Today I am picking and choosing. I am going to take Paul at his word when he says something I find compelling, and I am going to be less impressed by things he says, or things said in his name, that point in a different direction. And I think that’s fine, that’s what everyone does anyway.
There is no longer Jew or Greek; there is no longer slave or free; there is no longer male and female, for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.
That is Galatians 3:28, an undisputed letter of Paul. It is the rhetorical climax of Paul’s argument about what baptism into Christ does to the identity categories that structured the ancient world: Jew and Greek, the fundamental ethnic and religious division of his entire life; slave and free, the economic hierarchy that made the Roman world function; male and female, the gender binary that organised families, households, inheritance, public life, everything. Paul says all of it is relativised in Christ. The categories still exist, and Paul still uses them. But they are rendered secondary. What defines us now is Christ, and Christ doesn’t sort people the way the world sorts people.
This is scandalous. It would have been scandalous in a first-century context. And it was scandalous enough that the early church actually did things differently. Women led house churches. Women were named as co-workers. Junia was “outstanding among the apostles.” Phoebe was a deacon. Prisca, with her husband Aquila, taught Apollos. These are people Paul names in the same letters where he is supposedly laying down timeless gender hierarchy.
Then, later, in letters most scholars agree were written after Paul’s death, by someone(s) writing in his name, the tone shifts. Women are to be silent, learning quietly with full submission. And church leaders must be the husband of one wife, which sounds an awful lot like a restriction on who can lead that wasn’t there before. The scandal Paul started has been walked back.
The letters we have are one side of a correspondence. We don’t have the letters Paul was responding to, or the letters the churches wrote back. We are reading the transcript for one side of half a phone call. When Paul writes to a specific church about a specific issue (and he was writing to specific churches about specific issues, not composing a systematic theology for all believers for all time), we are overhearing one end of a pastoral conversation. And the letters that come after Paul reflect a church settling into the Roman world, institutionalising, making its peace with the social structures around it. The radical egalitarianism of Galatians 3:28 is being domesticated. What looked in Paul’s lifetime like a community where the old hierarchies didn’t apply is starting to look, a generation later, like a respectable Roman household, with the man at the head, naturally, because that was how respectable Roman households worked.
Take the qualification in 1 Timothy: a church leader must be “the husband of one wife.” For centuries this has been read as a statement about gender: men lead, women don’t. But in the Greco-Roman world, sex was understood as a power dynamic, the insertive active role and the passive receptive role. Wealthy men had access to multiple sexual partners: wives, concubines, slaves, prostitutes. This was normal. This was how you displayed status. Read through that lens, “husband of one wife” reads as a restriction on the powerful, the people who could afford multiple partners, who treated sexual access as a perk of their status. It says the people who lead this community should not be the kind of men who exploit their power for sexual access. That’s a character restriction, not a gender restriction.
Or take the other favourite proof-text: Adam was formed first, so men lead. The appeal is to primogeniture, the inheritance custom where the firstborn son took the family estate. Adam and Eve are not siblings. There is no dead father and no estate to divide. And the story keeps overturning firstborn priority anyway. Isaac over Ishmael. Jacob over Esau. Joseph over his brothers. David over every one of his older brothers. First never meant authority in the story God tells. The proof-text only works if you already want it to.
Paul also uses the metaphor of the church as the bride of Christ. It is a metaphor, a way of saying something about intimacy and fidelity. It was never meant to become a doctrine. But the bride-of-Christ image got taken and run with far more seriously than it was meant to be. It became the basis for a whole theology in which women represent the church and men represent Christ. Which means men lead and women submit, and the entire cosmic order comes down to who does the dishes. This is what happens when you read poetry as legislation. The metaphor was supposed to illuminate something about Christ’s love. It was not supposed to become a cage for half the human race.
That’s the biblical argument. Then there’s the performance.
In writing the following, I was reminded of this video which I loved and laughed with however many years ago it originally came out. I was deep into Church production and while I could see how this church was satirising themselves, it was also an influence on what and how to do church, or not to, in some more cynical ways.
Fifteen or more years ago, evangelical masculinity had a look. Flannel shirt. Sleeves rolled up. Sometimes a beard, sometimes not, but the flannel was non-negotiable. It was a performance of ruggedness, the kind that says I work with my hands, I could fell a tree if the situation called for it, even though I actually work indoors on a computer. I have come to call this lumberjack drag. Drag, because it is a costume: masculinity put on for display, drawing on signifiers that read as masculine in a particular cultural register. And like any drag, it reveals something about the culture that produces it.
I own flannel shirts. I like wearing them. Dressing up that way can feel good, I am by no means against this. I am describing a culture I participated in and still occasionally enjoy. In many ways it’s gender-affirming care. The difference is that I see it as in part as drag now. I know I’m putting on a look that signals a kind of masculinity and a kind of capable outdoorsiness that does not particularly match my life. The flannel is a costume, and I wear it because the costume works. That’s what drag is, right?
The church built a theology of gender on top of a few Bible verses and a lot of cultural assumption, and then it built an aesthetic to match: “lumberjack drag”, the tattooed pastor who wants you to know he’s a little bit rough around the edges, the whole performance of “biblical masculinity.” 2000s evangelical subculture dressed up as timeless truth.
John Eldredge’s Wild at Heart gave this aesthetic its theological backbone. Three innate male longings: a great adventure, a battle to fight, and a beauty to rescue. I got the book years ago. Started reading it. Don’t think I ever finished it, which may be its own review (though I honestly struggle to finish books). Looking back, I disagree with the framework. The great adventure, that one holds water. The gospel itself is structured as a great adventure: the kingdom breaking in, the least likely people becoming the bearers of the message. The battle to fight and the beauty to rescue are where it goes wrong. They are culturally specific scripts for masculinity that Eldredge baptised and called universal. A woman can want a battle to fight and a beauty to rescue. A man can want none of these things and not be deficient. And Jesus doesn’t fit the framework. He didn’t have a battle to fight in the sense Eldredge means. He rebuked Peter for drawing a sword. The women in the Gospels are not damsels. They are the ones who stay at the cross when the men have fled. They are the ones who find the empty tomb.
There is a version of the beauty-to-rescue idea that works. This whole project, the Scandalous Life thing, is about beautifying the bride of Christ: the long, slow, unglamorous work of helping the church become what she is supposed to be. That’s a Christian calling, not a male one. Eldredge gendered it and made it about damsels. The actual thing is bigger than his framework can hold.
Rachel Held Evans, in A Year of Biblical Womanhood, did the complementary work from the other side. She spent a year literally following every biblical instruction about women: sitting on her roof during her period, calling her husband “master,” covering her head, not speaking in church. The project exposed what should have been obvious: nobody actually does all of it. “Biblical womanhood” is a selective construction. Proverbs 31 is a celebration of valour, not a checklist. Gentleness can be strength, and modesty is character, not a dress code. The whole framework is a house of cards held together by the fact that nobody looks too closely at which cards are actually in the Bible and which are just wallpaper.
And Tim Keller’s The Meaning of Marriage, complementarian-leaning, covenant-focused, built on the Christ-and-church metaphor read as a prescriptive template, shows what happens when the poetry gets taken literally. Keller’s critique of soulmate idealism is right. Soulmates aren’t a thing. But the framework he builds in its place (wives submit, husbands love sacrificially) is just the old hierarchy in gentler language. The metaphor was supposed to illuminate. It became a lampshade, or a cage.
The scholars defending the tradition keep conceding the point by accident. Preston Sprinkle, who is no egalitarian (he spends most of his energy defending a traditional sexual ethic), wrote a piece called What is “Biblical” Masculinity and Femininity? in which he says, more or less, that most of what gets called biblical masculinity comes from culture, not the Bible. David was masculine as a harpist and as a warrior. Bezalel and Oholiab, the craftsmen of the tabernacle, were given skill by God to sew garments. The Proverbs 31 woman buys a field. Jesus wept over Jerusalem and described himself as a mother hen longing for her chicks. Sprinkle’s conclusion: the Bible celebrates sex difference and also celebrates, in his words, “the humble saints who color outside stereotypical gender lines.” When the scholar defending the traditional position concedes the gender scripts are cultural, what is left of the argument is mostly insistence.
And the costume has a supporting cast, and a violent edge. There is a satirical piece going around mourning the disappearing “beefy boy,” the muscular everyman of the church foyer, the bassist in the praise band. The joke lands because the anxiety behind it is real, and it is the same anxiety that feeds the manosphere pipeline, Mark Driscoll’s “UFC prize fighter Jesus,” a Christ who could take a punch. The flannel shirt and the six-pack Christ are the same costume at different temperatures. One wants you to think he could chop wood. The other wants you to know he could hurt you.
There is a version of masculinity I was handed that I no longer feel the need to perform. I am secure enough in my own to not need the costume, not for myself, anyway. The gender binary I was raised with is not as binary as I was taught to believe. I don’t know that I have the precise words for this yet. I might not need them. I am fairly certain in my masculinity, and I am also fairly certain it’s okay to be a little bit camp sometimes, a little bit what people might call girly, which is itself a reductive way of describing it, and I know that. The point is: the performance is optional. The costume is optional. You can wear the flannel because you like the flannel. Your manhood doesn’t depend on it.
The Paul of the undisputed letters, who named women as co-workers and apostles, who wrote that in Christ there is no male and female, that Paul didn’t build the cage. The cage was built later, by people who took a metaphor and turned it into a system, who took the contested letters and turned them into a constitution, who took their own cultural assumptions about what men and women are supposed to be and called it timeless truth. The scandal Paul started was that the old hierarchies don’t hold in Christ. The church is still walking it back.
None of this was ever divine. It was built from (now) contested letters, cultural assumptions, metaphors treated as legislation, flannel shirts, battle-to-fight rhetoric, a performance of ruggedness that serves the performers more than it serves the gospel. And what gets built can be taken apart. Galatians 3:28 is still there. Junia and Phoebe are still there, and the house churches led by women, waiting in the text for the tradition to stop pretending they’re anomalies. The scandal is waiting for people to read it honestly.
