The Image of God: Male & Female

Third Quarter 1998

This fall's Kuyper Lecture will focus attention on some of the important issues raised by feminism. In anticipation of the lecture, executive director James Skillen and development director Michelle Voll began a conversation that we invite you to join by sending in your comments and questions.

Michelle Voll: Where does the Center stand on women's rights and the roles of men and women in public and private life? Why has it not written on this subject before?

James Skillen: From its inception, the Center has been committed to seeking justice for all. That has meant developing a public philosophy—trying to articulate the normative task of government. We continue to grow in our conviction that all citizens, both male and female, should enjoy the same civil rights.

Our chief focus for most of the first 20 years was on institutional rather than individual rights, about the relation between government and nongovernment organizations. Within that context and with limited funding, we have been able to focus in detail on only a few issues. Our current work on welfare reform and earlier work on abortion touch on very important matters involving women, of course. And we look forward to the day when funds will allow us to take on a wider range of public policy and constitutional issues that involve the public roles and responsibilities of women and men.

Voll: I am glad we have invited Elizabeth Fox-Genovese to be our 1998 Kuyper Lecturer. The lecture and responses to it will help open the Center to a wider consideration of the roles of, and relationships between, women and men.

Skillen: I want to say something more about the Center's history. Our commitment has been to recruit anyone whose talents could help the Center achieve its aims. Before long, our board of trustees was composed of as many women as men, and for the last five years, Carol Veldman Ruche has chaired the board.

Women chair two of our three board committees. The Center's first employee in Washington was Joyce Ribbens Campbell. Many contributors to our policy research projects, to conferences, and to articles in the Public Justice Report have been women.

There is no reason why, at the Center, women as well as men should not fill any office. We have no gender roles, no glass ceilings. In fact, the same can be said about people of different ages and races. Anyone who shares the Center's Christian vision and principles and has the talent to fill a position will be welcomed into leadership here.

Voll: At the Center I feel genuinely encouraged to develop my abilities in organizing, writing, public speaking, and strategic planning in order to fulfill my responsibility as development director. I hope I will set an example of leadership as the Center' first female executive for other women who will follow in my footsteps. One great challenge at a small organization is to differentiate job responsibilities so that employee's offices are clearly defined. An office gives a person the authority to creatively put one's talents to work for the greater good of the organization.

Another challenge is to develop clear communication. Men and women often communicate differently and it's important for them to be sensitive to the metamessages that are entailed in their communication. What is said between the lines is sometimes more powerful than the words used. This is particularly true of unarticulated expectations.

The goal in clarifying job responsibilities and internal communications should always be to enhance the organization's team efforts as a community of believers, men and women together. Each of us is a leader in our respective office. Each should perform to the best of his or her ability and be encouraged by others to continually develop his or her gifts and skills through mentoring and professional training. I believe the Center is a place where people are interested in nurturing one another, especially in understanding a Christian political vision.

Skillen: How do you understand the biblical teaching that men and women have been created in the image of God?

Voll: Each man and woman is created equally in the image of God. From the beginning, men and women have been given a mandate by God to be co-stewards over all creation. Some traditionalists maintain that the man images God's authority in a way that the woman does not. In her submission to male authority, the woman is then said to image God only indirectly through man, or some say that she images creation and the church rather than God. A woman's ability to exercise her priestly authority in Christ is then restricted and she can only serve in certain ministries or dominions.

I see no basis for this in Scripture, which establishes the full priesthood of all believers—men and women—as co-heirs and co-rulers with Christ. Men have not been given the authority to mediate women's relationship with God. All believers are to be conformed to the image of Christ and are called to exercise stewardship responsibilities over a diverse range of responsibilities in home, church, and marketplace.

God did not create man first because God is male. Man is not the more perfect image of God. Male sexuality alone does not image God. It is the interdependence of male and female that reflects God's nature. In fact, Scripture tells us that God is Spirit and has no form. Our sexuality therefore should not be seen as the determining factor that defines everything about our life development.

The story of God creating the man by himself (Gen. 2:7-18) illustrates a point that is often not emphasized. At creation, God saw that it was not good for the man to be alone without an equal partner to share life, because by himself he did not adequately reflect the nature of God. The image of God, male and female, is relational and plural in character, which reflects the communal nature of the Trinity. It is in the communion of men and women together that the full glory of God is revealed.

Skillen: I would stress what you said at the end about male sexuality not imaging God by itself and say that neither sex images God by itself. Each of us is a full person and we were made for each other. In some sense, then, neither male nor female images God apart from the other.

In critique of the idea of a permanent subordination of female to male, I agree with your point about the priesthood of all believers in Christ as the restored image of God. I think it is in the multiple metaphors deployed throughout the Bible that people find images and arguments that seem to contradict this. For example, in Paul's comparison of Christ and his bride (the church) to a husband and wife, some see men permanently identified with Christ and woman permanently identified with the church. But the metaphor doesn't work that way. In reality, both male and female believers belong to the church and thus they are both equally part of the bride who belongs to Christ. The relation of husband and wife is not a general one that holds for all male-female relations. It is a distinctive communion of mutual love and service like no other human relationship.

Voll: We talk here at the Center about men and women holding various offices of responsibility in society. What light does that shed on the gender debate?

Skillen: What is most important, biblically speaking, is to recognize that men and women are not exhaustively defined by any of the offices they may bear. It was not a male job to be a judge or prophet in Israel, for example. Today we have countless professions and opportunities that did not exist in biblical times. When we recognize that the job of governing or painting, of gardening or teaching, of engineering or marketing, requires a particular talent that either a man or a woman might have, then one can see that the office of responsibility defines the role of the officer holder. The person's gender does not define the office.

Moreover, this also helps explain why the male/female identity of the image of God transcends those offices. There is always more to the image of God than can be expressed in any given role. Our maleness and femaleness cannot be reduced to one or more roles but embrace them all. This means, for example, that there is more to being a man than being a husband and father, and more to being a woman than being a wife and mother.

Voll: The important point here is that authority is attached to an office with certain responsibilities. In contrast, when authority is defined as arising from a person's gender, authority will be considered a permanent right of the person.

Today, we have many different institutions and offices in society. The reason is that the one high office of exercising stewardship over the earth, given by God to all humans at the beginning of creation, has been differentiated into many kinds of offices through the development of a complex world civilization. And all these offices add up to the task of caring for God's world, just as God originally commissioned us to do.

When it comes to a married couple, husband and wife should make their decisions to pursue different offices in accord with God's purposes for their lives individually and together. I think it is especially a shame when a person's callings are restrained primarily by economic factors.

Income should not be the deciding factor in shaping Christians' decisions about fulfilling God's callings. But often it has been the case with a family that the husband earning a higher income would be considered the one who should pursue the professional life as his primary calling. The wife's calling then would be confined to the responsibility of parenting, even though she may have wanted to pursue a career.

It may seem easier and economically advantageous for a couple to differentiate their roles by the private/public split of home and marketplace, but it seems unjust if both spouses cannot pursue what God has called each of them to do in both public and private life.

Skillen: How do you answer those who say that a woman's chief, or first, responsibility is in the home and that an egalitarian view of women and men will lead to the weakening of marriage and the family?

Voll: I don't believe the Bible teaches that a woman's chief responsibility is at home. Those who advocate rigid gender roles may refer to Titus 2:3-5, citing it as the singular proof text for a woman's homemaking duties. They miss Paul's point of teaching his audience the principle of leading a life above reproach. He was contrasting the time-wasting habits of some women with Christian women who were to submit to the tasks of their office. And about the only office that existed for women in the ancient Greco-Roman world was that of home management.

Jesus admonished Martha not to seek her identity in being a homemaker but to first become a disciple. All of us first need to become disciples of Christ and then learn, out of that new identity, to master various disciplines in life with the purpose of practicing them to the glory of God.

The egalitarian view will, I believe, only strengthen marriage and family. Those couples who practice mutuality will experience a richer, more fulfilling communion and family life.

Skillen: I agree that the higher our view of both women and men the more we will be able to love and care for one another and encourage one another in the use of all the gifts God has given us. We should never quit emphasizing the unique demands and requirements of marriage and family, however. Respecting the equal dignity of both women and men will not in itself guarantee good marriages and families. A couple that chooses marriage must make a mutual commitment to marriage and family life, for better and for worse, and this may well mean that other avenues which each might have pursued as single persons will have to be relinquished or delayed.

Voll: I think workplaces in America need to continue to become more family friendly. We need to devise public policies as has been done in certain European democracies that allow for more flexible work schedules. Both husband and wife should be able to take time off from work for childbirth and to raise their children.

Skillen: What other kinds of change in the roles of women and men do you think are necessary to allow for greater differentiation of responsibilities in public and private life?

Voll: I believe the differentiation of responsibilities is part of the good creation that God is redeeming in Christ. Men's and women's roles need to change in such a way that their exercise of public and private responsibilities restores them to their creational position of being co-stewards of every part of creation.

The distorted dualism of male rule and female subordination is a direct effect of the fall that has manifested itself throughout history. At the worst extremes, the fall of humankind has resulted in abusive male control and irresponsible female passivity. In every area of life men and women need to overcome these propensities.

What is truly radical about Paul's instruction in Ephesians 5 is his call for husbands to serve their wives as Christ serves the church. In effect, Paul asks husbands to give up what they take for granted as male privileges and sacrifice their desires for dominion in order to serve their wives.

Both women and men need to encourage each other to develop their full identities. I am always perturbed when I hear about how hard women have to struggle to successfully lead a career while also taking care of home and family. I think it is the case that women's roles will not change unless men's roles also change.

Skillen: Yes, more fathers need to see child rearing as a joint parental responsibility. And if both wife and husband have jobs and/or other responsibilities outside the home, then, when children come, fathers need to work as hard as mothers at figuring out how, together, they can take on the weighty responsibility of child rearing. Fathers as well as mothers should be ready to rethink and juggle careers and the pursuit of graduate school or professional training so that the full life of both can flourish. Husbands must truly love and serve their wives as full persons and not simply assume that their wives exist to serve them and their children.

Voll: I even believe that sometimes couples may not want to have children in order to be able to do everything God has called them to do in public service. There is still a real stigma about not having children. I think that needs to change as well. When we consider that all the human life already on earth is not even properly cared for, surely not every couple needs to bring new life into the world.

Skillen: We are ranging over many issues, as will happen when people discuss the image of God. But we should emphasize that from the Center's point of view, not every issue concerning the identity and relationship of men and women is a political one. So the question arises: how do we decide what is and what is not appropriate for government to do in regard to the relationships between men and women?

This is where the importance of a public philosophy comes in. Without clarifying the nature of political community and the task of government, the question cannot be answered.

Consider, for example, the family. All men and women, as citizens, should have the same civil right to enter into marriage and to raise children. Within the family parents bear certain responsibilities and freedoms, including that of raising their children according to their religious convictions. Those religious convictions may support male/female equality, or male superiority, or female superiority. If, however, parents begin to mistreat their children, abusing them physically, then the parents have gone beyond their parental authority and are violating the civil rights of their children. Every citizen, including children, should enjoy the equal civil protection of life.

Voll: I would add that today the state upholds the civil right of an individual not to have to suffer spouse abuse. Throughout most of history this was not true. In Greco-Roman society, for example, men held the civil right of life-and-death authority over their wives and families. Women had no legal recourse. Today, aside from physical ailments, wife abuse is still one of the greatest threats to women's wellbeing, even in the United States.

Skillen: Different jurisdictions have different kinds of authority. The equal civil rights of all women and men should always be protected by government, but this should always go hand in hand with the legal recognition and protection of other associations and institutions in which men and women also, simultaneously, have the right to participate. And these other institutions and associations have their own governance structures that may be more or less egalitarian than the governance structure of the state.

Voll: I agree that the state should not dictate what to believe about gender roles and relations. However, the traditionalist perspective of hierarchical gender relations has sometimes either contributed to or been part of the cause of spouse abuse. Therefore, within civil society I believe non-government groups should work to influence and try to change the perspective of people and institutions who hold such views.

As a biblical feminist, I will always believe that the authoritarian view of gender relations is wrong and unbiblical. And I will always work for biblical equality, which is part of my calling from God.

Skillen: I am glad we've begun this conversation, Michelle. The challenge for us today is to gain increasing clarity about how to do justice to people in all spheres of life so that as citizens we do not put up with any public injustice against women that ought to be dealt with by political authorities. At the same time, on the other hand, we must avoid politicizing non-governmental jurisdictions in ways that might lead to injustice against women and men in all the other areas of their lives.