In an earlier article, Gender: Part 1, I sought to explain how gender flows from the nature of God. As explained in the creation passages of Genesis 1 and 2, the plurality of personhood in the unity of God’s being is reflected in the plurality of genders in the unity of the human species. But the Genesis explanation is not finished, as the Apostle Paul in Ephesians 5:31-32 quotes from and further explains Genesis 2:24. “Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church.”

The Apostle Paul explains the existence of two human genders, and not three or four, as reflective of the gospel relationship between Christ and the Church. Throughout Ephesians 5, Paul argues that men are to be reflective of Christ in the marriage relationship as women are reflective of the Church. What must be further acknowledged from this passage in Ephesians is that the human marriage relationship is not simply Paul’s creative analogy for the relationship between Christ and the Church. Instead, Paul is arguing that the marriage relationship was created in order to express the relationship between Christ and the Church.

This can be seen in Paul’s explanation of Genesis 2:24. The original occurrence of Genesis 2:24 seems to refer to Adam and Eve’s marriage in Genesis 2:22-23  as it establishes a pattern for all future marriages based upon that first human marriage. One textual problem with this interpretation is that Adam had no parents, even though Genesis 2:24 clearly references the leaving of parents. Paul, however, in Ephesians 5, removes this difficulty by arguing that the marriage pattern of Genesis 2:24 began not with Adam and Eve but with Christ and the Church. Christ would leave his Father in heaven to come and victoriously win the church, redeeming her from sin by dying and rising again for her. For Paul, the human marriage of Adam and Eve is reflective of the spiritual union of Christ and the church, not the other way around! For Paul, gender and sexuality have their foundation in the Gospel!

In the teachings of Paul in Ephesians 5, one can see that Paul views the one flesh union of men and women as being reflective of the one flesh spiritual union between Christ and the church. From before the foundation of the world, as Paul argues in Ephesians 1, the Triune God had determined to send God the Son, Jesus Christ, to redeem the church. As the repetitive theme of Ephesians is our being “in Christ,” so God in His wisdom created marriage and the physical union of sexuality to be a ‘living parable’ of that spiritual mystical union between Christ and His Church. To pervert human sexuality, is to pervert the reflection of the union of Christ and the Church.  Thus, the goal of Christians is not simply to protect marriage for tradition sake. Instead, stemming from a correct understand of Ephesians 5, Christians should desire to preserve the testimony of the gospel relationship between Christ and His church which is reflected in human marriage.

Here’s a follow-up to my recent post on the two great anxieties Christians have about culture making. Drawing on Bavinck, Jordan Ballor appropriates two of the super-short parables in Matthew 13 to depict this tension in terms of “the gospel as leaven that leavens all of life” and “the gospel as pearl of great price.”

Today I put some thought into where in scripture we might find these two imperatives stated more clearly in the form of ethical commands, rather than in parables. Here’s what I came up with.

One of the loci classicus for faith/work integration is Colossians 3:23-24:

Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men, knowing that from the Lord you will receive the inheritance as your reward. You are serving the Lord Christ.

Here we see the gospel as leaven that leavens all of life. When you show up at work and do your job, you are serving Jesus. You want the gospel to work its way so deeply into the warp and woof of your daily life that as you carry out your cultural tasks, in your mind’s eye you are thinking of Jesus as your boss rather than only your human superiors.

This sheds new light on what I said before about the job of the ordinary factory line worker as meaningful culture-making. It is noteworthy that in this passage, Paul specifically addresses his remarks to slaves. If ancient Greek slaves are serving Christ in their work, then absolutely the so-called “menial” line worker is doing so:

It’s a beautiful thing that he does for God and his neighbor. And if we say otherwise, we’re not only in rebellion against the clear teaching of the Bible, we’re also condemning that Christian to live in a meaningless universe where what he does all day has nothing to do with God. (Not to mention the fact that we’re creating poverty and undermining our community, and also destroying religious freedom.)

On the other side, there is this from Romans 12:2:

Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.

Here is the gospel as pearl of great price. Even as the gospel is worked deeply into the warp and woof of the cultural tasks that make up our daily lives, it also stands dramatically apart from those tasks and from the culture as a whole. It shines a radiant light upon the culture, and in its illumination our participation in the culture and its daily tasks is to be evaluated and “transformed.” Anything too dull to reflect the gospel’s light must be either diligently polished or ruthlessly discarded. Just as the man who found the pearl sold all his possessions to buy it, so we must subject our cultural tasks to the gospel and “sell” whatever does not pass the bar.

This again brings me back to our line worker. Superficially, he seems to have no opportunity to “transform” his daily cultural tasks. He seems powerless. So if we only speak to him about his work with a “leaven” concern and not a “pearl” concern, he’s likely to be conformed rather than transformed. On the other hand, if we think of him not as a cog in a big corporate machine but rather as a human being with stewardship over his circle of influence (however small), we can think creatively about his opportunities for transformation:

He should radiate the gospel in both objective and subjective ways. Objectively, he should not only be a highly virtuous worker, he should go above and beyond the predominant ethical expectations that prevail on his factory floor. Perhaps he will take on more tasks or be a peacemaker when coworkers are in conflict. He may need to constructively challenge unethical practices. Subjectively, his bearing, spirit and demeanor should radiate the gospel. His company should taste different to those around him.

And, of course, Christians with larger domains of stewardship will have greater opportunities for transformation. In fact, in their cases it’s important not to lose sight of the leavening impulse. Pastors often assume that the capacity of a business owner to “transform” cultural activity within his business is limitless. It often becomes necessary to gently remind the pastors that human culture – even within a single company – is a highly complex ecosystem. It can never be very dramatically transformed even by the most powerful individuals. That’s why good Christian business owners pursue transformation as they’re able, but also work diligently to “leaven” a sense of meaningfulness and responsibility into all the work done by all their people, simply as it is.

“He changed the rules.”

Over on TGC, Joe Carter draws our attention to this gem, from the oral argument before the Supreme Court on gay marriage this week:

JUSTICE SCALIA: I’m curious, when—when did — when did it become unconstitutional to exclude homosexual couples from marriage? 1791? 1868, when the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted? Sometimes — some time after Baker, where we said it didn’t even raise a substantial Federal question? When — when — when did the law become this?

MR. OLSON: When — may I answer this in the form of a rhetorical question? When did it become unconstitutional to prohibit interracial marriages? When did it become unconstitutional to assign children to separate schools.

JUSTICE SCALIA: It’s an easy question, I think, for that one. At — at the time that the Equal Protection Clause was adopted. That’s absolutely true. But don’t give me a question to my question. When do you think it became
unconstitutional? Has it always been unconstitutional? . . .

MR. OLSON: It was constitutional when we as a culture determined that sexual orientation is a characteristic of individuals that they cannot control, and that that -­

JUSTICE SCALIA: I see. When did that happen? When did that happen?

MR. OLSON: There’s no specific date in time. This is an evolutionary cycle.

Antonin Scalia should be designated a Priceless National Treasure by the U.S. Department of Interior, and a bronze plaque designating him as such should be permanently affixed to his body.

When Bat-Dan first raised his challenge to the existence of transfer programs, I took the easy way out and kept him busy with riddles. But Batman always captures the Riddler in the end, doesn’t he? I knew that at some point I’d have to come out of the shadows and offer my own argument. Time to put up or shut up (or blow up a bank vault).

I’m going to keep it short and sweet here because I expect Bat-Dan will come back at me (with exploding toys or weaponized umbrellas, perhaps!) and give me a chance to draw out the details at greater length. We’ll get more out of the dialogue than we would out of a long treatise up front.

I hold that there is no justification for the existence of the state that does not, in principle, justify the existence of some transfer-type programs as circumstances permit. With Locke, I hold that the proper justification for government is the moral imperative (ultimately rooted in the divine ordering of the universe) to preserve human life. With Locke, I hold that the imperative to “preserve” life includes not only its bare physical preservation – which would justify only laws against murder and nothing else – but also 1) the maintenance of a broad scope of necessary social and civil preconditions for the preservation of life, such as the security of property; 2) the growth over time (i.e. multiplication) of human life, and 3) the growth over time of the social and civil preconditions of life (e.g. wealth creation, moral consensus).

As Locke shows in the First Treatise of Government and reaffirms (more briefly) in the Second, the imperative to preserve life implies a positive duty on the part of all people to rescue those in dire need. If we think we have no duty to rescue, we don’t really believe in an imperative to preserve life; we only believe in an imperative not to murder. And the imperative not to murder is insufficient to justify the existence of the state; murder is rare enough and murderers are few enough that spontaneous social cooperation would suffice to manage them. The state is necessary because in addition to the negative duty not to murder, we have a positive duty to preserve life, which requires the maintenance of a huge panoply of social and civil conditions that presuppose the state.

Additionally, in his reply to Filmer’s political absolutism in the First Treatise, Locke shows the deep connection between absolutism and the denial of such a positive right of intervention to rescue. He does this to expose the implicit inhumanitarianism of Filmer’s absolutism. Filmer argues that God gave the world to Adam, so everyone else is dependent on Adam (and his heirs) for their survival. Owning everything, Adam (and subsequently his heirs) can give everyone the choice of submission or starvation. Locke replies that even if God did intend for one man to own the whole earth (which he didn’t) that would still be no excuse for him to use that position of power to enslave his fellow human beings.

However, this logic also runs the other way; denying the duty rescue implies absolutism. For if I can use my neighbor’s distress to offer him a choice between submission or starvation, there will be no stopping the introduction of enslavement. This is the source of the two famous “provisos” on Locke’s theory of property in the Second Treatise; neither waste nor the denial of opportunity to support yourself through your own labor (including the access to minimal resources necessary for that opportunity) is ever legitimate. That the positive duty rests on all people is also presupposed in Locke’s account of familial obligation, and elsewhere. Remove the positive duty to rescue and Locke’s whole system falls apart – which only makes sense if Locke is the great theorist of anti-absolutism and the positive duty is necessary to anti-absolutism.

By now you see where this is leading. If there is a universal duty to rescue, government must be the rescuer of last resort where other rescue fails. And while we might envision a system where we wait for people to be on the brink of death before government helps them, it’s in everyone’s interest to introduce rules and regularity (a rescue-on-demand system would be subject to all kinds of arbitrary abuse).

Now, if the duty to rescue lies on all people, of course we would hope that most cases of need would be handled first by the spontaneous assistance of those most proximate, and failing that, non-political forms of social organization such as church programs. And it’s true that the existence of transfer programs has some “crowding out” effect, where people don’t mobilize to rescue because the government will do it.

But as we’ve already had occasion to notice on HT, the existence of a welfare state – indeed, an overly large welfare state that needs to be shrunk – has not prevented our Mormon friends from maintaining a huge national system of aid. Philanthropy magazine calls it “A Welfare System that Works.” So the crowding out effect is resistible. It doesn’t strike me as remotely plausible that resisting it requires the total abolition of government rescue.

The other major problem besides “crowding out” is the development of dependency and entitlement. But the success of welfare reform in 1996 shows that this tendency, too, can be resisted.

There is (sorry, Dan) no such thing as a system designed so perfectly that it will not develop evil tendencies over time that need to be corrected by prudential action. Crowding out and dependency are the tendencies of the welfare state. But the libertarian state can never overcome the contradiction at its heart – that it demands the positive and proactive creation of a huge social system for the protection of property while denying that the duty to preserve human life is positive and proactive.

Speaking of prudence, there is a prudential case for transfers as well. Andrew Biggs of AEI defends his desire to reform Social Security rather than abolish it in these terms (I’m paraphrasing): without Social Security, some number of old people will be able to present themselves to the public as in dire need of rescue, and whether we think it’s a good idea or not the public will overwhelmingly demand that the government rescue them. Better to design a sensible system in which the overwhelming majority of the saving is in privately owned accounts, but the accounts of the poorest people are “topped up,” than having no system and enduring unpredictable social crises that open the door to much more arbitrary impositions of power.

I await Dan’s batarangs.

Recent theological arguments in areas of sexuality have fallen flat in secular culture. But the church is the one place that the connection between theology and sexuality must be proclaimed the loudest! As one of my esteemed professors in seminary, Dr. Willem Van Gemeren said, the problem is not that we are failing to teach our teenagers about sex. The problem is we are not teaching them wisdom! We give them laws without explaining how those laws flow from the nature of God. My goal in this next series of posts is to address what exactly we should teaching about theology so that those in the church understand how theology connects to sexuality, beginning first with the issue of gender.

The connection between theology and gender can be found in Genesis 1:26-27. “Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness,…. ²⁷So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.” It never ceases to amaze me that ‘in His own image God created mankind (singular), in the image of God He created them (plural). He created two in one. One species, two genders. It would make logical sense for the one God to create one species with only one gender, like the all-female whiptail lizards. Instead, the God who is one created a species that is two!

Compare this also with Genesis 2:18 “It is not good for the man to be alone, I will have a helper suitable for him.” Notice that God does create for man another man. Instead, he creates a woman, “suitable for him,” literally “fit for him.” Again, we see the God of creation emphasizing a plurality and distinctness within the human species. After Eve is brought to Adam, in Genesis 2:28, Adam recognizes her ‘sameness.’ “This is now bone of my bone flesh of my flesh.” But Adam also recognizes her differentness. “She shall be called woman for she was taken out of man.” There is both a similarity and a disparity. Both human but different genders.

And human sexuality continues to emphasize this difference. In Genesis 2:29 we read “That is why a man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife, and they become one flesh.” Distinctness: man and wife, but becoming same: “one flesh.” Sexuality is an act which emphasizes unity in diversity, of the ‘fitness’ between the two genders. And we are told, all the way at the beginning, in Genesis 1:26-27, that this was so that they could be made in God’s image. Genesis 1:26-27 make it explicit that this singularity in diversity was found in the nature of God, which is odd, considering God always refers to Himself usually masculine terminology. Paul even says in Ephesians 3 that all fathers/families in heaven and on earth get such a name from God the Father. So why did a God who identifies Himself with masculine terminology choose to create a species with a female gender rather than all males?

Again, the answer lies in Genesis 1:26. “God said let us make man in our image.” God did not say “my image” but our image. Who was God talking with to be able to say “our”? The answer is progressively revealed throughout the rest of Scripture. God is Himself unity in diversity, which he reveals to us as He reveals His Triune nature. God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit (Matthew 28:19), three distinct persons, equal in power, might, and glory, but one God (Deuteronomy 6:4). Scripture continually emphasizes the plurality and differentness of the persons of the Godhead. And yet, likewise, Scripture emphasizes the unity and sameness of the divinity of the Godhead. Three persons, One God. A true mystery.

Yet, while it is certainly a mystery, we have a reflection of the image of the Trinity within our own species as we see two genders. On the one hand, men and women are separately made in the image of God so that any one person can claim to be an image bearer of God. On the other hand, men and women are not made in such a way that they are exclusively made in the image of God. Rather, they are both made in the image of God. Men and Women are made in the image of God but are also together the image of God as a species.In a very real way, men and women are incomplete as a species without each other. If all the men in the world died so that only women were left, the image of God in the human race would not be complete. We would most likely be unable to point to exactly what is missing other than to say that the plurality of our species is gone, and with it the reflection of the Triune God. Both genders, individually bearing the image of God, are needed to truly bear the complete image of God.

As Dr. Jonathan Lunde at Biola put it, the existence of gender is itself a ‘living parable,’ pointing to the image of God. Sex too, as he explained it from Genesis 1 and 2, is also a ‘living parable.” The distinctness of our gender is self-evident. In human sexuality, though, we have a reminder and picture of our unity, that men and women were made fit for each other as they come together to reflect the image of our Triune God.

Gender and theology cannot be separated. To deny the importance of gender in sexuality is to deny the nature of God, who is Himself a being of unity in plurality.

Then why not make three genders? For that we turn to Gender, part 2.