Yes, we find the Bible speaking of God in all sorts of ways that seem to predicate masculinity to him. However, we cannot take these predications as if they were literally true. They are simply a more elaborate version of a common figure of speech known as anthropomorphism – speaking of God as if he were human (or male). The Bible speaks of God as if He had bodily parts such as an arm, or or hands, or fingers, when we know that God is a bodiless Spirit.

The unknown author of Psalm 94, however, construes the relationship of Creator and creature in a different way:

God’s hearing is positively asserted here, and that very capacity – God’s actual hearing – underlies His creation of human hearing. That men see is evidence for God’s seeing, for He created men’s eyes. One could easily extend the Psalmist’s statements to the entire human body. If we did so and then summarized the result, we could say that man is the image of God!

“Image” in Genesis 1 is the Hebrew tzelem, the ordinary term for a statue. Nebuchadnezzar erects a golden tzelem of himself [the Aramaic equivalent of the Hebrew term] in the Plain of Dura. There is no question in either Daniel 3 or Genesis 1 that the respective images fail to precisely, accurately, and fully replicate those whose images they are. On the other hand, there is no doubt that either image corresponds to the one whose image it is.

The golden tzelem is, so to speak, Nebuchadnezzaroid. Nebuchadnezzar is the original, the archetypal schema, the prior reality which determines the shape of the image of himself which Nebuchadnezzar creates, such that the statue on the Plain of Dura is an image of Nebuchadnezzar instead of an image of Abdul the Beer Brewer down on the banks of the Euphrates.

To say that God’s arm or God’s hand or God’s finger are anthropomorphisms is, after a fashion, to put the matter backwards. Man is himself theomorphic. Not all God’s creatures are theomorphic; none of the animals, for example, are ever said to be created in the image of God. But man is expressly said in Genesis 1 to be theomorphic. Whatever this means in the details, the very notion of an image requires that some minimal features of the image mimic in their nature and/or function the Original on which the image is modeled. In these respects, therefore, it is legitimate to assert that any such features apply to the Original, even if we know such features only in the image.

Craig French, in a comment on a previous blog in this series, wrote this:

So if God describes Himself in masculine terms, it isn’t that He isn’t masculine…it’s that our masculinity cannot contain His. His masculinity is on an immeasurable scale.

In a sense, I guess it is better to say He *is* masculine…what we are is analogically masculine. We can only be accommodatedly masculine because He is ultimately masculine.

In this comment, French is getting at the same idea contained in the notion that we human creatures – created in the image of God – are theomorphic. And, if so, then it is not at all out of the question to predicate to God a quality one observes in the creatures created in His image.

Again, these considerations do not establish that God is masculine.  But, they do dispel the criticism of God’s masculinity, that it cannot be literal, that it must be merely figurative.

The same considerations undercut a criticism that other sex-specific predications about God are merely figurative. Among such criticisms is the claim that God’s fatherhood is merely figurative, he is only like a father. The Bible, of course, is awash in similes and metaphors applied to God.  But any objection to the Bible’s description of God as somehow defective or indeterminate because it is cast as a simile or metaphor begs the same sort of question as the claim that some statements are anthropomorphisms.  Any comparison between God and something not-God is obviously pointing to a quality or feature or aspect that is the same in both God and in that thing to which He is compared.  The interpretative challenge is to identify what those features or aspects amount to.

We say, for example, that a beautiful woman’s lips are like a rose.  Do her lips have thorns?  Roses have thorns, after all!  Are her lips colored yellow?  Many beautiful roses are yellow!  No — we mean that her lips have a deep red color, just as the rose has a deep red color.  Seeing the woman’s beautiful lips makes us think of the beautiful rose.  So, even if God is merely like a father, to say such a thing is to positively assert that fathers and God share some quality or characteristic(s) in common.

But, again, with fatherhood, Paul tells us in Ephesians 3:15 that God is the Father (as Mr. French describes in his comment linked above) while all fatherhood in heaven and earth takes its nature from Him.

At this point, a religious feminist can be expected to pounce and to say “Gotcha!! God is just as feminine as She is masculine!” The reasoning here is that man is created male and female, that both male and female are in God’s image, that this datum in Genesis 1 requires us to conclude that God is no less feminine than S/He is masculine.

Paul would disagree, of course. In fact, he does so in 1 Corinthians 11. And, that is the subject of the next couple of blogs in this series.

 “God is beyond gender. He is infinite, transcending of all things He creates. To say that God is masculine diminishes God’s glory. It puts God in a box that cannot contain Him.”

Among Eastern Orthodox theologians, you will find much discussion along these lines, all to this point: the only thing we can certainly say about God is what we certainly know is not true of Him. God is not this; God is not that; God is not such and such other things. This idea even has a standard name in the study of theology. It’s called apophatic theology.

Opposed to this is a different sort of theology which also has a name: kataphatic theology. A kataphatic way to say something about God would be to say that God is love. The apophatic way would be to express a similar idea would be to say that God is not hate.

But, one might just as well say that God is not love, as He transcends even our notions of love and hate. Ultimately, if we pursue this way of speaking about God, we would even jettison the cocept of the Trinity, or even jettison the idea that God is one, because the Divine is above numberhood. Indeed, if God is truly transcendent in the way that apophatic theology posits, then He is beyond all duality and all distinctions because God contains within Himself all things and is beyond all things.

Logically, to insist that our knowledge of God is apophatic is to insist that we may know nothing at all — in a positive sense —  nothing at all about God. He is beyond any conceptual understanding by His creatures.

I trust you can see that this runs into two problems. The most trivial of these is this: if we may only speak of what God is not, then there is no “stuff” for theology at all. A premise of apophatic thinking a bout God supposes that we cannot know God truly because we cannot know God comprehensively. We cannot know “all of God,” and so we cannot know anything of God. But, this then exposes a second problem: it flatly contradicts what we find in the Bible.

The Bible, of course, is riddled with positive statements about God’s nature and His actions.  His words and His works are the stuff of the Bible.  And, the Old Testament prophets, jesus, and Jesus’ disciples in their New Testament writings — all of them insist that the Scriptures are the Word of God, Scriptures which are composed almost totally of kataphatic, that is, positive statements about God’s words and God’s works.

Of course, the Bible might be completely false, and it’s no surprise to find that  those who insist on God’s ultimate incomprehensibility also discount the Bible’s revelation of God. In fact, the Bible ceases to be revelation in any authentic sense; it becomes “a record of men’s experiences and thoughts about God.” These thoughts and reports of experiences are all kataphatic; they all affirm positively things about God.Yet if the apophatic premise is correct, then even the statements of the Bible fail to tell us anything true about God.

With this objection to God’s masculinity, we find a dilemma. If this objection is valid, then it is also true that we know nothing at all about God. But, if the Bible is, indeed, true, if there is indeed truth about God which we may know, then this objection to God’s masculinity fails. That alone would not establish God’s masculinity, of course. But, it would move past this sort of objection.

The discussion presented above may seem arcane.  Most Christians today  — at least those wtihin evangelical Protestantism in America — have never heard the words kataphatic or apophatic. But, I’d wager that many evangelicals have heard their pastors or Sunday school or home Bible study leaders say something like this:

“It is true that the Bible speaks about God or presents Him in a way that is obviously masculine.  God, for reasons we may speculate about, wishes us to think of Him in these terms.  Jesus wishes us to call God Father.  But all of these forms of address or forms of speaking are metaphorical.  We must not put God in a box!  Just because the Bible speaks of God in masculine terms, this is no warrant to suppose that God is really masculine.”

This is simply a way to say that we do not know anything about what God truly is.  Behind the mask of metaphor, God remains unknown and unknowable to us.

In a later blog, I will lay out the evidence in the Bible that reasoning such as I’ve highlighted above is false  — false, that is, if the Bible is speaking truth.

If, however, the Bible does not speak truly about God, then all bets are off, and those who keep the words of the Bible while emptying them of any truthful content are the same as those who keep a form of religion but deny its power. They are, in spite of the Christian window-dressing, not Christian at all.

http://thegospelforoc.com/2010/11/biblical-masculinity-transcendent-gender/

Before more completely unpacking Paul’s contention that God is masculine in 1 Corinthians 11:7, we are first examining the most common objections to this idea, beginning with objections lodged even by committed patriarchalists. One of the most common objections from their quarter goes like this:

“Masculinity” is not in the Bible’s lexicon. We should, therefore, defer from speaking terms that the Bible does not.

The fact that the lexicon of Biblical Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek cannot be mapped word for word to the lexicons of any other language has never hindered anyone from undertaking a translation of the Bible. Masculinity is not the only word in modern English, for example, that has no equivalent in Biblical languages. In fact, most of the Bible’s vocabulary (in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek) is only approximated by vocabulary in modern English! Nevertheless, translators have inevitably resorted to “work-arounds” of various sorts (including paraphrase in the target language).

But, this critique of God’s masculinity goes beyond mere lexical equivalents. Because the words masculine or feminine do not exist as such in any Biblical lexicon, some will ruge that the concepts themselves have no meaning within a Biblical mode of expression. This is not true; but before showing this, we must note that these critics’ concern for the primacy of Biblical lexicons does not extend to other terms commonly used by them, terms which also never appear in any Biblical lexicon.

An obvious example, of course, is the word trinity and its related terms (trinitarian, Holy Trinity, triune, and so forth) These are wholly manufactured words, purely theological terms, technical terms if you will, terms applied to a fundamental doctrine of the Christian faith. Yet none of these trinitarian terms ever appear in the Bible. This fact is sometimes raised by unitarians or any who would repudiate Trinitarian doctrine. By appeal to what the Biblical lexicons do not contain, heretics score rhetorical points against their orthodox opponents.

Another word missing from the Bible is evangelize. Nor evangelism. But an entire Christian industry arises from these terms! Indeed, name any sub-group of Christendom and you can find within the parlance of that group any number of terms and expressions never found in the Biblical text.

To see this point, try to name each Christian subgroup which is known for using the following terms: (a) sacred heart; (b) move of God; (c) soul competency; (d) supralapsarian; (e) entire sanctification; (f) tight meeting; (g) Kingdom of the Left Hand and Kingdom of the Right Hand; (h) evensong; (i) Theotokos. The answers are given at the end of this blog post.

But, if there is no term within the Biblical lexicons for our term masculine, does this make it unwise or even impossible to affirm that God is masculine? For such an affirmation to be possible and credible does not, in fact, rest on a specific entry in a lexicon, but rather upon equivalent concepts in both the Biblical writings and extra-Biblical languages. And that is precisely what we find various parts of the Bible.

But, before examining these, let us first engage other criticisms of the statement “God is masculine” in the next two blogs.

(a) Roman Catholics; (b) modern charismatics; (c) Baptists; (d) strict Calvinists or the “Truly Reformed;” (e) Wesleyan Methodists; (f) Brethren; (g) Lutherans; (h) Anglicans; (i) Eastern Orthodox.

Is God masculine? Feminists laugh at the notion. Evangelical feminists tut-tut what they claim is the understandable parochialness of the idea. Complementarians bend over backward to grant as much of the feminist critique of patriarchy as they think is needed, in order to defang the challenge they fear by the question itself. And even defenders of Biblical patriarchy will often scoff at the question, declaring that asking this question makes fundamental category mistake when relating our ideas about God to human notions of sexuality.

However, Paul in 1 Corinthians 11:7 makes the point clear: God is masculine. To understand the impact of Paul’s statement today we first need to glance backward at the debate within evangelicalism over the past 40 years or so.

As the feminist revanche against Western patriarchy began to gather steam in academia during the 1970s, evangelical lights within academia were beset with a dilemma. On one hand, they could forthrightly defend Western patriarchy insofar as it grows out of an underlying Biblical patriarchy. The great risk to this approach, however, is that such defenders of Biblical patriarchy would be tarred with the label “fundamentalist” by their feminist colleagues within the academy, and avoiding such disgrace (for it is a disgrace to them to ever allow themselves to credibly be insulted with such a term) is the basic foundation of the evangelical agenda within academe since the beginning of modern evangelicalism in the 1940s.

The other option is the one evangelicals adopted. It has two prongs: (1) to grant to the feminist deconstruction of Biblical patriarchy as much of its critique as possible, doing so with fawning humility, and (2) to posit an explanation of Biblical patriarchy that avoids vulnerability to the feminist slander as persistently as evangelicalism has ever avoided vulnerability to being called fundamentalist.

At the core of feminism’s antagonism to Biblical patriarchy is the Bible’s portrait of God Himself. The bluntly masculine portrait of God that one finds in the Bible gives feminism its chief target. And for so-called evangelical feminists on one hand, or for complementarians on the other hand, God’s patent masculinity in Biblical revelation is ultimately something to be explained away, or explained in a way that makes it of little lasting consequence.

So, again, is God masculine? Let’s begin by evaluating the contention of those patriarchalists who think the question itself is faulty. They think this for any or all of the following reasons:

(1) “masculinity” is a modern concept, unknown in the Bible’s lexicon;

(2) God’s transcendence renders foolish any attempt to speak of Him in created categories; God is “beyond” gender, and so “God is masculine” makes a pointless predication about Him; and

(3) “masculinity” as a predicate for God amounts to an anthropomorphism, and only the spiritually unsophisticated would think such an affirmation is factually true. We will examine each of these objections in turn in subsequent blogs.

What is the glory of Paris? The Eiffel Tower, you say? Good answer! Oh, I see. This other fellow says it’s the Arc de Triomphe. Well, okay. There’s no law that says Paris can’t have two glories.

And, so, what is the glory of Athens? The Parthenon! There you go. See? This isn’t such a hard game after all!

What is the glory of Rome? Most folks will say the Coliseum. Or the Seven Hills (though they’re harder to actually see than the Coliseum). No biggie. If Paris can have more than one glory, so can Rome.

How about the glory of Vienna (I used to live there; eat your heart out)? People who’ve never been to Austria might say the Blue Danube. Folks who live there might easily say it’s St. Stephen’s Cathedral smack dab in the center of the city.

You see, when we’re talking about places (at least in English), it is easy to understand “A is the glory of B.” “A” is what comes to mind when we’re speaking of “B.” The glory of a place is what always comes to mind when that place is mentioned. That’s why, in the Old Testament, we find several examples of the cedar tree as the glory of Lebanon.

When we’re speaking of people, however, English speakers don’t often use the formula “A is the glory of B.” However, we have seen that this formula is easily used in the Bible when speaking of people. And, so “strength” is the glory of young men, because strength is what comes to mind when young men are mentioned. Gray heads are the glory of old men, for the same reason – when old men are mentioned, we think immediately of men with gray hair. And, as we’ve seen, skill at psalmistry (composing/singing songs to a plucked instrument such as a lyre or a harp) is the glory of King David in the Old Testament.

Now here is an amazing thing …

I have often presented the subject matter of this and previous blogs in this series, at seminars held in churches or at men’s retreats or similar venues. My students have been able to follow the inductive steps that let them see what “A is the glory of B” means. They can play “Name that Glory!” with complete accuracy.

And then I say, “Okay. We come to 1 Corinthians 11 and Paul tosses off the statement that men are the glory of God and woman is the glory of man. What does each of these phrases mean? Any hands?

No hands!

I wait. Still no one raises his hand. Many puzzled faces look back at me. A few of the faces are not puzzled, but they are suddenly very wary. Many faces go completely blank and unreadable; and long experience has taught me that when this happens in men’s faces, it is because they are alarmed or angry or terrified, and they instinctively grab hold of their emotions and hold them with a very tight rein, refusing to let what’s going on in their hearts show on their faces. It’s a sort of social defensive maneuver, deployed to keep one’s options open.

Why do you suppose this happens? Why does “man [the male, that is] is the glory of God” produce these reactions?

One hundred years ago, I doubt I’d see such reactions. Since the ascendency of feminism beginning in the 1950s through the 1970s, since the dominion of feminist values in politics, economics, academia, and cultural media was consolidated in the 1980s and codified in law and court decisions ever since then, and – most importantly – since evangelicals have more or less made their peace with religious feminism within their own ranks (and, this includes the so-called complementarians), on this side of all these developments over the past 70 years, evangelical men either cannot or will not acknowledge the meaning of “man is the glory of God.”

If they cannot acknowledge the meaning of “man is the glory of God,” it is usually because they are so conditioned against the meaning of that phrase that they are simply incapable of attaching that meaning to the words which convey it.

If they will not acknowledge the meaning of “man is the glory of God,” it is because they know better than to own up to what Paul is saying in 1 Corinthians 11:7. They know very well how powerful are the deterrents against such an idea, how punitive are the consequences for candidly owning up to Paul’s meaning.

So, let’s put it out on the table and look at it in all its modern scandal: “man is the glory of God.” What this means is this: when God is the subject of our speech or thought, a man comes to mind. A woman does not come to mind (at least not in the Biblical faith!). That is why woman is not the glory of God.

No, it’s a man who comes to mind when Christians speak of God.

When Jesus ministered for three years before He was crucified, the awareness steadily grew in the minds of the religious authorities that this rabbi was saying and doing things that lead inexorably to the conclusion that He was God. And, it because a mere man claimed to be God that Jesus was crucified.

Today, Jesus would be crucified for exactly the opposite claim – that God is a man, not a woman. And, of course, the Apostle Paul would be crucified right alongside him.

We’ll begin to unpack this scandalous meaning of “man is the glory of God” in subsequent blogs. Stay tuned!

Fortunately, as we shall see, the idea working in these phrases is comfortable in English prose. And even more fortunately, the Old Testament contains exactly the formulaic phrase “A” is the glory of “B.” along with a few more verses easily reducible to it.

So, to get a handle “A” is the glory of “B,” let’s look at a few examples. And, the first example – while not expressed in exactly the formula we have in 1 Corinthians 11 – is close enough to show us the idiomatic sense of the formula.

Read the following two verses from Isaiah 60, which look to Israel’s future when the Gentile nations shall worship Israel’s God in Jerusalem:

¹³ “ The glory of Lebanon shall come to you,

The cypress, the pine, and the box tree together,

To beautify the place of My sanctuary;

And I will make the place of My feet glorious.

¹⁴ Also the sons of those who afflicted you

Shall come bowing to you,

And all those who despised you shall fall prostrate at the soles of your feet;

And they shall call you The City of the LORD,

Zion of the Holy One of Israel.

In verse 13 a number of trees are mentioned. How many? What are they?

Inexperienced Bible students will see three trees mentioned here: the cypress, the pine, and the box tree. More seasoned Bible students will add one more to this list: the cedar.

“Where is the cedar mentioned?” you ask. It is mentioned in that phrase “the glory of Lebanon.” The cedars of Lebanon were so large, so remarkable in their size and beauty, that the region itself became synonymous with these trees. The cedar tree was the glory of Lebanon – it was what came immediately to mind when one thought of Lebanon itself. And, though the trees which originally lent their reputation to Lebanon have largely disappeared, their reputation was so great for so long in history that today the national flag of Lebanon still features that tree at its center.

The cedar is the glory of Lebanon. It is what comes to mind when one thinks of Lebanon.

Now, let’s keep in mind what the phrase “the cedar is the glory of Lebanon” means, and then let us examine a few examples of the exact formula “A is the glory of B.” We’ll begin with something straightforward and simple, Proverb 20:29 –

The glory of young men is their strength,

And the splendor of old men is their gray head.

First, we note that this proverb (like almost all of them) are couplets, two lines in some form of parallelism (formal, rhetorical, semantic, synthetic, whatever). This proverb is called a synonymous parallelism – the ideas expressed are synonymously parallel, and almost perfectly parallel in a formal way as well. For this reason, glory in the first line is parallel with splendor in the second line.

Now, we need to ask, what is the proverb telling us when it says that the glory of young men is their strength or that the splendor (a synonym of glory) of old men is their gray head? Well, if the cedar is the glory of Lebanon because the cedar is what comes to mind when Lebanon is mentioned, then …

When young men are in mentioned, what comes to mind is their strength, their youthful vigor or some other kind of potency arising from youth itself. When old men are mentioned, the color of their hair – the gray color of their heads – is what comes to mind. Again, when A is the glory of B, then when B is mentioned or thought about, it is A that comes to mind.

Will this interpretive formula work in other instances? Indeed it does. Consider, for example, Proverbs 17:6:

Children’s children are the crown of old men,

And the glory of children is their father.

This again is a couplet, though the parallelism is a bit looser than the previous example we examined. “Crown” in the first line is an emblem, it is emblematic of a reward or a prize for meritorious accomplishment. Today we think of a crown as an emblem of royal office – something a king wears on his head – but in the Old Testament that idea is more often expressed by a different emblem of royal office, the scepter.

So, the first line is saying that grandchildren are a reward, a prize of old men.

And, the second line? Ever heard the taunt “Who’s your daddy?” Wikipedia explains this taunt in this way:

Who’s your daddy? is a slang expression that, in one use, takes the form of a rhetorical question. It is commonly used as a boastful claim of dominance over the intended listener. The phrase itself stands out as a noteworthy lyric from the 1968 song “Time of the Season”, by The Zombies: “What’s your name? Who’s your daddy? Is he rich like me?”

The same idea lies behind the second line of Proverbs 17:6 and the contemporary taunt “Who’s your daddy,” namely that one’s worth or identity arises from the identity (and, therefore, the worth) of one’s father.

Interestingly, Jesus’ virgin birth very early on led to the gossipy slander that Joseph did not, in fact, sire his son Jesus, bur rather some Gentile. “Where is YOUR father?” the Pharisees taunt Jesus in John 8:19. Later, in the same argument with Jesus (John 8:41), they challenge him with “We were not born of fornication [implying that Jesus was!]. The taunt “Who’s your daddy” is far older than the Zonbies song in 1968!

Knowing that “A is the glory of B” means that B comes to mind when A is being spoken about helps us to understand statements in the Psalms that would otherwise be very murky indeed.

Consider, for example, the introduction to Psalm 57, written by King David:

¹ O God, my heart is steadfast;

I will sing and give praise, even with my glory.

² Awake, lute and harp! I will awaken the dawn.

³ I will praise You, O LORD, among the peoples,

And I will sing praises to You among the nations.

Now, consider that interesting phrase at the end of verse 1: even with my glory. What is that talking about? What does it refer to? If someone were to point to something we could see that is “David’s glory,” what would he point to?

Well, one must know something about David to answer that question. And, the thing we would need to know is listed in 2 Samuel 23:1 which introduces the last words of King David before he died:

Now these are the last words of David. Thus says David the son of Jesse; Thus says the man raised up on high, The anointed of the God of Jacob, And the sweet psalmist of Israel.

Among the things for which David is renowned – things that are his glory, if you will – is the fact that he is “the sweet psalmist of Israel.”

We have lost a sense of the term “psalmist” that was clear to the original listeners of this Old Testament text, namely that a psalm was a song accompanied by a plucked string instrument. No doubt, David developed his musical talent, particularly his skill on the harp, during the long days he spent alone in the fields with the sheep when he was a boy. It was a skill he maintained and matured into adulthood, and it shaped his formation of the Levitical choirs which he created for the worship of the Temple, even before Solomon constructed it.

Now, go back to verse 2 of Psalm 58: “Awake harp and lute! I will awaken the dawn,” David cries out. David addresses his signature instruments as if they are people he awakens from slumber. He declares that he will make such a torrent of music that even the sun will get up!

All that to explain this: when David says in Psalm 58:1 that he will sing and give praise, “even with my glory,” that phrase my glory does not refer to some fuzzy, mushy capacity of David’s soul; rather, it refers to the musical instrument(s) which invariably accompanied the songs which David composed in order to praise God.

So, what does Paul mean when he says “man is the glory of God?” Or that “woman is the glory of man?” It should now be obvious what he means. And, the implications of this are the subject of the next blog in this series.

For example, Ms. Faw opines that lack of relaxation probably takes a toll. She cites Melanie Shreffler of the youth marketing blog Ypulse: “These women worked like crazy in school, and in college, and then they get into the workforce and they are exhausted.” On the other hand, Captivate Network reveals that compared to their female peers “Men are 25% more likely to take breaks throughout the day for personal activities, 7% more likely to take a walk, 5% more likely to go out to lunch, and 35% more likely to take breaks ‘just to relax.’”

Here’s a shocker: “It’s not as if these women expected their jobs to be parties and good times, but many underestimated the actual day-to-day drudgery.” And why, you ask, is this so shocking to read? Well, it’s because the classic work of women – to make a home for husband and children – was so thoroughly trashed by all the feminist founders of the Millennial Woman lifestyle, beginning with Betty Friedan in the 1950s and on to all the Women’s Studies centers in universities which insinuated their agenda into every other degree program in every other college on campus for the past 50 years.

Home making? Drudgery! And, now the workplace is filled with drudgery too? Who knew??

Ms. Faw continues, without the slightest hint of embarrassment: “Also, while earlier generations may have opted out of the workforce through marriage or motherhood, these paths aren’t viable for these self-sufficient women, who either are still single or unwilling to be fully supported by men.”

Well, there you have it. Women need men like fish need bicycles, right? Self-sufficient Millennial Women can’t “opt-out” through marriage or motherhood. These are paths Millennial Women are unwilling to take. Evidently, they prefer single self-supporting drudgery to the drudgery of companionship and (yes, it’s shocking to say such a thing nowadays) the support of a husband. It’s soooo demeaning to be a “kept-woman,” dontcha know!

Purdue University’s Teri Thompson’s analysis is cold comfort. Ms. Faw summarizes Thompson’s insight this way: “Ultimately these women are going through the difficult realization that they may have to redefine their goals and come up with different measures of success in order to thrive in the corporate world.” Why, we wonder, is departing the corporate world for something more – uh, well, sheltered? – not a possibility to consider? Instead, Millennial Women “are turning to therapists and prescription medicines, as well as [to] explore alternative remedies, including acupuncture, yoga, and even psychics.”

Over a hundred years ago, when feminism was giving its first full-throated cry, G. K. Chesterton had its mistake accurately analyzed and published for all to read in What’s Wrong With The World (1910). Following the teaching of Christendom, which itself had learned from the Bible how men and women differ in their work, Chesterton nailed the feminist mistake about the old way of women in the home with these words:

When domesticity, for instance, is called drudgery, all the difficulty arises from a double meaning in the word. If drudgery only means dreadfully hard work, I admit the woman drudges in the home, as a man might drudge at the Cathedral of Amiens or drudge behind a gun at Trafalgar. But if it means that the hard work is more heavy because it is trifling, colorless and of small import to the soul, then as I say, I give it up; I do not know what the words mean.

To be Queen Elizabeth within a definite area, deciding sales, banquets, labors and holidays; to be Whiteley within a certain area, providing toys, boots, sheets, cakes and books, to be Aristotle within a certain area, teaching morals, manners, theology, and hygiene; I can understand how this might exhaust the mind, but I cannot imagine how it could narrow it. How can it be a large career to tell other people’s children about the Rule of Three, and a small career to tell one’s own children about the universe? How can it be broad to be the same thing to everyone, and narrow to be everything to someone? No; a woman’s function is laborious, but because it is gigantic, not because it is minute. I will pity Mrs. Jones for the hugeness of her task; I will never pity her for its smallness.

These days, of course, “woman’s function” is nothing like what it was in Chesterton’s day.  That function –  to be wife and mother to a family – is now deemed to be drudgery in the nonsense meaning Chesterton describes above.  Rearing children is something for the State, at as early an age as politics will permit.  And wifery?  Well, Friedan broke women out of that comfortable concentration camp (her term for domesticity, in case you haven’t read The Feminine Mystique).  Now women are free to pursue their Millennial Careers as Millennial Women – single, self-sufficient, and burned out.

The penchant women have for playing the generalist, in contrast to the specialist bent of most men in the workplace, is a distinction between the sexes as old as Adam and Eve in the Garden. And, if we take the human who is by design (yes, yes, feminists won’t grant you that one either, I know) equipped to administrate in a private domain 100 disparate agendas simultaneously and place her instead in competition against the male in the public arena where he excels in a narrow focus relentlessly pursued as a hound chases a fox – well, might we not predict the woman to burn out as Ms. Faw describes?

First, some claim that “man is the glory of God” is telling us that man glorifies God in the sense of giving glory to God or ascribing (or being) an honor to God.

There are a couple of things wrong with this idea.

As noted in an earlier blog, Paul is everywhere in 1 Corinthians 11:2-16 drawing distinctions between man and woman. Note also the formal identity between the phrases “man, the glory of God” and “woman, the glory of man.” Each follows the form “A is the glory of B.” So, if the point of such a phrase is that “A gives glory to B,” then the two phrases about man and woman distinguish men from women only insofar as each sex gives glory and honor to different “targets” as it were.

This understanding of “man, the glory of God” and “woman, the glory of man” leads to spurious conclusions. Manifestly, such a sense does not distinguish men from women or vice versa. Women give glory to God, for example. They do so in most of the ways men do: singing God’s praises, confessing faith in Him, offering petitions to Him, and so forth. While women were not required to attend the three annual feasts of the Lord under the Old Covenant, they were always permitted to do so. And, so, Mary went up to the Feast of the Passover with Joseph on the occasion that Jesus stayed behind in the Temple.

And, if “man, the glory of God” means that men give glory to God, it follows that “woman, the glory of man” means that women give glory to men, and that in pretty much the same way that men give glory to God. Such an idea – no matter how one tempers it with caveats – is far afield of whatever Paul is talking about in 1 Corinthians 11!

So, “man, the glory of God” does not mean “the man (i.e. the male of the species) gives glory to God.” He may, in fact do so of course; but, that is not what this Pauline phrase is telling us.

Another failed interpretation of the phrase understands “man” to mean “mankind.” And, so, “man the glory of God” means that mankind glorifies God, or mankind gives glory to God, or something similar.

And, of course, one may argue on other grounds and from other statements in Scripture that mankind does exactly that. Indeed, the kings of the earth are exhorted in the strongest possible terms in Psalm 2 to do this:

¹⁰ Now therefore, be wise, O kings; Be instructed, you judges of the earth.

¹¹ Serve the LORD with fear, And rejoice with trembling.

¹² Kiss the Son, lest He be angry, And you perish in the way,

When His wrath is kindled but a little. Blessed are all those who put their trust in Him.

But, “mankind gives glory to God” is not what Paul is getting at when he says that “man is the image and glory of God.” For one thing, the use of the word “image” pulls us back into Genesis 1:27 where “mankind” (in our vocabulary) is said to be created male and female. “Man” in Genesis 1:27 is the inclusive masculine – referring to both males and females, as the immediate context confirms. “Man” in the Pauline phrase “man, the glory of God” must be referring to man as a collective noun for the male of the species, for it is contrasted with “woman” which is a collective noun for the female of the species.

The one place where “man” may, indeed, be the male inclusive for “mankind” is, ironically, in the phrase “woman is the glory of man.” But, to see this clearly, we must turn our attention, finally, to elucidating what it means to say that “A is the glory of B,” a subject for the next blog in this series.

First of all, to avoid saying – nay, to deny – that woman is the glory of God is to insult every feminist sensability you can think of. Whatever Paul means by “man, the glory of God,” it necessarily follows that woman is not the glory of God in the same sense that the man is. Of course, it is also true that whatever Paul means by saying that woman is the glory of man, it necessarily follows that man the male not the glory of man in the way that the woman is. For that matter, the man is also also is not the glory of woman! Again, leaving aside precisely what Paul means by these concepts, they are not reciprocal. They are strictly hierachical (cf. 1 Corinthians 1 11:3)

“Glory of God” and “glory of man” are ideas that identify male and female and which distinguish each from the other. And, this can be known for certain from Paul’s exposition even if we do not understand what either of these phrases mean! Throughout the entirety of 1 Corinthians 11:1-16, males and females are distinguished from one another. Their natures, their behaviors (both what they do, what they should do, what they should not do), they relationship to one another – all these are distinguished from one another over and over again.

“Man, the glory of God,” then, is an idea Paul predicates of males, not females. And, “woman, the glory of man” is an idea Paul predicates of females, not males. Before we delve into what Paul means by either phrase, we must acknowledge this: the phrases are not synonymous in any sense though they are formally identical. And, we know they are not synonymous in any sense because they are used by Paul to distinguish the man from the woman and vice versa.

To see this, examine the following text of 1 Corinthians 11:2-16 in which the words man and woman are rendered in a color different from the surrounding text. Just glance over the passage and you will see – in a visual rather than a semantic way – how Paul distingthishes man from woman and woman from man throughout the entire passage:

 ² Now I praise you, brethren, that you remember me in all things and keep the traditions just as I delivered them to you. ³ But I want you to know that the head of every man is Christ, the head of woman is man , and the head of Christ is God.

⁴ Every man praying or prophesying, having his head covered, dishonors his head. ⁵ But every woman who prays or prophesies with her head uncovered dishonors her head, for that is one and the same as if her head were shaved. ⁶ For if a woman is not covered, let her also be shorn. But if it is shameful for a woman to be shorn or shaved, let her be covered.

⁷ For a man indeed ought not to cover his head, since he is the image and glory of God; but woman is the glory of man . ⁸ For man is not from woman, but woman from man . ⁹ Nor was man created for the woman, but woman for the man. ¹⁰ For this reason the woman ought to have a symbol of authority on her head, because of the angels.

¹¹ Nevertheless, neither is man independent of woman, nor woman independent of man, in the Lord. ¹² For as woman came from man, even so man also comes through woman; but all things are from God.

¹³ Judge among yourselves. Is it proper for a woman to pray to God with her head uncovered? ¹⁴ Does not even nature itself teach you that if a man has long hair, it is a dishonor to him? ¹⁵ But if a woman has long hair, it is a glory to her; for her hair is given to her for a covering. ¹⁶ But if anyone seems to be contentious, we have no such custom, nor do the churches of God.

Again, this little exercise establishes that in Paul’s writings, this passage is undoubtedly teaching us about men (i.e. males) and women, and that it distinguishes them from one another at every point. The core distinction between men and women is contained in those phrases man, the glory of God and woman, the glory of man.

We have not yet engaged the meaning of these phrases (that’s coming in subsequent blogs).  But, even without a handle on the meanings of these phrases, we may confidently affirm the following:

• Men and women differ from one another as glory bearers.  Man is God’s glory (whatever that means), and woman is not.  Woman is man’s glory (whatever that means), and man is not.
• Paul’s purpose in this passage is to urge upon the Corinthians a specific practice: the covering of women and the absence of covering of men.  In just what context this practice is to be followed is the subject of another blog.  All Christians who comply with Paul’s prescription do so within some sort of context, even those Christians who, for example, have their women with some sort of covering on their heads in all settings, public and private.  Men, for example, will cover their heads because of the weather, but will uncover in settings deemed appropriate for compliance with Paul’s directive in 1 Corinthians 11.
• There are three glories specified in this passage: man (who is God’s glory), woman (who is man’s glory), and the woman’s hair (which is her own glory).  Keeping these three glories in mind is critical to understanding the meaning of Paul’s prescription.  Specifically, the woman’s hair is given to her both as a covering and as a glory (both are mentioned in verse 15. Consequently, the covering Paul mandates in verse 10 covers two glories: the woman’s glory (her hair) and the woman’s head (for she is man’s glory).  Only the man (God’s glory) is uncovered.

Before fully elucidating Paul’s teaching here, there remain several interpretive points to illumine, and these are the subject of subsequent blogs.  Watch for more.

Paul’s teaching in Ephesians 5 is not difficult to understand, though religious feminists seem to find it challenging. On the other hand, Paul’s teaching in 1 Corinthians 11 seems to be very difficult to understand if one surveys the almost wildly diverse interpretations given to it by just about everyone (including both patriarchalists and religious feminists).

So, while Paul in Ephesians is merrily spun by religious feminists, his teaching in 1 Corinthians 11 is usually ignored as treating some obscure cultural issue pertaining to First Century Corinth, but having no relevance to modern Christian faith. It’s commonly referred to as “the head covering passage,” though the covering of women is actually an application, a behavioral consequence, of the truth about the sexes which Paul is expounding in 1 Corinthians 11.

The two passages, however, are the most dense in Paul’s letters on the subject of the sexes: That one is spun to say what it most emphatically never says and the other is dismissed as (at best) a cultural curiosity shows how seriously confused modern Christians are about the tenets of their faith at a place where the world attacks those tenets with special ferocity.

1 Corinthians 11 contains special problems beyond its subject matter. A quick beginning-to-end reading of the verses sounds very much as if Paul is reviewing teaching that he likely gave the Corinthians when he was previously with them. He speaks of man, the glory of God, and woman, the glory of man, as short-hand terms which he expects his readers to understand, for he writes not one syllable to define these concepts.

Add to these problems other obscure statements: because of the angels and authority on her head along with an obvious play on multiple meanings of the word head (Gk. kephale).

None of these difficulties in 1 Corinthians 11 are insuperable. Yet, they are variously parsed by students or expositors of the text. And, so, this present blog serves to introduce a series of additional blogs devoted to the overall teaching that Paul gives us in 1 Corinthians 11 as well as specific interpretive pitfalls in this passage (not pitfalls for Paul, of course; it’s his religious feminist despisers and his pusillanimous defenders who are always falling into pits!).

Prospective (at this point) blog topics in this series will include:

• Glory of God, Glory of Man: what do these phrases mean?
• Image and Glory: are they the same? Different? What difference?
• Worship and Glory: the overall argument of 1 Corinthians 11:1-16
• The Veiling of Women: an archaic Corinthian custom?
• The role of the sexes in worship: why men are up front and leading while women are present and participating

Watch for additional blogs in the series.