Christian Ideas About Men and Women

By Novaseeker | Source | December 7, 2009

Talleyrand had an interesting post today about Christian morality, and his perception, which is in all too many cases regrettably accurate, that many Christians practice a morality that is rather secular, and in particular Christian women.

I wrote a response which probably merits cross-posting here as a proper post, since comments tend to get lost in the shuffle eventually:

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I think that the issue derives really from the relationship between church and culture in our Western setting, and specifically how this has played itself out over the past several centuries.

Christianity is not, in its essence, misandrist or gynocentric.  In our Western culture, it has become so as a result of a quite lengthy process of undoing.  The separation between the East and the West eventually led to the Reformation, which in turn led to the Enlightenment which, eventually, led to a desire to approach truth from the perspective of secular reason alone.  The problem with this is that there isn’t a solid, consensus basis for “values” based on secular reason — there are merely arguments for and against certain values.  Because of that, the Post-Christian West has largely inherited some of the basic moral ideas of Christianity but, importantly, unmoored them from their religious basis — which has enabled a cafeteria approach to them.

To take a relevant example — the notion of fundamental human equality is a very Christian one — all men and women are equal in the eyes of God, and as Paul himself said, among those who are “in Christ” there is no male and female, no Jew and Greek, and so on.  This radical, fundamental equality, in spiritual terms, was a true revolution in thought brought about by Christianity — at least in the context of the dominant civilization of that time, and the civilization which was our cultural precursor as Westerners.  However, this core reverence for the fundamental equality of human beings did not obliterate differences in sex and station and hierarchy, but rather affirmed these.  Hence Paul’s admonitions about husbands and wives and so on, and his writings about authority, and the different talents and stations in the church and so on.  This kind of “tension” between fundamental spiritual equality, on the one hand, and, on a more day-to-day level, fundamental difference only seems contradictory to modern minds because modernity has lost a truly Christian worldview.  As a result, much of the West has “ditched” those aspects of Christian moral thought (such as the idea that fundamental equality expresses itself also as hierarchy and difference and is not antithetical to this) which it finds contradictory to the rather linear, and therefore misleading, ways and means of human reason.

The fundamental Christian worldview that underlies the harmony of fundamental equality expressed and lived as difference and hierarchy is, of course, the Holy Trinity itself.  The persons of the Trinity are true persons, differentiated and unique, yet “one in essence” and hence fundamentally equal in essence and all God.  Yet there is a hierarchy within the Trinity — the Father is the monarch, if you will, the fountainhead of divinity, of whom the Son is begotten, and from whom the Spirit proceeds.  Father, Son and Spirit are all equally God, yet among them exists both differentiation and hierarchy — neither of which upsets their fundamental equality as God.

Following from a solidly Trinitarian concept of reality, and viewing humanity as being made in the image and likeness of God — that is, in the image and likeness of the Trinity — we can clearly see that humanity is characterized by both fundamental equality and differentiation and hierarchy.  Not only do these characteristics not conflict, but rather they reflect, in a fundamental and constitutive way, the underlying nature and proper ordering of human beings.  When contemporary “Christians” in our Post-Christian West read Paul to be contradictory when it comes to equality and contemporary notions of appropriate gender relations, this is really only a reflection of how profoundly un-Christian a worldview these “Christians” have.  And it’s precisely because of this lack of a Christian worldview — something which has happened with the resurrection of humanistic philosophy in the West — that the moral ideas of Chistianity, which still inform the West even as a ghost to some degree, are hopelessly twisted and teased beyond recognition, in order to “get rid of” those aspects of Christian moral thought that appear contradictory to those who have a humanistic, as opposed to a Christian, worldview.

HT:  Talley and Al

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Singlextianman also linked to an earlier post of mine on his blog, and included some nice YouTube links, to which I also added the following: