John Piper and the Rise of Biblical Masculinity
We've been hearing a lot about masculine Christianity lately.
By now we're used to hearing Mark Driscoll campaign for more masculine church leaders and expressions of Christianity; late last year, Reformed pastor Douglas Wilson invited Driscoll to his church to speak at a Grace Agenda conference—a gathering that tactfully segregated women by offering a separate pre-conference just for them. In turn, Wilson spoke at John Piper's Desiring God Pastor's Conference, which this year had an explicitly masculine theme: "God, Manhood & Ministry: Building Men for the Glory of God." No stranger to strong statements in the blogo-twittersphere, Piper again drew attention by declaring that "God has given Christianity a masculine feel."
The insistence that Christianity ought to be muscular is often traced to American evangelists of the early 20th century, such as Billy Sunday and D. L. Moody, who emphasized sports and physical strength to counter the perception that Christians were soft and docile, in other words, feminine: a concept attributed to the 19th-century idealization of women as keepers of home and hearth and nurturer of the family's spiritual well-being. But even then, the perception of "spirituality" as "feminine" was itself a relatively new idea. For millennia, Western ideology tended to understand women as being grounded in body and matter, while men dealt in the realm of the mind and spirit.
If nothing else, it's clear that masculinity and femininity are not fixed and eternal sets of attributes, but are by and large culturally defined, and always changing. For example, blue was once more closely associated with "feminine" while pink was associated with "masculine." In parts of Europe, it's still not unusual for men to greet one another with kisses; in India, you might see two male friends walking arm in arm. And we have many examples of renaissance poetry—essentially love poetry—written by and for non-homosexual males who were close friends. By looking to other times and other places, we can see that masculinity is a way of behaving culturally that looks different in different times and places.
In their 1990 book, What's the Difference?: Manhood and Womanhood Defined according to the Bible, John Piper and Elisabeth Elliot acknowledge that the cultural forms of masculinity and femininity can change, but insist that Christians ought to respect, not challenge, these cultural codes, including things like, "Who speaks for the couple at the restaurant?" and "Who drives the car? … Mature masculinity will not try to communicate that such things don't matter." I doubt such displays of masculinity—driving the car, speaking to restaurant staff—held much more cultural sway in 1990 than they do today, so it's worth asking: Why do Piper, Wilson, Driscoll, and other neo-Reformed leaders feel the need repeatedly to defend masculinity, often stridently?
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Piper Larry
How do we call men to lead in their homes and churches alongside women without replacing or marginalizing them?
Yohanna Puric
Hmm...and after all that, was it edifying to the Body of Christ and glorifying to Christ? Shalom:-)
Sam
@Jason: "It's easier for me to wrestle with scripture than it is with human experience or emotions." Therein lies your difficulty with being able to relate to the other half our brothers and sisters in Christ. Perhaps you should spend less time strengthening the muscle that is clearly already quite strong (your logic and critical thinking) and now work on a muscle that may have been neglected (your intuition and emotional empathy). It is my strong belief that the moment one becomes more prominent than the other, misunderstanding and fallacies spring up. This in turn requires a constant vigilance to be sure one is being truly balanced, and enough humility to admit they might be wrong about something when someone tries to correct them. Of course, I could be wrong too ;)
Margaret
The problem with this article is the reasoning behind why the leadership in the church should not be just viewed as masculine. Not because there are lots of women in the church, and not because there are character qualities in women that can be good in leadership, and not because not only men have those qualities. The reason why leadership has to reflect both masculine and feminine is because human beings, both men and women, are made in the image of God, which means that the godhead contains both masculine and feminine qualities, that He is both masculine and feminine in His character and expression of Himself to us--loving and nurturing, comforting in the Holy Spirit, creator and initiator in His love for us iN Jesus Christ. Thus leadership in the church, both from men and from women, must contain these qualities of masculine and feminine. Give me a leader, a male pastor, who can nurture and love in the feminine ss well as exhort in the masculine initiator role. Give me women who can love and nurture in the healing gifts of the feminine, and also lead and organize retreats. Give me men and women who are not afraid of the other gender, or of co-ministry for the sake of Jesus Christ, men who are not afraid to bring women alongside their leadership, and women who are not afraid to defer. Give me Christ in His Body, orderly and unified and unashamed, unafraid to submit, unafraid to lead. "Who of you can say to the hand, I don't need you...." The whole debate disappears if you focus on Christ. MB
Margaret
The problem with this article is the reasoning behind why the leadership in the church should not be just viewed as masculine. Not because there are lots of women in the church, and not because there are character qualities in women that can be good in leadership, and not because not only men have those qualities. The reason why leadership has to reflect both masculine and feminine is because human beings, both men and women, are made in the image of God, which means that the godhead contains both masculine and feminine qualities, that He is both masculine and feminine in His character and expression of Himself to us--loving and nurturing, comforting in the Holy Spirit, creator and initiator in His love for us iN Jesus Christ. Thus leadership in the church, both from men and from women, must contain these qualities of masculine and feminine. Give me a leader, a male pastor, who can nurture and love in the feminine ss well as exhort in the masculine initiator role. Give me women who can love and nurture in the healing gifts of the feminine, and also lead and organize retreats. Give me men and women who are not afraid of the other gender, or of co-ministry for the sake of Jesus Christ, men who are not afraid to bring women alongside their leadership, and women who are not afraid to defer. Give me Christ in His Body, orderly and unified and unashamed, unafraid to submit, unafraid to lead. "Who of you can say to the hand, I don't need you...." MB
Tim
Well Vik Feodorov, all I can say is Philippians 3:15. Blessings, Tim
Tim
Well Vik Feodorov, all I can say is Philippians 3:15. Blessings, Tim
Vik Feodorov
"Great article", "wonderful thoughts" and other pathetic-like whoops from the choir of spiritually powerless readers.. Well, it completes the picture of Western feminized, tooothless type of Christianity. Iti is not just John Pipers opinion, folks, it is written! in the Scriptures!
Tim
But Joe Brooks, this article's discussion is not about the nature of God the Father but the nature of Christianity. Why? Because that's how Dr. Piper framed the issue in the first place: "masculine Christianity", not whether God is portrayed as Father or not. His attempt to cast biblical Christianity as masculine is hogwash, because Christianity as a faith is not genderfied in the Bible. Other things and people are, but not the faith itself. Blessings, Tim
joebrooks
It never ceases to amaze me the hoops that writers will leap through in order to feminize God, especially considering that, before you feminize Him, you must de-deify Him! The very idea that the Bible (if we are really to believe it to be the Word of God) is subject to earthly editorial boards, is preposterous. If God had wanted to establish Christiantiy as a matriarchial belief system, then God would have done so. To believe otherwise is to believe that humankind has veto power over God. So. do we worship an all-powerful God who presented Himself to us in a manner that He chose or do we worship a god who is at the mercy of societal prejudices? If you worship the latter, you do not worship the God of the Bible, but clearly a deity of your own making.
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