relationship between the Son who submits to the Father, and the Father who has eternal authority over the Son, I disagree. 

As I was reading Timothy Keller's "The Reason for God", more specifically, chapter 14, "The Dance of God," in which Keller explains the profound, life-shaping implications of believing in a triune God in which each person is "other-centered" and defers to the other, I couldn't help but turn his argument around to examine the profound, life-shaping implications of believing in a hierarchy of authority within the Godhead instead.
I don't really have much time to organize all my thoughts at this point, (perhaps I'll get back to this later and structure it all a little more clearly),  but if you can try to stick with me, I promise you will find something of value in this mess.

Timothy Keller starts, 

"The Gospel writer John describes the Son as living from all eternity in the 'bosom of the Father' (John 1:18), an ancient metaphor for love and intimacy. Later in John's gospel, Jesus, the Son, describes the Spirit as living to 'glorify' him (John 16:14). In turn, the Son glorifies the Father (17:4) and the Father, the Son (17:5). This has been going on for all eternity.
What does the term "glorify" mean? ...To glorify someone is also to serve or defer to him or her. Instead of sacrificing their interests to make yourself happy, you sacrifice your interests to make them happy. Why? Your ultimate joy is to see them in joy.
What does it mean, then, that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit glorify one another? If we think of it graphically, we could say that self-centeredness is to be stationary, static. In self-centeredness we demand that others orbit around us..."

(and don't complementarians claim that the Son and Holy Spirit submit to the Father, but the Father does not submit to the Son and Holy Spirit?)

Read on.
 

"The inner life of the Triune God is utterly different. The life of the Trinity is characterized not by self-centeredness but by mutually self-giving love. When we delight and serve someone else, we enter into a dynamic orbit around him or her, we center on the interests and desires of the other. That creates a dance, particularly if there are three persons, each of whom moves around the other two. So it is, the Bible tells us. Each of the divine persons centers upon the others. None demands that the others revolve around him. Each voluntarily circles the other two, pouring love, delight, and adoration into them. Each person of the Trinity loves, adores, defers to, and rejoices in the others" (emphasis mine).

However, some of us do not believe that the Bible teaches this kind of reciprocal glorification within the Trinity, but a nonreciprocating submission by only two persons of the Trinity to the other, who they claim is primary of the three.

"That creates a dynamic, pulsating dance of joy and love. The early leaders of the Greek church had a word for this - perichoresis. Notice our word 'choreography' within it. It means literally to 'dance of flow around.'"

So just to clarfify: complementarians then define perichoresis as the dance of authority and submission as opposed to mutual love and submission?
Interesting. I wonder how what the historical view of the perichoresis is.

My question for the complementarian crew would have to be, first, why do we assume that structures of authority and submission exist eternally between the persons of the Godhead? There is no biblical basis for this assumption. Yes, no one denies that Jesus, or, God the Son, submits eternally to the Father. He always does the will of his Father. But the Father always does the will of the Son as well. And he always does the will of the Holy Spirit. Apart from the logical impossibility of authority and submission marking the very nature of God (as they assert), do we not see how critically important it is that we recognize that there is mutual submission between all three persons of the Trinity? Let me try to explain.

If there does exist a hierarchy of authority in the Trinity where two persons flow around one, the implication is that ultimate reality becomes a community of persons where you will find that some are in fixed positions of authority, and some in fixed positions of subordination. And this role of authority or subordination is permanent and has it's roots in the essence of that person. So it is an ontological primacy or an ontological subordination. Love may exist within these relationships, but is it secondary to the hierarchy. This, then, becomes the foundation for inequality, racism and sexism among people. (This is what Hinduism is all about [the foundation of it's caste system]. I will try to flesh this out in more detail in a few days, but until then, you can purchase Richard Howell's "How Hierarchy Leads to Abuse" here.)
And there are other consequences for those in the authority positions to whom others must submit.

"You will, then, never get a sense of self by standing still, as it were, and making everything revolve around your needs and interests. Unless you are willing to experience the loss of options and the individual limitation that comes from being in committed relationships, you will remain out of touch with your own nature and the nature of things. ...You were made for mutually self-giving, other-directed love. Self-centeredness destroys the fabric of what God has made."  ~ Timothy Keller

Can it be that we are actually crippling half of the human race - namely, men - simply because of this distortion that teaches them to expect others to revolve around them instead of each person revolving around the other? This is a very serious question, because Jesus made it clear that "you must lose yourself in service to find yourself" (Mark 8:35) - and he was recounting what the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit have been doing throughout eternity, who we are fashioned after and who we will find our ultimate joy and satisfaction in emulating.

Yes! Within the Trinity we find mutual deference between each person, and that means that ultimate reality is a community of persons who find their ultimate joy in submitting one to the other (Ephesians 5:21). In this way, as Timothy Keller describes, 

"Imagine there is someone you admire more than anyone else in the world. You would do anything for him or her. Now imagine that you discover this person feels exactly the same about you, and you enter into...a romantic relationship and marriage. Sound like heaven? Yes, because it comes from heaven - that is what God has known within himself but in depths and degrees that are infinite and unimaginable. That is why God is infinitely happy, because there is an "other-orientation" at the heart of his being, because he does not seek his own glory but the glory of others."

And this is how we will find our ultimate joy as well, both men and women, husbands and wives. And if we agree on nothing else as egalitarians and gradationists (hierarchicalists), we have to agree that gradationists DISAGREE with Timothy Keller's conception of the "Dance of God."