11.23.2024. — Manhood, Sexual Ethics, Womanhood

Innate Differences Between Men and Women, Sexuality, and Christian Ethics

by Alan Branch

Editor’s Note: The following article appears in the Spring 2024 issue of Eikon.

Defining male and a female has become difficult for educated people. On March 23, 2022, the United States Senate was holding confirmation hearings for President Joe Biden’s nominee to the Supreme Court, Judge Ketanji Jackson. Tennessee Senator Marsha Blackburn asked Judge Jackson, “Can you provide a definition for the word ‘woman’”? To which Jackson said, “Can I provide a definition? No.” She added, “I’m not a biologist.”[1] Many have noted that a good follow-up question would have been, “Judge Jackson, are you a woman?” Jackson was confirmed by the Senate and is now a Supreme Court Justice. She has both her undergraduate and law degrees from Harvard, and yet she still does not know how to define “woman.” Contrary to Justice Jackson, the gender binary is clearly defined by innate differences between males and females, and these differences point to the profound importance of Christian sexual ethics.

Males and females are identified by innate differences. Males have one X and one Y sex chromosome, while females have two X sex chromosomes. Males have genitalia and external reproductive organs consistent with males, while females have genitalia and internal reproductive organs consistent with females. During puberty, males and females develop separate secondary sex characteristics.[2]

These innate differences between males and females were created by God for the purpose of glorifying himself through all people. Genesis 1:27 declares, “God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.” The threefold repetition of the verb “create” amplifies God’s activity in designing the sexual binary. Some suggest Genesis 1:27 is possibly an embedded poem within the creation account, with lines one and two in chiastic arrangement and the last line as an explication.[3] Such an arrangement accentuates the importance of sexual differentiation and identity for God’s image bearers.  Oliver O’Donovan explains, “One can express the Christian perspective like this: the either-or of biological maleness and femaleness to which the human race is bound is not a meaningless or oppressive condition of nature; it is the good gift of God, because it gives rise to possibilities of relationship in which the polarities of masculine and feminine, more subtly nuanced than the biological differentiation, can play a decisive part.”[4]

The binary of male and female is the essential starting point for understanding God’s purposes for sex. Much modern confusion regarding sexual ethics flows from faulty notions of human origins. From a secular and naturalistic perspective, the binary of male and female is a direct product of evolution by natural selection; the struggle for reproductive success drives males and females down different evolutionary paths.[5]  From this perspective, if gender differences have no transcendent purpose, then the sexual choices we make have no ultimate purpose either. Helmut Thielicke saw the flaws of this view and said, “He who no longer knows what man is, also cannot know what it is on which his peculiarity as a sexual being is based.”[6] Indeed, our culture no longer knows what it means to be human in general, or male or female in particular. With human origins left to random time and chance, one’s sexual ethics become just as random.

Avant-garde sexual ethics are welded to the progressive bifurcation of sex and gender into separate ontological categories; sex is used in reference to biological differences, while gender refers to the continuum of complex psychosocial self-perceptions, attitudes, and expectations people have about members of both sexes, behavior, lifestyle, and life experience.[7].

A clever modernist will grant the Christian insistence on the biological binary between male and female, but then argue that one’s subjective gender identity is a completely separate matter with no necessary connection to one’s own body. And separating one’s subjective identity from one’s embodied reality results not only in psychological dissonance but profound confusion regarding sexual ethics. If gender identity is divorced from concrete reality, then sexual ethics become subjective and divorced from God’s moral boundaries.

Scripture does not bifurcate sex and gender. The uniform witness of Scripture is that a person should conform his or her gender expression to the body. Specifically, Christian sexual ethics are grounded in the design God has for the body, a point central to Paul’s critique of homosexuality in Romans 1:24–27. In this passage, Paul uses the words for male and female taken from the LXX of Genesis 1:27, a point certainly not lost on his original audience. Sexual ethics cannot be bifurcated from the design of the body; neither our own self-chosen gender identity nor our own autonomous sexual ethics are to be superimposed on our bodies. Instead, we surrender to God’s design for our bodies in both areas.

Secularists who reject the gender binary insist gender itself is merely a social construct. Social construction is an epistemological theory which claims that characteristics typically thought to be immutable and solely biological — such as gender, race, class, ability, and sexuality—are products of human definition and interpretation shaped by cultural and historical contexts.[8] Social Constructionism rejects the biblical concept of innate differences between males and females and contends that the categories of “man and woman” are created, modified, and replicated through institutions like the church to advance male privilege. For instance, feminist Shulamith Firestone argued that overturning these social constructs was central to ending male privilege and insisted “the end goal of feminist revolution must be . . . not just the elimination of male privilege but of sex distinction itself: genital differences between human beings would no longer matter culturally.”[9]

But innate differences between males and females do exist, and these differences profoundly matter because God designed them. Denial of the gender binary encourages misogyny. Why? Because the same worldview that denies essential differences between men and women denies essential boundaries for sexual ethics. When the Creator is abandoned, sexual ethics becomes “red, tooth and claw,” and women become prey for predatory men. The innate differences between men and women matter because they are real and cannot be easily swept away by wishing that things were different.


[1] Myah Ward, “Blackburn to Jackson: Can You Define ‘the Word Woman’?” Politico, March 22, 2022, https://www.politico.com/news/2022/03/22/blackburn-jackson-define-the-word-woman-00019543.

[2] It is not my purpose here to address disorders of sexual development.

[3] Kenneth A. Matthews, Genesis 1 – 11:26, The New American Commentary, vol. 1a (Nashville: Broadman, 1996), 173.

[4] Oliver O’Donovan, Transsexualism and Christian Marriage, Grove Booklet on Ethics, no. 48 (Bramcote: Grove Books, 1982), 7.

[5] Northern Arizona University, “Sexual Dimorphism,” https://www2.nau.edu/~gaud/bio300b/sexdi.htm.

[6] Helmut Thielicke, The Ethics of Sex, John W. Doberstein, trans. (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), 20. Thielicke used many of the same interpretations of Genesis 1–3 which egalitarians use today (and which I reject), but he is strong at this one specific point.

[7] Chiara RealeFederica InvernizziCeleste Panteghini, and Barbara Garavaglia, “Genetics, Sex, and Gender,” Journal of Neuroscience Research 101.5 (2023): 553–562.

[8] Miliann Kang, Donovan Lessard, Laura Heston, and Sonny Nordmarken, Introduction to Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Libraries, 2017), 35.

[9] Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003; 1970), 11.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
  • Alan Branch

    Alan Branch is Professor of Christian Ethics at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. He is the author of Born This Way? Homosexuality, Science and Scripture and Affirming God’s Image: Addressing the Transgender Question with Science and Scripture.

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