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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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Is It Unfeminine to Be Strong?
Last month while doing some research in Italy, I went with my family to visit the catacombs in Rome. Much of what I saw moved me. But the most inspiring part of all was hearing a story about a strong woman. Our guide pointed to a sculpture memorializing Cecilia, whose bones had once rested in that place. Apparently Cecilia was born in Rome of wealthy parents about the year A.D. 200. She had such zeal for the Christian faith that when her parents coerced her into marriage with Valerian, Cecilia counseled her bridegroom on their wedding night to go to Bishop Urban to be baptized. Valerian converted, and shared the…
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The Mother Heart of God
Two days ago we observed Mother’s Day in the US. I think Mother’s Day matters to God because mothers matter to God. And I think mothers matter to God beyond their necessity for bringing new life into the world, but because women reflect an aspect of God’s heart in ways men cannot. Every aspect of our femininity, it seems to me, comes from God originally. He made females in His image with the feminine attributes and strengths that come straight from the Father heart of God. The essence of our femininity is expressed in two main ways: responding and nurturing. One of the most wonderful promises in God’s word says,…
