Via Media Podcast, Episode 8 Theology of the Sexes Alastair Roberts 3/28/19 https://www.beesondivinity.com/the-institute-of-anglican-studies/podcast/2018/theology-of-the-sexes Announcer: The Institute of Anglican Studies at Beeson Divinity School welcomes you to Via Media, a podcast exploring the religious and theological worlds from an Anglican perspective. Here is your host Gerald McDermott. McDermott: Welcome to Via Media. This is Gerald McDermott at Beeson Divinity School. Two episodes ago we did a podcast about Julian of Norwich, a great female Anglican. And last episode we interviewed Julie Roys, an Anglican journalist, on the subject of femininity. And today we’re going to return to the subject of man and woman. We’re interviewing the fascinating, productive, Anglican theologian in England named Alastair Roberts. Many of you have probably listened to his podcasts. He is what I would call “Mr. Podcast.” He does so many. One almost every day. Alastair earned his PhD at Durham University in England, where he lives in that neighborhood. Today he is a lecturer for and a writer for the Theopolis Institute and the Davenant Institute. He is often on the Mere Fidelity podcast. He has his own podcast called “Alastair’s Adversaria.” He’s the author of Echoes of Exodus, published by Crossway. That I have read, it’s an excellent book, I recommend it, on typology. And he’s about to release at the end of this year a book that I think is going to make many waves, both in the Church and in the academy. It’s titled, “Heirs Together: A Theology of the Sexes.” Alastair, welcome to Via Media. Roberts: Thank you very much. McDermott: I’d like to start, Alastair, by asking why you wrote this latest book, “Heirs Together?” Roberts: The initial prompt to write it was given to me by the publisher. Justin Taylor got in contact with me, read some of the things I’ve been writing online in various discussions and said, “You need to write a book on this. Would you be interested in putting out a proposal and we would be very interested in working with you on this subject.” More generally, to think about that subject it has been the experience of seeing the debates that are taking place in the church. The way that certain passages are being used. The way that the debate is framed, and being frustrated at how constrained and narrow the vision is. And also how often we come to the Bible with our own questions in a way that prevents us from hearing what the Bible itself says to these issues. So, what I’ve been trying to do is to read the Bible on these subjects in a more attentive way to hear what the Bible says for itself. Then to expand our peripheral vision, bringing into the conversation things that aren’t usually attended to. So, paying a lot more attention to the witness of the sciences, to pay attention to sociology, philosophy, anthropology, all these different areas of thought that can shed light upon fundamental questions about how we think about men and women within a methodology that’s far more integrating than the approaches that you’ll often find are just narrowly fixated upon a particular problem, such as the question of women in ministry. That’s an important question, but unless that’s framed within a bigger picture we’ll struggle to answer it well. McDermott: Now, Alastair, you mentioned mining the fields of science and philosophy and anthropology; and you’re saying that recently these questions about man and woman have been approached in narrow ways. And yet in the broader culture the academy and those outside the academy who are addressing this issue are claiming to be mining science and philosophy and anthropology and the other social sciences. But it seems to be that you’re suggesting that they are mining these fields in the wrong way. And therefore they’re coming up with conclusions about man and woman that are not necessarily good conclusions. Is that true? Roberts: In many cases, yes. I think as we look through the research there’s a very mixed bag there. There’s a lot of research that’s towards ... it has limited goals. It’s designed to answer very specific questions and it can be very helpful in those things. To that sort of research what a Christian approach does is give a more philosophically and theologically integrating picture within which all those different parts could be part of a greater whole. But for a lot of other research a Christian witness would be more corrective. It will show some of the faults, some of the ways in which the research and the teaching more generally has been designed to escape the witness of nature and not just the witness of nature, but the witness of scripture. So, for instance, if you look at a lot of the research that is focused upon issues like gender and sexuality one thing that you’ll notice is often removed from the picture is any question of procreation as a factor that is a sort of gravitational field within which all of these things make sense. When you listen to people talk about gender identity or talk about sexual relations and do so in a way that’s abstracted from any sense of a telos within nature it makes it very hard to understand those phenomena. Why exactly do we have just about every human society having a distinction between not just a random set of some number of gender identities but between men and women. Now, the shape that takes is very different from culture to culture. But there are common themes that you see in every one and there’s also the commonality of the single difference. Now, understanding that without making reference to this purpose or end or gravitational field within nature is very difficult. But yet if you look at so much of what is said today it’s as if procreation did not exist; that we could make sense of what it means to be man or woman with no reference to that. That my gender identity is something that floats free. It’s purely some construct within my mind. A Christian approach, I think, will often find common cores with approaches that want to take seriously the gravity of nature. And here I think we’ll find a lot of support within various quarters of the natural sciences where they are dealing with this stuff and saying, “We can’t avoid the fact of the differences between men and women being ordered towards the end of bearing children.” And if we remove that from the picture and then try and make sense of things it will not make sense to us. But yet so much of gender theory is designed to remove that from the picture. So, I think it plays both an integrating and a corrective relative to these other fields. McDermott: That is very interesting and helpful. Listening to the witness of nature, particularly on the question of procreation. Can we drill a little deeper here and can you get a little more concrete and tell us what ... and here you’re talking about the witness of nature ... what science that deals with this question tells us about man and woman difference concretely. So, I imagine biology, maybe even anthropology here. Can you give us some more concrete illustrations here? Roberts: Yes. We think, for instance, about the difference between men and women as related to something like anisogamy, the way that our gametes are different sizes. Now if you see the way that this plays out in other species it leads to differences in behavior. Because one of the sexes has to bear the young within themselves, gestate the young, and the other is more free to move around, for instance. That sort of difference has predictable effects upon the characteristics, the traits, the behaviors, the form of the body, all these sorts of things for those different ... for the sexes within those different species. Now, we are not detached from the natural world. We are not creatures that somehow exist purely in this mental plane. We have physical bodies. The same principles that help us to understand the shape of the bodies of animals, the tendencies of different creatures, can also help us illumine significantly the behaviors of human beings; help us to understand why men and women behave differently. Why, for instance, men have greater strength than women. Now, these are problems I think that we will often run into if we’re engaging purely on a theoretical level, where as it were we strip away all these concrete features of men and women and deal with them merely as abstractions. When you read a lot of theology about men and women it can almost seem as if these are just conceptual constructs. We’re not talking about your mother and your sister, or your aunt or your uncle, or your brother or the guy across the road. We’re talking about some abstract creatures that exist within just a mental space. But when you look at human beings and when you look at creatures within the world more generally, we will see that the way that we behave and the way that we relate to each other follows along developmental and other lines of the grain of reality itself. It has to move with certain aspects of reality. If we’re not responding to that reality, then we’re not truly embedded in nature, but we are embedded in nature. So, for that reason I think we will see this correspondence, this congruence, between the form that we take as human beings and what role we play in procreation. Now, that’s just one example. There are other ways that we can see, for instance, competition between men and women. Or between man and man, and women and women. The way that plays out very differently for the most part. Those are differences that we’ll also see in other species. Or if you look at play behaviors, for instance, Richard Wrangham has done research on play behaviors in chimpanzees and the way that male chimpanzees will engage in far more aggressive play. They will hit things around. Whereas female chimpanzees will adopt rocks. They’ll take these rocks and they’ll treat them as children until they have their first children of their own, at which point they’ll give up the rocks and relate to the children. Now, those differences are not accidental and they’re related, very much, to the differences that we see between young children, boys and girls, and their play behaviors. If you give a boy a doll a boy will often be nonplussed. I mean, what is he supposed to make of this? For some boys it becomes an action figure. An action figure is a different thing from a doll, it’s something that is designed very much about performing actions, playing out certain scenarios, concerned with action. Whereas for the girl the doll can often be something that’s focused upon nurture, upon protecting and serving this creature that plays the role of a child. And those relationships between human beings and animals and helping us to understand more general behavioral differences are not something that people pay much attention to within theological debates. But yet they explain a great deal of the differences in society and the differences in behavior and other things like that. That if we do not have these things in our mind, will be confusing or frustrating to us. McDermott: Alastair you are suggesting something quite countercultural today. That is unrecognizable to many, at least in the academy and the chattering classes, namely that men and women are fundamentally different. How do you think ... Did this understanding of nature, and we’ve been talking so far simply about nature, not about super nature. Now, the Bible, of course, we believe is a product of both nature and super nature; guided by super nature, God’s Holy Spirit, but using real men and real women as authors. Possibly women, we don’t know for sure. But how do you see scripture recognizing these fundamental differences between men and women in its treatment of men and women? Roberts: I think the obviously place to begin is in the book of Genesis, in the opening chapters, where we see a portrait of human beings within the framework of the natural order, that human beings are not just creatures abstracted from the world in which they’re created. They’re created for the sake of the world. We’re supposed to tame the world, to bring order to the world, in various ways. But as you look at the way that human beings are created – they’re created in very distinct ways. What it means for the man to be created is a different thing from what it means for the woman to be created. One is a created in a particular relationship to his mother, the earth, that he has to serve and he has to bring order to that world. He has to till the land – that sort of thing. Then we have the man placed within the garden, given a particular task to guard and to serve the garden. Alongside that, to establish the law that God has given to maintain which trees should be eaten from and which trees should not be eaten from – the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Then the woman is brought to him, taken from his side. There’s a different relationship there. The most salient relationship is between the man and the earth, the man and that realm of his external labor, whereas for the woman it’s the relationship between her and the husband by her side, and what she bears within her. As we see that playing out it will be something that’s fairly obvious within the context of the judgments upon the man and the woman, where the woman is cursed with respect to ... or judged with respect to her bearing children and in her relationship with her husband. Whereas the man is judged with respect to his external labor bringing forth fruit from the land and with respect to his relationship with the land itself. The land will in fact be that to which is returns. That sort of framework, I think, is also complimented by a deeper understanding of what’s taking place in Genesis chapter 1 with the fundamental creating pattern; where human beings are created as a pair that, as male and female, we are icons of the entire race. The whole race is male and female, and then each couple is an icon of the entirety of the race within just one marriage. But that marriage holds within it the potential to bear offspring and those offspring are a manifestation, again, of the one flesh union that exists between the couple. Now, that one flesh union, there’s an asymmetric pairing. It’s not that it’s a straightforward hierarchy - one being greater than the other, one being above another – but there’s an asymmetry. That asymmetry, I think, is something that reflects, in part, what we see in God’s form of creation. On the first three days of creation we have acts of forming, naming, taming, structuring, ordering, dividing – these sorts of acts. Then when God creates the man, those are the sorts of acts that he primarily delegates to the man. Whereas on the second three days of creation what we see are filling, glorifying, perfecting, creating life, communion, and bringing the future – all these sorts of things. Those are things that we see particularly associated with what the woman brings. And more generally in scripture, I think, we see those themes being played out. What is being explored there is not just some divinely given roles that are imposed upon an amorphous creation, but rather something that helps us to see order within the creation itself – that God has established this at the very beginning. So, when God says that the man is the head of the woman, he does not say the man should be the head of the woman, it’s just a statement about the way things are. As you look through human society it’s something that you will see, that human society, some sort of patriarchal structure is almost unavoidable. Now, that structure has throughout history been often one that’s attended with deep sin and oppression, but yet it’s not something that we seem to be able to straightforwardly avoid. Now, that I think is the sort of thing that scripture highlights – that just as the man is the head, the woman is the heart. The woman is the one that, not in the sense of emotions versus reason but in the sense of the one who stands at the center, who gathers things together. She is the one who is our first home. She is the one that is the glue that holds all these other things together; that brings unity and communion; that establishes “home” and presence and these sorts of things. If it were, for instance, that God created just another man to assist the Adam what you would have is probably the Garden of Eden as the show home on the construction site, or maybe the base that they return to at the end of the day just to put up their legs and drink some beer together. But what happens is when the woman is created there’s communion, which is something that does not exist in the same way between a man and a man. There’s a new form of reality created that corresponds to God’s own mode of creation, that God brings communion on the second three days, and in the same way that second great act of creation of a human being is the creation of the one who brings life, communion, the one who will be the hope for the future. If Adam represents the origins, Eve represents the destiny that they’re going to head towards. At the very end that’s what we see, the unveiling of the bride. McDermott: Alastair, you mentioned patriarchy and you suggested that this is, indeed, in the biblical text. You well know that legions of theologians and leaders of churches today, whole churches, decry patriarchy as necessarily evil. That any structuring of society that centers in the family where the father is the head of the home, or in a church where the leadership of the church is restricted to a man, or presiding at sacramental events like the Eucharist is restricted to a man – all these are examples of patriarchy which is necessarily bad, wrong, immoral, evil, oppressive to women. Therefore either it’s ... It’s in the Bible, as you say, and therefore the Bible is wrong, or it’s not in the Bible and the Church has wrongly been seeing it in the Bible and has wrongly been interpreting it and thus teaching patriarchy in the home and a form of patriarchy in the Church. So, my question is: Can patriarchy be a good thing? Roberts: I think to the extent that it is building upon the natural order in a way that reveals the true possibility of that in God’s good purpose. It is a good thing. But yet what we do see within the world in most situations where we do see patriarchy we see abuse. We see some dysfunction. Now that’s part of what it means to be people who are shaped by sin, that all aspects of society are tainted or shot through with aspects of sin. There’s no aspect of our human existence that is not unaffected by sin. But yet I believe that patriarchy is, in principle, a good thing. It’s not what people can often ... I think terminology is a problem here. What are we referring to when we talk about patriarchy? Many people are thinking, when they hear that term, of a very oppressive form of male control of women. And that is something that results, I believe, from the fall. And it may relate to the statement made to Eve that her desire will be for the man, but he will rule over her. That “ruling over” is not the original intent, but it’s not something that’s detached from the order that God had created. When that original order goes awry sin is twisting something that’s there. And what it’s twisting is the fact that God has made the man more powerful, that he’s made the man with a different orientation, and a different way of relating to the world more generally. That means it’s almost unavoidable that when the world goes awry it will take the form of an oppressive relationship between the man and the woman. That is not good. But, yet if you peel away that, I think what you find is at the very root there was some sort of patriarchal structure established. The man was created first. The man was given responsibilities that the woman was not. The man was told to guard the garden and to keep the garden. He was told to ... given the law concerning the tree. The woman was not in the same way. She was responsible to keep that, but yet under the guidance of her husband. That relationship, I think, is difficult for us to understand because we think in terms of abstract individuals and every abstract individual should be boiled down to the same fundamental level. We should ultimately be interchangeable, male and female, and then you have these things that are added to that as a second level, perhaps; different traits, different roles, maybe even. But that is not the way that the Bible talks. The Bible gives, I think, more weight to these differences. Seeing these differences as part of the dignity and the glory of humanity. Those differences are not differences that serve to denigrate women, as I think patriarchy in its expressions have generally been in danger of doing, if they’ve not actually done it. They’ve been in danger of denigrating what women do, denigrating the calling of women, denigrating the dignity of women as the image of God. All these sorts of things we need to push back against. But, yet I think when we push back against those things we’ll still find that there is a fundamentally patriarchal structure. Partly, this is seen in the fact that God is ... declares himself as “Father.” God is not “Mother” in relationship to his creation. That difference, I think, is a salient one for understanding what men and women mean. That there is something about the identity of men and women that is not just about what we do, but it’s what we symbolize. That as human beings, for instance, mothers have a different relationship with us than our fathers do. Our mothers bore us within themselves. There is a material connection with our mothers. We grew from our mothers bodies. Whereas there is the relationship with our fathers. Our fathers love us, but they stand over against us. If we thought about God as “mother” there’s a fairly natural movement from thinking about God as “mother” to thinking about God in very ... in more panentheist terms, in God’s relationship with the creation. But yet within scripture God being declared to be “Father” is part of the way that we affirm God’s loving transcendence – that God is near to us, but yet there is a material hiatus between us and God. We are not part of his body, as it were. Those sorts of differences then play themselves out on many different levels of human reality. The way that we relate in society, I think, is not just that we do things differently. There is something more fundamental about who we are that represents a difference. When you go from society to society it’s not just that we obey certain roles and therefore patriarchy arises. Rather these are more fundamental channels of human existence that God has created. Dignifying channels by which we reflect dimensions of his character that are lost to sin as we head off in distorting directions. But, yet some form of patriarch is virtually unavoidable. McDermott: Now, Alastair, and this will have to be the last question, because of the time. But this is the Via Media, an Anglican podcast. You know there’s a grand debate going on right now in the Anglican communion over women in the priesthood. Should women be ordained as priests? In some provinces they are and in other provinces they are not. And even within some provinces like the ACNA, there are those dioceses who do ordain women and those that do not. How would you apply this research that you’ve been doing to this question? Roberts: I think it applies in a number of ways. And obviously this is far too large a question for me to tackle in its entirety here, but I’ll throw a few points towards it. One of the things it highlights is that there is an integrity to human existence that is often lost sight of within a world that is very much built around abstract systems. When we think about the work place in the modern world it’s something that’s abstracted from where it would have been connected to the household in the past. In the past we would have been working with ... We’d be working alongside people of our own sex. We would be part of a larger network of very deeply sexed relations. That what it meant to be a son, for instance, was not just something that was defined in the case of a young child on their father’s knee. But, you enter into sonship in a fuller sense as an adult where you start to represent your father in the world; where you act in your father’s name. Add all these sorts of things. There’s also a recognition in that respect that one’s place within society, more generally, is a dimension of who you are. Not just of what you do. Now, when we think about systems and structures and institutions we just think about functions. We don’t think about who you are, being part of what it means to be acting in the capacity that you act. Now, if we’re talking about someone being a mother, or someone being a father, we do recognize a relationship between who someone is and the role that they are playing. We recognize that there is a way in which a mother can provide comfort to a child that no other person could. Because she is the child’s mother. That she represents something to the child, that even the father cannot represent. In all the love that he has for the child, there is a difference to the relationships at that point. Now, for us to get back into that way of thinking is very difficult, which is one of the reasons why it has become so thinkable for us to have women in ministry and things like that. Whereas in the past it was ... it just wasn’t thinkable in the same way, because first of all people had a greater sense of the connection between who you are and what you’re doing, but also the life of the Church was a lot more connected with the organic life of a community. It wasn’t this institution that was detached from the community, rather it was an expression of it. So, the leaders of the church would be naturally taken from the body of the males who protected the community. There’s something about the protection of the community and what it means to be a leader of the church that was seen to be consistent with being a protector of a community more generally. When we think about the Levites, for instance, the fact that all the Levites and the priests were male. Part of that was related to symbolism of priesthood and a military type role – that they are the guardians of the community. They are the ones that uphold the boundaries. They are the ones that set the foundations. And the more that our notion of priestly ministry or notion of pastoral ministry has ventured into a more therapeutic direction the more we’ve found it harder to understand that it would take a shape that’s primarily male. Also, when we think about abstract institutions we think about institutions having power that they delegate to people. They empower people by putting them into particular roles. Whereas there’s a difference between power and empowerment. The more you look at this movement in the direction of empowerment, I think what you notice is that there is a loss of the natural power of an institution. The more that it becomes primarily an empowering institution. And the church in its ministry, the more that it sees itself in those positions where it’s supposed to be guarding the flock, where it’s supposed to be exercising the role of a shepherd ... and in scripture the role of a shepherd is a guarding role, a role that is very much associated with dealing with threats of wolves, of robbers, of thieves, of bandits, of wild beasts of various kinds. When we lose that sense, I think, we’ll end up with a more therapeutic understanding focused more upon the inner life of the Church. We’ll lose a sense of what it means to have a body of men that are the back bone of the church – that serve to give it force as it goes out into the world; that serve to protect it from assault and we’ll think of it more as an abstract institution with certain functional roles into which you slot people and empower them to exercise that. And as a result, I think, this is one of the reasons why the Church is seen as a lot weaker. It’s less of an organism and it’s more of a detached institution. It’s less of a community that has the organic power of a body of men that gather together and support and out of whom leaders come that would protect the whole body, of the community, and it’s more an institution that’s detached from it into which we appoint certain officers. That is just some aspect of it. I think also there’s the fact that the ministers of the church are supposed to represent God’s authority to the congregation. And God’s authority is authority that is a fatherly authority. It’s not a maternal authority. As C. S. Lewis recognized when he talked about priestesses within the Church. The more we move in the direction of a maternal priestess type of figure, the more we’ll lose sight of what it means to have the paternal authority of God operative within our lives. I don’t think it’s an accident that there is a doctrinal shift as that deeper symbolic shift is made. McDermott: Right. Well, that’s helpful to help us understand why it’s been more difficult for the Church to sustain the idea that only a man should, say, preside at the Eucharist. Could you just speak for a minute or two, because we are just about out of time. Maybe just a minute or two to the Anglican question of why historically men alone and not women have been permitted to preside at the Eucharist? Roberts: When we think in scripture about something like the Eucharist there is ... I mean, we talk about the marriage supper of the Lamb, and those bridal or those nuptial themes play in the background. Within scripture we’ll see, for instance, in John’s Gospel, John the Baptist describing himself as the friend of the Bridegroom. We’ll see Paul talking about guarding the Bride and seeking to ensure that the Church is not led astray, that it is kept as a chaste virgin for Christ. When we think about leading the Church in the Eucharist if someone is leading in a way that’s just a maternal way I think you lose sight of Christ’s role as the host. That Christ is the one, the Bridegroom is the one, who invites us to this table. And that relationship between the priest, as a male figure, and the congregation is a dynamic that is deep within biblical symbolism. Something that we find within the book that’s been called a “holy of holies” of scripture. The Book of Song of Songs - it’s something that we find fore grounded within the story of Revelation. And to lose that, I think, is to lose something about the deep structure of the Christian faith more generally. And I think it’s a serious departure from the symbolic world that has a lot of ramifications that we may not recognize initially, but once you lose these key symbols all sorts of shifts take place. I think we can see those taking place at the moment. McDermott: Thank you, Alastair. And thank you for listening to us today on Via Media. Announcer: You've been listening to Via Media with host Gerald McDermott, the director of The Institute of Anglican Study Studies at Beeson Divinity School on the campus of Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama. The Institute of Anglican Studies trains men and women for Anglican ministry, and seeks to educate the public in the riches of the Anglican tradition. Beeson Divinity School is an interdenominational evangelical divinity school training men and women in the service of Jesus Christ. We hope you've enjoyed this episode of Via Media.