Debates and assertions about gender identity these days often obscure some of the fundamental questions we have about ourselves and what we truly desire. As a result, our “gender identities” often get lost in the abundance of approaches we take to acting out what’s inside of us.
No Buts about It
One of the central problems of understanding who we are as men and women is that we don’t understand the true nature of the God who made us. You’ll often hear teachers, writers, commentators, et al, explain the “uncomfortable” aspects of Christianity by saying things like “God is a God of love, but He’s also a God of wrath.” Or “Yes, He’s loving, but He’s also just.” These seem to be ways of excusing things we don’t quite understand about Him. Yet any statement about God’s character that sets His love as distinct from anything else is a faulty statement about the nature of God.
According to the Scripture which Christians generally claim to adhere to, God is love (see The Bible, 1 John 4:8). That all-encompassing statement reflects everything there is to know of what God is all about. Everything else we observe about the Creator flows out of His loving essence. No matter what it is, anything God does is because of His love for humankind—including His anger and insistence on justice being done.
You would never think to suggest that I (or any well-intentioned parent) am a father who loves but one who also disciplines my children. Or that I’m a nurturing father, but I also train my sons and daughters—as if discipline and training somehow stand in contrast to my love for them. No, the training and discipline are aspects of my love for them, not some other component of my relationship to them. Yet we separate God’s “love” from His “justice” or “wrath” and as a result, misunderstand His essence. Justice is just as loving as nurture. My children expect me to be fair to them.
This is one reason we should recognize that being a parent is a blessing. By having children of our own, we come to understand, at a visceral level, things we would otherwise never fully grasp about the God many of us call "our Father in heaven."
Where we’ve gone wrong—especially over the last half-century or so—is that we’ve redefined love in touchy-feely terms which leave us believing that only things that make us feel good are truly loving. This feeling-based idea of love takes comfort in warm hugs, a listening ear, encouraging words, and personal affirmations. But it also embraces insidiously destructive things like indulgent pleasing, refraining from firm discipline, or bending rules to avoid conflict.
Lop-Sided Love
Our culture encourages warm fuzzies, but it often rejects more severe aspects of loving action. It is especially profound in the way this plays out in our views of men and women, and it’s one that has worked its way into the modern paradigms of sexuality as well.
We’ve been on a quest since sometime after World War II to “refine” men to be more nurturing and caring—like women. And little by little, “feminine” characteristics have come to be thought of as love. This misalignment of characteristics has damaged family relationships, largely because it has undermined the place of male love within a family.
To be sure, both are necessary. The reason I introduced God into the discussion in the title of this article is that God perfectly manifests both feminine and masculine elements of love, and in the union of marriage, men and women are meant to do the same thing.
Our culture has not succeeded in making men into women. It has merely kept them from functioning as men. It has, however, done a better job of making men out of women.
Although feminism allegedly set out to promote the concept that women are equal in every way to men, the result has really been to establish a belief that they are actually superior to men. One outcome of this is the belief that women—because of nurturing tendencies, warmth, chattiness, expressiveness, and a host of other stereotypically female attributes—have the corner on how to generate relationships. What this too often overlooks is the other dimensions of what is required for healthy relationship: consistency, focus, passion, fairness, discipline, and intentionality.
As I explained in my previous post, God engineered the world (and us) to function the way it does, so it is first necessary to recognize that God doesn’t always do things or make things the way we think He should. And the problem is not that He has hidden them from our view. More often it is that we overlook the obvious, we overthink what we see, articulate “foundational principles” based only on appearances, and come to very wrong conclusions about the world that surrounds us.
God is the ultimate engineer and has made sure that the things He wants us to know about Him and to do in this life are readily accessible through the way He has created the world. That’s why respecting both “masculine” and “feminine” characteristics of love results in more whole relationships.
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