I spoke at Sydney University EU this week about gender. Here is the text of what I said. Hope you like it! (It’s long.)
Men and Women, Children of God
Introduction: How is this talk not a bad idea?
The EU have asked me to speak about gender this week; and it has been hard to shake the feeling that this is, actually, a bad idea. Perhaps you have felt the same too. After all, who am I to do this talk? I am a young, white, religious man. Honestly, what could be worse. Don’t I represent every single roadblock to progress, as far as gender is concerned? Well, in a way I do, and there’s nothing I can do about it — I could give up the religious bit but I don’t want to.
So isn’t this talk a bad idea? Who wants to hear a young, white, religious man talk about gender? My friend told me he was going to run a tomato stall outside the lecture room for this week.
But it’s not just me that’s the problem: this is a much bigger topic than anyone can cover in one talk! Is anyone here doing gender studies? This terrifies me. If it’s a degree-length, or more, subject, what good is one talk going to do?!
Nevertheless, here we are; and the reason is that I think there is still something useful that I can do in one talk; and that is to show you something of how the Bible helps us think about gender, to suggest to you, for your reflection, a way of thinking about gender that comes out of the Scriptures. Because of the size and importance of the topic, though, I make no apologies for the fact that this will be both long and a bit dense.
Of course, for some people here, this is still all a bit rich; because they know that my reading of the Bible will inevitably be influenced by my assumptions about gender, which are probably bad. And they’re right, at least that my reading, like all of our reading, gets filtered through a lens we bring to it. But unless we want to give up on the practice of reading altogether, we’ve got to believe that the influence can run both ways. The Christian conviction is that this is why God has given us an authoritative text, a book to teach us, guide us, and shape us. The Bible can also reshape our assumptions about gender. And so even if you’re sceptical, can I invite you to listen, if only to observe what reading the Bible has done to a young, white, religious man.
Our Context: Confused About Gender
Let me begin by making clear what we are talking about. The question of gender is the question of the social significance of male-female sexual difference. What I mean is that gender is about what, if anything, should the reality of male-female biological difference mean and contribute in our relations with other people — that’s really all I mean by social here: relations with others. I’m taking as a starting point that there is a basic, biological difference between men and women. There are, of course, cases where this difference is obscured in some way or another. People can be born with abnormal or undeveloped genitalia, for example. These situations create very painful and difficult experiences for people; but they are also very rare cases and I think it would be a mistake to let them stop us from starting from this point. So the question of gender that we’re looking at is the question of what this basic difference means in social relations: the social significance of male-female sexual difference.
It seems to me that we live in a world which is confused about this issue. On the one hand, we live in the wake of the success of the feminist arguments that dominated the 1960s and 70s: that men and women are essentially the same and should be treated the same way. We mostly, now, take for granted things like that men and women should be paid the same amount for doing the same job; and that there is nothing wrong with women being engineers or wearing trousers. And rightly so. There are, of course, an embarrassing number of areas in which these ideas haven’t taken hold. But the point is that hardly anyone, these days, is arguing that that is how it should be.
But on the other hand, the idea of differences between men and women will not go away, and in fact has made a bit of a comeback. This is obvious at a popular level. You only have to watch TV for an hour or so before you are met with stereotypes about the differences between men and women of the most ridiculous simplicity. Dads who can’t cook. Mums who are frustrated with dads who can’t remember things. Every single add for washing detergent features a woman. Every single add for hardware or auto stores features a man, a stupid man. Wife Swap. You’ve got to be joking! But it’s all here, part of the cultural soil we all grow up in.
This popular commitment to difference is backed up, though, by a whole raft of literature that talks about the differences between men and women: books with titles like Brain Sex and The Essential Difference giving us ideas about “the male brain and the female brain”, and finding evidence for things like the “empathic advantage” of women and the heightened spatial awareness of men.
Of course, there are other voices today shouting out that this is all a lot of crap. This book, Cordelia Fine’s Delusions of Gender (London, 2010) is a mercilous demolition of a lot of the pseudo-science of gender difference. She shows that most of the purportedly “natural” differences between men and women are no such thing, but in fact differences resulting almost entirely from social expectations and gender stereotypes. This book is so much fun that I thought I’d quote a little bit:
“As the result of my research, I have come up with four basic pieces of advice for anyone considering incorporating neuroscientific findings into a popular book or article about gender: (1) unless you have a time machine and have visited the future in which neuroscientists can make reverse inferences without the nagging anxieties that keep the more thoughtful of them awake at night, do not suggest that parents or teachers treat boys and girls differently because of differences observed in their brains; (2) if you don’t know what a reverse inference is, read the previous chapter of this book; (3) exercise extreme caution when making the perilous leap from brain structure to psychological function; and (4) don’t make stuff up.” (page 155)
Now, Fine undoubtedly has a point about many of the ideas she lampoons. Yet, there’s something inadequate about the claim that gender differences are all a big illusion; because the fact is that, wherever they come from, we all have to live with gender differences. This is why books like Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, do sell. Different statistics for men and women emerge almost everywhere, and they have to be taken into account. It’s all very well to insist that there is no essential biological male tendency to be aggressive or short-tempered — and that may well be right — but it would be nonsense to try to address domestic violence without taking gender into account. The fact is, we all experience differences between men and women; and even if they’re not innate we still have to live with them.
But it’s more complex than this, even; because there are others who disagree with Fine’s approach at a much more serious level. Much post-modern feminist scholarship has been deeply disatisfied with the philosophical assumptions that dominated earlier feminism. Various thinkers have argued that an emphasis on the sameness of men and women is inadequate, because what it can easily end up doing is denying the particular and distinctive being and contribution of women as women. Belgian philosopher Luce Irigaray, for instance, has criticised the inadequacy of a “masculine-neutral” gender that applies to all. Let me quote from her book Elemental Passions:
If it is composed of unisex citizens, society risks losing its regenerative resources, since these are to be found not only in genetic reproduction but also in sexual difference: the most radical difference, and the one most necessary to the life and culture of the human species. For this culture to advance, therefore, new models of sexual identity must be established. Woman must be valued as a daughter (a virgin for herself, and not so that her body has an exchange value among men), as a lover, and in her own line. {This means that she should not be subordinated first to her father, her uncle or her brother, then to her husband’s line, nor to the values of a masculine identity, whether these be social, economic, or cultural.} She therefore needs her own linguistic, religious and political values. She needs to be situated and valued, to be she in relation to herself. (Elemental Passions, New York, 1992, page 3)
Women are women, and must be able to know themselves as such, and not just as the same as men. Now, thinkers like Irigaray would, of course, vomit if they read the kind of pop-sex-difference literature that Fine gets stuck into. But they also impress upon us the idea that for all its problems, this difference matters.
So we’re confused. On the one hand, it is clear that many, perhaps even all, of the differences between men and women that we experience owe their existence to social conventions and gender assumptions. There’s no point pretending that away. But on the other hand, the reality is that we do still experience these differences, and we have to live with them. And, of course, it’s not all an illusion: there really is this fundamental twofoldness to human beings. Why on earth shouldn’t that mean something? — something, as Irigaray argues, quite profound and important.
Overview
I believe that the Bible’s teaching about men and women can help us to navigate this confusion. The Bible gives us an understanding of men and women that both affirms the difference between men and women as important, while also giving us reasons to be suspicious of claims to know exactly what this difference means.
But more than helping us understand the issue of gender, the message of the Bible, the message of God’s grace to us in Jesus, empowers us to live into it: to live as men and women in the midst of all our questions and problems with gender. But it does this not by focussing on the differences between men and women, but on the shared acceptance we have in Christ as God’s children.
What the Bible has to say about gender can be helpfully organised under three headings: creation, corruption, and redemption. Let us start where the Bible does, with Creation.
Bible (1): Creation
The opening chapters of the Bible offer a profound and subtle account of the nature of humanity as male and female. The two different creation accounts each focus on the remarkable twofoldness and unity of man and woman. Look at Genesis 1, verse 27:
So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them.
This move from the singular “him” to the plural “them” is there in the Hebrew original; and it is a beautiful way of holding together the way in which humanity is both one and two. There is no sense here of this being a bad thing or a difficulty: it is the form in which humanity will represent — image — God in the world.
What immediately follows from this is a shared human task. Verse 28:
God blessed them and said to them, ‘Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground.
This is important for our interests, for two reasons. One is that this task is given to “them”, not “him”: there is no sense that this is Man’s task that Woman is simply an addition to. The second reason is that this reminds us that creation is not static. What do I mean by that? I mean that God does not create something that is finished, in the sense of having nowhere to go. God finishes his work of creation; but creation itself is not meant to remain as it is. Humankind, male and female, has a task, a purpose to pursue. And this goal is there right from the beginning. It is not an addition to creation. God creates a world with potential.
We see both of these ideas — the unity and distinction of humanity, and the potentiality of creation — in the second creation account as well, though it is depicted differently there. Here, as we saw, the task is described in terms of working and taking care of the garden, as well as avoiding the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Eve is described as Adam’s helper in this task. If we feel uncomfortable about this, I think it is not in fact because the text expresses inequality. The phrase used is “a helper as his partner”, and it is in fact an expression of equality without identity. Eve is Adam’s equal, but not his clone. And She is a helper in the sense that She will share his task together with him. There is an element of order here: Adam is created first, and the fact that Adam names Eve probably implies an idea of priority. But priority does not mean superiority. The text as a whole is focussed on the mutuality and equality of man and woman in the most wonderful way. The man’s exclamation when he encounter’s the woman is wonderful: she is just right, bone of my bone, a partner without being the same. And for this reason, we are told, a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh. The text is not embarrassed about the difference between men and women; it is in fact the best way it could be, because it means that there can be something far better than sameness: there can be unity.
This last comment is significant also in its reference to marriage. It is another point at which it is obvious that God’s creation is not static but is going somewhere. Humanity has a task, creation has a purpose. Moreover, this task, this purpose, can only happen socially. There is no sense here in which the growth and development of society is a mistake: humankind is created to be social, to multiply and rule the earth through marriages, families, clans, peoples.
The “biopolitical illusion”
Why does this matter? It matters for this reason. One of things lying behind the cultural confusion we described above is the way we think about the idea of what is natural. Let me explain. Much of our thinking about gender takes the form of arguing about whether differences between men and women are natural or cultural. That is, we assume a dichotomy, a clear-cut either/or, between what is natural on the one hand, and what is socially-constructed on the other. And the reason we feel this distinction matters is because it has moral connotations. What is natural is worthy of respect in some way, but what is just socially-constructed can be ignored. If differences between men and women are natural, then they matter; but if they’re cultural, we can forget about them.
We’ve seen this already in Cordelia Fine’s arguments that many claims to have found natural differences between men and women, in terms of brain types or whatever, are in fact dependent on cultural contexts and assumptions. Her argument works because of its assumption that if you show something to be socially-constructed rather than innate or natural, you’ve shown it to be morally unimportant. By the same token, the books she attacks use the same argument in reverse: they aim to show how differences between men and women are rooted in different brains, that is, that they are natural; and this means that the right thing to do is to take them seriously.
This is very much how the older debates about gender went, too: pre-modern ideas of gender roles relied on the idea that these things were what was natural. Modern feminism, however, demolished these arguments by pointing out that the things that were said to be “natural” were in fact no such thing. They were, rather, simply cultural constructions: the product of socialisation and tradition. And this meant they could simply be ignored. There was nothing unnatural at all about women wearing trousers; it’s just a social convention about women and so didn’t matter a fig. These debates gave us the distinction between sex, which refers to the biological phenomenon of male and female, and gender, which refers to the social assumptions about what is masculine and feminine that have been built upon that difference.
This dichotomy between natural and socially-constructed, with its moral implications, is however partly the reason for the confusion we are in today. Because its effect has been to radically undermine our ability to say anything substantial about the difference between men and women. Because as Cordelia Fine so wittily puts it: “Pick a gender difference, any difference. Now watch very closely as — poof! — it’s gone” (27). For any difference to matter, it can’t have even a wiff of social constructedness. Yet that massively limits what we can say. It’s one thing to point out that men and women have different bits. That’s fine, but not a very impressive discovery. It’s a whole other thing to say anything at all about what this difference means or implies.
What if, though, this dichotomy is a mistake? What if the relationship between what’s natural and what is socially-constructed is not, in fact, an either/or relationship? The English theologian John Milbank has called this dichotomy the “biopolitical illusion,” which, he explains, “splits humans up into a wild, natural component on the one hand, and an artificial ‘cultural’ component on the other.” He suggests that it is in fact a bad distortion of what is in fact the case, that we are, as he puts it, “a ‘cultural animal’ – an animal whose nature it is to survive through the invention of cultures which are very diverse, though not wholly diverse from each other.”
And this, I think, is the conclusion the Christian understanding of creation leads us to. Because the Bible’s presentation is not that there is this underlying foundation of what is “natural” and then a whole lot of unfortunate cultural accretion built on top of that. The understanding that Genesis leads us to is that cultural development is natural, because creation is meant to develop and unfold. It is part of the way the world was made to be for human beings to develop cultural ways of living and relating.
This is an important point, because what it means is that just showing that some idea about gender roles is dependent on cultural assumptions is not enough to make it morally irrelevant. Because creation’s development is not unnatural but in fact how creation was always intended to go. And so socially-constructed answers to the question of the significance of sexual difference are not simply “unnatural”. In fact, they are the only way in which the social significance of sexual difference could ever be experienced.
Bible (2): Corruption
This emphatically does not mean, however, that cultural constructions of gender roles are simply natural and therefore good. Because that would be to miss the crucial point that all human cultural development takes place in a corrupted world. This is the next aspect of the Bible’s teaching about gender.
In the narrative of Genesis, the joy of creation is followed immediately by the tragedy of humanity’s rejection of God and the consequences of this for the world. Almost the moment their eyes have been opened, Adam and Eve turn back into their own self-centred world. They believe the lie of the mysterious serpent and eat from the tree that God had set apart. Out of a perverse desire to rise above dependence upon their Creator, they willfully transgress the one boundary God had marked out.
We see the consequences of this action first in God’s pronouncement, and then in the unfolding narrative of Genesis. We will focus, first, on the word God speaks to the woman in chapter 3 verse 16:
To the woman he said,
“I will greatly increase your pangs in childbearing;
in pain you shall bring forth children;
your desire shall be for your husband,
and he shall rule over you.”
These are enigmatic words, and understanding everything they entail is beyond us. But at the least, these words imply that gender relations will be a point at which the corruption of creation introduced by sin will be especially evident. God’s word singles out the relation between the man and the woman as a point where a distortion has been introduced, where things are not right any more, where desire has become warped and power will mean pain. The words desire and rule imply a struggle, a relationship distorted by urges and dominance.
In the narrative that follows in chapter 4, our attention is drawn to the way in which sexual difference immediately becomes corrupted. We are introduced to a man named Lamech, and are told that he had two wives. The subtlety of the Hebrew narrative makes the point very clearly that what we are seeing here is the corruption spoken of by God. Because Lamech is a brutal man. We are told in 4:23 that he speaks to his wives like this:
Adah and Zillah, listen to me;
wives of Lamech, hear my words.
I have killed a man for wounding me,
a young man for injuring me.
If Cain is avenged seven times,
then Lamech seventy-seven times.
Why is it to his wives that he says this? Why do they need to hear this? What the text is showing us, you see, is how the mutuality of male and female has been corrupted: woman becomes valued as a commodity, rather than a companion; and she is kept in fear by the threat of violence.
Tellingly, it is with Lamech’s children that we see the first developments of culture. His sons Jabal, Jubal and Tubal-Cain are, according to the story, the founders of practices of organised farming, music, and metal work. And what this reminds us is that all our cultural answers to the question of gender are answers attempted under conditions of corruption. They are all, to a greater or lesser extent, twisted.
So although, as we concluded before, we cannot simply write off cultural ideas of gender because they’re socially constructed, we also have to be very hesitant about them. The Bible cannot be taken as simply affirming socialised gender roles. In fact, if anything, I think the Bible should lead us to expect every idea about what it is to be men and women to be damaged to a greater or lesser extent; and to hesitate before being too confident about what is a helpful expression of the significance of male-female difference; because the Bible testifies to a radical and pervasive distortion that affects every human culture, corrupting the good of human sexual difference almost beyond recognition.
We must not let this point be lost. Although I talked about our culture under the heading of confusion, the reality is that this is far too generous. Our world is characterised, in many, many ways, by an ugly sexism that squashes and threatens women, whether through the proliferation of pornography and sexual harrassment, the normalisation of practices like going to strip clubs, or simply through the continuing prevalence of violence against women. The Bible gives us a powerful key to understanding and not pretending away this ongoing aspect of our world: these are the consequences of humanity’s rejection of God. The beautiful gift that is the mutuality of man and woman has been badly warped, almost beyond recognition, into a relationship characterised by struggle for dominance, fear, and pain.
Bible (3): Redemption
Thankfully, though, we are not left with despair and uncertainty. In the story of the Bible, the tragedy of the fall is overcome by what God does through Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of God. This is what we now need to discuss under the heading of “redemption”.
What, then, happens to the issue of gender in the New Testament? What does Jesus do to the question of the significance of male and female?
Well, on the one hand, what we see in the New Testament is that the significance of male-female difference is radically relativised by Jesus. We see this first taking shape, I think, in the life of Jesus himself. It is a bit trite to put too much stake on “the way Jesus related to women”. We are after a theological argument, not just some inspiring stories. Moreover, the gospels simply don’t tell us enough to draw adequate conclusions about all the things we’re interested in. Nevertheless, it is important at least to notice the remarkable way in which Jesus engaged with, valued, and related to women. In a highly patriarchal culture, what we do see of Jesus’ behaviour is quite striking. To make the point, let me quote the English writer Dorothy L. Sayers, who expressed her feelings about Jesus like this, in the 1940s:
“Perhaps it is no wonder that the women were first at the Cradle and last at the Cross. They had never known a man like this Man — there never has been such another. A prophet and teacher who never nagged at them, never flattered or coaxed or patronised; who never made arch jokes about them… who rebuked without querulousness and praised without condescension; who took their questions and arguments seriously; who never mapped out their sphere for them, never urged them to be feminine or jeered at them for being female; who had no axe to grind and no uneasy male dignity to defend; who took them as he found them and was completely unself-conscious. There is no act, no sermon, no parable in the whole Gospel that borrows its pungency from female perversity; nobody could possibly guess from the words and deeds of Jesus that there was anything ‘funny’ about women’s nature.” (Are Women Human?, 47)
The reason for this, I think, is that Jesus saw women as persons, equally the subjects of God’s kingdom as men.
This is the radical idea that unfolds elsewhere in the New Testament. Listen to what Paul writes in Galatians 3:
In Christ Jesus you are all sons of God through faith. As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus. And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to the promise.
The difference between men and women is radically relativised. There is an important sense in which what has happened in Jesus means distinctions are abolished. There is no longer male and female. That’s a radical statement. Something profound has happened in Jesus which means we are no longer “in the garden”, so to speak.
Notice, however, the way Paul’s argument works. There is a profound sense of equality here. But the basis of this equality is not in anything about the people involved, rather it is in the fact that they are all equally in Christ, they are all brought together as one in him. The basis of equality is the equal stake they have in Christ and the equal blessings that flow from being united in him. This is different to what we normally think. We normally assume that equality must mean sameness, identity. But in the New Testament, the equality of men and women is a function not of their identical qualities, but of what they hold in common: their common participation in Christ. What’s important is not that men and women are the same, it’s that they are together — together in Christ.
This is the reason that the New Testament does not dispense with the idea of social significant differences between men and women. In fact, what we find is that the reality and goodness of male-female difference is reaffirmed. Thus we have passages that speak of the obligation of wives to respect their husbands and husbands to honour their wives, and that reserve certain responsibilities in the Christian community for men and others for women. This is stuff we tend to find hard to stomach today; but the New Testament is unembarrassed about it. The reality of male-female difference is not abolished because of Jesus; it is reaffirmed.
It is tempting to think of the relationship between these ideas, the relativisation of gender on the one hand, and the reaffirmation of it on the other, in terms of tension. But that would be to misunderstand what is actually going on.
The issue here is the way we think about redemption. That is, what exactly it is that Jesus does to creation. Let me illustrate by constrasting two types of approach. On the one hand, we might say that what Jesus does is simply to restore creation, to wind back the clock and take us “back to the garden”. On the other hand, we might say that what Jesus does is to surpass creation, to take us beyond creation, leaving it behind, along with all the mess.
The true answer, of course, is neither of these, and yet also both of them in a way. Jesus restores creation by perfecting it, by bringing it to its completion. If creation is like a tree growing, Jesus does not return creation to its first shoot from the seed, if you will, but brings it to its full-grown goal.
This is why the truth is that it is precisely the relativisation of gender in the New Testament that makes possible the reaffirmation of it. The awareness of how the distinction between male and female has been put in the shade by the dawning of God’s kingdom is actually what makes it possible to reaffirm this difference as something good, and to seek to live it out even in the midst of a broken world.
This, in fact, is what we find going on in the New Testament passages that uphold the social implications of male-female difference. We don’t have time to look at all of them, so I thought I would just look take you to what is perhaps the passage we find most difficult, in order to show you that there is more going on than we might assume. Look with me at 1 Peter 3:1–7.
Wives, in the same way, accept the authority of your husbands, so that, even if some of them do not obey the word, they may be won over without a word by their wives’ conduct, 2 when they see the purity and reverence of your lives. 3 Do not adorn yourselves outwardly by braiding your hair, and by wearing gold ornaments or fine clothing; 4 rather, let your adornment be the inner self with the lasting beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is very precious in God’s sight. 5 It was in this way long ago that the holy women who hoped in God used to adorn themselves by accepting the authority of their husbands. 6 Thus Sarah obeyed Abraham and called him lord. You have become her daughters as long as you do what is good and never let fears terrify you.
7 Husbands, in the same way, show consideration for your wives in your life together as the weaker sex, paying honor to them as co-heirs of the gracious gift of life—so that nothing may hinder your prayers.
In order to understand this passage, we have to imagine our way into a highly patriarchal culture. Peter’s advice to wives seems to be particularly aimed at wives whose husbands were not Christians, and who lived under the same threats that women so often experience. This is why he exhorts them in verse 6 to not let themselves be overcome by terror. He encourages them to do essentially two things: to submit to their husbands authority, and to cultivate a beautiful character rather than a beautiful exterior. We should not miss the significance of this. It is a profoundly counter-cultural exhortation. To submit to authority does represent an acceptance of a legitimate order in the relationship that we may be uncomfortable with. Yet what Peter is urging them to is to submit freely, rather than to fight against it. Moreover, this submission is with an end in view that is not of the husbands’ choosing: so that he may become a Christian.
The exhortation to adorn yourselves inwardly, though, is important; and just because we may not like the idea of a gentle and quiet spirit, it doesn’t mean that what Peter is doing here is not powerful. Because there is no doubt that in that age, as in our own, there was pressure on women to highlight and exploit their physical beauty, to doll themselves up with finery just as we get spray tans and breast enhancements. Peter calls Christian women to reject that — no doubt to the frustration of some of their husbands — and to instead pay attention to their character motivated by their spiritual convictions.
The exhortation to husbands, though it offends our sensibilities, is likewise striking in its call to pay honour to wives as co-heirs of the grace of life. Heirs is something women have often tended not to be; but heirs of the kingdom they are, because they too are children of God through Christ. Peter’s mention of “the weaker sex” is the kind of “statement of the obvious” that is possible in a culture that is simply not sensitised to these issues like ours is. Peter means, I think, nothing more than simply the observation that men are generally physically stronger than women, and that this should be a cause not for exploitation, but for consideration. If you had pointed out to him that women tend to live longer and can endure pain that men cannot, I wonder if he would probably have just said, sorry, he didn’t mean to deny that in the least, but that he thought there was still something important to say there, and that to deny it would be disingenuous. And note that the aim of this consideration and honour is unhindered fellowship in prayer.
What we have here in 1 Peter is a call to a practice that actually dismantles distorted cultural ideas of gender from within, that slowly and subtly undermines male sexism, without rejecting the idea of order in the male-female relationship, and that gradually establishes patterns of relating based on mutual respect and the recognition of an ultimate horizon of equality in the kingdom of God. It is not the practice our culture demands; and perhaps it is not the practice we would wish for; but it is a remarkable one nevertheless.
In fact, what we see here, I think, is a practice that is in a profound sense one of freedom. This may seem ridiculous, but I believe it is true, and indeed, at the heart of what the Christian vision has to offer. Because what we see here is a way of life that is anchored in the profound security that comes from knowing you have been loved and accepted, and that your future is eternally secured; and that is therefore able to act without fear in the midst of a broken and distorted world. In the face of threat and terror, the wife here is able to not give in to a simplification of the meaning of her sex in terms of outward appearance, but also not reject her sex as unimportant, but to acknowledge the goodness of her husband’s authority. And the husband is able to see his wife as a partner in prayer and an equal in the kingdom without her becoming a threat, so that his strength becomes an opportunity not for selfishness, but for love.
Conclusion
Let me conclude what has already been too long a talk.
We live our lives as men and women amongst cultural stories of what it means to be a man or a woman that are never perfect, and sometimes very bad. For some, this is not particularly troubling, either because they fit in without much trouble, or because these stories work to their advantage. For others, though, these stories and stereotypes create real frustration, either because they create a sense of alienation from one’s own body, or because they feel like they squash us, constraining us from fulfilling our potential.
The Bible shows us that we are right to feel uncomfortable about many aspects of our cultural accounts of gender. And yet, the Bible also holds us back from abandoning these cultural accounts completely, because underneath it all there is something that is good and important: the reality of male-female difference. Humanity’s twofoldness in creation is good, and so it is not surpassed by God’s kingdom, as if it was just a passing necessity which can now be dispensed with. In Jesus we see a clear confirmation that what God declared in the beginning to be good really is good, and it deserves to be upheld and respected.
But although it is good, it is not the most important thing about us. Because those who have faith in Jesus are first and foremost no longer men and women, but children of God in Christ, heirs of the kingdom.
And this is the key to a beautiful freedom in relation to our gender: freedom to welcome our gender as a gift and an invitation to a particular kind of contribution, rather than resenting it as an imposition; but also freedom to not be intimidated or imprisoned by those aspects of our culture that reduce the meaning of our sex to something less than the beautiful version of humanity it truly is. This, it seems to me, is the kind of freedom that is truly worth having. For real freedom is found not in denying reality, but in rejoicing in it. The gospel of Jesus Christ sets us free to live and rejoice in being men and women; because more than being men and women, we know ourselves to be children of God.
The experience we discover here is anything but a drab, lifeless, or guilt-ridden. It is full of hope, comfort, yearning, and passion. The Psalmist sings at night and sleeps in deep thankfulness. To be sure, it is not simply an easy life. It is not a life without pain, “troubles” and frustrations. It is an experience that is tiring, in a way. But it is not dead. Obedience is not dead. The life of faith, the life of prayerful dependence upon God’s Word, is a trying life, an at times troubling life; but it is life, in the profoundest sense.
Turning to Scripture, the idea of regeneration owes its significance to Jesus himself. In his conversation with Nicodemus (John 3:1–10) he famously declared “you must be born again/from above” (3:7). This text suffers from being detached from its biblical–theological context. Jesus is explicitly engaging Nicodemus on the question of Israel: “you” here is plural, making Nicodemus, as Dumbrell puts it, “Israel’s representative”. Most importantly, Jesus’ reference to being “born of water and Spirit” (3:8) is a clear allusion to Ezekiel 36:25–27 and Isaiah 44:1–5. These prophecies speak of Israel’s hope in terms of a dramatic new work of the Lord to recreate his people. They connect the idea of regeneration to God’s promise of a new covenant in which he would give his people a new heart and put his Spirit within them (cf. Jeremiah 31:31–34). Jesus’ words to Nicodemus thus take us right back to the hope of Deuteronomy for a circumcision not just of the body, but of the heart (30:6).
The fifth stanza of Psalm 119 has something to teach us, I think, about our dependence on God for knowledge of his word.
I’m very happy with the NIV 2011. There seem to be quite a few people who have some kind of small problem with it; but for me, that’s precisely the attraction: it’s not a Bible for any one small subset of the Christian community. It’s a genuine attempt at a genuinely widely useful Bible.
My soul clings to the dust. 
Provide for your servant
