A Theologian’s Description of Male/Female Encounters

What would it look like if  a German Neo-Orthodox theologian around the time of WWI tried to describe what it’s like for a man and woman to fall in love? Try this:

What else can stir him so much, bringing him as he thinks – whether he be a crude or a highly cultivated person – into such ecstasy, such rapture, such enthusiasm, into what seems to be the depths and essence of all being, into the vision of the Godhead and participation in it, supposedly exalting him into the vicinity at least of another God and Creator – what else can do this like the primal experience of encounter between male and female? Perhaps it is this experience itself in any one of its possible forms and varying degrees, perhaps it is a sublimation, transposition and spiritualization of it – but always it is the experience of this encounter! Why this experience precisely?…It is obviously on account of the truly breathtaking dialectic which arises in this encounter – the dialectic of difference and affinity, of real dualism and equally real unity, of utter self-recollection and utter transport beyond the bounds of self into union with another, of creation and redemption, of this world and the next. If humanity spells fell-humanity is primarily experienced in this dialectic, how tempting it is to understand and experience this fellow-humanity as the bold and blessed intoxification of the deepest abasement and the supreme exaltation of human essence, as its deification!

Barth has some incredibly interesting and insightful things to say about the gender debate in VII. Man And Woman in Church Dogmatics. Although, he doesn’t believe masculinity can be properly defined without femininity. That is, male cannot know what it means to be male without comparing himself to female, and vice versa. Gender is not so much defined in terms by the Creator, but rather defined in relation to each other:

We cannot really characterize man and woman in the form of a definition, but only as we recall that in their very differentiation. God has will and made them in mutual relation and that His command has also the dimension or component that in the interests of this relationship they must be true to their specific differentiations. We have no right, especially if we ask concerning the command of God, to define or describe this differentiation. The command of God will find man and woman what they are in themselves….in no even is it bound to a scheme which we may propose.

In other words, there’s no such thing as objective masculinity and femininity. In fact, “we have no right…to define or describe this differentiation.”

The obvious problem with Barth’s assertion, is that Adam existed before Eve. And Adam, we can assume, was fully man and masculine before Eve was made. He was masculine and man before there was any female from which to compare and differentiate himself. That means masculinity must have been solely defined by the Creator, and not by differentiation between the sexes.

What then is masculinity as defined by the Creator? Rebecca Groothuis, the egalitarian writer of Men and Women: Leaders Together asserted in her September 15th post in 2008, that answering this question is itself impossible:

Most of us have also noticed gender differences that obtain generally but not universally. For example, women tend to be more inclined than men to nurture young children at home. In addition, men and women typically exhibit different communication styles (women tend to process ideas in a more holistic and relational fashion, are more readily engaged in personal conversations, etc.). Also, there is a general difference between conceptual processing in women and men (women tend to have a more integrative way of thinking, while men seem more inclined to focus on single issues). Differences such as these are truly complementary, and demonstrate why it is usually beneficial to have both men and women working together in various projects, churches, and organizations, according to each one’s gifts and callings.
However, it is not possible to ascertain which of these general differences between men and women may have been established by God in the original act of creation, and which have developed as a result of the fall…Similarly, it is impossible to decipher which generally apparent gender differences are due to nature and which are due to nurture, or what mixture of nature and nurture there may be in these generalizable differences. Because of the powerful and pervasive influence of environment on human behavior, innate gender differences cannot be isolated and then manipulated and controlled in scientific experimentation. Yet it is evident that in every culture there are general behavioral differences between women and men, some of which seem to be more or less consistent across culture; but even this does not necessarily show these differences to be ordained by God. (emphasis mine)

The basic assertion is that objective masculinity and femininity (not mere roles, but the differences in the person’s very heart) may not exist, and if they do, cannot be known for sure. In other words, it is impossible to know if there are God-ordained differences between the sexes other than biology. But what we can objectively know, it is argued, is that the sexes are similar and that, somehow, we know they’re different:

Although the points of difference between men and women can vary from time to time and culture to culture, the consistency of complementarity (in the true sense!) is indicative of God’s creationally ordained differentiation of male and female humanity. This we can know to be God’s design! What is not warranted from either nature or Scripture is a flat-footed stance on what men and women ought and ought not do in terms of ministry and vocation in order to be truly feminine or truly masculine in accordance with what God “clearly” ordained at creation.

Careful. In this perspective, we cannot know what masculinity and femininity are as Christians – not even from general revelation. But we can know that – as Barth said almost a century ago – that they are objectively different. There is, according to Groothuis and Barth, “differentiation.”

But, how can we objectively know “God’s creationally ordained differentiation of male and female humanity” without objectively knowing the actual differences between gender? That is, how can we know there’s difference without defining the differences? It’s like looking at two couches in a store and saying “these two are different,” and your friend asks “how do you know they have differentiation?” and you reply, “I don’t know the differences, but I know they’re different.”  That’s the best answer even the most scholarly egalitarianism has to offer in terms of what it means to be a man and a woman (and Groothuis is by all means a scholar in the movement). Of course, that shouldn’t surprise us. The movement was never designed to define what it means to be a man and a woman, but rather blur that entire attempt in the first place.

Complimentarianism has its own problems as well. But instead of simply saying “we can know objective masculinity and femininity,” they usually go too far in an attempt to drive away feminism and state the case too far. Eventually, gender roles do become too rigid. But, that’s a topic for another post…For know, there remains a gap in scholarship regarding not not gender roles, but what it really means to be a man and a woman within any cultural context. Egalitarians promote justice in the form stressing similarities in the sexes, while complimentarians promote justice in the form of stressing the differences. Reductionism is certaintly not the answer here.