There were a series of rallies this past August that said a lot about the times in which we live. Women in nine cities gathered in public places to… go topless. In fact, the efforts were led by the group Go Topless whose director, Nadine Gary, states their goal like this: “It’s a matter of fairness. We want equal topless rights for all or none.”
But is it really a matter of equal rights that the fellas can take their shirts off and the ladies cannot? This question and the rallies they are producing are yet another example of how gender is one of the crisis issues of our time. Yes, it is a crisis. It is a crisis because our gender helps define who we are as people, and how we understand it deeply influences our understanding of God, the Gospel, and how we live our lives.
A Personal Realization
The question of gender exploded for me several years ago—not at a rally but at the knowledge that my wife and I were going to have a son. As I pondered the incredible responsibility that was coming, I couldn’t help thinking, “I’m having a son!… I will be pivotal in raising him to be a man… But wait! What does it mean to be a man?!”
Our culture offers a variety of images or icons expressing different views on what it means to be a man. See if these sound familiar:
The Gangsta Rapper
This is nothing against the generic musical genre of rap. This is about the guy who writes poems about how great he is, how he dominates women, and how he is going to thrash whoever is against him. It’s a false masculinity that lacks love, refuses to take a healthy responsibility for others, and is angry and defiant.
The Maxim Man
I hope this is not you, but a lot of men are reading the magazine Maxim, and it’s teaching men to “look right” and “act right” so that they can be rich with bling and take a horde of women to bed. At Maxim, you can even rank the hottest models. This is a false masculinity that promotes being smooth and intelligent—but only towards using others for your own pleasure.
Homer Simpson
I must admit that I’ve done my share of cracking up to The Simpsons. Even so, I must reject the view of masculinity it promotes because according to The Simpsons, masculinity is about being more stupid than your youngest child. It is passing out on the couch after your last Duff and doing whatever it takes to avoid responsibility. This is similar to “beer commercial man”, where you get guys like the idiot on the Coors Light commercial who thought his wife’s exclamation of “it’s blue!” was about his beer getting cold instead of her positive pregnancy test.
We cannot fall prey to these icons or even faint images of them. It would be to our shame.
Problems with choose-your-own masculinity
The other day, I was reading an article written by a student columnist from Iowa State who was asking the same question. I sensed disillusionment in her voice as I read her words. She wanted to define masculinity after encountering a magazine commercial which said that manhood was about drinking whiskey. A later interview claimed that, “masculinity has to do with capitalizing on the differences between men and women.” Unconvinced, she later settled for her own definition. She wrote,
Masculinity is not about difference. It’s not about money, chivalry, guns, or whiskey. It is about being a man, and by that I mean whatever man you are or choose to be.
This may be where many folks want to land on the subject, but this definition is simply not helpful. Candidly, such a view would mean that there is no such thing as transcendent masculinity at all. It says that being a man is relative—not absolute. And indeed, some would promote that gender is simply a matter of cultural conditioning or personal choice. Like a baseball card, if you don’t like yours you can simply trade it in for better alternative.
Really?
God talks about masculinity in His Book
But there’s another place we need to look for the answers to this incredibly important question. If gender exists in any transcendent way—if its definition and purposes are absolute—it will be because God made it so. And if God made it so, we can expect that gender will have meaning and value. And if it has meaning and value, we can expect that it will be worth knowing about, preserving, and celebrating. And if God has indeed created gender distinctives and created them as good, perhaps He has already revealed it and His purposes for it.
I believe that He has.
In the following posts, I will attempt to define masculinity according to the Bible, working out what it means in light of the Gospel. Call it Biblical Masculinity, if you will. I hope you find the blog series helpful. Please let me know your thoughts or questions, and I’ll interact with them as best I can.
4 Comments on "Biblical Masculinity"
This is gonna be a good one. I can feel it.
Amen, Jimmy. Looking frwd to it.
My husband needs to read this
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