To understand what it means to be male and female, we must listen to all five acts of the biblical drama.
My younger son once asked me why people don’t get as excited about Pentecost as they do about Christmas and Easter. He thinks we should send up fireworks on Pentecost. (“After all, that’s when God sent fire down, isn’t it?”) I agree. Pentecost is an exciting act of the biblical drama. Peter explained it as a fulfillment of Joel’s prophecy:
And in those last days it shall be, God declares, that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams; yea, and on my manservants and my maidservants in those days I will pour out my Spirit; and they shall prophesy. (Acts 2:17–18)
Pentecost is the fourth act in the five-act biblical drama—Creation, Fall, redemption, Pentecost, and renewal. To understand the biblical meaning of male and female, we must read act 4 first, before we tackle the earlier scenes. In the first chapter of Acts we read that just before he ascended into heaven, Jesus told his disciples to wait in Jerusalem until they received power to become his witnesses. Significantly, both women and men waited in prayer for this promised coming of the Holy Spirit.
Pentecost has sometimes been called “women’s emancipation day” because of women’s inclusion with men in the outpouring of the Spirit. Before, it had been the Jewish custom to recognize only males as full members of the community through the sign of circumcision. After Pentecost, the church baptized men and women alike. Before, it was considered at best unnecessary and at worst scandalous for women to study the Scriptures beside men in the synagogue. Now they broke bread and participated in worship services with the men. Before, women’s freedom of movement was rigidly restricted because of the rabbinic assertion that public contact between nonmarried women and men was bound to produce lust. Now women assumed positions of leadership even in mixed gatherings and were acknowledged and praised by Paul at various points in his letters.
It is important to remember that not only did the barriers between men and women come tumbling down after Pentecost; so did those separating Jews from non-Jews and slaves from free persons. “You are all one in Christ Jesus” is how Paul summarized it (Gal. 3:28).
Kari Malcolm has pointed out that whenever the church has been in a state of revival—a “mini-Pentecost”—arguments about which sex should do what seem to recede into the background. At other times men and women alike seem to regress to a pre-Pentecost anxiety about gender roles and become preoccupied with details concerning headship and submission. The terrible irony of this regression (often rationalized as a “return” to the most important requirements of Scripture) is captured by Malcolm’s comment on it: “We have a world to win for Christ. The ship is sinking, and we [stand] on the shore arguing about who should go to the rescue, men or women.”
In light of Pentecost, we are all called to proclaim the lordship of Christ and the healing and hope he offers, so that through active witness and self-sacrificing service our fellow sinners may be drawn to God and share in the building up of his kingdom. All other callings—whether as wife or husband, married or single, clergy or laity—are secondary offices within this larger calling. A Christian is a saved one who is Spirit-filled in order to become a sent one. Women and men are thus equally saved, equally Spirit-filled, and equally sent. This does not imply, however, that there are no differences between men and women.
Act 1: Created In God’S Image
Throughout the Bible we are told that all persons are made “in the image of God” (see Gen. 1:26–27; 5:1; 9:6; Jas. 3:9). Yet nowhere does the Bible give us an exact list of characteristics that make us like God. Scholars have differed as to what these qualities might be. I am going to focus on two that I believe to be of particular importance for our understanding of sex and gender, namely, sociability and accountable dominion.
The account of humankind’s creation begins in Genesis 1 with the following words: “Then God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, after our own likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.’ So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them” (vv. 26–27).
Strikingly, God refers to himself in the plural. This may be our first hint about the existence of the Trinity—the God/Logos/Spirit through whom all things are created and sustained. If God is a social tri-unity whose image is in all persons, then it comes as no surprise to read in Genesis 2 that it is “not good” for the man to be alone. So God creates the woman. Like God, both men and women are intrinsically social.
A second thing is immediately apparent in Genesis 1:26–27. Not only are both male and female created in God’s image as social beings, but both are given dominion over the rest of creation. Man and woman are told to fill the earth and subdue it, to be fruitful and multiply, and to have dominion over every other living thing.
Act 2: Trouble In Paradise
Both human sociability and dominion over the earth were to be exercised within limits set by God alone. But the man and woman exceeded those limits. Led astray by a rebel angel in disguise, the woman abused her dominion by eating of “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil” (Gen. 2:17). The man, in turn, abused his sociability by accepting some of the fruit from her even though he knew that their unity as man and woman was not to supersede their obedience to God. From then on, the creation love story, with its intended mutuality and equality, goes sadly awry. Genesis 3 tells us how.
First of all, the woman and man hide from each other. Their differing sexuality is now a source of self-consciousness rather than delight, and so they clothe their bodies. Then they hide from God. And when God finds them and questions the man about his disobedience, the man first blames God (for giving him the woman in the first place), then blames the woman (for giving him the fruit). Only then does he reluctantly confess, “And I ate” (Gen. 3:12). The woman, on the other hand, tries to pass the buck to the serpent, completely ignoring her husband in her confession.
We read in Genesis 3 what features of that outcome they shared. They were banished from the garden with the prospect of painful labor while reproducing the race and feeding it, with death as their final outcome. But for our purposes, one consequence needs to be understood in greater detail. God announces to Eve in Genesis 3:16: “I will greatly multiply your pain in child-bearing; in pain you shall bring forth children, yet your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.”
Biblical scholar Gilbert Bilezikian concludes that in Genesis 3:16 the woman is being warned that she will experience an unreciprocated longing for intimacy with the man.
[The woman’s] desire will be for her husband, so as to perpetuate the intimacy that had characterized their relationship in paradise lost. But her nostalgia for the relation of love and mutuality that existed between them before the fall, when they both desired each other, will not be reciprocated by her husband. Instead of meeting her desire, he will rule over her.… [In short], the woman wants a mate and she gets a master; she wants a lover and she gets a lord; she wants a husband and she gets a hierarch.
Now let’s first be clear about what is not being said here. It is not the case that positive, mutual interdependence between man and woman totally disappeared after the Fall. We are still created in God’s image, even though this image is distorted. Nor is it the case that being a “master” or “lord” is totally against the creation order. Human abuse of power is possible only because we were originally given that power by God—to exercise accountable dominion over the creation.
But what I take God to be saying in Genesis 3:16 is that as a result of the Fall there will be a propensity in men to let their dominion run wild, to impose it in cavalier and illegitimate ways not only on the earth and on other men, but also upon the person who is bone of his bones and flesh of his flesh—upon the helper corresponding to his very self. Legitimate, accountable dominion all too easily becomes male domination.
This is not to say that all men at all times behave this way toward all women. But it does mean that there is something akin to a congenital flaw in males that makes it all too easy for them to assume that they have a right to dominate women. However, this is not the end of our exegesis of Genesis 3:16.
Although there is something creationally right about the woman’s desire for intimacy with the man, Genesis 3:16 warns us that this desire has become distorted by sin. The peculiarly female sin is to use the preservation of relationships as an excuse not to exercise accountable dominion in the first place. Thus, the woman’s analog of the man’s congenital flaw, in light of Genesis 3:16, is the temptation to avoid taking risks that might upset relationships.
Despite the progressive removal of external, legal barriers to women’s achievement, many psychologists have noted with distress that women still seem to have enormous internal barriers to overcome. The titles of best-selling books that have been written on this subject are very telling: Sweet Suffering: Woman as Victim, Women Who Love Too Much, Why Do I Think I Am Nothing Without a Man?, and perhaps most telling of all, in light of Genesis 3:16, Men Who Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them.
These authors have done a remarkable job of documenting some of the empirical effects of Genesis 3:16, at least on the psychological level. But they share with many other psychologists the error of trying to reduce such problems to the way women have been socialized. They do not realize (or refuse to admit) that something much deeper is at work: something that cannot finally be eradicated by psychotherapy or by institutional change, however important both of these may be.
By way of summary, it seems that the effects of Genesis 3:16 reflect the peculiar way in which each party sinned in the garden. The man and the woman were equally created for sociability and dominion. But in reaching out to take the fruit, the woman overstepped the bounds of accountable dominion. As a consequence, her sociability was mixed with the problem of social enmeshment, which continues to hamper the proper exercise of her dominion in the world at large. By contrast, the man, in accepting the fruit from his wife, overstepped the bounds of human social unity. As a consequence, his legitimate, accountable dominion became laced with the problem of domination, which has been interfering with his relationships—to God, to the creation, and to other people, including women—ever since. In each case, the punishment seems to fit the original crime.
Acts 3 And 4: Redemption And Renewal
In Biblical Affirmations of Women, religion scholar Leonard Swidler compiled close to 100 pages of Bible passages on Jesus’ teachings about men and women. Considered together, they show that it was Christ’s clear intention to reverse the consequences of Genesis 3:16. Since we now take for granted the rights women have achieved, it is difficult for us to realize how revolutionary Jesus’ teaching on men and women sounded to his hearers. The writings of the period show that the Jews of Jesus’ time had an overwhelmingly negative attitude toward women—an attitude that the women, moreover, seemed to accept, since to do otherwise would be to risk having no place in the community whatever. Throughout the Old Testament period, Genesis 3:16 was working itself out in predictable fashion.
Into this setting came a rabbi who almost never told a parable using male images and activities without also using a parallel one involving women. To a culture that allowed easy divorce and even polygamy for men, but not women, he insisted on monogamy and the elimination of divorce. (His disciples were so stunned by this teaching that they suggested it would be easier not to marry at all!) To a culture that was obsessed with blood ties, and in which barren women were a disgrace, he taught that the family of God was so much more important that it might even divide parents from children. In a culture that refused to recognize women as teachers or as witnesses in court, he allowed women to be the first witnesses of his resurrection and a woman to proclaim that event to his male disciples. The list could go on and on. Over the course of the four Gospels, there is a total of 633 verses in which Jesus refers to women, and almost none of these is negative in tone.
Significantly, those that are negative seem mostly to rebuke women who, in the wake of Genesis 3:16, are caught up in the problem of social enmeshment. Jesus tells Martha of Bethany that being busy in the kitchen over food is not as good a choice as sitting at the master’s feet learning. He chides his mother for trying to make him place blood ties before kingdom ties. To the woman in the crowd who cries out to him, “Blessed is the womb which bore you, and the breasts which nursed you!” he quickly replies, “Blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and keep it” (Luke 11:27–28).
Already in his earthly ministry, Jesus is setting men and women up for the “emancipation proclamation” of Pentecost. But if Christ preached a clear reversal of the effects of Genesis 3:16, and if Pentecost empowered the early church to overcome them, why are there still so many problems surrounding gender and sex in the lives of Christians as well as everyone else?
Theologian Oscar Cullmann compared the period between Pentecost and Christ’s final return with the period between D-day and V-day of World War II. By D-day, everyone knew that the turning point of the war had come; the Allies would win. But between that day and the surrender of the German army, some of the most vicious fighting of the war took place, with many casualties. It was as if Hitler, furious that his defeat was inevitable, wanted to drag the whole of European civilization down with him. The present period in salvation history is like that. Our “ancient foe,” the Devil, knows he has been defeated by Christ’s death and resurrection, but still “seeks to work us woe.” And the more Christians can be kept from acting like post-Pentecost men and women, the less effective will be their witness to the world around them and the less likely will others be to respond to God’s offer of salvation.
We cannot, in such a situation, always be at our Pentecostal best, in gender relations or any other area. Our full healing awaits the fifth act of the biblical drama, the inauguration of the new heaven and the new earth. But in Francis Schaeffer’s words, we are called to set up “pilot plants,” or self-conscious attempts to work out the implications of our salvation in every area of life, whether that be science, the arts, politics, technology, or relations between women and men.
At the same time we are not to grow triumphalistic. Christians are not to assume that, because they have accepted God’s salvation and are well intentioned, they can get everything figured out once and for all. For this, too, can be a trick of the Devil; it can blind us to the sin that remains and make us resistant to reforms that may be desperately needed. Still, substantial healing is possible between D-day and V-day, during this time between the times.
