Q. What is Scripture’s basic teaching on the natural differences between men and women?
A: Scripture teaches “male and female he created them.” The essential scriptural teaching is that there is a sexual binary that exists within a created natural hierarchy. You can see this in the narrative of Genesis 1–3. In Genesis 2 you have the roots of male initiatory formation of family units. This biblical pattern gets rendered in different ways. American evangelicals label it complementarianism. Historic Protestants defined it as patriarchy, although that term isn’t a synonym for the way it gets used by modern folk Calvinists. What is essential is that there is male and female in the divinely created natural order — and that that which is male and female is not naturally or supernaturally interchangeable. Matthew 19 states that there is a necessary functional unity — sexual and social — that is formed by males and females. The Bible should chiefly be understood to teach that natural differences help form society. Male and female can’t be interchangeable because procreation and social formation rely on natural differences in the created order. There are inferential differences Christians have historically rendered from biblical texts, but the most basic difference defined by the Christian scriptures is a natural and unchangeable binary, male and female.
Q. What is the relation between the natural law and the natural differences of men and women?
A: Natural law picks up — for Christians at least — where Scripture leaves off. Historically Christians, including Protestants, understood that Scripture was not the only place that God revealed his teaching on the differences between men and women. In addition to Scripture, God reveals these differences in the created order. These natural differences, therefore, have been recognized by both Christian and other ancient thinkers. Clement of Alexandria argued, for example, that Greek philosophy was one of the rivers that prepared the Greeks eventually to receive the Christian gospel; and so Greek, and subsequently Roman, thinkers offered important understandings of natural law to the early Christian lexicon. For the ancients, the natural differences between men and women mattered. Men were naturally — cognitively and physically — built to do different sorts of things than women were. Men fight, and build, etc., while women were understood to take the lead in aspects of society that needed finesse. There’s a reason why even secular Americans will note that a home needs “a woman’s touch.” The ancients have been accused of ignoring or dehumanizing women; what is interesting is that the Jewish theocracy and later the early Christian church had capacious roles for women in ways that most ancient civilizations did not. One popular trope is that Christians revolutionized the place of women in Roman society. That’s overstated; one of the reasons Christians were able to make their case for being good citizens of the Empire — and they were — is precisely because there was not a massive disconnect between Roman natural law understandings of the place of women and the place of women in the early Christian church.
Q. How should natural differences between men and women inform their roles in the home, church, and society?
A: Natural differences taken seriously mean Christians take seriously the idea that men and women are created with aptitude that excel in particular social and religious spheres. Men are, overall, larger than women and have bodies that are oriented towards specific types of physical exertion. There are also cognitive differences between men and women that have vocational ramifications. What is difficult is that many Christians want a definite answer for exactly how men and women are supposed to interact with their naturally defined roles. For example, it is clear that women are supposed to be mothers and take a role in nurturing their children, but the Bible does not tell women exactly how to do that or what it might look like. Can a woman have a job “outside the home”? How should a woman nurture her children?, etc. Christians have understood that the state, guided historically by natural law, orients society and law so that men and women can fulfill their naturally appointed vocations. Men, for example, are drafted into armies, not women. Nature makes it clear why that is the case. Women physically and emotionally nurture babies because their bodies and their psycho-emotional framework — their very DNA — orients them to that pursuit. The question of the church is somewhat different because the church is a supernatural society in the way the home and broader society are not. That does not mean that natural law precepts do not guide some of what the church does; it just means that the church’s final formation and churchly authority is defined by specific scriptural texts in a way leadership in the home and society are not.
Q. Where is the Christian teaching of male-female natural differences most at odds with the prevailing narrative regarding men and women in the Western world?
A: In the past century an interesting shift has occurred. One hundred years ago, it was the church’s commitment to the supernatural — the Virgin Birth, the Miraculous, Original Sin, the reality of the spiritual world — that defined the antagonism between conservative Protestants and the liberalizing and secularizing zeitgeist of the 1920s United States. In the early twenty-first century, it is the natural teachings of the church that enrage the culture of the day. The mere claim that male and female are natural and not interchangeable is perceived as an assault on the unlimited autonomy to which modern Westerners believe they have a right. Perhaps the most difficult aspect of this question is the confrontation not so much with the church’s teaching, but with the state’s teaching. Historically, the state upheld long-time natural law frameworks of the male-female binary and oriented law towards that binary’s maintenance. The social maintenance of historic natural-law teachings on male and female was the province of the state, not the church. The state’s abdication of its duties has led to the reality where the church is, in some ways, trying to do the job of the state in taking the lead on teaching natural law to society. The extent to which the church — a spiritual and supernatural society whose mission is properly spiritual and supernatural — should take on the teaching of natural law is controversial, but it seems likely that as long as the state abdicates its responsibility, the laity will have no choice but to look elsewhere.
Q. What do you see is the greatest temptation or strongest challenge to Christian faithfulness with regard to male-female natural differences?
A: The greatest temptation stems from the church confusing the nature of its spiritual mission. All too often there is a tendency for “mission-minded” Christians to ignore natural teaching because they do not perceive it to have a spiritual consequence. This leads to situations wherein — in the interest of being loving — Christians treat certain natural teaching as adiaphora because it “doesn’t have anything to do with a person’s salvation,” etc. The Apostle Paul does not let people off the hook so easily, and in the sixth chapter of his first letter to the Corinthians, he anathematizes fornicators, thieves, adulterers, and other sexual deviants. This is not merely a situation where people being “bad” consigns them to hell. It means they give themselves over to certain sins to the extent they not only reject salvation, but they choose sins that so disorder their lives that they reject their basic humanity. Thinkers from Aristotle to Martin Luther and John Calvin warned about the consequences of rejecting nature; modern evangelicals’ weak doctrine of natural law and reduction of salvation to that which is merely spiritual have left them unable to understand how sinning against nature destroys souls and bodies. There is a very real temptation to ignore Christian natural teaching in the interest of being mission-minded, but the presentation of a gospel that does not deal with the embodied effects of sin is no more helpful than a gospel that does not deal with sinful souls.
Q. How can Christians employ the Christian view of men and women as a witness in the midst of cultural opposition?
A: This question seems to drive at an important question: is male and female teaching a vital part of the gospel, or is it necessary for the maintenance of the temporal — instead of spiritual — civil and political orders, or is it both? If it is both, does this mean there is a necessary biblical component to government? If there is a necessary biblical component, who decides the biblical teaching, etc.? This may seem like pedantry but it is actually important to understand the mission of the church, the mission of the state, and where they interact. Whose job is it to educate the populace on the social aspects of biblical teaching on male and female? Or is the idea that that which is social is also spiritual, which leads to the question, What is properly sacred and what is secular? Is theocracy necessary? I do not think so, but this question is as important to understand as what is rendered as biblical teaching on male and female. Yes, there is mass confusion about male and female in society; the question is however, whether it is the job of the church to rectify society’s confusion on that issue even as it is charged with saving souls. The church has some duty to address this teaching; it is in the Holy Scriptures after all. How the church is supposed to address this teaching vis-a-vis the state is as important a question to ask as if the church is supposed to do it.
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