On this episode of the Evangelists Podcast, we're continuing to look at some big questions that often crop up when talking about issues of faith. This week we're gonna look at the subject of gender.
SPEAKER_00The Evangelist Podcast from Revival. Find out what's new in telling people the good news about God, the world, and you with Andy Brinkley and Glenn Scriver.
SPEAKER_01Welcome back to the Evangelist Podcast. Now we've looked at other religions, suffering, science, and now we're gonna look at gender, Glenn.
SPEAKER_02Yes, why are you looking at me?
SPEAKER_01Glenn, when we're looking at the subject of gender, God is perceived as a man, Jesus is a man, the Holy Spirit is referred to as a he. Is the Bible biased towards men?
SPEAKER_02Um I think absolutely Christians believe in the equality of the sexes and and and believe it at a really deep level, um, I think as we'll see. So right at the beginning, the God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in Genesis one says, Let us make humanity in our own image, and he makes them male and female. In order to picture what God's like, God makes humanity as these differently gendered, different people who are distinct but equal and bound together in love, and you know, between man and male and female, they're meant to be fruitful and multiply and and produce a third sort of thing. And so the way that God's life is imaged, is pictured in the world, is with male and female, so female absolutely integral to the divine image that sets humanity apart from everyone else. So so right from page one of the Bible, uh, women are given the exact same equal dignity as men in terms of you know uh the image of God. And then if we leapfrog over you know centuries and come to you know Jesus in the in the New Testament, I was um just having a look at uh John four earlier today, and and um John is speaking to this woman in Samaria, and of course we read that and we think, well, look, they're just passing the time of day. And yet, uh interestingly, John 4 verse 27, just then Jesus' disciples returned and were surprised to find him talking with a woman. And all of a sudden, you put yourself in sort of first century Jewish sandals, and you think this is shocking. But then you read the rest of the gospels and you see Jesus is always talking with women, teaching women, the there are you know women in in his wider group of disciples who sit at his feet, who he teaches who support him in his ministry financially, who he touches publicly, and and all these sorts of things which for us in the twenty-first century that's that's nothing. Absolutely radical Jesus' approach to to women, and we we roll forward in the New Testament and we see all these named prominent women like Lydia and Tabitha and Philip's daughters and Priscilla. Uh we get to Galatians 3, verse 28, is it? Um there is in Christ Jesus there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for we are all one in Christ Jesus. So absolute equality there. And I think interestingly, affirming the equality of the sexes is basically of the same order of affirming the equality of Jesus with his father. So if you if you go to 1 Corinthians eleven, Paul makes this really interesting parallel between the head of every man is Christ, the head of the woman, or it could be the wife is the husband or the man, and the head of Christ is God. So what's going on there is he's saying there is a a head-body relationship between the father and son, and there's a head body relationship between husbands and wives. And just as it is a heresy to say that the son is less equal to the father, so it is an equivalent heresy to say that women are not equal to men. It goes very deep, I think.
SPEAKER_01You had an interesting conversation once on the doorstep when some uh was it Jehovah's Witnesses came and uh talked to him.
SPEAKER_02Tell us that story. Interesting, it was it was this very verse. Um they came to the doorstep and they started talking about Jesus things, and I started talking about Jesus things, and and they they picked up that I was referring to the Trinity and they said, Ah, the Trinity. Um Paul refutes the idea of the Trinity in one Corinthians eleven. I said, Does he really? Let's so let's, you know, we went to the our Bibles, I got my Bible out, and and I read, you know, this verse. Uh the head of every man is Christ, the head of the woman is man, the head of Christ is God, and they said, Exactly, God is greater than Christ. I said, Well, the parallel here is that God is to Christ as men are to women. And he agreed to that, and I said, So do you think that my wife is an inferior being to me? And uh he got the logic, he got the logic of of of this verse, but he was driven by his beliefs to say, Yes, that my wife is an inferior being to me. And this really shocked. There was a woman doing some evangelism with him. She was on the doorstep with him, and she looked at him and and the colour drained out of her face, and she was what? and her jaw was hitting the floor. And I said, Let me get this, let me get this straight. You're saying that just as God is is superior to Christ, so I am superior to my wife. And he said, Um, well, you call the shots, don't you? I said, You don't know my wife. But it's it was a real eye-opener that what you believe about God translates to what you believe about gender. Um and right at the heart of the Christian confession of faith is that Jesus is utterly equal to the Father in just the same way women are utterly equal to men.
SPEAKER_01So we're exactly the same.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, well that's the that's the thing. Um are we the same uh as as each other? And uh obviously anyone who's actually met a member of the opposite sex would say no. Um we're not the same at all, in the same way that Jesus isn't the same person as the Father. He is the Son, and he's always sent by the Father, and he never sends the Father, and and they're not they're not identical twins. It's father and son. There's distinction. And in the same way, men and women are are very different. And anyone who tries to negate that or blur the distinctions just comes a crop, really, because we we just are irreducibly concretely different, men and women. And so obviously that that leads to a big issue when we're talking about equality. Because how do you make different people equal? It's very e it's very easy to make identical twins equal. So, you know, how would I have a race, an equal race with Usain Bolt? Now you might think, okay, if you want an equality of outcome, then Usain Bolt can can run two hundred metres and I wanna run one hundred metres, and we might just about have an equal race at that s at that stage. But that's in another sense, that's very unequal, very unfair. Why should he have to run two hundred metres? And so at some level, some kind of inequality has to come in. And these sorts of issues are absolutely rife when you talk about equality. You could you could just treat everybody the same, but then you've got kind of a steamroller kind of thing. And you just steamroller all differences. Or you could basically have the same set of circumstances for everybody, but then you'll end up with a ladder. Some will end up higher than others and some lower than others. And so if we're just about equality, we steamroll the di the differences. If we're just about distinctions, we'll have a ladder and we'll have hierarchy. So how do you have a kind of equality that's also uh honors distinctions? And well, I I think actually, because Christians believe in Trinity, w we have a unique way of coming at the question and and hopefully can provide some solutions in terms of equality and difference.
SPEAKER_01So what kind of equality do we believe in?
SPEAKER_02Uh yeah. Well, again, I think the ways of seeing God will leaves lead to ways of seeing gender, so that if I see God as just a single solitary individual, you know, like like Allah, for instance, if I if I see God like that, then anything that is different to Allah is lesser than Allah and is inferior. And so, interestingly in Islamic theology, creation is this lesser thing, you know, the world's created order is is this lesser, less real thing. And interestingly also women, you ought to veil women and put them out of sight, out of mind, they they are lesser, inferior. Because if you've got this vision of of what God is like, then God is just ultimate and supreme and everything else just is lesser. Uh on the other hand, if you believe just in a kind of an uh a purely evolutionary account of the world, if ultimate reality is not the you know this single unitarian god, if it's basically time and chance and survival of the fittest, then essentially everything's always changing. One thing's evolving into another thing, into another thing. So there's no there's there's no distinctions in that sense. And in that way, my gender becomes this infinitely plastic kind of thing, and I can I can change who I am. But I I suppose what a good biblical Christian understanding of of equality is, is not the not the Unitarian thing and not the purely evolutionary thing. It's a Trinitarian thing in which different people uphold one another in bonds of of love and outdo each other in showing honour to one another. So that actually the way that for instance the father is head of the son is that he commits everything into his son's hands and says, Go and accomplish everything for me. And the way that the son uh honours his father is is again by saying, Not my will but yours be done. And and the way that the spirit kind of affirms the other is is by being the spirit of the father and the son and and in in in that serving way.
SPEAKER_01Aaron Ross Powell Glen, regarding gender in the church, it is a sensitive subject and and people do have, you know, very passionate views about it. How do we approach talking about different roles for men and women in marriage or or in the church?
SPEAKER_02One thing to say is that in the history of the church, there have almost always been more women in church than men. And it's always been uh a very affirming thing for women down through the ages, uh to be to be in church and and and certainly down through the ages, women have found church to be a place where they are affirmed and loved and honored and welcomed. In terms of the r the role of let's say, pastor or in an Anglican setting, vicar or or that or that kind of thing. I think one of the problems has been in a an authoritarian church structure where basically such positions are thought of as the privileged ones and the powerful ones, rather than positions of of being the chief servant um in various congregations. So, I mean that that's that's one problem that, you know, with or without the gender issue is is a problem and has been a problem in the church. Many Christians see no barrier to any role within the church because of gender. Some Christians do believe that there are there are definite roles within the church. But I think before anyone was able to call that sexist, I think you'd want to sit long and hard and and ask is every distinction in role always meaning a a distinction in status? And it shouldn't be. And you know, th there are loads of ways that in churches men lord it over women and that's a terrible thing, and an unbiblical and unchristian thing. But to simply say that because there are distinct roles, therefore that's a distinct status to people. Actually Christianity has a very developed understanding of distinction in role and equality in being that is able to handle that, and you'd have to sit long and hard with a Christian to before you could accuse them of being sexist, I think.
SPEAKER_01In all of this, I see how things could go very badly if it was just one gender or just another you know, the other gender. Somehow in God's design, he's he's a planned it so that both genders uh mutually complement each other. Yeah. Most particularly within within marriage.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. There's that lovely thing in Genesis 2 uh where the Lord says to Adam, I will make a helper suitable for you. And first of all, the word helper doesn't mean oh daddy's little helper, like a an inferior thing. So often in the Bible, the Lord is my helper, you know, God is our helper. Um so it's it's not at all meant to imply inferiority, but a a helper suitable for the man, and and you could translate that as opposite to the man. You know, she's she's opposite to him, she's his complement. And I think in in marriage you see that beautifully, really. So I'm I'm about to preach at a wedding in a couple of weeks, and the text that I'm preaching from is Ephesians chapter five, which talks about this complementarity between the husbands, love your wives just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her. And it says to wives, wives, submit to your husbands, just as the church submits to Christ. So you've got this wonderful picture, it's a gospel picture of husbands being called to be like Jesus, to sacrifice everything, to bleed bleed for their wives if if if need be, to give their lives in every kind of way, and for wives to receive that love, just as the church needs to to receive Christ and receive his love and and his direction in that sense. So you've got this wonderful complementarity when it's working right. And I think in the Lord's design, I think that is a beautiful repair or redemption of the way we get gender wrong. Because we get I mean, what it what is the natural couple? The the natural sort of couple that we see in the culture and you know, we see it in churches as well as outside churches. You see this good for nothing man who is, you know, in front of Dave watching old reruns of Top Gear. You know, he's part man, part sofa, just, you know, drool coming down the chin. And there's Don't know what you mean. Don't know what you're talking about. And the and his wife, let's call her no, I won't his wife is there tapping her foot and trying to nag him into submission. You know, isn't that's kind of how gender gets perverted outside of the gospel. You've got either very weak men who don't step up or men who use the their authority violently and and and just are not Christ-like in that way. And then on the other hand, you have women who, because they're men, are good for nothings, have to nag and take control and and that kind of thing. And you and you get that sort of ugly dynamic going on. But I think if you sit down with the Bible and and sit down in in church community and look around, hopefully it's some good pictures of of male-female complementarity, you start to see a flourishing, you start to see a freedom, you start to see good news as men like Christ, hopefully, are giving their lives for their wives, and wives are are feeling affirmed and loved, not because of what they do or contribute, but you know, simply because husbands are honouring them in that in that way. And I think when you see Christian marriage really flying, I think that's when you start to see a picture of what God intends for male-female complementarity.
SPEAKER_01Well, Glenn, that's a a good point. We'll uh stop there and and carry on a bit more next time, uh, talking about sex and sexuality, which kind of leads on from this. So that's what we'll be talking about next time. Thanks for listening to the Evangelist Podcast. I hope you like listening each week. If so, we would really appreciate a rating and a review on iTunes. Currently we have no reviews yet. It's very easy. We've got a link that forwards to the podcast page on iTunes. Just go to revivalmedia.org slash iTunes. That should take you directly to the podcast page on iTunes where you can leave us a review. We'd be very happy if you could do that. And I thought I'd also make a an extra offer to you as well, uh, of a book, not a download or a link, but yes, a real glossy booklet you can hold in your hand. It's called Is Anybody Out There? Written by John Blanchard. It's all about answering questions. Questions such as why am I here? Would it matter if I'd never been born? Does life need to have any meaning? And these questions often lead to deeper ones, such as, is there anything beyond our universe, or is there a greater intelligence? So this booklet uh explores these issues. It's a nice A5, it's a great one for you, or you can give to a friend, perhaps you know who's asking these questions. To receive a copy, just go to the contact details on the web address for this episode. It's revivalmedia.org slash TEP ten. Where you can simply get in touch with us. You can also leave a comment on this specific show, perhaps if you have any questions or comments about this particular episode. That's revivalmedia.org slash TEP ten.