The Image of God and Gender

From the beginning

In the first two chapters of this book, we have seen that the image of God refers to humanity’s dominion over the world as God’s stewards, and that it is the basis for the unique dignity of human beings, for equality, and for human rights. In this article, we will look more closely at the issue of gender.

Gender is specifically mentioned in the first passage in Scripture dealing with the image of God: … God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. (Gen. 1:28 ESV)

Notice that the text very pointedly identifies the image of God with both male and female. Men and women are thus equally image bearers of God, and this means that they are intrinsically equal in worth, in their rights, and in their call to exercise dominion in God’s name over the earth.

It is impossible to overstate how revolutionary this idea was in the ancient world. We sometimes hear the argument that paganism is far better for women than monotheism, because in paganism there are goddesses along with gods, thus providing women with a claim to status and even authority in society. This argument is great in theory. In practice, it’s total nonsense.

Women under paganism

In the real world, paganism almost inevitably placed rigid restrictions on women’s roles. Essentially, they were only permitted to do things that the goddesses did. And generally speaking, this meant that they were responsible for the domestic sphere and often little else.

In Greece, for example, “free” women did not leave the home even to go shopping—that was handled by the men or by slaves. In places like Ephesus or Corinth that were dominated by temples to goddesses, the priestesses had more public roles, but they also doubled as prostitutes. And in general, only a very small number of wealthy women, priestesses, and prostitutes had any roles or responsibilities in public life.

Further, women were considered intrinsically inferior to men in almost all ancient cultures. Aristotle, for example, considered women to be essentially the result of birth defects—they were “misbegotten men,” incomplete and inferior physically, morally, and intellectually.

Women also were not valued as highly as men, an attitude that persists in many parts of the world today. In Rome, wives came in a distant third for their husbands, behind parents and sons. As for children, Romans typically kept all healthy boys and their first daughter; the rest were discarded and left to die.

And these problems were not limited to the Greco-Roman world. All major civilizations in the ancient world and the vast majority of minor cultures held women as distinctly inferior to men, with far fewer rights, privileges, or opportunities.

Judaism

Things were quite a bit different in Judaism, largely due to Genesis 1:28. Women were seen as being equal to but different from men because of their common creation in the image of God.

Spiritually, women were seen as setting the tone for the entire family, so much so that it was believed that a pious man who married an evil woman would become evil, and an evil man who married a pious woman would become pious. Women were seen as more intuitive than men, and some scholars argued that the wives of the patriarchs were superior to their husbands as prophets.

Women were also highly respected. In the Ten Commandments, we are told to “Honor your father and your mother” in Ex. 20:12, but to “Honor your mother and your father” in Lev. 19:3. The fact that father comes first in one case, but mother in the other, was taken to mean that we are to honor both parents equally.

Although women’s primary role was as the mother and keeper of the household, they were not limited to the domestic sphere. Women had the right to own, buy and sell property and to engage in business, following the example of Proverbs 31. They also had more rights with respect to marriage than in most other cultures, and under no circumstances could they be beaten or abused by their husbands.

To be sure, the Talmud says some negative things about women, with some rabbis describing them as being lazy, gluttonous, gossips, and prone to witchcraft; of course, they also describe men as being prone to lust and sexual sin. Overall, though, there can be no serious question that Jewish women were far more highly regarded and far better off than their pagan neighbors, stereotypes to the contrary notwithstanding.

Christianity

Christianity carried on this tradition of honoring women. Women played important supporting roles in Jesus’ ministry and were the first witnesses of the Resurrection. Spiritually, the distinction between men and women is erased in Christ (Gal. 3:28). Women converted to Christianity in large numbers, in part because of the respect and freedom it gave them. Some of these women even became leaders in the early church, sponsoring churches in their homes (e.g. Col. 4:15) and serving as deacons[1] and prophets (e.g. Acts 21:9).

Women continued to play important roles in the church into the middle ages and beyond, including powerful and influential abbesses who ran women’s convents and sometimes double monasteries (that is, two monasteries close together, one for men and one for women), founders of religious orders such as St. Claire, mystics and visionaries such as Hildegard von Bingen and Theresa of Avila, and in the modern world highly respected religious leaders such as Mother Theresa.

Christian ethical standards also raised the status of women. Husbands were commanded to love and take care of their wives as Christ loved and took care of the church (Eph. 5:25), an unheard of idea in the Greco-Roman world. The impact of Christianity on family life is important enough to deserve its own study, so we will return to that topic in the next chapter. For now, suffice it to say that here again, Christianity markedly improved the marital conditions for women compared to the pagan world.

Christians also joined the Jews in rejecting abortion and infanticide, but went further in rescuing abandoned babies—mostly girls—and raising them in their own households.

At the same time, it must be said that the Church has not always been true to its foundations in its treatment of women. A great deal of the problem here comes from the influence of Greek misogyny on early Christian writers, who imported negative ideas about women from Aristotle, Neo-Platonists, and other pagan sources. It certainly does not originate from the Biblical concept of men’s and women’s shared creation in the image of God, nor from Jewish theory or practice.

Despite stereotypes to the contrary, Judaism and Christianity have had a more positive impact on women than any other movement in history. The image of God in both male and female was the foundation for women’s rights and the ultimate source for modern ideas of gender equality. Scripture affirms that though men and women are different, they are equally valuable before God, equally worthy of honor and respect, and spiritually and morally equal in Christ.

Sex and Gender

Returning to Genesis 1, we are told that humanity was created in two sexes, male and female. This leaves no room for our modern, frequently blurred distinction between sex and gender.

This distinction began with the observation that different cultures assign different duties to the sexes. The term “gender” was then borrowed from linguistics to describe this intersection of sex with culture. However, feminist theorists the began to argue that gender was peformative and that man and woman were gender terms. This meant that anyone who performed male roles was a man, and anyone who performed female roles was female. Sex, which was defined biologically, thus had nothing to do with gender. This then allowed people to self-define as men or women regardless of their biology and opened the door to a plethora of other genders, often defined in terms of sexual preferences.

More recently, gender and sex have become conflated, for example in the phrase “sex assigned at birth.” This means that biology no longer determines sex; it is something arbitrary and unknowable by external, objective standards.

This amounts to a kind of Gnosticism: it argues that the real truth about people’s identity is determined by who they are on the inside, in their own intuitive sense of who they are. It is non-objective and non-observable and only known to the person and those to whom the person reveals it. The argument sometimes goes so far as to suggest that sex/gender is immutable and that babies know they are trans in the womb so that labeling them male or female at birth is arbitrary and oppressive.

Yet Genesis tells us that our bodies are an essential part of who we are. Genesis 2:7 says that God made the man out of the ground (his body) and breathed into him the breath of life and the man became a living soul. As souls, we are a combination of body and the breath of life. Separating our bodies from our identities violates Scripture’s teaching about what it means to be human. Suggesting that that a person can be born in the wrong body implies that God makes mistakes.

Further, the distinction between the sexes is part of the image of God (Genesis 1:27) and is essential for us to perform our responsibilities as God’s stewards, which includes reproducing and multiplying.

Put simply, Scripture does not give us license to define ourselves contrary to the identity God has given us, an identity that is connected with our body.

Questions

1. Read Proverbs 31. What does this passage tell you about Israelite ideals of the role of women in the family and society?
2. Where do you see women’s rights and status under attack in the world today? In what ways do you see practices similar to those of the ancient world? What should be our response to these attacks?
3. Think about the views of women that are common in our culture today. In what ways do they correspond with the teachings of the Bible? In what ways do they depart from the Bible?
4. Why do you think it is important to understand the role of Judaism and Christianity in the development of women’s rights throughout history?
5. Using what you now know, how would you respond to someone who claims that Christianity is oppressive to women
6. How do you reconcile the Bible’s affirmation of differences between the genders with the Bible’s insistence that men and women are equal image bearers of God? How does this play out in families, churches and society as a whole?
7. How would you respond to the arguments that gender and sex have nothing to do with our bodies but are based purely on a person’s subjective sense of who they are?

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^[1] In addition to Phoebe (Rom. 16:1), the Roman writer Pliny the Younger wrote a letter to the Emperor Trajan asking him how to handle Christians and noting that he had arrested two female slaves who were deaconesses. (https://www.earlychristianwritings.com/text/pliny.html)