April 12, 2012
Gender Neutral
I’m working on a presentation for a women’s tea and the requested topic
is the Fruit of the Spirit. Over the years I’ve attended many talks on the
Fruit of the Spirit, but it just dawned on me that it’s always been the topic
for women’s groups. I don’t think I’ve heard of a men’s retreat featuring a
keynote address on the Fruit of the Spirit. You have to admit that the Fruit –
love, joy, peace, patience, kindness goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and
self-control – really doesn’t have that dragon slayer feel to it. I’m wondering
how Paul’s masculine audience reacted to his teaching…I think I’m sort of glad
my audience will be women. (Gal 5:22-23 NIV)
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Gail;
-----I think we can honestly say mankind is messed up, maybe not completely, but significantly. It follows rather naturally that since gender roles are human roles, they are somewhat messed up as well. God did not discuss gender roles in our Operator’s Manual by giving them a tidy chapter of their own listed in the content table and referenced in the index. Instead, what we can know about them by His Word comes from just a few specific, yet elementally basic impacts gender roles had upon other issues in the Bible. The sense of reality about them is therefore not automatically produced in us such as a straight-forward and concrete discussion of them would more do. Yet where they are discussed in His Word, their doings are discussed specifically as very real and very important. Yet their why’s remain abstractly embedded in the rest of the Scripture, but surely simple and quite understandable if sought diligently.
-----We look at the pretty girls and think sweetness, but in the handsome men we see conquerors, heroes, and other ruffians of the field. Yet this is like trying to differentiate between Corvettes and Mustangs on the basis of their colors. Maybe there were more silver Corvettes than Mustangs, but that does not mean a silver car is a Corvette. Basically, we have let biases take us over before we’ve studied our way completely into the intelligence of the more elementary information.
-----Philosophically speaking (and no philosophy can escape the potter’s wheel of the Bible,) truth and love must be the basics of all sense and matter, truth being that everything is exactly what it is whether any human mind knows it or not, and love being that a cause produces only beneficial effects. God has called upon both man and woman to live truthfully and lovingly. And He created both masculine and feminine natures to deal truthfully and beneficially towards whatever their dealings are aimed. But by the makeup of their bodies and minds, this truthfulness and these benefits extend from slightly different activities. But they will still be truthful and beneficial, that is, if we were not so messed up.
-----So the husband is the head of wife, it is anathema to say, but Scriptural anyway. Being “head” is merely an activity. And like all other activities, it is subject to the basics of all sense and matter: truth and love. Therefore Paul continues in Ephesians to explain that the man will give himself up for his sweetie. And the loving man does. But for sure, this doing does not inhibit his ability to set his foot firmly upon the rabbit’s neck so the wife can feed stew to the babies by giving him the freedom to chase (submission) what rabbit he deems best stepped upon. The submission of the woman and the headship of the man, the tenderness of the woman and the toughness of the man, the intuitiveness of the woman and logistics of the man are shapes of the roles differentiating the Corvette from the Mustang, but neither from “car.” Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control are merely characteristics of the paint which should go onto all cars alike (and one glorious day will.)
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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