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What It Means to Be a Woman (Not for Women Only)
In a seminary Sexual Ethics course I co-teach, my co-worker and I have students survey churches' curriculum relating to manhood and womanhood. Consistently these students find that evangelical curriculum writers have gone to biblical instruction directed to the "wife" or "husband" and extrapolated from the spouse-specific commands to support their ideas of gender. But wife and husband are only subsets of man and woman. So we need to start at a different place. In this episode of The Table Podcast, I talk with Darrell Bock and Kymberli Cook about that place as we discuss gender, sexuality, maleness, femaleness, masculinity, femininity, and how men and women need each other. We end…
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“Act Like Men”: What Does Paul Mean?
A few weeks ago I received an announcement that an organization committed to teaching what the Bible says about being masculine and feminine had published an updated guide available for free. Because the history of ideas about gender, especially within Christendom, is one of my fields of academic study, I eagerly downloaded and began reading. But only a few pages into chapter one, “Being a Man and Acting Like It,” an alarm went off. Here’s what I read: “Paul writes to the leaders in the church at Corinth, ‘Be watchful, stand firm in the faith, act like men, be strong. Let all that you do be done in love’ (1…
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What’s a Man-Card Got to Do with It?
Recently when I spoke with a group about biblical teaching on marriage, one of the people in attendance told of a young Christian husband who refused to do a simple household task his wife asked him to do. His defense: Doing so would require him to give up his “man-card.” Such a view, which stems from a wrong view of “headship” in marriage, is showing up with increasing frequency at Christian seminars and on blogs, veiled as a biblical view of masculinity. Women are instructed to “respond” positively to such demonstrations of “initiative.” Yet nowhere in the Bible do we find teaching that anywhere resembles this sort of behavior. Let’s…
