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What Does Genesis 6 Have to Do with Male/Female Relationships?
What Does Genesis 6 Have to Do with Healthy Male/Female Friendships? Recently, I had a fascinating email interaction initiated by my friend Henry Rouse, a theologian in Australia, about the narrative in Genesis leading up to the Flood. The text in view seems to reveal something important about man and woman in God’s story. The text we discussed was not Genesis 1 (origin of humanity) nor Genesis 2 (the man’s nap, the woman’s creation) nor Genesis 3 (the Fall)—the usual pericopes from the book of Beginnings mentioned in conversations about men and women. Rather, we were talking about Genesis 6. I’ve combined our conversation into what follows, which includes work…
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“Touch Is a Human Thing”
An excerpt from my conversation with the late Eugene Peterson The late Eugene Peterson—poet, Presbyterian pastor, and parser of Semitic-language verbs, who died in 2018—was best known for The Message, a paraphrasing of the Bible into modern American English, complete with idioms. But he also authored some deeply wise books on ministry, some of which—like Under the Unpredictable Plant—number among my favorites. Dr. Peterson was a founding pastor of Christ Our King Presbyterian Church (PCUSA) in Bel Air, Maryland, where he served for twenty-nine years before becoming a professor of Spiritual Theology at Regent College in Vancouver, British Columbia. During his time at Regent, 1992–1998, I had the pleasure of interviewing him as part…
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What Is Intersex and What Does the Bible Say about It?
We see the acronym LGBTIQA, and we might not even know what every letter stands for. To have conversations with people who self-identify in any of the represented categories, we need some basic language for communication: The acronym LGBTIQA stands for: 1) "L" – lesbians 2) "G" – gays 3) "B" – bisexuals 4) "T" – transgender people 5) "I" – intersex people 6) "Q" – queer and questioning people 7) "A" – asexual people and allies (Notice “homosexual” is not on the list—many consider that word “Christianese.”) Recently, I have had conversations with Christian leaders who’ve told me, “I don’t even know what intersex is.” I also hear people…
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Is God More Male than Female? Why Did Messiah Have to Be a Man?
The gold ceiling in St. Mark's Basilica in Venice represents God the Father. Is God more male than female? Of course not. Nor is he more female than male. God is spirit (John 4:24), so God has no sex. Father and Son are metaphors, not sexual identities. The early church never depicted the Father as a male human. But later…well…consider the Sistine Chapel’s “The Creation of Adam.” Michelangelo painted the Father as an old man with white hair and a long beard. But in earlier centuries, it was considered heretical to portray the Father in human form at all. Only Jesus could be depicted in art, because he did indeed…
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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…
