Mutuality | Blog + Magazine | Spring 2014
The print + digital magazine of CBE International
Mutuality offers articles from diverse writers who share egalitarian theology and explore its intersection with everyday life.
Blog + Magazine ArticlesThe opinions expressed in these articles are those of the authors. They do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of CBE International or its members.
Spring 2014
Volume: 21 | Number: 1
Masculinity
In this issue, our goal is to reframe the discussion of biblical masculinity around Jesus, the Bible, and real life, and to do so without the lens of patriarchy.
Contents
When asked what we, as regular people, can do to prevent sex trafficking, a Minneapolis police officer who works with both victims and perpetrators on a daily basis had only one response: “We need to reinvent what it means to be a man in our society.”
If violence, abuse, and discrimination against women are the fruits of patriarchy, its seed is the distortion of God’s image in each of us. Patriarchy paints caricatures of feminine and masculine identity, and when these messages fall on fertile soil—a culture that will embrace these images—they grow into the next generation of [...]
Ask one hundred people “What does it mean to be masculine?” and you will likely get a hundred different answers, along with a fair amount of blank stares and blinking eyes. When I posed the question, rather unscientifically, to a few people hanging around our campus’s social science building, I got a variety of [...]
I’ve always wanted to get it right the first time. I don’t like to make mistakes. I don’t like to learn from experience; I’d rather learn from books. So when I was getting ready to propose to the girl who would become my wife, I read everything I could about how [...]
In a world in which real men didn’t cry, Jesus wept. In a world in which masculine men didn’t characterize themselves as women, Jesus compared himself to a hen, and his Father to a woman who lost a coin. In a weapon-wielding world, Jesus told Peter his sword was out of place.
“Who do people say the Son of Man is?”
Jesus asked this question of the disciples (Matt. 16:13–19) after warning his followers about the false teachings of the Pharisees and Sadducees, who had been hounding Jesus for a sign from heaven to validate his identity as Messiah. This was done to test or disprove Jesus. Asking [...]
Worldly stereotypes about men abound. Movie-goers watch jet-setting spies spring back to life after leaping out of airplanes. Professional athletes are valued for their physical prowess. Romance readers lust after rugged cowboys. Gamers pretend they are militaristic superheroes. And Wall Street applauds twenty-something billionaires.
God led Moses, Isaiah, Matthew, and Luke to describe God as a woman. When we read verses with feminine imagery, we should start by thinking of, well, a woman.
My world changed in 2008 when I listened to a Namibian woman speak about her experience of being raped three times as a teenager. I was aware that violence against women was an important issue, but it had not affected my heart. I felt God challenging me about what kind of world we had created—a [...]
Those who believe that gender is the most important aspect of personhood are called "gender essentialists." For them, maleness or femaleness is an attribute that shapes the fundamental meaning and purpose of life, a view that, sadly, drives gender hierarchy in the world and also in the church. Significantly, gender essentialism is not a biblical [...]
