Discipleship Over Definitions: Why Character Trumps Personality ⚓

00:00:01 Speaker 1: The world is becoming increasingly proficient at telling stories that deny God. As such, we need Thinking Christian to become as natural as breathing. Welcome to the Thinking Christian podcast. I'm doctor James Spencer, and through calm, thoughtful theological discussions, Thinking Christian highlights the ways God is working in the world and questions the underlying social, cultural, and political assumptions that hinder Christians from becoming more like Christ. Now onto today's episode of Thinking Christian. Hey, everyone, welcome to this episode of Thinking Christian on Doctor James Spencer and I'm joined again by doctor Asheesh Pharma, and we're going to continue our discussion about Biblical manhood and womanhood and masculinity, effeminity and what it really means to be a male disciple of Jesus Christ. And today we're going to be looking at John Piper's Essay in Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, which is a book that was written some time ago. A couple things before we dive into the argument. Number one, the book has a lot of exegetical chapters. They actually have full sections on the exegetical chapters of these various texts, and so I'd encourage you if you want to see an in depth look at each one of those these texts that are covered in the book, Great pick it up that written by strong scholars. Da Carson Wright's one of them. Tom Shiner, I believe is in there. And so they're dealing with these different texts. Piper does not in his essay deal with all of these texts. He's making some assumptions about these texts. The texts in question really are as he lists them. One Corinthians eleven three through sixteen, which is a passage about women and men and head coverings, and there are a lot of interpretive issues there about what's going on in that passage. Ephesians five twenty one through thirty three, which largely deals with husbands and wives. One Timothy two eleven through fourteen, is also one of those that is heavily disputed. It's a difficult passage to interpret. 00:01:59 Speaker 2: There's this. 00:02:01 Speaker 1: To women being saved through childbearing that no one seems to know what to do with. But I would say there's a lot of really good scholarship going on around that passage. Now, a couple of the issues that I have with these texts in relation to what they're trying to do, which is construct a notion of Biblical masculinity or Biblical manhood. The ones that are specific to husbands and wives, I would say those are role based and they don't really necessarily speak to men. They speak to husbands, they speak to wives, and so whether that can be generalized to women and men is a different question. Now, there is an essay in the book I believe that you Know talks about you know, if men are the head of the family, they need to be the head of the church, and so there is an argument for that. But I would just say that in general, I have trouble translating from husband, wife, or particular roles into a notion of masculinity. And here's part of the reason why I have that. It's because of the Master and bond servant passages. I think when we look at the master bond servant passages, if we were to start there and say, can we extrapolate to an understanding of Biblical manhood from the Master and bond servant passages, We're going to come to very different conclusions than when we start at the male female passages. And these are men in relationship to each other. Many times. It's not that there wouldn't have been female masters or female bond servants necessarily, but there's obviously also men in these relationships, and so. 00:03:30 Speaker 2: What do you do with that? 00:03:31 Speaker 1: These are two very different sorts of relationships, and if we were to construct an understanding of manhood based on these two texts, you're coming to very different conclusions because a man is subserving it to another man presumably, and is told to act in different ways, and so to me, just some of these texts don't really relate when we're trying to jump between men and women and husbands and wives. I find that particularly difficult if are looking to build an understanding of Biblical manhood. So I'll leave it there. We'll we'll basically the structure of this episode. We're going to go through and read a few of these different passages and kind of talk through them a little bit of what Piper says. We're going to try to give the context and appropriate reading without you know, skewing him. We don't want to set up a straw man with Piper, and obviously he's written other things. This is a thirty minute podcast, so we're gonna do what we can. Uh ah I'll let you, I'll let you share your thoughts before we jump in here. 00:04:34 Speaker 3: Yeah, thanks James, thanks for that intro to sort of the issues at play and what we're going to go through era. I think it's important to note too that we are not We just can't, as you said, go through everything Piper says. And our goal is not to say it's a it's either on or it's off, it's yes or it's no. Everything Piper says it's either great or everything he says it's awful. I think what you'll find that we're being fairly critical the goals and to say that everything's awful. There's a spectrum, as with most things, that there are things that he says. He said, that's a fair point. Many of them are observations, observations of difference that are worth noting. Our goals aren't here to completely collapse the difference between men and women. Our goals are more what we tend to think of as social understandings of gender male and female, to kind of question the assumptions at play. There are the things that he says that maybe we don't agree with, or maybe one of us doesn't agree with and the other one maybe does other Does you know, we haven't worked through every single detail. That's not the issue either. There's some things he says that we find pretty bad. Again, we can't go through them all. But the goal here is really ultimately to get to sort of the heart of what is animating Piper to say the things that he's trying to say. Where are his conclusions coming from. How do those track vis the biblical text? Are things always as simply biblical, straightforwardly biblical, as he might want them to seem. I think you and I, James both think that probably not. And those are the sorts of things we want to get into. So what's at the core of what Piper's doing rather than let's examine every single tree in this forest? 00:06:33 Speaker 2: Yeah? Yeah, exactly. 00:06:36 Speaker 1: Because I think I do probably agree with him on the interpretation of specific passages, though I don't agree with him in the implications of those passages. He tends to draw more out of them than I would, and he does that an awful lot. And because he tends to root those in biblical interpretation, they seem to have an authority that I don't really think they should carry. Are interpretations that go beyond the text everybody does that. That's not the that's not the problem. Everybody does this. The question is how sure are you about these specific interpretations that go beyond the text? 00:07:15 Speaker 2: You know. 00:07:15 Speaker 1: So the one that I usually like to use is the Trinity. Right We don't find the trinity that language in scripture, and yet we talk about the Trinity. We don't talk about the humanity and deity of Christ in scripture or the you know, homusia or whatever, right, Like, there are certain things that we have developed into doctrines that are that are aligned with the scriptures, but aren't actually there in the text. They're not spelled out for us. So the interpretive community does this all the time. We pull things out of the text and try to understand it and synthesize something out of the text that is appropriate to the text, that emerges from the text. And so I think that's the attempt that Piper's doing here. It's just that part of the time what he's pulling out is I think a little bit too sure of itself. It seems like it's sort of if you don't believe this, you're obviously wrong about biblical manhood and womanhood. So I would sort of press back on the surety of his interpretations. But then I would also question some of the things that he tries to tease out of these texts and out of a broader understanding of biblical manhood and womanhood, because I don't think they would actually work, nor do I think that this is what God's word is telling us. 00:08:28 Speaker 2: So with that said, why don't we. 00:08:30 Speaker 1: Jump into one and we can kind of give a concrete illustration. So I want to start with one that Ashishu actually brought up. It's his sixth comment on mature masculinity, and I'm just going to read the sixth statement and then a section of his work. Here he says, mature masculinity expresses it's leadership in romantic sexual relations by communicating an aura of strong and tender pursuit. And then he goes down and he says, it will not do to say that since the woman can rightly initiate, therefore there's no special leadership that the man should fulfill. When a wife wants sexual relations with her husband, she wants him to seek her and take her and bring her into his arms and up to the pleasures that his initiatives give her. He goes on to say, consider what is lost when a woman when women attempt to assume a more masculine role by appearing physically muscular and aggressive. It's true that there is something sexually stimulating about a muscular, scantily clad young woman pumping iron in a health club, but no woman should be encouraged by this fact, for it probably means the sexual encounter that such an image would lead to is something very hasty and volatile and a long run unsatisfying. The image of a masculine musculature may beget arousal in a man, but it does not beget several hours of moonlit walking with significant caring conversation. The more women can arouse men by doing typically masculine things, the less they can count on receiving from men. A sensitivity to typical feminine needs. Mature masculinity will not be reduced to raw desire and sexual relations. It remains alert to the deeper personal needsable woman and mingle strength and tenderness to make her joy complete. 00:10:24 Speaker 2: End quote. 00:10:27 Speaker 1: What stands out to me in this association, then I'll hand it over to you, is that there are a couple things that bother me about this. Number one, the typically masculine activities. Those words mean nothing. I mean, I've been in the gym for years, Like I've spent countless hours in a gym lifting weights. There are always women there, always, always, always. This was not a typically masculine activity, right, Yes, she might catch the men doing more like powerlifting and stuff like that, but the women were always at the gym. This is not something that like, women don't lift weights, and so this masculine activity at a health club is crazy talk. There are women powerlifters, there are women wrestlers. There are women. I mean, my daughter's a gymnast. She's like, she can do more pill ups than me, she can do more push ups than me. She like she's good at that because she practices it. She's in the gym sixteen hours a week. Like this idea that this sort of physique is somehow makes a woman more masculine. 00:11:40 Speaker 2: Is crazy town to me. 00:11:43 Speaker 1: But I would also say that, if I'm going to be fair to him, what I think he may be referring to is sort of a flaunting of that physique. 00:11:51 Speaker 2: Maybe, but that's not at all what he says. 00:11:55 Speaker 1: Right, I've also been in the gym when you do tend to see the flaunters, right, they're not really working out, they're just sort of hanging out, right, that's men and women. Quite frankly, it drives me crazy because it's like, get away from my machine. But ultimately that's not what he describes. He describes a woman who is scantily clad. Sure, which that could mean many things to many people. 00:12:18 Speaker 2: Right. 00:12:20 Speaker 1: You know, tights are pretty common in the gym nowadays. I don't know that I've ever gotten aroused by a woman in tights. It's just it is what it is, right, It's Jim Garb, you know what I'm saying. So I think overall this is a really deeply mischaracterizing narrative that is just problematic on a number of levels. 00:12:42 Speaker 2: So the idea of. 00:12:43 Speaker 1: A typically masculine thing is problematic to me, and I think ultimately just the overall context of what he's arguing doesn't really bother me to say that a man should attend to a woman's needs and a sexual encounter. Right, that okay, But I don't see how any of that really has to do with biblical manhood. 00:13:05 Speaker 2: I'll leave it there. 00:13:09 Speaker 3: Yeah, my initial reaction is what what is going on here? That's my technical reaction. So I think you're being kind to Piper in the way that you respond. I think he says a little bit more, then you're kindly attributing to him. Right, he's not talking. He's not talking about the person who's there to say look at me, but is not actually working out. He talks about the ripped or toned muscles. I can't remember his exact wording. Yeah, but he's talking about someone in such a way as this woman is actually working out. And the implication is because she's working out in this way that in some way in his social imaginary makes her masculine. Okay, it's therefore going to arouse some sort of sexual desire in the mail, and in that process it's going to create an environment that is purely charged sexually but does not allow for a long walk with caring understanding of the other. I just don't there's so many steps there that I don't know where to even begin, to be honest with you, you know, fallacy of false cause, as philosophers might say. 00:14:43 Speaker 1: Yeah, it's almost like it's a scenario that if you don't think about it too hard, you could go okay, but once you dig into it, you're going No, none of that makes any sense, none of it. 00:14:56 Speaker 3: How does one lead you to the next, How is it skill in for a woman to be working out in a gym. There can be a lot of reasons to work out in a gym. It could be it could be the simple reason of this person plays basketball and she goes into the lane and a bigger person is able to knock her off her shot. The refs aren't going to change or they're not going to call everything, and so she knows that she's not going to be able to finish her shot consistently when the defense is taking their hedging their bets on the refs not calling everything, so she goes to the gym. In fact, this was my motivation in high school to start lifting weights. It was entirely basketball related, right. It was I need to put on muscle so that when I'm in the lane, bigger guys can't knock me off my shot. I would venture to guess that if you go to the average women's basketball player, she'd say this same thing, especially those who are on the smaller end. 00:16:03 Speaker 2: Right. 00:16:06 Speaker 3: But okay, the next implication from that, so if she's in the gym and she's working out and a guy notices her and goes up to her and talks to her. This is going to then potentially begin a relationship based entirely on the physical How does he know that? Why is that necessarily true? Could? Could I offer as well that I've watched enough of these David Attenborough BBC Nature documentaries to realize that God has in fact made these sorts of physical attractive attractions too, to be the impetus for what ends up resulting in reproduction of a species. Right, this isn't this isn't to human problem. In other words, this is entirely present throughout the rest of creation. Where you know, a flower looks better ostensibly so that it can draw the bee to it. The bird pulls out its special it's special colors that's hidden underneath its wings and does a little dance quite literally, in order to entice the female bird to say, yes, I want to reproduce with you. Now, I think it's important to note that we humans were made I think, quite clearly for something more than just the physical. But that's sort of denouncing of the physical attraction as an as as the impetus for a relationship strikes me as very gnostic. You know, this sort of ancient philosophy of away with the physical, away with the material, everything's purely intellectual, which I think has its own problems. To just say everything's purely that could be a topic for another time. But then finally to say that none of that can then lead into meaningful conversation. 00:18:08 Speaker 2: I think. 00:18:10 Speaker 3: I think anyone who's been in a relationship long enough realizes that whatever physical markers instigate the beginning of a relationship, those physical markers never sustain a relationship. 00:18:23 Speaker 2: Right. 00:18:25 Speaker 3: A relationship that does not grow in some sort of let's call it a spiritual intimacy for lack of a better term, is a relationship that's doomed to failure. Right, But one needs to look no further than the massive relationships that we see coming out of Hollywood. 00:18:43 Speaker 2: Right. 00:18:43 Speaker 3: These are beautiful people, men and women both, and it's quite apparent that the beautifulness of these couples in and of itself never sustains a single one of those relationships. The relationships that survive, you get a sense, oh, there's an actual kind there beyond whatever the physical was gave away to something else. So I just think that the moves Piper is making just on a basic sociological level to make it don't make sense. Never mind that it's not clear to me at all, and what respect any of that came from biblical exegetical work, right, we have we haven't even reached that spot. 00:19:21 Speaker 1: And I think we haven't reached that spot because it's not really there like he created. He doesn't argue it anywhere. There's no sense in which I can't think of biblical texts that really do relate to this, right like, they're just not there. And so yeah, that is a big part of this problem is that once we get and I'll just be transparent. Like Ephesians five talks about the man being the head of the woman, so does First Corinthians eleven, and there's a lot tied up with that conversation about the head. But in my research, I don't think that head can really mean source necessarily. I don't find that that's the way it's used there. And so my tendency is to say, no, it means head is in authority. When we're saying that, you know, Christ is the head of the man, Christ is the head of the church. There is a positional authority that's occupied there. Now, how do you tease out that authority. In other words, what are the implications of that authority. We don't really know other than what we see in places like in Ephesians five, where we're told that the husband is to love his wife. And this emerges from that sort of very patriarchal culture where I think some of the best research that's been done on this deals with cafale, which is Greek for head, and from a medical point of view, so in other words, the cafale was something you know, there's a reason we wear helmets when we play football, right, it's because our heads are vulnerable, and so you want to protect your mush, right, like you need that protection on your head. Well, that physical understanding of head was then pulled over metaphorically into families, and the head of the household becomes like the head of the body, and the whole household now sort of is oriented to protecting the head, protecting the reputation of the head, protecting the lifestyle of the head, doing what the head needs, right, And so you've got this whole sort of structure that's oriented to the man, the head of the household that Paul is saying, no, okay, man's the head but that doesn't mean what you think it means. Right, Christ is the head of the church. Look what he did. He sacrificed himself. He wasn't leading from behind. He was right out in front, willing to sacrifice himself, willing to die to follow God's will, but also to care for his church, care for his people. And that's the way this headship is supposed to be exercised. I say all that to say I think Viper would generally agree with that understanding of that text. Right, That head in that context doesn't mean source, it means something of authority. My problem isn't with that sort of reading of the text. My problem is with everything that's drawn out of that. And so all of a sudden, you know, I have this text about the sexual encounter. There's another one I'll read here that deals with breadwinning, which is just to me sort of off base as an entailment of what headship is. So let me just read this and we can have a little bit of discussion on this one too. The basic idea he's arguing in this section is that the man is to have this this general sense that it's his job to care for the home, to protect the home, right, and he says, let's say this man has a disabling disease. I'll start from there, and it says, this is quote. His wife may be the main breadwinner in such a circumstance, and she may be the one who must get up at night to investigate a frightening noise in the house. 00:23:12 Speaker 2: This is not easy for the man. 00:23:14 Speaker 1: But if he still has the sense of his own benevolent responsibility under God, he will not lose his masculinity. His sense of responsibility will find expression in the ways he conquers self pity and gives moral and spiritual leadership for his family, and takes the initiative to provide them with the bread of life and protect them from the greatest enemies of all, Satan and sin. 00:23:40 Speaker 2: So there's this sort of. 00:23:43 Speaker 1: Narrowing of what it means to provide and protect away from the physical and just toward the spiritual. When a man is disabled physically, and then he asks this, someone might ask, so is a woman masculine if she is a single parent and provides these same things for her children. Are these only for men to do? I would answer, A woman is not unduly masculine in performing these duties for her children, if she has the sense that this would be properly done by her husband if she had one, and if she performs them with a uniquely feminine demeanor. 00:24:21 Speaker 2: End quote. 00:24:24 Speaker 3: I want to start with this last two words, go for it. What in the world is a feminine demeanor? Right that it's taking for granted the very thing he's trying to argue for here, right, Yeah, it's begging the question. 00:24:39 Speaker 2: It's very circular. 00:24:40 Speaker 1: And so you get to this, like I find it interesting, you know, And Okay, let's say from within this sort of perspective where the man is supposed to protect and provide, Okay, you probably do have to make provision for people who can't physically work, can't physically provide protection. But then doesn't that automatically make them less masculine. It would almost have to, like it's not even a it's not even a question. It would almost have to make them less masculine from within this perspective, if that's what they're supposed to be doing, not just providing and protecting spiritually, which by the way, any man could do whether his wife made. 00:25:26 Speaker 2: More money than him less money than him, Like. 00:25:28 Speaker 1: If if the woman was the breadwinner, you could still have this exact same dynamic, right, And so the question is if the man has to be the breadwinner, if he's the one who's supposed to protect and provide for the family, and that is his primary responsibility, like once he can't do that anymore, how could he not become less masculine? There's a negative there that I don't think he's really dealing with. Now he does deal with the absence of a man, right, and I agree with you. What does it mean to be have a feminine demeanor or to be unduly masculine? 00:26:08 Speaker 2: Neither of those terms mean anything. 00:26:10 Speaker 3: Right, it's taken for granted to content. You get the sense at the beginning of the chapter he's very intentional to make a point that he's he's rejecting cultural understandings of masculinity and femininity. 00:26:30 Speaker 2: Yes, and he's. 00:26:30 Speaker 3: Appealing to the Biblical text to try to understand as best as he can what the text says, and that it's important for him to point out that the text that he's appealing to aren't making cultural appeals, but rather appealing to the pattern of creation. Right, at least in this chapter, he doesn't really do the work to show what's going on in those passages. No, but I think it begs another question here. So he's thinking of places like in Firse Corinthians where Paul speaks to the pattern of creation in order to then to make his appeal about husbands and wives. Right right, here's one of the troubles to me. When you look at creation. We have this, I think, very beautiful rendering in chapter two Genesis, Chapter two of the man who is made from the dust of the ground, the very breath of God, the spirit of God has breathed into him in order to make him a living soul, and then he's given to the ground. Right the languages. There aren't certain kinds of plants because there was no people to work the ground. Now he's meant to work the ground. There are these animals, and he's meant to name them, and among other things, to learn in the process that they're not like him. Right beyond mere superficial sorts of things. Of who striped horse over there looks different than me. I'm not striped and I'm not horse like like. There seems to be an intimate understanding of knowledge, and God says it's not good for this man to be alone puts him to sleep, draws the woman from him, and then in that moment we get the one moment of him naming, or at least ostensibly quasi naming, right, bone of my bones, flesh and my flesh. Yep, I shall call her ish in Hebrew, I shall call her eshah. That's right, very very similar to the English man woman. Right. But at no point in any of that narrative does it say, then, and here's what the role of the man is in the garden, and here's what the role of the woman knows in the garden. 00:28:47 Speaker 2: Right. 00:28:48 Speaker 3: In fact, it seems so insignificant to the point of that passage as to not even be hinted at. 00:28:54 Speaker 2: Right. 00:28:55 Speaker 3: Yeah, we move straight from there to ostensibly we finally have the situation where things are full and complete and rightly ordered, because we now have a man and a woman together. 00:29:09 Speaker 2: Right. 00:29:10 Speaker 3: I don't mean complementarianism, but there's a complimentarity that's implied between them, correct, Right, But where does one set make way for the other set of complimentarity? No comment whatsoever. So, now when Paul's picking up these sorts of things, and this will get me to number two. So if one was that the Genesis text doesn't actually say anything. When Paul then makes us appeal, what is he trying to get at? And I would argue that this is sort of an issue of what some would call a social imaginary. What I mean by that is the way that we inhabit the world is shaped by a reality that pre exists us that we then enter into. We've talked about this before, but our kids speak the languages they do with the idioms that they do for the reasons that they do because of where they're born and where they grow up, and that's the saturation around them that helps them see the world that they do. 00:30:14 Speaker 2: Right. 00:30:15 Speaker 3: I grew up to immigrant parents, and at times in a very immigrant community, and it was very important to my father, who didn't speak English terribly well initially, that I speak English well. He said, you will always have troubles if you don't, and it was important to him to put me in the settings where I could learn to speak very well. But the thing he could not give to me, and this speaks to the social imaginary, was idiomatic expressions. And to this day, right several decades into my life, I struggle with American idioms and I've been in front of a class and I say it, and the the kids in the class, kids that the people in the class, they'll chuckle at me, and then I realize, oh, I got that one wrong, or I combined one idiom with. 00:31:05 Speaker 2: Another, right. 00:31:08 Speaker 3: I remember a friend of both of ours, who I used to be a roommate with. He would he would say an idiom or pronounce a word in a certain kind of way, and like, I don't know what that is, and there was a little chuckling session. 00:31:22 Speaker 2: Right. 00:31:24 Speaker 3: My daughter, one of my daughters, she did a unit on idioms in school, and she came home and she was so excited about them, and I was, frankly, I was learning idioms from my grade school daughter. And the idea of social imaginary play here is that I could speak English technically masterfully, I could write it masterfully. But something that couldn't be taught to me in this sort of overt way was the idiomatic usage. And the reason for that is because it comes from embodying a social imaginary. And while I did have part of my social imaginery in American schools, I also had a very large component in my life embodied in a world that didn't know American idioms. And so they weren't commonplace to me, and I didn't know them, right. I say all that to say that that idea of a social imaginary, yes, I think is inescapable, and that's not a bad thing, so provided we understand that that's a thing. And this is where I see some struggle entering into Piper, where Piper is embodying a sort sort of social imaginary that has ideas of masculinity and has ideas of femininity that might have been produced, as we've said in the previous episode, might have been produced for good reason in a certain time and place. But the problem is is that when we take that for granted as itself some sort of universal fact of masculinity and a universal fact of femininity such that it historically is even created issues of violence. Right when the English first came to what we think of as North America today, one of their justifications for their treatment of the First Nation's peoples was, we see these men and women in these First Nations communities not operating the proper social boundaries of masculinity and femininity, right, and as a result, that means that they're barbaric, they're not truly civilized. They don't have They don't even have the right starting place for nature, never mind the ability to perfect that nature. And if they can't have the perfection of that nature because they're starting in a barbaric state, then they can't receive the grace of God in Christ. Now Piper does not say all of that, but it's the same sort of mentality and logic that's at play here. Whatever it was, right, He even starts his chapter again with here's who my dad was, and here's who my mom was. And this was a wonderful and beautiful thing. But it's not hard stop there, it's and this is the way it ought to look for all men in ways. Yeah, And the fact what flows out of that is the rest of the chapter, the fact that it doesn't look that way for all men and women creates and he starts to name social problems that Honestly, I read it and I think, how could you possibly know that those social problems didn't previously exist? How do you know that those social problems are a result of not living into these ideals, these social imaginary ideals of masculinity and femininity that you've brought to the plate. Yeah, you know, I know that idiom baseball brought to the plate, right, And and there's where the struggle comes in for me, kind of at that core level. Yea, That it's not it's not him just simply saying, here's one rendering of the world for one group of people that is attempted to embody in a particular place and time, this complementarity of male and female. It's him saying, this way of doing things is the perfect way of doing things, or as close to perfect as we can get, and any deviation from this creates all manners of evil. 00:35:09 Speaker 2: Yea. 00:35:09 Speaker 1: And I will say the portion that you are referencing where he and I'm having trouble finding it here, but where he talks a little bit about the genesis narrative, he draws from the post fall genesis narrative to make these normative statements. 00:35:29 Speaker 3: So even as he says he's not doing that, by the way. 00:35:32 Speaker 2: That's right, but he is. I mean, the woman is going to be the one that gives birth. 00:35:36 Speaker 1: And you're kind of sitting there and scratching your head like, well, duh, that makes perfect Like who else is going to do it? 00:35:43 Speaker 2: And then you know, because the man is. 00:35:45 Speaker 3: Donald Schwarzenegger and the movie Junior. 00:35:47 Speaker 1: That's right, But because the man is punished with you know this idea, because you ate from the tree, now the ground will not yield it's fruit for you. 00:35:57 Speaker 2: Without this toil and labor. 00:35:59 Speaker 1: Obviously, now the man is supposed to be the one who goes out and does toil on labor. Well, you could make that assertion, you could assume that the man is going to do toil on labor, but I'm not sure you can jump to say that. Look, the woman's going to bear the children and then raise them, which the text doesn't say, right, right, the one's going to bear the children sure makes good sense. And she's also going to have enmity. 00:36:25 Speaker 2: Of a serpent. 00:36:26 Speaker 1: So I guess if you're a man and you're scared of snakes, that's a problem, you know somehow. But well, it's actually not her, it's her seed. So my snark, my sark has have gotten away, and my good thegreating there. But the idea is that when you get down to the man and there's this toil that he's going to experience, it's not exclusive to the man. Necessarily, there has to be a symmetry within the narrative, right and so if you look at the way the narrative is structured, you do tend to see this. 00:36:58 Speaker 2: The serpent is the first one, can then the woman than the man. 00:37:02 Speaker 1: Right as you've made We are doing lectures on on Old Testament theology too. You should check those out and we release them. But one of the points you made at one point was it reverses the order of creation, right, so the man, woman, beast. Now you're a beast woman man. But it also mirrors what you just saw in three to one. The serpent was the first actor that we see in that narrative, the woman was the second, the man is the third, And so there's a symmetry to the narrative that I think he misses and then overreads and extends well beyond what's actually there. It's similar to a point that I had Krista mccurlan on for an episode. She was talking about biblical authority, and one of the points she made in talking through One Timothy two is that in saying that when Paul says I do not allow a woman to have authority over a man, for one, that's a very rare use of that term authority. 00:37:57 Speaker 2: There. Usually authority is ex Usia that one author tain. 00:38:02 Speaker 1: I think, I don't know why I'm saying that right exactly, but it's a different word than next you see you. But then she said something that I really hadn't thought that much about was in precluding women from having authority and teaching over men, we automatically assume that the men have the authority, which the. 00:38:20 Speaker 2: Text doesn't say. 00:38:22 Speaker 1: Right, Paul could easily be addressing a situation where they're domineering women in the congregation and he's saying, no, you, nobody gets the domineer. 00:38:32 Speaker 2: Nobody gets this authority. This is not the way it works. 00:38:35 Speaker 1: But we don't tend into account and so it's like, there's all these little pieces that I think he's going beyond texts with that aren't really rooted in biblical text, but he's making it seem like they're rooting in biblical texts, and really where they're rooted is back where you're talking in this sort of social expectations that have been developed within a particular sect and field. And I just don't see that this way of arguing biblical manhood and womanhood is particularly biblical, right, It's not bad sociology. Let's say from a phenomenological perspective. I think he probably gets a certain segment of the population right, and the way they view manhood and womanhood. That's what I mean by its decent enough sociology, but it's not biblical. And I think part of the reason it's not biblical is we'll kind of discuss in another episode, is that I'm not sure you can construct a notion of biblical manhood out of scripture. I'm just not sure you can actually get there. I think there are too many I don't think the Bible is doing that, and I don't think there's a sufficient degree of passages or theologies that will allow us to sort of extract it in the same way that we do with certain other doctrines. So I'll leave it there. We probably should wrap this one up. Maybe I'll give you the last word if you have any. 00:40:12 Speaker 3: Well, I'd like to clarify unless in case someone misunderstands what you're trying to say that when you say manhood, you're talking about a social expectation or construct, right, And I would agree with you. I don't think the Bible gives you a social construct of this thing called masculinity. A male will act like this will bench this many pounds. Will we'll type this many words per minute, right, and a woman will that the feminine will have this proportionality and type this many like that doesn't exist. Of course, the Bible, on some sort of biological level, speaks of the reality of male and the reality of female and identifies them in ways as different. Yes, but I don't think that that's really truly in doubt in any serious space, even where it might seem like it. I think that the biological reality is not ultimately what's truly in doubt in any space. It's that social formation that you're talking about. 00:41:20 Speaker 2: That's right. 00:41:21 Speaker 1: George Will has this great quote, and I'm going to butcher it, but he wrote in the preface to his book The Pursuit of Happiness and Other Sobering Thoughts, which I love that title. He writes, male and female are biological facts. 00:41:36 Speaker 2: Ladies and gentlemen are social constructs. 00:41:40 Speaker 1: They are they embody the wise laws of the civilization that they're in. And then he goes on to say, and that is why statecraft will always be soul craft. And I think it's just a really good distinction. Male and female are biological facts. There's no like, we're not trying to collapse that. But there's this other thread. Ladies and gentlemen, right, those carry a social weight that I'm arguing you wouldn't really find in the Bible, and that I think Piper is having difficulties showing how they would arise from the Bible in this chapter. 00:42:18 Speaker 2: We're always going to have those. 00:42:20 Speaker 1: The question is whether we should embrace them as Christians or try to push against them. The question is whether they set up a standard other than Christ that we're called to live up to, or whether we could coincidentally sort of live into some of those as we pursue and formula with Christ. And to me, I think that's a really important distinction for Christians to make. So I don't know whether you agree with that, but yeah, the last word. 00:42:53 Speaker 3: Oh I gave the last word. I thought, yeah, I know, I'm good. I appreciate the clarity that you're bringing in there. 00:43:00 Speaker 2: All right, everybody, we'll wrap it up. 00:43:02 Speaker 1: We're gonna deal with one more scholar who's written on these issues in the next episode, so come on back. We'll take a look at what he has to say and address some of the issues that we're seeing in his text. 00:43:13 Speaker 2: As well. 00:43:15 Speaker 1: Hope you enjoyed this and hopefully it's helpful and join us next time on Thinking Christian Take Care. I just want to take a second to thank the team at Life Audio for their partnership with us on the Thinking Christian podcast. If you go to lifeaudio dot com, you'll find dozens of other faith centered podcasts in their network. They've got shows about prayer, Bible study, parenting, and more.