Does gender* affect everything? Is biological sex the determining factor of our personalities, temptations, interests, and paths in life? God made me female—and that is no small thing. And yet, it’s not everything.
Katelyn Beaty, managing editor for Christianity Today, writes,
If mainstream culture reduces femaleness to a construct, church culture loads femaleness with a ‘universal essence’ not actually described in Scripture. If mainstream culture thinks gender roles are unimportant, church culture makes them too important.
When the culture proclaims that gender affects nothing, the church sometimes swings to the other side of the pendulum, proclaiming that gender affects everything.
Some women teachers, Jen Wilkin for example, remind women that we need to love God with our minds just as much as our emotions. In general, this topic needs to be addressed in the church. Women should be theologically educated (and I greatly respect Wilkin). But we must be careful not to take this generality and apply it to each individual Christian woman, as if we all struggle with the same temptations and those temptations spring solely from our gender.
I’ve never had an issue with loving God with my mind. If anything, I’ve tended to elevate my mind above my emotions—loving God only with my mind and forgetting my heart. This is why I usually steer clear of women’s Bible studies. There’s often the assumption that since I am a woman, I struggle to grasp intellectual matters and I am led by my emotions. Not only is this a stereotype, but this narrow picture of women ignores the men who are emotionally expressive. It doesn’t leave room for the vast array of personalities and giftings in the church. Different people have different bents and gender is not the sole determiner of that bent. So, while there are times and places to emphasize issues for a particular gender, it turns out that the struggle to love God with both mind and emotions is just a human problem.
We can become so desperate to parse out the differences between men and women that we forget our same calling to follow Christ. Beth Moore recently tweeted,
Relentless overemphasis on biblical manhood and womanhood—the constant pounding—will inevitably, inadvertently, cause us to attend more carefully to carrying our genders than carrying our crosses. Whether you’re male OR female, deny yourself, pick up your cross and follow Jesus.
Ironically, we display the glory of being male and female when we stop talking about biblical manhood/womanhood so much and simply focus on obeying Christ.
Since God purposefully made me a woman, I find it important to speak about issues that specifically pertain to women, and even more so to women in the church. However, I have no intention of making that all or even majority of what I speak about. For most of my Christian life, I haven’t wanted to speak on it at all. I’ve often found the talk around women’s roles annoying at best and crippling at worst. That isn’t to say my womanhood is inconsequential. But my every word and action is not a direct result of being female.
Beaty again writes,
As far as I can tell, I don’t edit with a feminine touch. I don’t keep a schedule, respond to emails, or read the news in a way that’s fundamentally different from that of male colleagues…I’ve concluded that any insistence that men and I do our jobs as editors in fundamentally different ways comes down to semantics.
It should go without saying, but women also enjoy speaking on and learning about topics other than gender. Yet, it often doesn’t seem the case at some conferences. There’s Christian conferences that minister primarily to men and then there’s women’s conferences that minister primarily to women. This assumes that men are the typical Christian and should learn about the whole counsel of God, while women should learn primarily through the lens of their womanhood. We then have men speak on Ephesians 1, evangelism, and Christology and we have women speak on a narrower set of topics pertaining to gender. This suggests, says Beaty, “that women need a particular type of Christian discipleship because women are very particular types of Christians, radically different in their spiritual needs than male Christians.”
So, being female is a significant part of who I am. But it doesn’t necessarily determine my intellectual or emotional capacity, my giftedness, or my interests. I’m wary of drawing hard lines from our biology to our personalities or our roles. So often this approach stifles women’s gifts and it doesn’t tend to leave room for nuance. Yes, gender matters. No, it’s not the sole lens through which we view the world.
*By gender, I mean the biological reality of being male or female.
Book/video recommendations on this topic:
- Katelyn Beaty– A Woman’s Place
- Dr. Elissa Weichbrodt, “A Thousand Subtle Artifices”: Art, Sex, and Gender https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fE90Tb5C07M
- Dr. Carole Yue, “Sex, Gender, Brains, and Cognition” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-f3I75TdKTM
Tindol
Thank you for carefully but boldly wading through this complex topic!