American Protestant theologians during the nineteenth and the first half og the twentieth centuries almost without exception did not include in their systematic theologies any section concerning man and woman, presumably because the topic was not deemed to be germane to or essential for systematic theology.
Karl Barth and Emil Brunner did give serious attention to the subject of man and woman in their systematic theologies, especially in the context of the image of God in human beings, and their treatments may have stimulated other theologians to include the topic in their systems.
I. BIBLICAL PASSAGES#
A. OLD TESTAMENT#
In the firs creation acount God is said to have created human beings as male and female (Gen. 1:27). According to the second creation account, the man’s need for a “helper” was genuine, God formed woman (‘issa) from a rib of man (‘is), and the intended pattern was set forth: “Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and cleaves to his wife, and they become one flesh” (Gen. 2:18, 20b-24). The creation of “man” as “male and female” and in “the likeness of God” was reiterated in Gen. 5:1-2.
The seventh commandment in the Jewish and Reformed sequence was: “You shall not commit adultery” (Exod. 20:14). The Mosaic allowance of a “bill of divorce” was described in Deut. 24:1-4. The good wife and mother was described and celebrated in Prov. 31:10-32, esp. vv10-12, 28-31/
B. NEW TESTAMENT#
According to Paul, the unity of believers in Christ transcends the diversity of maleness and femaleness (Gal. 3:28). The same apostle advised the Corinthians Christians “It is good for a man not to marry. But since there is so much immorality, each man should have his own wife, and each woman her own husband” (1 Cor. 7:1b-6).
It is good for the unmarried and for widows to remain unmarried, but they should marry if they have not self-control. The separating wife should either remain unmarried or be reconciled to her husband, and he should not divorce her (1 Cor. 7:10-11). A believer should stay married to an unbelieving spouse if the spouse should be willing, but if the unbelieving spouse should leave, the believer “is not bound” (1 Cor. 7:12-16).
Paul encouraged virgins to remain single because of the shortness of time and because those who are single can be more undividedly devoted to “the Lord’s affair” (1 Cor. 7:25-35). Marriage is acceptable, but the single life may be even a better choice (1 Cor. 7:36-38). Even so widows are free to marry believing men (1 Cor. 7:39-40). Paul based his instruction that believing women, but not men, should be veiled when they pray or prophesy in public on the principle that the man is “head” of the woman and “woman is the glory of man”, woman being made “from” man and “for” man (1 Cor. 11:2-16).
Having rebuked sexual immorality among believers (Eph. 5:3-7), Paul called for mutual submission of spouses and then admonished wives to be submissive to their husbands as their “head”, even as the church submits to Christ, and husbands to have self-giving love for their wives, even “as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her” (Eph. 5:21-33). A similar admonition was given in Col. 3:18-19, and in Tit. 2:4-5 young women were instructed to love their husbands and children and to be submissive to their husbands.
A comparable wife-husband instruction was given in 1 Pet. 3:1-7, execept that it called upon wives not to major on outward adornments and to live in such a manner that their unbelieving husbands may come to believe in Christ.
II. THEOLOGICAL INTERPRETATION#
The issues raised and the insights gained concerning man and woman during the history of Christian doctrine can be combined with the contemporary issues and teachings in a single coordinated treatment.
A. MALENESS/FEMALENESS AND THE IMAGE OF GOD#
The differentiation and relationship of man and woman, particularly as husband and wife, even as Karl Barth himself acknowledged, is not to be equated fully with the imago Dei. The man/woman differentiation/relationship with its sex polarity is not the totality of human distinctiveness, though it is indeed part of it.
The true and desired relationship between husband and wife points to the reality of “existence in community”, or fellowship, in contrast to the reality of utter individualism. In order to be able to love, “man’s has to breated as a pair of human beings”. Creation as male and female is the natural basis for potentially the truest I-thou relation among human beings. But genuine agape is expressible apart from the marriage relationship and without the admixture of eros.
B. REFUTATION OF ANDROGYNY#
The existence of human beings as male and female, beginning with creation itself, stands in opposition to androgyny, or the alleged bisexual or non-sexual character of the earliest human beings.
The concept of androgyny stems from Plato’s myth of androgyny, the word itself being derived from andros, male, and gyne, female. Plato described “a monster with four arms and four legs” who created “anxiety in Zeus, who split Androgyny into two halves with a bolt from the blue and a threat to quarter him”. Then there was “a longing (eros, sexual love) that tried to unite the two halves as man frantically looked for his better half”.
Something akin to androgyny was accepted by certain of the Greek Church Fathers, especially Gregory of Nyssa, who held to “a double creation of our nature, one to express the divine similarity, the other to distinguish the sexes”, whereas the Latin Fathers did not embrace such. Paul King Jewett has explained this difference of attitude toward androgyny on the basis that the Greek Fathers interpreted sin as sensuality rather than pride and made sexual lust to be the chief example of sensuality.
In the medieval West it seems that androgyny was taught by Duns Scotus, and in the seventeenth century Jacob Boehme (1575-1624) taught it. On the American frontier, George Rapp (1757-1847), the founder of cumminities at Harmony, Indianna, and Economy, Pennsylvania, held to the view that Adam was created as an adrogynous being and that the separation of Adam and Eve was the “true fall” of humanity.
Modern Eastern Orthodox writers have taught androgyny. Vladimir S. Solovyev (1853-1900) is thought to have inclined to androgyny, but such is difficult to find in his writings. Nicolai Berdyaev accepted androgyny, including the idea that the two sexes resulted from the fall of humankind.
Androgyny as a teaching is Platonic in origin, not biblical, and cannot be harmonized with Gen. 1:26-27 and 5:1-2. According to Genesis, maleness and femaleness stem from creation, not from the fall. However, human beings misuse and abuse their sexuality and that of others, sexual differentiation must not be reckoned as sin.
C. MONOGAMY AND PARENTHOOD#
In the Old and the New Testaments monogamous marriage, with the exclusion of polygamous occurrences in the Old Testament, which subsequently became the norm in Islam, was reckoned to be the divinely ordained pattern for marriage and the rightful matrixt for the begetting and rearing of children.
The actualization of the ideal of monogamy has become increaasingly difficult in Western societies, wherein divorce, cohabitation apart from marriage, and homosexual practice abound. Consequently there are serious difficulties in the parental upbringing of children.
Increasing world population and what is reckoned as overpopulation in certain very populous nations have led to measures to limit the begetting of children. The same pattern of limitation has been chosen by married persons for whom overpopulation is not the primary factor. Various forms of contraception have been developed and utilized to prevent conception as the result of sexual intercourse. The Roman Catholic Church has officially banned all such methods except the so-called natural method of abstinence during ovulation. Even Catholics, however, are not choosing to reject all other methods.
D. SINGLE STATE AS VALID BUT NOT ABOVE OR BELOW MARRIAGE#
Virginity as an expression of the single state was approved by the apostle Paul (1 Cor. 7:25-35), especially in view of eschatological suffering. The single state needs to be recognized and respected today, and churches need to minister effectively to the needs of single persons.
The Catholic tradition, especially its Roman Catholic aspect, early came to embrace and insist upon the exaltation of virginity above marriage. Jerome and his sympathizers were the vanguard in the exaltation of virginity. Unfortunately the fourth-century protest ofHelvidius, Jerome’s contemporary who rejected the new doctrine of the perpetual virginity of Mary, and the protest of Jovinian, another contemporary of Jerome, that virginity should not be elevated above marriage were not heeded by Latin Christianity as a whole.
Celibacy, or one’s inability to contract marriage, came to be required of all the clergy in the West after the eleventh century.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, on the other hand, by its doctrine of celestial marriage, or sealing for eternity, has exalted marriage above the single state to the denigration of the latter. A woman cannot hope to attain to the highest of the three Mormon heavenly states and have “eternal increase” without being sealed to a man. Celestial marriage, therefore, serves as a quasi-sacrament with salvific results for women; without it neither men nor women can become “gods,” but only “angels.”
The single state should not be exalted above marriage so that marriage is seen as an inferior state, and marriage should not be exalted above the single state so that the latter is reckoned as an inferior state. Human beings should be free to make voluntary and responsible decisions as to their entry into and continuance in either of these states.
E. CONJUGAL LOVE#
The realization of conjugal love by a husband and a wife, as well as the propagation and upbringing of children, is a major and legitimate purpose of monogamous marriage.
It enhances the seriousness of adultery
It helps to explain why both polygamy/polyandry and homosexual practice are contrary to the divine intention for human beings
It is distorted and perverted by pornography
Roman Catholic moral theology prior to Vatican Council II stressed almost exclusively the begetting and rearing of children as the primary, if not the sole, purpose of marriage. The Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, adopted by Vatican Council II, elevated to a plane of equality with such purpose the realization of conjugal love.
Conjugal love in its truest sense is an expression of genuine affection between and mutual commitment of responsible persons who have given themselves to each other in the bond of marriage. Adultery and indeed much sexual activity outside marriage may be seen as an unwarranted distortion of the affection and denial of the commitment and may also prove to be, at least partly, the use of man or woman as “thing” for self-gratification.
Conjugal love cannot be rightly sundered from the God-ordained function of procreation (’“Be fruitful and multiply”’ Gen. 1:28b, RSV). Homosexual practice constitutes a fundamental sundering, whereby the possibility of procreation is excluded. Such practice reflects the fallenness of human beings and of the sinful social order, not the design and intention of the Creator. John R. W. Stott has summarized the biblical prohibitions against homosexual practice as follows:
The stories of Sodom (Gen. 19:1-13) and of Gibeah (Judg. 19) regard it as forbidden.
There are Levitical prohibitions (Lev. 18:22, 20:13).
Homosexual practice as contrary to nature is listed among the sins of the Gentile world (Rom. 1 :26-27).
The inclusion of “male prostitutes” (malakoi) and “homosexual offenders” (arsenokoitai) among the sins which will prevent the inheritance of the kingdom of God (1 Cor. 6:9-10, NIV) and which are against both law and gospel (1 Tim. 1:9-11) would seem to be condusive.
Conjugal love is grossly distorted and perverted in the commercialized pornography which has proliferated in Western societies during recent years. Eroticism in its bizarre extremes is presented as the summum bonum of human life, thereby blinding the consumers to the nature of agape, which in the Christian understanding must always be preeminent over eros.
F. WORTH AND STATUS OF WOMEN#
Although both the Old and the New Testaments are set in the context of patriarchal societies with strong emphasis on male dominance, the Bible affords no little evidence of the significance of women in salvation history.
In the Old Testament Miriam, Deborah, and Esther had leadership roles.
Jesus’ attitude toward women may be seen in reference to the adulterous Samaritan woman, the woman with a hemorrhage, the Syro-Phoenician woman, Mary and Martha, and Mary Magdalene.
The response of women to Jesus may be seen in Mary, Elizabeth, and Anna.
Paul recognized such women as Phoebe and Priscilla as leaders.
Across the centuries Christianity has served to elevate, even if slowly, the recognized worth and status of womanhood in contrast to woman’s quite inferior and almost servile role in many primitive and non-Christian societies. This elevation has gone even beyond those limitations upon Christian womanhood which are reflected in the Pauline epistles (for example, 1 Cor. 14:33-36 and 1 Tim. 2:11-15).
The present-day Women’s Liberation movement, so far as it draws from Judaism and Christianity and from the principles of political democracy, may serve the good purpose of seeking and obtaining much-deserved civic equality and non-discriminatory economic opportunity for women and protection from personal abuse. But, insofar as it draws upon naturalistic, humanistic, antimonogamous, antifamilial, antimaternal, defeminizing, and lesbian presuppositions, it may serve the evil and anti-Christian purpose of downgrading the particularities of womanhood and woman’s complementarity vis-a-vis man and of undermining the strength of the monogamous family at a most crucial time in social and religious history.
The status of the woman as wife in marriage has become a controversial issue toward the end of the twentieth century among Evangelical Protestants. The crucial issue has been the subordination of wives to husbands as mandated by Paul, and divisions have arisen as to the obligation of Christian wives to be subordinate today or as to the degree of subordination.
First, the traditional approach to this issue has been to emphasize and insist upon subordination of wives to husbands by stressing the meaning of the verb hypotassein, “to place under,” “to be subject to,” “to submit to,” or “to keep one’s place,” used six times by Paul and once by Peter. Female or wifely subordination in such a traditional view has tended to be based on the assumed inferiority of the woman, rooted in man’s having been created first according to Gen. 2, in Eve’s being tempted by the serpent and tempting Adam, or in some other consideration. The traditional view seldom gives attention to the implications of Gen. 1:26-27 for the marriage relationship. It majors on a hierarchy of being: God, Christ, husband, and wife.
Second, Paul King Jewett rejected the hierarchical and subordinationist view on the grounds that Paul used rabbinic hermeneutics for understanding Gen. 2, that female subordination “breaks the analogy of faith” (Gen. 1, Jesus’ attitude toward and relations to women, and Gal. 3:28), and that Christians must now do similarly for the Pauline wifely subordination texts what in the recent past they did with the Pauline slave-master texts, namely, reinterpret them in view of the abolition of slavery.
Third, Karl Barth taught that both male and female are in the image of God and affirmed that women are both structurally and functionally different from men but sought to retain an aspect of wifely subordination on the basis that such subordination, being unique, is primarily to the Lord Jesus and only secondarily to the husband and is without any notion of female inferiority. The third view, though not without its difficulties, may point toward a resolution of the contemporary issue, especially if supplemented by mutual submission (Eph. 5:21).
G. NON-ETERNALITY OF MARRIAGE#
The existence of humankind in the relation of husbands and wives is seemingly not intended to be for eternity.Jesus taught: “For in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven” (Matt. 22:30, RSV). One should be careful to conclude that it is marriage, not sexuality, that is to disappear in eternity.
Even Augustine of Hippo taught that women would rise in the resurrection as women, not as men, and that their femininity would evoke the praise of God rather than masculine lust. He argued that “They shall not be given in marriage” is applicable only to females and that “Neither shall they marry” is applicable only to males.
A contrary position is to be found in the Latter-day Saints’ doctrine of celestial marriage, or sealing for eternity.
SUMMARY#
In this chapter we have made an effort to relate man and woman to the image of God, to the theory of androgyny, to monogamy and parenthood, to virginity and singleness, to conjugal love, to the worth and status of women, and to the heavenly state. We have not dealt with the important contemporary configuration of issues and concerns about divorce and remarriage but have left it to its proper and detailed treatment by Christian ethicists.