Two Ways News is a weekly collaboration between Phillip Jensen and Peter Jensen – a newsletter and podcast on a topic to encourage gospel thinking for today (subscribe at twoways.news).
Genesis 2 opens up some big topics for debate including re-thinking marriage. The conversation has been part of our social dialogue since the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s. Re-thinking the reality and role of men and women, their sexual differences and similarities has caused great turmoil in society. This episode gives more food for thought and ammunition for debate
The previous episode is The Animals. The next episode is Parents and Children.
MEN AND WOMEN
Re-thinking the reality, role and differences.
Phillip Jensen: Our generation has seen and caused one of the great revolutions, namely the understanding of marriage. There have been changes both for good and for ill. It has come out of the de-Christianization of society that we are now, as a society, confused about marriage. This is extraordinary because marriage is such a universal phenomenon. I don’t think it is a problem of multiculturalism because we are still not promoting polygamy, arranged marriages, or juvenile brides. It’s a matter of individualism, wealth, the sexual revolution, and the fact that people see rights as more important than responsibilities. Marriage is not simply a Christian thing; it’s a creational thing. The Bible teaches us that it is the nature of creation and the nature of humanity itself. Our topic is marriage: what it is and the essence and heart of marriage. This is part of our Genesis series. Peter, could you read Genesis 2:18-25?
Peter Jensen:
Then the LORD God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.” Now out of the ground the LORD God had formed every beast of the field and every bird of the heavens and brought them to the man to see what he would call them. And whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name. The man gave names to all livestock and to the birds of the heavens and to every beast of the field. But for Adam there was not found a helper fit for him. So the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept, he took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. And the rib that the LORD God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. Then the man said,
“This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.”
Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed.
Phillip: This is the first time we’ve heard that anything is ‘not good’. God is now addressing something that is ‘not good’. Genesis 2 adds something to the Genesis 1 account. So what do we expect to see from Genesis 2 that is additional or different to Genesis 1 on this subject of marriage and the creation of women?
Peter: We need both Genesis 1 and Genesis 2, making the same but slightly different points. In Genesis 1:27-28 we read:
So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them.
And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, …”
In Genesis 1, you have the fundamental principle of the equality of the sexes, that they are both in the image of God and that they belong together. And together they are going to fill the earth. It’s an equality of humanity. It is important that we regard every person who bears the human face as being equal with every other person. Then, we need Genesis 2. What is it that’s ‘not good’? That man is alone. That loneliness is not good. To be human is to be relational. The other animals are called before Adam, but they are not the answer. God creates from the side of Adam, symbolically very important, the woman, a helper fit for him. It does not mean she is like a servant; it means that she complements him. She’s equal but different, and that difference is absolutely necessary if they’re going to populate the earth.
Phillip: Yes, because in chapter 1 there is male and female in the image of God, but we’re not told why male and female. We are just told there are two different humans, which chapter 2 then teases out for us.
Peter: We see the delight that Adam expresses, as opposed to the animals, “This at last is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh.” You can have a wonderful relationship with a pet, but it can never take the place of a relationship with another human being, whether in friendship or, more particularly, in marriage. She is ‘fit’ for him.
Phillip: You said the word ’helper‘ doesn’t necessarily mean a servant.
Peter: God is our helper.
Phillip: Right, and he is not a servant, not a lesser being, because service always involves caring for the needs of the other person.
Peter: Service in itself does not mean that you are inferior to someone. Indeed, it’s essential from a biblical Christian point of view that we regard all people as equal—equally valuable, equally precious in the sight of God. We have different tasks to perform. For instance, I am a minister of the gospel, a servant of the gospel, and I serve a congregation. It does not endanger my image-bearing preciousness. But it means that there is in all human relationships a hierarchy.
Phillip: I used the word ’minister‘ to introduce myself a couple of times in a context where people have then asked me which portfolio I have. We use the word ’minister‘ for our politicians, and we have a prime minister and a minister of defence. Most people, therefore, see the word ’minister’ as a word of power. But it’s the word ’servant,’ which is the reverse, and it would be good if our politicians understood that.
Peter: It is a wonderful description of the people in power.
Phillip: We had a great song of the last 20 or 30 years about ‘the servant king,’ which is purposely putting two words together that are not normally thought of together but show the essence of Christian understanding in the nature of the Lord Jesus Christ, who is the King of Kings and Lord of Lords, the ruler of all rulers. And yet he came to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many.
Peter: You can serve by taking charge of other people. An officer serves his men and women, but he serves by telling them what to do. In military terms, it’s very hierarchical. A teacher serves his class and must see himself as the servant of the class.
Phillip: The officer who sees himself as serving his men is different to the officer who sees his men serving him. They are both giving orders, but the mindset is so different.
Peter: That raises the difficulty or the awful consequence that you may regard people as inferior to yourself, which is a very foolish way to think.
Phillip: How do men and women complement each other?
Peter: As experience shows, men and women benefit each other. It is in marriage, but it’s also in all human relations by the way we contribute to each other. We need to recognize that we are making generalizations but there are some things that one sex will see more clearly than another sex, generally speaking. And we complement each other. It’s always important to have a range of views in the room. It’s very important to have both men and women speaking in most contexts.
Phillip: It is a good word, ‘complement,’ because it allows us to be different and yet not to be competitive but to help each other.
Peter: We can produce more together than we can alone.
Phillip: It also allows us to contribute to the benefit of the other because I can do for the other what the other can’t do, and likewise, they can do for me what I can’t do. I mean complementary relationships; it’s not just male and female. Two men or two women can be in a complementary relationship.
Peter: I always assumed that our father was one thing and our mother another. Both of them contributed mightily to our upbringing, but they did so in different ways, and that was good. We had a team of persons bringing us up, each contributing their special gift.
Phillip: Are there fundamental differences between men and women?
Peter: Speaking generally, there are, and it is only a woman who can be a mother; that gives her a special role, but there are also strength differences. It is demonstrated, for example, in sports. Women play tennis, and men play tennis, but they don’t play tennis against each other in open championships because there is a reality there. It doesn’t remove the equality of men and women or the preciousness of both sexes, but it’s a recognition of the difference between both sexes.
Phillip: Recently the Supreme Court in England ruled that a woman is someone who is biologically born as a woman.
Peter: Why on earth would we need the Supreme Court to make this point?
Phillip: Because common sense has been overruled by ideological views of confusion between sex and gender. It’s a confusion of language that has been purposely put forward for the last generation, where ‘gender’, which used to be a term of grammar, has been applied to a person’s identity.
Peter: Precisely because it’s malleable.
Phillip: Whereas ‘sex‘ is not malleable, and you either are male or are not, except in the very rare cases of birth defects. But in more than 99% of cases, biologically, the two are different. I want to say they’re different in three ways: things that are absolute, things that are comparative, and things that are cultural. When people are talking about differences, they get the three confused.
In absolute terms, in the area of reproduction, the area of physiology, and the area of chromosomes, men and women are different. Comparatively, you have to take into account that there’s diversity within each sex. While there are general physical differences between men and women—such as height and hair growth patterns—there is also significant diversity within each sex, making generalizations problematic. These differences are not inherently good or bad and don’t determine a person’s worth or reproductive role. Culturally, societies have often reinforced these differences through gender roles and concepts like masculinity and femininity, which are based on secondary sex characteristics. However, turning these traits into stereotypes can harm individuals who don’t fit them, such as short men or tall women. Ultimately, while there are differences between the sexes, they are not absolute or interchangeable, and stereotypes can be damaging. There is great diversity within each sex, as there is a difference between the sexes. But the sexes are not interchangeable.
Peter: Feminists have been making the point very strongly that there are a number of areas that have been, in the past, inhabited almost entirely by men. Women have not been involved, not because they can’t do certain things, but because of exclusion. Some clubs are male-only clubs; mind you, there are also clubs that are female-only clubs, but if you can’t go to the male-only club, then you don’t have the business connections, the commercial connections. The technological revolution has freed up more time, so women are now able to go to university in large numbers and can do the things that were thought to be particularly masculine.
Phillip: Women are the majority in Australian universities now; 60% of university students are women.
Peter: In previous generations, women have not been encouraged to study at university. There may have been reasons for this, such as the demands of home in the pre-technological age. Now that we have the capacity to run homes, and we have sexual reproduction skills in terms of contraception, women now have the opportunity to do what they could always have done if they were not living in a world where they were not permitted to do it.
Phillip: However, it comes at a cost. To be able to say that 60% of our university students are women is just what is the case. The fact that such an opportunity arises can be seen as a good thing. But it does raise the question: if the population is 50% male and 50% female, why are only 40% of our university students men? And what is the consequence of this? There is a higher rate of divorce amongst university graduates today than amongst people who haven’t been to university. Whereas that was not true 30 or 40 years ago. There are also consequences that are only coming from the changes that we’ve made that are yet to be seen. There are still differences between men and women that need to be weighed up.
Peter: Has marriage changed as a result of some of these changes? Are there differences, and are they for the good or for the ill? What are we seeing here?
Phillip: Men and women are not interchangeable. In absolute terms, reproduction is still only possible for women. Not just even having children, but breastfeeding. Some women, of course, don’t breastfeed; they wish to use bottles, and men can do that, but men still can’t breastfeed. There are comparative differences, which are contested, but I’ll give you two.
One is empathy. We do notice that when oestrogen is put into men, they become more empathetic, that there is some element of our physiology that makes us more empathetic, and early child raising, the empathy relationship between mother and child, is not actually replicable for men. Good men, lovely men, and loving fathers still have a different connectivity with a baby than the mother. So there are still comparative differences there.
A second one is in the area of STEM: science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Jordan Peterson points out that in countries where there is freedom for people to study whatever they want to study, it turns out that the men want to study STEM areas and the women don’t. In countries where it’s directed that women will work in STEM, they can do it. It’s not as if women can’t do it. It’s got to do with some innate choice that would seem to be not cultural because it’s the very countries that encourage men and women to be interchangeable that are the ones where it doesn’t happen. In general, when you put toys in front of children, the little girls move to the people things, relational things, and the little boys turn to the things, the cars, and the trucks. It seems that there is a comparative difference that you don’t want to turn into a stereotype, but there will be differences between them. So we’ve got to work on how to acknowledge the differences. In one way it’s got to do with responsibility: helping young mothers because they have particular needs, helping young men through the testosterone-driven, competitive, risk-taking, and husbands living with their wives. 1 Peter 3:7 talks about husbands living on the basis of knowledge with their wives and so understanding their needs. But what about raising children, Peter? You’ve only raised 5 and are now in the process with 26 grandchildren. What about raising children in terms of acknowledging the differences between men and women?
Peter: The necessity for male and female was very clear day after day of the ordinary events of marriage and of raising children. We needed to have both. There were times when the boys needed their dad to go and bowl the ball to them and kick the ball with them. I used to enjoy doing the rough and tumble until they got too big for me. There’s a way in which Dad teaches the boys the rules. You can have fighting, but it’s within a certain set of rules that ensure no one is hurt. Wrestling is something you do to train a boy. That may sound odd, but that’s what I did. And I didn’t expect my wife to do that; that was my business. But then, on the other hand, I observed, in later teenage girls, where Dad becomes very important. I can still remember going to a father-daughter dance with my eldest daughter, a way in which Dad is contributing. I think in a way, modelling the sort of man she may wish to marry—or may not, as the case may be. But there is something that boys need in dads, and also girls need in a dad. But it’s different.
Phillip: Girls need safety and security.
Peter: Yes, they do, and security is provided in different ways by both parents. It used to be exhibited in different manners that were drummed into us, which doesn’t have to be these days. The man was to walk on the outside of the woman while walking down the street.
Phillip: I disagree with you. You say it doesn’t have to be these days, but I say it does. I think we’ve lost something fundamental.
Peter: I agree with you. Good manners are very important, but how they are shown may be different these days. It may no longer be taking your hat off when you’re speaking to a lady or standing up when a lady comes into the room. These are simply cultural and arbitrary in a sense, but teaching men the art of manners is teaching them to discipline their strength and to discipline their testosterone so that they acknowledge their service to women. It’s not as though women absolutely need to be protected.
Phillip: Women can open a door and walk through without any difficulty. But teaching a man to stand back and open a door for a woman teaches him to respect the difference, which is an important part of life down the track. I remember fighting with you and our mother declaring that I was not to hit a boy with his glasses on, and you racing to put your glasses on. It taught an important point of restraint, that there is a danger in the rough and tumble that is inappropriate when a person is wearing glasses. And being taught from day one you never hit a girl—that is totally forbidden is important. You are allowed to hit your brother, but you can’t hit your sister. That is really critically important. The idea of murder and the idea of hitting a woman are both unthinkable for me, and it comes from being taught critical manners of differentiation. You can go overboard about it, but on the other hand, that manners are no longer taught is a bad thing. Part of learning manners was differentiating between males and females.
Peter: Learning manners was also about differentiating between age and youth. So you may stand up for an older person on the bus. I’m always very impressed by the way our Asian friends are so punctilious about standing up.
You started on the subject of parenting, and we need to think about what this passage leads us to in terms of parenting.
Phillip: That is going to take us to another podcast. The passage goes on to talk about marriage and leaving father and mother, which brings in the subject of parenting. So, that will be our next topic.
Scripture quotations are from The ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
