Today I want to write about the question of whether God created and intended gender roles and how I believe He from the start embedded them in the balanced environment of human equality. Many people believe gender roles are simply a human invention. However, we believe the Bible reveals a God who intentionally created the human race male and female, and that God was delighted in what He made. We also believe in a God who reveals enough of his will and his purposes through His Word for us to understand how to live. Therefore, we believe that although gender may look differently across cultures, gender in and of itself is not solely a human construct, and the Scriptures instruct us how to think about it.
If God intended in His good creation for there to exist some gender role differentiation, then gender roles can be good. If they came from the fall, after man sinned, then they are bad and legitimately to be put off with all forms of sin among the redeemed people of God. Genesis chapters 1-3 reveal that gender roles were created for good in God’s world, and marred by the fall of humanity into sinful forms (as was work and everything else). Given this Biblical reality it is important to seek out God’s original intent and to put off the imbalances caused by sin.
So how do we recover intended gender roles ? And how do we achieve balance? I believe the Scripture balances itself and guides us in understanding the good that God intended from gender. It does so, not by cancelling out its own statements, but by tempering and interpreting its statements. Gender roles are balanced, not erased, by the fundamental equality of men and women taught in the Scriptures. Equality before God is the hedge of protection intended to prevent oppression in gender roles. It is important to realize that God’s truth in Genesis helps guard against the confusion and and harm of sin.
How do we see this in Genesis? I keep returning to Genesis to discern God’s creation intention, following the examples of Jesus and Paul who treat Genesis as precedent setting history for marriage and gender. Genesis itself tells us it is a precedent setting passage for marriage unity. In Genesis 2:24, after recounting the creation of man and woman, the author says “therefore. . .” He is saying that the way God made the man and the woman tells God’s people how to conduct marriage. This is not merely an interesting story of how our forefather, Adam, met our foremother, Eve. This is a history in which God was in sole control, with the purpose of teaching a human norm. The man is to leave his parents, and be joined to his wife in permanent, “one flesh” unity. Marriage was intended to be exclusive, prioritized and permanent. It was intended to be a place of blessing.
Jesus reinforces that message in Matthew 19, when His disciples asked about divorce. He quotes Genesis 1 and 2, and draws the application that marriage was intended by God to be permanent. He was responding to a disputed question in his time by using the ancient history of our origins and showing us that Genesis’ history conveyed God’s intent for marriage. That is very significant for how we view Genesis.
Paul, like Jesus, said this creation history was norm-setting. But the norm he teaches is about gender roles within family and the church. You can see him referring to Genesis to support gender roles in marriage and the church in 1 Corinthians 11, in Ephesians 5 and in 1 Timothy 2. We will be writing more about each of those passages in the next months. But, does Genesis support Paul’s differentiation of gender roles? (For a lengthier discussion of gender roles see Two Perspectives, which we posted last week.)
Gender roles are implicit in God’s creation of male and female. God planned for procreation and rule of his creation to involve teamwork between two slightly different members of the human species. The man and the woman have anatomical sameness and differences. They both have brains, five senses, arms, hands, legs, feet, etc. But they also have differences that enable them to perform some special functions with different muscular strength, different functions in sexual expression and in reproduction and the nurture of children. We know that God was able to design creatures that reproduced without interaction with another, but it was His choice to design some of His creatures with this need for interconnectedness. Humans are some of these gendered, interconnected creatures. The teaching lesson which Moses draws out of the passage – one flesh marriage unity between a man and a woman – is enabled by both their equality in humanness and their differentiation as man and woman. I believe this unity comes about not only because of their anatomical differences/connection, but also because of the role differentiation that accompanies their physical design.
The Genesis 1:26-28 overview of the creation of humanity indicates that both the male and the female are created in God’s image, and commissioned together to multiply and to rule the earth. This is the “plumb-line” of equality. No distinction of their humanity is made in that overview, giving the strong impression of teamwork in that society-building endeavor. The overview as I am calling it is the first word on men and women. Equality does not cancel out the differences between male and female and whatever role distinctions can be discerned from Genesis 1 and 2 cannot cancel out that beautiful statement of equality and teamwork!