Creation, Christ and Gender

A few weeks ago, a friend asked in the comment thread if I could elaborate on this brief post about why I found John Piper's talk from the True Woman conference so helpful.

I took a while to get around to it, but have finally managed to sit down and pull my thoughts together!

When I first started (re)thinking what the Bible says about gender differences and roles, I remember being struck by the way that the key NT texts (eg. Eph 5, 1 Cor 11, 1 Tim 2) in each case tie the instructions they give about how we are to live as men and women to Genesis 1-2 and the way God made us - in his image, male and female, for one-flesh union in marriage, the man first and the woman as his helper, and so on. I still think this is really important - the NT verses about men and women are not just arbitrary rules or reactions to unique first-century circumstances, but are grounded in the way that God has made us.

But the John Piper talk helped me see how important it is that there is something even more fundamental than Creation - deeper magic from before the dawn of time!!! Before there was creation there was God's eternal plans and purposes to sum up everything in Christ, and to glorify Christ as the redeemer and husband of his people. It wasn't that God made us male and female, then decided some time later that marriage would be a good way to order our sexuality, then some time later thought that marriage might be a good metaphor for Christ and the church. No - according to Eph 5:32, "Christ and the church" is (ultimately, eternally) what marriage is for and about.

This doesn't mean that creation, marriage, sex and so on are not real or not important, in and of themselves. They are not "just" symbols and signs of something else. But they are part of a universe in which everything is created "by him [Christ] and for him".

So it's not enough just to get the "creation" foundations of my understanding of what it means for me to be a woman. I also need to keep a "Christ" focus in understanding what the purpose of my womanhood is. That means that my practice of marriage, family, etc is not just about looking backward to the way God made us in creation but looking forward (and further back!) to what God's Christ-centred purposes are for everything that he has made.

That's why (I think!) it's not enough for me to keep thinking about "motherhood" without thinking about "missional motherhood" - not mission as an alternative to motherhood or motherhood as an escape from mission, but motherhood (and womanhood more generally) as something that was created for the glory of God in Christ and to serve God's mission in the world.

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