When Simone de Beauvoir famously proclaimed, “One is not born a woman but becomes one,” the idea that gender differences between women and men were socially generated radically changed the gender conversation.1 Since that time, traditional ideas about the existence of essential differences between the sexes—differences rooted in an underlying, unchangeable essence of womanhood and manhood—began to give way to anti-essentialist conclusions that either denied a gender essentialism altogether or promoted a “new essentialism” grounded solely in the choices and desires of individuals. In both cases, the anti-essentialist juggernaut raged and eventually overwhelmed biology so that even male and female bodies were irrelevant to one’s gender identity. All with the effect that now in many circles the notions of “man” and “woman” have disappeared entirely, and the simple question “What is a woman?” (recently dodged by a sitting Supreme Court justice) cannot afford to be answered.2

To such a radical anti-essentialist agenda, Evangelicals and Catholics have responded with a renewed attention to the Christian tradition’s theological anthropology that posits human nature as a holistic dualism of body and soul, material and immaterial.3 In this tradition, the sexuality of the body delivers a divinely sourced message about who we are. Beyond this foundation, however, the parties of the evangelical gender debate move in different directions on the essentialism question. For their part, complementarians assert an essentialism that is located in the body, but one that is personal in social relationships, too. Egalitarians affirm the body as the site of an essential gender difference, but also claim the Bible says little beyond that for the differences between women and men.

In this essay, and with an eye to the anti-essentialism of contemporary culture, I propose to evaluate the two evangelical options. Part 1 briefly surveys essentialism’s ups and downs in the broader culture, especially since de Beauvoir. In part 2, I propose a biblical gender essentialism that is sensitive to both the sexuality of the body as well as the relationality of the soul—the inner and outer man of the Christian tradition. In part 3, I compare the proposal of part 2 against the options in evangelical complementarianism and egalitarianism for efficacy and standing in our present cultural moment. Both sides indeed have something valuable we need, but one side, appropriately modified, offers the fullest biblical picture of gender difference and, I would propose, the greatest resilience and hope for the future of gender difference in the church, if not society, too.

1. Difference Pathologized

The culture’s history with gender difference is in large measure a subset of the history of the modern feminist movement. Within this context, some form of the “essentialist fallacy”—that difference for women inevitably means a destiny of oppression in patriarchal societies—is always in the crosshairs of suspicion.4 The answer to this suspicion for most of this history has been the promotion of broad gender similarity, so that women might achieve social equality with men. Within this agenda, however, there are distinct movements orbiting around the question of whether gender difference is hard-wired by nature or the result of “social coding” imposed by the culture. We turn to a brief survey of these movements now.5

1.1. Difference as Dangerous

Contemporary feminist thought about gender difference relies heavily on the tradition of essentialism inherited from preceding generations. Differences between men and women are still rooted in the biology of the body. However, this was part of the problem, because men, who wielded social power, used the belief in distinct essences to justify women’s oppression and inferiority. The incipient responses to the plight of women in this period, usually first traced to the Romanticism of Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1790), did not deny essential differences so much as they attempted to dim or mute them.6 In a move that would fund feminist dogma into the modern day, Wollstonecraft saw that the struggle for equality demanded a focus on the similarity between women and men as human beings. Women’s rights were indeed human rights, and equal treatment could only be achieved by highlighting the common humanity both sexes share in rationality and virtue. This similarity doctrine did not deny difference so much as shift attention away from it. Women’s identity comes to be understood in terms of her nature as a human creature, not her nature as a woman.7

1.2. New Essentialism

The leveling of gender differences took a new and radical turn in the mid-twentieth century with de Beauvoir’s famous claim cited earlier. Emerging from an existentialist root, this branch of feminism now set the stage for the final postmodern dissolution of essentialism, as we will see below.8 At this point, the etiology of gender differences—ultimately, even biological differences—is found entirely in the social order. All difference is in fact just a mask; a matter of how gender is performed. The seminal essay by Candace West and Don H. Zimmerman, “Doing Gender,” states the case: “We contend that the ‘doing’ of gender is undertaken by women and men whose competence as members of society is hostage to its production. Doing gender involves a complex of socially guided perceptual, interactional, and micropolitical activities that cast particular pursuits as expressions of masculine and feminine ‘natures.’”9 This new essentialism renders all gender difference as a “static” discussion with even reproductive biology largely rendered “indifferent,” thanks to the Pill and abortion rights.10 There is no masculine or feminine “nature” underlying the constructs society imposes upon its members. Men and women need to be seen as the same, for they are essentially the same. As the radical feminist Shulamith Firestone famously wrote: “The end goal of feminist revolution must be, unlike that of the first feminist movement, not just the elimination of male privilege but of the sex distinction itself: genital differences between human beings would no longer matter culturally.”11

1.3. Difference Reclaimed

Parallel to the new essentialism of de Beauvoir and her followers was also a return to real gender difference. Whereas difference had to be diminished or even erased in the name of equality prior to and after de Beauvoir, other feminists pushed back and contended for the unique feminine “voice” of women. Real equality demanded more than downplaying difference because that still left in place the Western Cartesian tradition of moral reasoning that valorized the masculine virtues of abstraction, individuality, and the appeal to universal principles. The feminine genius in the relational self needed more definition, not dismissal.12 Carol Gilligan’s In a Different Voice (1982) was revolutionary in this regard, lionizing the features of the feminine relational moral domain and, at the same time, taming the androcentric Cartesian one. She describes her work at one point thus:

For the present, my aim has been to demonstrate the centrality of the concepts of responsibility and care in women’s constructions of the moral domain, to indicate the close tie in women’s thinking between conceptions of the self and the conceptions of morality, and, finally, to argue the need for an expanded developmental theory that would include, rather than rule out from developmental consideration, the difference in the feminine voice.13

The feminine relational, connected self, rather than being inferior to the Cartesian masculine self was truly its equal and valid complement for the domain of moral truth. The unique feminine psyche (“voice”) was often thought to emerge directly from women’s biology that then was performed and accountable to the distinct gender roles exposed by the “new essentialism” discussed above.14

1.4. De-essentialized Essentialism

The return and even celebration of gender difference marked by Gilligan’s revolution gained new impetus when the continental struggle against the patriarchy entered the American arena in the early 2000s. However, the new move included a radical turn and claimed the final frontier that even biological difference is not absolute. European feminism had always been more inclined to a difference-agenda over a similarity one, but only under the condition that all “reality” is a mere linguistic game completely and utterly circumscribed by society.15 Elaine Storkey notes well the postmodern challenge to the traditional American feminist similarity doctrine:

An egalitarianism that rests on the abandonment of difference is the most subtle way yet of making women invisible, for tradition, language, and concepts have for too long all been formed within a male dominant framework. Espousing “equality” while everything else stays the same is to give the appearance of empowering women while denying the reality of it. It is in fact to capitulate to the deeper structures of the patriarchy in the name of reform.16

With the postmodern turn, everything thought to be natural, self-evident, and true is now regarded as only a series of language signs. Even notions of “equality” and “difference” are illusory products of patriarchal power dynamics.17 Difference cannot even be found in the sexual binary of the body but rather lived only on the basis of one’s narrative “standing.”18 Difference is now re-defined across all boundaries of all individuals, of genders and classes of people.19 Under this linguistic press, any absolute idea of “man” and “woman” literally disappears. There is no essence to either—not culturally and, more importantly, not biologically. Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990) was an early voice championing the virtual disappearance of the body “by asserting that the ‘natural’ body as such does not exist ‘before’ the language and meaning of cultures. Language cultivates different bodily sex differences…. Stated simply, even biology is a matter of culture. In order to liberate oneself as a woman, one can subjectively ‘engineer’ one’s open-ended sex.”20

At this point of our account, the only essentialism left is the relativistic and individualistic one, which for sexuality means anything goes but “the binary.”21 Whereas in the three previous stages, the body remains an aspect of gender identity, however muted in the relentless pursuit of similarity, now under postmodern ideology the body is a mere screen upon which the “real” person writes their own identity.22 None of the traditional, standard categories of difference apply, except to see them as an unwanted challenge to what it means to be human.

1.5. Summary

From its earliest days, the feminist movement has pursued social equality with men by the promotion of women’s essential similarity to men. Differences, even biological ones, are too easy to secund to the essentialist fallacy, therefore essentialism is treated as a dangerous and even unwanted contributor to society’s disenfranchising of gender stereotypes. The radical postmodern turn of the last twenty years goes so far as to eliminate the objectivity of the body and what that might mean for the constitution of human identity. This is the new essentialism. Difference is utterly defined away from traditional categories and now left to the domain of the individual’s imagination and desire. We turn next to the biblical response and understanding of human essentialism.

2. The Body of Difference

The Christian tradition interfaces most profoundly with the new essentialism of postmodernity precisely at the place of the human body. This is why social commentators like Carl Trueman consider that the Church’s current struggle for the Christian worldview is in essence the “battle for the body.”23 In this second part we will consider the theology of the body and the foundations it provides for other dimensions of the biblical approach to human gender difference.

2.1. Essentialism of the Body

In the biblical tradition, the human body is one of the basic and irreducible components of human identity. This is because the inner and outer person exist together, identifying us, as Genesis 2:7 reveals, as ensouled bodies: “Then the Lord God formed man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man become a living being” (NASB).24 Further, in Genesis 1:26–27, it is this dualistic composite of body and soul that separates human beings from all other embodied creatures as God’s own earthly representatives, i.e., his image.25 And while God delights in both the human body and the human soul equally, in Scripture this union is not one in which body and soul coexist juxtaposed. The body is not the material “shell” of the soul. The church encountered this kind of platonic dualism long ago in the struggle with Gnosticism.26 However, by many counts, the gnostic challenge continues today particularly in the similarity agenda of feminism and even more so transgenderism.27 Like ancient Gnostics, modern ones are “confused about what it means to be a human person in a body.”28 They despise the body for any revelation of human identity—the real person of the mind submits the body to medication and surgery according to its own desires and imaginations.

By contrast, the Christian tradition affirms a holistic dualism, that human beings are a hylomorphic, psychosomatic composite of body and soul.29 Holistic dualism negotiates the Scriptural tensions where the person—the “I”—can stand apart from their body and present it to the Lord (Rom 12:1, cf. also 1 Cor 9:27), and at the same time assert that “I am my body.” To do something against the body is to do it against the person.30 Moreover, this tradition also asserts that this holistic, spirit-matter composite means that the body is unique and matches the soul. Put me in a different body, says Gregg Allison, and you would not know me.31 It also shows that persons are created for relationship with other persons. As Karl Lehmann has observed, humans are “a personal otherness and relatedness, … indispensably linked” to one another.32

In Scripture, this body-level difference also establishes a complementary asymmetry between men and women that is intended by God to serve them in their mutual calling as his image. The body tells us that the common vocation men and women share of being fruitful, multiplying, filling, ruling, and subduing the creation for God (Gen 1:28) is a calling that men and women equally share but grasp differently as corresponding complements.33 Male persons are not interchangeable with female ones in that calling.34 But is this a difference confined only to functions in human reproduction? For some, it seems so. “A woman,” concludes Katie McCoy, “is a biologically female human being.”35 Others, however, also press the vocational implications of Eve’s biblical identity as “the mother of all the living” (3:20), noting not just the female body’s capacity for giving birth, but also its regular, cyclical sign of fertility.36 Edith Stein, thus, speaks of the “maternal vocation” shared by all women regardless of whether they give birth or not.37 With bodies uniquely organized to gestate and nurture life, a woman has a propensity “to receive new life that is entrusted to her, and to foster its complete and integrated flourishing.”38 Men’s bodies, by contrast, indicate at the very least a “paternal” soul-vocation of securing, serving, and protecting women’s maternal vocation, including also a particularly male “exteriority” and expendability.39

2.2. Essentialism of Persons in Relationship

The complementary, relational essentialism signified by the human body is made more explicit in Scripture’s approach to differences through the personal relationships men and women have with each other. As we have seen, because we are made in God’s image, human life is a differently embodied life of persons intended for communion. It is in this context of our personal communion that Scripture moves to define the difference of manhood and womanhood in terms of each one’s behavior toward the other. Manhood, in this sense, is about what men do for women, and womanhood about what women do for men. Thus, as Sam Andreades and others note, womanhood is a very masculine affair and manhood a very feminine one.40 Not only does this approach move human relationality to the forefront of a biblical essentialism, but it also betters the essentialist strategy intrinsic to the rationalistic and scientific mentality of Western cultures. These approaches divide and isolate men from women and tend to make gender difference subject to contextualized cultural stereotypes like preference in sports, food, number of words spoken, gesture habits, facial expressiveness, etc. Such essentialism always leaves “outliers,” who do not fit the prescribed “list” of stereotypical gender essentials. But when difference is a matter of the clear imperatives addressed to men and women, no one is left out.

The biblical contours for its relational essentialism begin in Genesis 1–2, which lay the foundation for the other consistently asymmetrical gender imperatives that appear throughout Scripture. Alongside the undeniable equality of male and female embodied souls, Genesis 1–3 records an androcentric asymmetry for the man and the woman in terms of their order, origin, and mission.41 This asymmetry grounds later Old Testament patricentrism and the New Testament authors’ imperatives governing the relationship of men and women in home and church.42 Thus, “ordering under” and headship language appears asymmetrically for both men and women in Ephesians 5:21–25 and 1 Corinthians 11:3.43 In regard to the activities of prophesying, judging prophesies (1 Cor 11, 14), and authoritative teaching (1 Tim 2:11–15), distinctions are asymmetrically assigned because the man was created first (1 Tim 2:13) and because “he was not made for her sake, but she was made for his” (1 Cor 11:8). Likewise, the occupants of the final accountable church office of elder/bishop/pastor come in asymmetrical fashion (1 Tim 3:1–7; Titus 1:6–9).44 Of course, the interpretation and application of all these asymmetries as abiding statements have been hotly contested within evangelicalism for the last 50 years. Nonetheless, they do comprise a significant part of the biblical text for a relational essentialism. Gender differences exist and should even be publicly secured.45

2.3. Summary

In the biblical tradition, differently sexed bodies reflect differently sexed persons. In the image of God, women and men are created individually and personally to reflect a differentiated equality before God and the rest of the created order. The differences that are displayed visibly in human sex dimorphism are also matched with consistent imperatives in Scripture that support the essentialism of the body at the point of personal relationship. This holistic dualism of human nature in relationship displays Scripture’s essentialist vision for a differentiated, complementary union designed to effectively provide for human flourishing and mission in the world. Thus, loss of difference weakens humanity’s reflection of God’s own differentiated equality, the richness of human relationships, and the effectiveness of humanity’s mission as God’s stewards of the creation.

3. The Future of Difference

It remains for us to assess the current evangelical options for gender essentialism against the wider culture’s anti- and de-essentialist narratives. And while there are other futures predicted within the culture and the church, including a trajectory toward androgyny and other ventures to completely eliminate gender difference, my assessment will focus on the two primary, conservative evangelical options, popularly labeled egalitarianism and complementarianism.46 What does the biblical picture of gender essentialism and gender difference, offered in part 2, look like for these option, in contrast with the culture’s radical dualism and pursuit of radical similarity?

3.1. Egalitarian Essentialisms

At the outset, it is important to note that egalitarianism offers a constructive voice against an essentialist fallacy within the evangelical gender conversation. This is a fallacy that too easily conflates gender vocations with stereotypical social roles.47 As John Grabowski and others of the so-called New Feminism aptly note, gender vocations and social roles are different. The female vocation as life-nurturer, for example, has more applications in society than stay-at-home mom!48 The version of the essentialist fallacy, sometimes seen in complementarian arguments, is also outside of the Bible’s approach as we have already seen. It may indeed be reasonable and legitimate to suppose psychological and spiritual differences in the different “voices” of male and female persons, but Scripture’s essentialism does not begin there. It is in the holistic union of sexually dimorphic bodies and persons-in-relation that manhood and womanhood are differentiated, not in psychological or temperamental traits, however prominently they may be expressed in a culture.49

Beyond its positive contribution, however, egalitarianism appears to possess two liabilities for biblical essentialism before the culture’s anti- or de-essentialist approach to gender. First, with its principal project to exegetically eliminate all alleged patriarchy and hierarchy from the biblical texts, it, like its secular contemporaries, is left with a positive message only of gender similarity. Sharon James’s complaint about a vacuum of positive teaching about manhood and womanhood in the second edition of Discovering Biblical Equality (DBE) still applies to the recent third edition and to the egalitarian movement as a whole.50 For instance, Elizabeth Hall’s essay—one of the two essays in the third edition of DBE specifically devoted to the question of essentialism—begins with promising questions: “What does it mean to be a man? What does it mean to be a woman? What is masculinity and femininity? What are the differences between men and women?” But it ends up, in the words of the editors, recounting only “the scant evidence for gender complementarity in the social sciences.”51 To be sure, there is not a wholesale denial of male-female difference within egalitarianism. Many egalitarians, like Elaine Storkey, for example, claim the reality of gender differences, even complementarity for those differences, but end up only by affirming what those complementary differences cannot mean; namely, hierarchy.52 Likewise, many of the contributors to DBE (third edition) affirm women’s retention of “femininity” within the functional interchangeability with men their position advances, but again they offer no specific content as to its meaning. As such, “femininity” reduces to the domain of preferred stereotypes, social constructs, and relativist community narratives, just as they do for the post-moderns in our midst.53

Second, while it is important to note that, unlike the wider culture, no one in evangelical egalitarianism is seeking to cancel the male-female “binary,” the keen interest to stave off traditional role stereotypes mutes the personal differences located in differently sexed human bodies. In a pattern of dualism that is thoroughly synchronized to feminist convictions since Mary Wollstonecraft, egalitarianism shades embodied human difference by relentlessly focusing on a similarity doctrine at the point of the invisible soul.54 Efforts to locate and highlight functional gender sameness in the believer’s identity “in Christ,” as children of God, as those born of the Spirit and Spirit-gifted, as members of the New Covenant, within the priesthood of believers—which of course are biblical identities—are never taken up with the dimension of personal differentiation located in the body. There is no holistic, embodied, complementary gender reality to any of these identities in egalitarianism. Contributors to the most recent edition of DBE appear to take this even a step further by now denying the male/female body as having any significance for understanding identity in the image of God and affirming how scant the evidence is for complementarity in the social sciences noted above.55 Unfortunately, this hesitation with difference leaves egalitarians at best silent or at worst open to the charge of complicity with a culture that is surging dangerously out of step with biblical norms.56 In the current “battle for the body,” egalitarians appear to have little positive to offer.

3.2. Complementarian Essentialisms

While complementarians appear to be better situated to leverage the entirety of the biblical witness to gender difference, numerous liabilities of application limit the message for our cultural moment. Living out “equal but different” is easier said than done, especially in Western culture, which, as Nancy Miller rightly notes, “has proven to be incapable of thinking ‘not-the-same-as’ without assigning one of the terms a positive value and the other a negative.”57 And as this cultural context has pushed egalitarians to define equality as an interchangeable, functional sameness, it pushes many complementarians toward a “male culture” reality or worse.58 Here “male culture” largely entails missing a key distinctive of biblical essentialism; namely, Scripture’s larger context of inclusion, unity, and complement-in-relationship. Graham Beynon and Jane Tooher, with other recent voices, chart four complementarian missteps of this order in the life of the church: (1) separatism—the siloing of men’s and women’s ministries; (2) focusing solely on authority “boundaries” in questions of what women cannot do; (3) de-contextualization—a gender discussion extracted from the nature of the church as a diverse but unified body and spiritual family; and (4) individualism—I-thinking, rather than we-thinking.59

In the face of such a diagnosis, the remedy appears to require broader thinking and messaging within the complementarian camp, not just about how to encourage the ministry of women, but also about the nature of the church, leadership, and ministry in general. Is ministry just preaching the word on Sunday mornings? Does the service of elders operate like that of a CEO with top-down values associated with “position, line management, public profile, financial oversight, formal authority, and salary”?60 Is the study of doctrine just for men? Do we really pursue the contribution of all members of the body for the church to function? Does the ministry of women really count, or is our thinking here dominated only by limits—what they cannot do?61 Are women expected to be just “different men” and to censor their issues or attitudes to be taken seriously?62 How will the church family hear and honor the voice of its spiritual mothers while visibly honoring biblical, complementary difference?63 Evangelical complementarians need to do all they can to avoid the trap, identified by Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, of unilaterally “seeing women as fit only for motherhood and service to others.”64 A “new feminism,” which is what Fox-Genovese calls her brand of complementarianism, “must encompass and honor vocations for single women, just as it must support the distinct vocations of women who are wives and mothers.”65 As the theological discipline of doctrinal criticism cautions us, it is all too easy for denominations, theological systems and movements to be defined by the social and historical context of their origin.66 Evangelical complementarians may need to take stock and consider how their application of the difference texts of Scripture has been shaped by the context of the mid-twentieth century feminist revolt against women’s traditional domestication and motherhood. The Bible, of course, has no time for any disparaging of motherhood, which is only everywhere praised and honored. But is that the extent of the message? In a day when there is growing evidence that the culture’s individualism and feminism is separating the sexes from one another, a robust portrayal of gender difference within the Bible’s message of inclusion, other-promotion, and complementary union gives the Church an effective antidote that must be leveraged.67

3.3. Summary

The two sides of the evangelical gender conversation uniquely refract the proposed biblical essentialism of part 2. Egalitarianism does well to shift the conversation away from culturally captive stereotyping and essentialist fallacies but also significantly weakens a biblical message for gender difference in its pursuit of a gender similarity dogma drawn from its secular feminist contemporaries. Complementarians also betray a certain cultural captivity, but in a different direction. While this preferred view naturally enjoins the full biblical picture of difference, contextual forces can also limit complementarian applications. The beauty and the power of the biblical message for gender differences to serve relationship, union, and inclusion can too easily be bent to serve individualism and anachronism.

4. Conclusion

Against a wider cultural narrative that now thoroughly pathologizes biologically determined differences between men and women, evangelicals respond with a theological anthropology grounded in the biblical texts. In this essay, I have argued for a biblical essentialism that is both embodied and personal. The gender differences of men and women in God’s created order are not only grounded in their differently sexed bodies but reflect the differentiated unity and equality of the divine persons. I have also argued that the biblical commands avoid common and culturally contrived essentialist fallacies. Fully leveraging this holistic vision of difference will be key for engaging the “culture of confusion” and the “battle for the body” we see around us every day. At the same time, as we translate the biblical message into the language of the day, we must do so without distorting it. Our own evangelical conversation on gender shows that transformation of the biblical message can happen by missteps in both exegesis and application. It also shows us how those missteps are easily shaped by cultural pressures. For egalitarians, the pressure of the culture’s similarity doctrine has left only a negative half-message of what difference cannot mean. With a message of both what difference is not and also what difference is, a revisioned complementarianism that faithfully speaks about gender difference in light of Scripture’s emphases, ordering, and narrative, will be better situated to strengthen the church to stand against the culture and to promote the positive flourishing of Christian women and men.

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1 Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. H. M. Parshley (London: Cape, 1953), 267.
2 Compare recent titles: Carrie Gress, The End of Woman: How Smashing the Patriarchy Has Destroyed Us (Washington, DC: Regenery, 2023) and “The Abolition of Man and Woman,” The Wall Street Journal, 24 June 2020, https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-abolition-of-man-and-woman-11593107500; also John Grabowski, Unraveling Gender: The Battle Over Sexual Difference (Gastonia, NC: Tan, 2022), 56. According to Hanna-Barbara Gerl-Falkovitz, “The question about the ‘essence of the woman’ has been taboo since Simone de Beauvoir” (“Gender Difference: Critical Questions Concerning Gender Studies,” in Women in Christ: Toward a New Feminism, ed. Michele M. Schumacher [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004], 4).
3 Gregg R. Allison lists thirteen recent offerings on the topic (“A Theology of Human Embodiment,” SBJT 63.2 [2021]: 67 n. 9), to which could be added: Gress, End of Woman; Abigail Favale’s The Genesis of Gender: A Christian Theory (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2022); and Grabowski’s Unraveling Gender.
4 The common denominator of all streams of feminism is “the conviction that women, as a collectivity have always been treated unjustly in patriarchal societies” (Beatriz Vollmer Coles, “New Feminism: A Sex-Gender Reunion,” in Women in Christ, 54, citing the specialist of feminist history, Guy Bouchard, “L’hétéropolitique féministe,” Laval théologique et philosophique 45 [1989]: 95–120, here, 100–101).
5 In many ways the feminist narratives for essentialism track with the four so-called “waves” of feminism often used to chronicle the intellectual history of the movement. See, for example, such accounts in Favale, The Genesis of Gender, 53–83; Sharon James, God’s Design for Women in an Age of Gender Confusion (Darlington, UK: EP, 2019), 31–50; and Michelle Lee-Barnewall, Neither Complementarian nor Egalitarian: A Kingdom Corrective to the Evangelical Gender Debate (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2016), 15–68. It should also be noted that many feminists deny the linear wave-model to describe their intellectual history. See Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay, Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody (Durham, NC: Pitchstone, 2020), 298 n. 4.
6 Elaine Storkey, citing the work of Jean Joseph Goux (Michel Foucault and Jean Joseph Goux, “Irigaray vs. The Utopia of the Neutral Sex,” in Engaging with Irigaray, ed. Carolyn Burke, Naomi Schor, and Margaret Whitford [New York: Columbia University Press, 1994], 189), notes that essentialism still remains at the heart of this period of feminism (Storkey, Origins of Difference: The Gender Debate Revisited [Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2001], 25–26).
7 See the treatment of Wollstonecraft in Gress, The End of Woman, chs. 1–2.
8 De Beauvoir was a long-time companion of the existentialist, Jean Paul Sartre. See Grabowski (Unraveling Gender, 65–66) for an account of the existentialist core of feminism of the 1960s and 1970s. Among other points he notes the impact of Sartre for essentialism along with its theological root: “For Sartre, ‘existence precedes essence’” (citing Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism, ed. John Kulka, trans. Carol Macomber [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007], vii). Contrary to philosophers like Aristotle, there is no human nature that a person actualizes and that is the basis of his or her flourishing. It is up to us to fashion our own identity and our own self-definition of what it means to be human. The ultimate basis of Sartre’s claim is theological: “There is no human nature, since there is no God to conceive it” (Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism, 15).
9 Candace West and Don H. Zimmerman, “Doing Gender,” Gender and Society 1 (1987): 126.
10 For the impact that the Pill and abortion have had in making the female body’s fertility something pathological to be rendered medically sterile through pharmacology (the Pill) and surgery (abortion), see Favale, Genesis of Gender, 85–114.
11 Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (New York: Morrow, 1970), 22; cited by Grawbowski, Unraveling Gender, 74–75; cf. also Coles, “New Feminism,” 56–57.
12 Susan Hekman, “Subject,” in The Bloomsbury Handbook of 21st-Century Feminist Theory, ed. Robin Truth Goodman (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), 23.
13 Carol Gilligan, “In a Different Voice: Women’s Conceptions of Self and of Morality,” in The Future of Difference, ed. Hester Eisenstein and Alice Jardine (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1985), 316.
14 See the summary by Nancy Chodorow, whose own project remains closer to the new essentialism’s similarity dogma. She considers gender difference to be the product of socialization and developmental attachment patterns (Nancy Julia Chodorow, “Gender, Relation, and Difference in Psychoanalytic Perspective,” in The Future of Difference, 3–19).
15 Alice Jardine, “Prelude: The Future of Difference,” in The Future of Difference, xxv–xxvi.
16 Storkey, Origins of Difference, 55.
17 Elaine Graham, Making the Difference: Gender, Personhood and Theology (London: Mowbray, 1995), 185.
18 Storkey, Origins of Difference, 57. According to Judith Lorber (“Shifting Paradigms and Challenging Categories,” Social Problems, 53.4 [2006]: 448), the postmodern turn introduces three new elements to our understanding of gender: (1) Making gender, not biological sex, central; (2) Treating gender and sexuality as social constructs; (3) Focusing upon one’s standpoint—that is, one’s identity (cited by Pluckrose and Lindsay, Cynical Theories, 138).
19 The notion of intersectionality, first introduced around 1985, now “reconceptualizes ‘difference’ as an ongoing interactional accomplishment” among all individuals of all genders, races, and classes (Candace West and Sarah Fenstermakeer, “Doing Difference,” in Doing Gender, Doing Difference: Inequality, Power, and Institutional Change, ed. Sarah Fenstermaker and Candace West [New York: Routledge, 2002], 56; cf. also Jardine, “Prelude,” xxv–xxvii). Because of individuals’ unique standing/narrative, difference is strictly a matter of individuals’ experience.
20 Gerl-Falkovitz, “Gender Difference,” 10. In Bodies That Matter, Butler argues that the materiality of the body (“sex”) is not a given “on which the construct of gender is artificially imposed,” but is itself the result of certain regulated practices “forcibly materialized through time.” The sexuality of the body is in reality the result of the heterosexual imperative imposed over time so that it only appears as a boundary we call matter. Bodies themselves are hermeneutically neutral (Butler, Bodies That Matter [New York: Routledge, 1993], xii, xix). Along with Butler, see also Elizabeth V. Spelman, Inessential Woman: Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Thought (Boston: Beacon, 1988).
21 See Gerl-Falkovitz’s discussion of the West’s cult of individualism driving the elimination of male and female categories of difference (“Gender Difference,” 8).
22 After chronicling the intellectual history of the “waves” of feminism, Favale concludes we are at a profound moment of “disembodiment” because of the limits that a sexed body places upon the expressive desires of the soul (Favale, Genesis of Gender, 83). The notice here of “waves” or stages of feminist thought should not be taken as monolithic movements where later “stages” replace earlier ones. Anti-essentialist and essentialist feminisms remain in tension with neither viewpoint winning the day (Storkey, Origins of Difference, 23). See also here, Mark S. McLeod-Harrison, “Christian Feminism, Gender, and Human Essences: Toward a Solution to the Sameness and Difference Dilemma,” Forum Philosophicum 19 (2014): 174–77.
23 Carl Trueman, “The Battle for the Body,” First Things, 21 September 2023, https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2023/09/the-battle-for-the-body.
24 Technically, the biblical anthropology of Genesis 2:7 has the soul (נֶפֶשׁ) as the result when the physical body (עָפָר) is united with the animating and quickening spirit (נִשְׁמַת חַיִּים). I use soul here for the immaterial dimension of human life according to the philosophical tradition.
25 As God’s image, humans are his representatives to the creation for its rule and blessing. Personal attributes like conscience, freedom, spirituality, and reason should be seen as capacities enabling our representation rather than elements defining the image. See Ryan Peterson, “The Image of God: Human Identity in the Cosmic Temple,” in Essays on Creation, Covenant, and Context in Honor of John H. Walton (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2020), 90.
26 Although the discoveries at Nag Hammadi showed ancient Gnosticism to be a more diverse ideology than typically reflected in its adversaries, a feature of the “common core” to all versions includes a dualism whereby “the essential core of the human being comes from the divine world of light and peace and must return to it, but is held captive in the material world, in which it has been entrapped” (Roelf van den Broeck, Gnostic Religion in Antiquity [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013], 2; cf. also Grabowski, Unraveling Gender, 111). Tertullian’s “caro salutis cardo” doctrine (the flesh is the hinge of salvation) was an elegant apologetic counter to gnostic Neo-platonic dualism of this kind. The incarnation, passion, and resurrection of Christ’s body makes flesh the very instrument of salvation (Grabowski, Unraveling Gender, 107–11).
27 Feminism’s similarity doctrine defines real human identity primarily or even solely in the invisible dimension of the mind (Grabowski, Unraveling Gender, 115; Coles, “New Feminism,” 59). According to Favale, “feminist theory is saturated with dualism” (Favale, Genesis of Gender, 111).
28 Favale, Genesis of Gender, 141; Grabowski, Unraveling Gender, 115.
29 In the theology of Thomas Aquinas, hylomorphism (from Gk. ὕλη, matter, and μορφή, form), means human beings are not soul alone or body alone, but a composite of both. Different versions of hylomorphism exist concerning the primacy of the soul in the union, but the end for all, according to Robert S. Smith, is “that embodiment is basic to human ontology” (“Body, Soul, and Gender: Thinking Theologically about Human Constitution,” Eikon 3.2 [2021]: 33). Augustine, Luther, and Calvin all believed sexuality/gender was fundamental to human life (Christopher Roberts, Creation and Covenant: The Significance of Sexual Difference in and for the Moral Theology of Marriage [New York: T&T Clark, 2007], 8).
30 Israel’s legal code, and ours too, makes this clear. Augustine’s thoughts on the essential embodiment of human nature are rather frank: “The whole human nature includes spirit, soul, and body; anyone who tries to alienate the body from human nature is out of his mind” (quisquis ergo a natura humana corpus alienare vult, desipit). De natura et origine animae 2.3.
31 Allison, “Theology of Human Embodiment,” 72.
32 Karl Lehmann, “The Place of Woman as a Problem in Theological Anthropology,” Communio 10.3 (1983): 234; cited by Michele M. Schumacher, “The Nature of Nature in Feminism, Old and New,” in Women in Christ, 40; cf. also Favale, Genesis of Gender, 40, 199, and the essays in Welker, ed., The Depth of the Human Person (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014). John Paul II’s concept of “original solitude” underscores the physical body’s role in revealing the Man’s personal rationality and relationality. Even before Eve’s differently embodied person was revealed, it was by the physical means of his body that Adam experienced his solitude in the dissimilarity of his body with the bodies of animals. He is a person through his body and learns his capacity for relationship and rationality from his body (John Paul II, Man and Woman He Created Them: A Theology of the Body [Boston: Pauline, 2006], 152–53). On the original solitude, see also the commentary by Beth Zagrobelny Lofgren, “The Ontological Priority of Being a Body,” Journal of Moral Theology 9.1 (2020): 159.
33 For a history of intellectual reflection upon the complementary nature of men and women, including the place of Aquinas’s hylomorphism, see Prudence Allen, The Concept of Woman: Volume III: The Search for Communion of Persons, 1500–2015 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2016), esp., 16–18, 362–88, 416–41, 462–67, and the concluding section, “The Chronic Vigor of the Integral Complementarity of Woman and Man,” 501–3.
34 This is where the human “image that is like” God stands over and above the animals. Animal bodies do not reveal male and female animal persons, but human bodies do show male and female human persons.
35 Katie McCoy, “What is a Woman? God’s Intent for Sex and Gender,” The Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, 6 June 2022, https://erlc.com/resource-library/articles/what-is-a-woman/; Gregg Allison, “What is a Man? Looking at a Historical, Contemporary, and Essential Answer,” The Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, 6 June 2022, https://erlc.com/research/what-is-a-man/.
36 Parallel to Eve’s name in the biblical text would also be the divinely located place of sin’s impact recorded in Genesis 3:16–19. She will experience sin’s chaos directly in her maternal vocation as he will in his paternal vocation (Claus Westermann, Genesis 1–11, CC [Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1984], 262).
37 See Stein’s Essays on Women, 2nd ed., trans. Freda Mary Oben (Washington, DC: ICS, 1996), 59–85.
38 Allen, Concept of Woman, 501. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese describes this unique female vocation as “a special affinity for connection” (Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, “Equality, Difference, and the Practical Problems of a New Feminism,” in Women in Christ, 307). Gress describes the maternal vocation under the metaphors of “birthing,” “nourishing,” and “holding” (Gress, End of Woman, 180–82).
39 See here, Christian Raab, “In Search of the Masculine Genius: The Contribution of Walter J. Ong,” Logos 21.1 (2018): 83–117, and Deborah Savage, “The Genius of Man,” in Promise and Challenge: Catholic Women Reflect on Feminism, Complementarity, and the Church, ed. Mary Rice Hasson (Huntington, IN: OSV, 2015), 129–53. For Jewish traditional reflection upon the different spirituality of male and females, see Yisrael Ben Reuven, Male and Female He Created Them: A Guide to Classical Torah Commentary on the Roles and Natures of Men and Women (Southfield, MI: Targum, 1995), 131–56. The claim for maternal and paternal vocations is not unlike Carol Gilligan’s claim for a different “voice” for women from men, except her research is a project of psychology and is not specifically linked to the male and female bodies. Both approaches have support in brain science. See Louann Brizendine’s, The Male Brain (New York: Three Rivers, 2010), The Female Brain (New York: Broadway, 2006), J. Richard Udry, “Biological Limits of Gender Construction,” American Sociological Review 65.3 (2000): 443–57, and recently, Katie McCoy, To Be a Woman: The Confusion Over Female Identity and How Christians Can Respond (Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 2023). There are male and female “patterns” hardwired into our brains from birth. Raab’s work, cited above, specifically engages Brizendine’s findings.
40 Sam A. Andreades, EnGendered: God’s Gift of Gender Difference in Relationship (Grand Rapids: Kregel, 2015), 51; cf. also Karl Barth: “It is always in relationship to their opposite that man and woman are what they are in themselves…. Relationship to woman … makes the man a man, and her relationship to man … makes the woman a woman” (Church Dogmatics, ed. G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance [Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1965–1975], III/4:163), and Miroslav Volf: “Men’s identity is not and cannot be only men’s affair, just as women’s identity is not and cannot be only women’s affair. Gender identities are essentially related and therefore the specific wholeness of each can be achieved only through the relation to the other, a relation that neither neutralizes nor synthesizes the two, but negotiates the identity of each by readjusting it to the identity of the other” (“The Trinity and Gender Identity,” in The Gospel and Gender: A Trinitarian Engagement with Being Male and Female in Christ, ed. Douglas A. Campbell [London: T&T Clark, 2003], 173).
41 See D. J. A. Clines’ account of the androcentrism of Genesis 1–3 in the first chapter (“What Does Eve Do to Help? And Other Irredeemably Androcentric Orientations in Genesis 1–3”) of What Does Eve Do to Help? And Other Readerly Questions to The Old Testament, JSOT Supp Ser 94 (Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Academic Press, 1990): 25–48. Other concise accounts of this orientation include Alastair Roberts, “Man and Woman in Creation (Genesis 1 and 2),” 9Marks, 10 December 2019, https://www.9marks.org/article/man-and-woman-in-creation-genesis-1-and-2/, and Sharon James, God’s Design for Women, 83–105.
42 “Patricentrism” is preferred to “patriarchy” in the OT, because, as Daniel Block notes, “the Old Testament pays relatively little attention to the power of husband and father,” but rather focuses on the responsibility to serve the interests of those who are led. The head of the family is to inspire confidence, security, and trust, and not to serve a self-interested privilege and power (Daniel I. Block, “Marriage and Family in Ancient Israel,” in Marriage and Family in the Biblical World, ed. Ken M. Campbell [Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2003], 41–44).
43 Even within the mutual submission Christians owe one another (Eph 5:21) or the different meanings proposed for “head” (κεφαλή, source/origin, chief/preeminent), a husband is never called to order himself under his wife the way she is exhorted to do so to him. Neither is she, also, ever called his “head.”
44 Within the many leadership functions women hold in Scripture, including prophets (Acts 21:9), deacons and teachers (1 Tim 3:11, Titus 2:14), and fellow ministers and co-laborers with the apostles (Rom 16:1, 3, 7), only men are ever associated in the NT with the pastor/elder/bishop function of ultimate church leadership.
45 The visible distinction of male and female differences is contextually realized in Israel’s Torah with the proscription against wearing the other gender’s clothing (Deut 22:5) and in the NT where wives’ order toward their husband is to be visible in the church’s gatherings (1 Cor 11:1–16). See Graham Beynon and Jane Tooher, Embracing Complementarianism: Turning Biblical Convictions into a Positive Church Culture (Charlotte, NC: The Good Book, 2022), 77–78.
46 A concise expression of egalitarianism, and by extension complementarianism, is offered in terms of sexual difference by the editors of Discovering Biblical Equality: “The sexual differences that exist between men and women do not justify granting men unique and perpetual prerogatives of leadership and authority that are not shared by women. Biblical equality denies that there is any created or otherwise God-ordained hierarchy based solely on sexual difference” (Ronald W. Pierce, Cynthia Westfall Long, and Christa McKirland, eds., Discovering Biblical Equality, 3rd ed. [Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2021], 2, emphasis theirs). Peter Jones has made a compelling case for androgyny as the “pagan” ideal ascendant in the culture (Peter Jones, “Androgyny: The Pagan Sexual Ideal,” JETS 43.3 [2000]: 443–69). Other recent approaches call for the church to move beyond sexual difference/dimorphism as the best means of eliminating misogyny or as care for intersex individuals. A sampling includes Adrian Thatcher’s Redeeming Gender (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); Susannah Cornwall, ed., Intersex, Theology, and the Bible: Troubling Bodies in Church, Text, and Society (New York: Macmillan, 2015); Gerard Loughlin, “Gender Ideology: For a ‘Third Sex’ Without Reserve,” Studies in Christian Ethics, 31.4 (2018): 471–82; Megan DeFranza, Sex Differences in Christian Theology: Male, Female and Intersex in the Image of God (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2015); and James K. Beilby and Paul Rhodes Eddy, eds., Understanding Transgender Identities: Four Views (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2019), 164–97. Some, like McLeod-Harrison, propose “eternal androgyny,” where gender differences remain as part of the created order but disappear in the eternal one (McLeod-Harrison, “Christian Feminism, Gender, and Human Essence,” 190).
47 The new essays in the third edition of Discovering Biblical Equality that address essentialism both register a concern with traditional, culturally contextualized roles (Christa McKirland, “The Image of God and Divine Presence: A Critique of Gender Essentialism,” in Discovering Biblical Equality, 287). Elizabeth Hall’s essay exposes complementarian essentialist fallacies but also rejects any essentialism based in the asymmetries of Scripture’s prescribed gender behavior advocated by Andreades (and others cited above in part 2, cf. n. 40) because it reinforces “stereotypical gender characteristics” (Hall, “Gender Differences and Biblical Interpretation: A View from the Social Sciences,” Discovering Biblical Equality, 469 n. 50).
48 Grabowski, Unraveling Gender, 155–56, and Fox-Genovese, “Equality, Difference, and the Practical Problems of a New Feminism,” 309.
49 The Bible has two places that might contribute this way, however. Manhood is described by the assumption of risk, or having courage (1 Cor 16:13, ἀνδρίζομαι), and faithful vigilance and steadfastness to see and discharge all of the king’s duties (1 Kings 2:2). Biblical descriptions of God’s fatherhood and, metaphorically, his mothering also add dimensions to human masculine and feminine natures. J. I. Packer’s classic, Knowing God, summarizes the meaning of God’s fatherhood (in John’s Gospel) with the concepts of authority, affection, fellowship, and honor (Knowing God [Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2011], 295–96). Mothering metaphors for God, Christ, and the Spirit include a mother carrying her unborn child, birthing her child, nursing her child, and nurturing her weaned child (Ronald W. Pierce and Erin M. Heim, “Biblical Images of God as Mother and Spiritual Formation,” in Discovering Biblical Equality, 379–91).
50 Sharon James, et al., “Biblical Truth and Biblical Equality: A Review Article on Two Recent Books by IVP,” EvQ 78.1 (2006): 80.
51 Pierce, Long, and McKirland, eds., Discovering Biblical Equality, 9.
52 Storkey concludes her work with four paradigms for gender difference: 1) There is difference—Eve is not the same as Adam; 2) There is sameness—men and women are both human and therefore share more in common than they are in difference; 3) There is complementarity—men and women “fit” each other in correlation and reciprocity; and 4) There is union—women and men together are the image of God (Storkey, Origins of Difference, 129–30).
53 Editors of DBE (third edition) admit that their authors are “less likely to define what ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ qualities are” (Pierce, Long, and McKirland, eds., Discovering Biblical Equality, 4).
54 Favale says that dualism has been a huge feature of feminism from the beginning (Favale, Genesis of Gender, 111). When difference is visibly located in the body, similarity is most easily pursued at the level of the soul.
55 McKirland, “The Image of God and Divine Presence,” 291–92, 305, and Mary Conway, “Gender in Creation and Fall,” Discovering Biblical Equality, 38–42. McKirland states: “the Scriptures do not make maleness and femaleness central to being human, nor can particular understandings of masculinity and femininity be rigidly prescribed, since these are culturally conditioned. Scripture makes Jesus Christ central to what it means to be human, and becoming more like Christ, through the empowerment of the Spirit, is the intended telos of all human persons” (p. 287). Her thesis concludes for gender difference: “the Scriptures have little to say on what it means to be a man or what it means to be a woman” (p. 305). After a helpful survey of sociological meta-analyses regarding psychological traits, Hall’s essay concludes by describing her own view that “sees current gender differences largely as a result of the fall” (Hall, “Gender Differences and Biblical Interpretation,” 470).
56 Francis Schaeffer prophetically warned in 1968 that the culture’s sanctioning of homosexuality would lead to the “obliteration of the distinction between man and woman” (Francis A. Schaeffer, The God Who Is There [Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1968], 39). In another new essay in DBE (third edition), Ronald Pierce takes up the challenge of egalitarianism being the slippery slope to endorsing a homosexual agenda (“Biblical Equality and Same-Sex Marriage,” Discovering Biblical Equality, 489–509). Pierce’s argument is made on a hermeneutical level, but Schaeffer’s warning is philosophical: level the difference, lose the binary.
57 Nancy K. Miller, “Toward New Criteria of Relevance,” cited by Jardin, “Prelude,” xxv.
58 Worse would be the recent return of a “proud patriarchalism,” advocated by some. See https://youtu.be/mXUiM0OE324?si=dkVSEMXUt-MZuX4i. Egalitarian “sameness equality” is well-represented by Rebecca Groothuis’s essay (“‘Equal in Being, Unequal in Role’: Challenging the Logic of Women’s Subordination,” Discovering Biblical Equality, 393–428). Equality without sameness is a logical impossibility and also entails inferiority, in her view. Differentiated equality, however, appears as a biblical option in the relationships of the Trinity, men and women, racial differences, and gifts of the Spirit in the Church. For an account of the origins of Western notions of equality and their anachronism for reading Scripture, see John H. Elliot, “Jesus Was Not an Egalitarian: A Critique of an Anachronistic and Idealist Theory,” BTB 32 (2002): 75–91.
59 Embracing Complementarianism, 13–17, 35. See also Lee-Barnewall (Neither Complementarian nor Egalitarian), Rachel Green Miller (Beyond Authority and Submission: Women and Men in Marriage, Church and Society [Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 2019]), and Rebecca McLaughlin (The Secular Creed: Engaging Five Contemporary Claims [Austin: The Gospel Coalition, 2021], 63–82). The irony of individualism appearing in this list for complementarians is that individualism is usually laid at the door of feminists according to Fox-Genovese: “The premises of individualism, with their emphasis upon autonomy, independence, and self-determination, have made it virtually impossible to imagine an equality grounded in difference, with the result that feminists who seek equality for women have almost invariably been led to deny or abstract from sexual difference” (Fox-Genovese, “Equality, Difference, and the Practical Problems of a New Feminism,” 302–3; also Gerl-Falkovitz, “Gender Difference,” 8).
60 Andrew Wilson, “Beautiful Difference: The (Whole-Bible) Complementarity of Male and Female,” The Gospel Coalition, 20 May 2021, https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/beautiful-complementarity-male-female. Wilson also notes how the “church-corporation” makes saying women cannot be elders sound like they cannot be CEOs, when in fact it is really saying women cannot be spiritual fathers (and men cannot be spiritual mothers)!
61 Practically speaking, would our thoughts and praise for a church’s ministry be as gender-diverse as Paul’s is for the Roman church (Rom 16)?
62 Beynon and Tooher, Embracing Complementarianism, 46–48; Andreades, EnGendered, 49.
63 Historically, the diaconate, which is probably best seen as open to women in 1 Timothy 3:11 (e.g., John McKinley, “The Ministry of Women and the Meaning of Deacons in the Church,” Doon Theological Journal 12 [2015]: 186–90), provided a forum for the “voice” of spiritually qualified women to be heard.
64 Fox-Genovese, “Equality, Difference, and the Practical Problems of a New Feminism,” 309.
65 For-Genovese, “Equality, Difference, and the Practical Problems of a New Feminism,” 309.
66 According to Alister McGrath, “the discipline of doctrinal criticism seeks to evaluate the reliability and adequacy of the doctrinal formulations of the Christian tradition, by identifying what they purport to represent, clarifying the pressures and influences which lead to their genesis, and suggesting criteria—historical and theological—by which they may be evaluated, and, if necessary, restated” (The Genesis of Doctrine [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997], vii).
67 The “Barbie” movie (2023) provides a recent case in point. The final resolution after patriarchy-smashing is an egalitarian separation of the sexes by the mantra “be your best self,” but one utterly devoid of relationship, collaboration, union between them. For other sources tracking the increasing competition or “gender divide” between the sexes: Brett McCracken, “How Local Churches Can Bridge a Widening Gender Divide,” The Gospel Coalition, 14 February 2024, https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/local-churches-gender-divide, and the report of an EU-wide study that finds increasing numbers of men under thirty view themselves in competition with women (“Men Under 30 Are Less Accepting of Women’s Rights,” The Telegraph, 2 October 2022, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/10/02/men-30-less-accepting-womens-rights).

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