Rethinking Masculinity: From Cultural Stereotypes to Christ-Centered Discipleship ⚓

00:00:01
Speaker 1: The world is becoming increasingly proficient at telling stories that deny God. As such, we need Thinking Christian to become as natural as breathing. Welcome to the Thinking Christian podcast. I'm doctor James Spencer, and through calm, thoughtful theological discussions, Thinking Christian highlights the ways God is working in the world and questions the underlying social, cultural, and political assumptions that hinder Christians from becoming more like Christ. Now onto today's episode of Thinking Christian. Hey, everyone, welcome to this episode of Thinking Christian. I'm doctor James Spencer and I'm joined today by doctor Ashish Pharma, and we're going to be talking a little bit about how to I with maps, but specifically we're going to be talking about the methodological problem at the heart of a lot of the Biblical manhood conversation. And so this is this is going to be the first in a series discussing Biblical manhood and how we should be thinking about it a little bit differently. And today we thought it'd be smart to start with just a methodological conversation to kind of set the stage for everything that's coming next. And so thanks for being here. Looks any initial thoughts on this before we before we jump in.

00:01:14
Speaker 2: I always love methodological conversations. So you might need that fishing reel to reel me back in, and.

00:01:20
Speaker 1: That's totally good. Well, we talked a little bit about, you know, starting this out in terms of maps. There's a book it's actually titled How to Lie with Maps, And one of the things that the author notes there is that in every map, we as the people who are reading the map, allow for a certain degree of what he would call lying in a map. And so these are representations that are made by a cartographer that are basically necessary in order for the map to be functional. So you can imagine the map can't be an exact replica of the terrain and still have it be functional for us. It can't show all the detail. It has to be a summary and abbreviation. And so what he argues is that because we trust the cryptographers to abbreviate in an appropriate manner, then that opens it up to the cartographers potentially being able to lie to us in ways that we're not going to notice. And so that's the gist of sort of or an introduction to how he thinks about this mapping issue. And so the methodological problem probably is something around what Alvis Huxley talks about, which I kind of love his quote. He talks about abbreviation being a necessary evil and the abbreviator's job being to simplify but not to the point of falsification. And so the reality is that we're all abbreviating something. There's always something that's left out of our conversation. In other words, there's always more to say. But as we look at these maps, there's probably something that's happening here that is closing off additional conversation, bringing sort of an end to a dialogue, when in fact that dialogue should be kept open.

00:03:22
Speaker 2: Yeah. So from where I say, there's sort of two issues at play with the line. Yeah right, there's the one that's the necessary evil, the necessary evil of abbreviations, as you just put it, where when you think about a map, a map can only do so much, and so a given map is only going to do so much, right, like we think about maybe the most obvious example is that we live on a sphere, but most of our maps are not globes, right, and so you end up having Alaska, Northern Canada, Greenland, Northern Russia. Look disproportionately huge. Yeah, And that's just a function of what happens when you're taking lines of latitude and longitude and having to recast them on a flat on a flat, two dimensional surface rather than a sphere. And so the in the ideal situation, we understand that there is that problem. We don't overweigh the eye test of oh, Greenland's way bigger than whatever. Right, it is big, right, but it's not as disproportionally big as it looks there. And you know, that's where we can say maps are livable.

00:04:43
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know.

00:04:43
Speaker 2: Related to that is the fact that if you have to consider what a map is for if you're looking for a roadmap, let's say we exist in a time where there's no Google Maps and GPS's and you're actually looking at a map. You don't want necessarily a topographical map. You don't want the mountains and the scale of the mountains. Which you want is the roads, right, and so the road outlysts is going to give you that. And again that's it. That's sort of a necessary reality of abbreviation. But I think there's a second issue as well, and that second issue is when we're not aware that there are those problems, and we begin to treat the map as if it is basic reality. Since we're talking methodologically, you know, one of the methodological ways of discussing this is first order, second order, and we don't need to get too caught up in that language other than to say that our language is inherently second order. Right, we we engage the world and descriptive ways that are meant to go on in the way that they've gone before. Right. We receive from our parents and from our societies, from our friends, our schools, the ways that we talk, and we carry those forward in relatively relatively confident ways. But the trouble comes in when we fail to recognize that that is a second order description. It's not the same thing as reality itself. It's already an organized way that's been given to us that we treat as normal. And that's where I think the methodological problem is most serious. That I think we have a tendency to hear pastors say certain things, well intentioned parents say things, well intentioned teachers, politicians perhaps, and we may not have that filter of being able to say, well, maybe they're not aware of the complexity of a conversation, or maybe they're not aware that they're already taking an interpretive room, and we don't necessarily want to always jump in and say they're deliberately trying to deceive us. So that sometimes happens, right, But when we have that sort of understandably naive position, the map becomes that second order reality becomes the default as if it is primary reality. And I think that in the conversation we're wanting to get into, this is especially significant of an issue.

00:07:27
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's almost like reading a map but ignoring the legend. You know, if you were to sit back and say, you know, okay, yeah, Greenland is disproportionately large, is it? I don't really have a good sense of how big Greenland is. I know what it looks like on a map. It looks huge, right, and so, but I also know that the map is distorting that. So when I'm looking at the map, I'm not saying they've got all the relative sizes correct, right. What I'm looking at is they have the relative positions correct. This is about where Greenland is. It's not about size, it's about position. And so you do tend to sort of start to recognize and understand what's really happening.

00:08:10
Speaker 2: Here.

00:08:11
Speaker 1: And I think that as we as we think through all this in a methodological perspective, and you sit back and you say, well, what what would be the guiding idea, what would be the first order principles of you know, mapping out of biblical manhood. I think what we have to understand is we can't really start with where the culture believes that masculinity starts, how it represents masculinity to us. It's not that that's trivial. I think as we get into this series and we talk about the different you know, biblical texts where maybe Paul is addressing men in particular roles for instance, husband or father, it's not at all that the culture's perception of what it means to be a good husband or father, or even what it means to be masculine are irrelevant. It also, though, we have to realize that as those are second order and they're coming in, there has to be something first order underneath that. And I would argue that what that first order really is it's discipleship. And I think we probably have to get into a little bit of what discipleship is. But just for my shorthand, I would go to Matthew twenty eight eighteen through twenty and essentially say that discipleship is learning to live under the authority of Christ. And so the concern that I have with this current conversation around biblical manhood biblical masculinity is that we've created a separate authority, or we've accepted a second a separate authority than Christ when we're thinking about manhood, and that second authority is the cultural perceptions of masculinity. And if we look at that passage Matthew twenty eight eighteen through twent what we really are going to see is that it starts with Christ being given all authority. Then it goes into the logical consequence of that authority, which is, go and make disciples of all nations. Right, So what is making disciples mean? What it means bringing other people under the authority of Christ. It means helping them to recognize that Christ is an authority, committing to that through baptism, and then ultimately helping them understand what it looks like to observe all that Christ commanded. So all discipleship really, at least in that passage, stems from this idea of Jesus's the authority. And now we are learning to live in light of that authority. We're responding to that authority and not to some other authority. Even the language of baptized in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, right, learning to observe all Christ commanded. We have these qualifiers that sort of narrow down and make very specific what it looks like to be a disciple. We're not you know, we're not baptized into any other name, and we're not to observe any other authority. Right that these things are exclusionary in a lot of ways. And so if we and I'm not sure whether that's what you mean by first order, but that's where my mind goes, right, So feel free to clarify that. But to me, that's where we start. We start with the reality of God his position as authority over us, and now what it means to become a man has to remain coupled to that in a way that makes obedience to Christ a necessity.

00:11:44
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's not exactly what I meant by first order, right, But I don't know that what I meant by first order is really the point. I think what you're offering now is the compliment to if we're not going to treat a second order reality, you know, a map, a category as if it is the thing in in itself. Then we need to be able to get even if we don't necessarily know that, we can say once and for all time, this is what the thing is in and of itself. We need to get at what it ought to be. Right, And I think what you're getting at is a theological anthropology. Since we're into big words this episode, what does it mean to be a person, and specifically in a theological way in light of thinking of ourselves as people who are who we are because we are the created beings of a triune God. That's what we mean by the theological anthropology. And I think that basic reality before we get into content, and this is where we get in trouble. I think we jump into the content is that there's some notion of being like Christ. But that notion of being like Christ without being Christ, what I gather you're doing with discipleship has remarkably little actual material form commended to us in scripture. Yeah, and I think that the church, and again that's where I think it's a complement of the first order, right, because I want to pause there and just think a moment about why this is significant to distinguish the two. Yeah, we have our categories, and our categories entail things like a mammal is a certain kind of a vertebrate creature that gives lie birth and feeds its youth via milk right from the mother. And we have this other category such as fish, and a fish is also vertebrate creature, but reproduces via eggs. It doesn't feed the youth of its of its kind via milk from the mother. But these fish all live in the water, and so we tend to think of all these creatures in the water as fish. And then we have this strange creature like a manatee or a dolphin or a whale, who are entirely sea bound creatures, but they're mammals. And from a practical standpoint, the reason that we make these distinctions is because we're trying to lay out a careful understanding. Right, Maybe not us particularly, but scientists wanted to lay out a careful understanding of what type of creatures these are. That's a second order description, that's a category, it's a bucket. And the first order reality is that neither the piranha on one side, right in the fish category, nor the whale or the manatee on the mammal c category cares one lick about the category. It doesn't mean the category is unimportant for us, right, but it doesn't actually affect the daily life of the whale, because that category is already attuned to do something for us. It's a naming activity relative to us. But the life of the whale is the life of the whale, and the whale has to be worried more so about where do I find the food that I need for the day?

00:15:24
Speaker 1: Right right.

00:15:26
Speaker 2: Now? That same sort of I think reality comes unto us where we're not wanting to say maps are evil. They're doing something. But I think again, too often we view those maps as if they are reality, in the same ways we might view the relatively insignificant fact that we think of whales as mammals as reality. Well, it's not reality, it's it's our bucket. Biblical manhood similarly has to be concerned about particular conversations. So, for whatever reasons, the conversation is a risen. It was a desire to give a map to people as to this is what you should live like Now, the question is is that a helpful map in a certain time and a certain place. Perhaps I'm not sure, but perhaps, But is that in and of itself the definition of that fancy word again theological anthropology? Is this what God has said? This is what humanity ought to be? And there's sort of the crux of the question. And you and I want to move forward, saying the goal here is less to be concerned about the map, other than to identify the gap between the map and the people. Right and now be able to articulate if we are considering discipleship, that material form of discipleship is far less certain. We get discipleship, but what does it look like? Here? One other quick parallel, like we might say, who's the true America? Is the true American? The one who grows up in the so called heartland, as some like to say, is the true American. The one who grows up in the heavily packed urban center is the true American. Someone who's a suburbanite is the true American? A New Englander or a Southerner, or a Midwesterner, or a West Coaster or a mountain person. It's a silly question at a certain point, right, Like all of these people can be in our Americans, so to expect people to be the same in all these environments is utterly silly. Right. We build our houses different in each place, We grow different crops in each place depending on the climate. The way that our muscle structures work if we're in the mountains versus on the flatlands are different. Yeah, and that's sort of the question that I think you and I are trying to get at by offering a critique, but not a denigration of the map, right.

00:18:03
Speaker 1: Yeah, Yeah, It's interesting. When I went back through and read some of the authors that will be interacting with, there were some common threads, Right, what are to your point, the map might be good for a certain moment or trying to react or respond to a certain moment. And so a lot of what I what I was reading it involves this, I don't know whether i'll call it, let's just say it's a supposed crisis amongst men, especially young men. How do you take responsibility? You know, how do you own some of the characteristics that are normally associated with, or have been traditionally associated with being a man, being aggressive, being ambitious, being competent and confident in all these kind of ideas, And what most of the people that I read are saying is that we're starting to lose that, that we've overcorrected, let's say, from a time when those characteristics used to be the pinnacle of everything. Everybody needed these characteristics, Like there was this uber masculine sort of understanding of yes, be ambitious, Yes, move forward, Yes, be brazen, you know, be bold, pull yourself up by your own bootstraps. And there's been this overcorrection away from those to say that these things are now wrong to do, that these are bad things to do. And so I think a lot of the literature we're going to interact with wants to rehab this perspective of saying, no, it's not bad to be ambitious, it's not bad to have exercise responsibility, it's not bad to be confident and competent in the areas that you're in. I don't think that's a bad diagnosis necessarily, right. I think the problem is that it's a reaction to something, and that in reacting to something, it hasn't drawn back into the biblical and theological resources the way that I think it should and the way I think really every Christian ought to think it should right and just say like, we're not looking for brazen ambition, we're not looking for sheer aggression, like we all want those to be qualified and shaped, and I think everybody would acknowledge that. Unfortunately, I think a lot of the literature on masculinity is over responding to the overcorrection and not actually giving a set of resources that would help young men be appropriately aggressive, be appropriately ambitious, and have those tendencies if they have them shaped by discipleship. And that, to me is a big part of the problem in sort of putting out this different prototype right or even worse, as we'll kind of see as we go through this, I think is framing Jesus as the pinnacle of masculinity.

00:21:18
Speaker 2: Right.

00:21:21
Speaker 1: What we begin to see is that this sort of slippage so that Jesus starts to look more like us than we we're supposed to look like him. There's a way in which we start to shape Jesus into who we want him to be, as opposed to taking him on his own terms. When we draw our map. You know, as you've referenced in other places, you know, Jesus tends to have broad shoulders and six pack abs, right, and so you have these sort of pictures of Jesus where everything he does is this uber masculine thing, even to the point where some of the authors are saying that when he cries at Lazarus's death, he cries like a man in contrast to Mary, who cries like a woman. Now, there's no indication in the text of this, but these are the sort of aberrations that tend to come out of this, And to me, it's the methodological problem is that we're letting the cultural context the crisis that's being identified that I think could be the right diagnosis, but we're allowing that diagnosis then to dictate the solution and rereading Jesus's life so that it comes out so it turns out to be polar opposite of where the culture wants us to go. But it's polar opposite in a very odd, the cheese moish sort of way, as opposed to allowing Jesus be countercultural in his own right and then having us follow after that particular way of being human.

00:22:59
Speaker 2: Yeah, questions popped to my mind immediately, which is when we start to do those sorts of grafting of Jesus into our particular storylines, and we say he's masculine, and then we have to go to something like Jesus wept, and well, he cried like a man. I have to chuckle, as you've pointed out, that's all the text says, Jesus wept. That's it, right, Yeah, So before I even get to what does it mean to cry like a man? Right, how do we even know that he did? Apart from some prior presumption that Jesus, you know, the argument would go probably something like this, Jesus came as a man, not a woman, as a man who is God as well. He's the fullness of that representation of who a man is. So he's not going to have any slippage and his madness and start to devolve into womanness like so many problems on so many levels, right, There no need to get into those at the moment. But what we do in those moments to get to our previous discussion on maps is now that we have this important understanding of what jesus masculinity is, which really is more of a putting him into a prior mold. Yes, that says something more about our time and a place. We've now created a structure that is frankly violent. Right, because now we're going to people and we're saying, so, unless you can live into this, this thing that we don't actually know that Jesus even lived into, but that we've decided he does or did, you're something less than what a fully man ought to be. Yeah, and I think you know, you and I both have plenty of stories we could tell of where that's gone. Amok, Right, where you have you have people who grow up either on one side embodying that. I suppose there's more than two sides here, but could be a embodying that and then replicating it b kind of by resignation, living into it in ways that are self detrimental. Yeah, and don't don't really align with what a person is, or just full on reject it and in the process reject Jesus with it, which creates a double problem. Right, We've got the problem of not just rejecting it. Okay, so then how do you fill the rejection? How do you fill that space? But also what do we now do to try to go to that person and say, hey, hey, that's not who Jesus was. Forget it. I've heard about Jesus plenty. I'm not doing this right. Yeah, real problems that is baked into this, right that I'm tempted to say that, you know, you have some people for whom this sort of manhood discussion has been very helpful towards. And they're like the people who are closer to the equator in that map where there's less distortion. Sure, but the closer you get to the polls you're less you're more likely to be distorted. Now you're distorting a person. But I don't even know that that's the way to go through with this, because that seems to be giving credence to the idea of well, there are some for whom this is good and others it distorts them. But I'm not sure that it's good for anybody to carry forward this particular idea of masculine. Now, this is not saying if you're James Spencer and you can bench five thousand pounds or whatever the exact number is, that's bad, right, It's just simply saying it's actually neither good nor bad on the anthropological discussion, neither finds a man, nor does it not define a man. It just simply tells us spot Jams Spencer.

00:27:05
Speaker 1: Yeah, and that is where I think we want to as we do this sort of methodological problem, if we deal with it. As we deal with this methodological problem, I think one of the things we also want to keep in mind is that each of us embodies our maleness differently. So there's this great book I really enjoy James C. Scott. He wrote a book called Seeing Like a State. And part of what he talks about and Seeing like a State is that if you picture a forest, it's got all the trees in it. You could go in and you could touch and see each one of the individual trees, and they're different in a myriad of ways. But he says, when the state kind of gets in charge, the state has to make things manageable, like it's part of what the state does. It just it's part of the function. And so instead of going in and looking at the uniqueness of each individual tree, what they do is they say, well, there's so many yards of wood within the forest, and so they have to have these measures right that you give them the ability to manage some of what's there, to handle the resources. And so even as we're talking about what does it really mean to be a human, what does it really mean to be a biblical a male disciple of Jesus Christ. We're ramping that up to a level that has the potential of minimizing individual difference. Right, You and I are both males, but we're both very different people. We've had different upbringings, We've had different experiences, we went to different colleges sometimes. I mean, I know we both shared our Weekned experience, but like we haven't had the same life, right, and so we embody the world differently. So nothing that we're going to say about being a male disciple of Jesus Christ necessarily applies to both of us in the exact same way. There has to be that individual individualization there as well. Each person has to work it out out for themselves, but that's worked out within a set of boundaries and constraints. It's like, you can't just decide, well, no, for me, this this you know, clear principle son in scripture doesn't mean anything, right, I'm gonna I'm going to depart from that and just do whatever I feel like doing. It's not that sort of individualization, but it is a We're confronted with a number of different situations as individuals, and the way that we respond to those is going to be unique depending on what we bring to the table. I'm not I'm not a sensitive person generally. I don't have like most of the people who know me, if I gave them a hug when they're, you know, feeling bad, they find that surprising because I'm just not a real touchy feely guy. Right. The hugs don't come easy, right, But I'm more the person that people would come to if they're having like a strategic problem or you know, something like that. Like I don't relate to people as well with you know, the sort of emotion that would yield a hug, as I am the sort of logic that would yield the strategy. And so that's not good. That's not bad, you know. Does it mean that I need to be more fully well rounded? Probably, But it's not like to be a man means you have to give people strategy and avoid the hugs. That's not the point, right. The point is that as I do this, that's just more my pocket. That's where I am, right, and so I think we want to not lose that either. So in this methodological discussion, we're going to be talking sort of this umbrella category of what does it mean to be a mail disciple of Christ? But the reality is that the specifics of that almost always are going to differ from person to person.

00:30:49
Speaker 2: Yeah, to the point of discipleship that you brought up earlier. The question then, more materially, is okay, James tagic guy, not the go to him for a hug guy. Great? So what does it look like for James to be a faithful disciple as that strategic guy, in which that's a valuable person as a member of a community, right, And what does it look like for whoever it is that's the touchy feely go to him for a hug guy, yes, to do so as a valuable member of a community. And specifically, what does it look like then in a Christian theological conversation, for both to be quite quite reasonably impossibly together to be transformed into the image of Christ and continue to be James the strategic guy and person be the hug guy. That's the kind of idea play. And I want to I want to appeal briefly, I'm gonna I'm going to ask to fine tune some of the language you use. If we don't have to go with the fine tune language but least to bring it up. Kevin Van Whoser, theologian, he's very.

00:32:07
Speaker 1: Very very much.

00:32:10
Speaker 2: Interested in moving beyond principle language. Yeah, and I tend to share his concern there. Right. The thing about principles is that we we look at a story, or we look at an event, or we look at a teaching, and then we discern some core thing about it that we can say, this is the timeless piece, and we pull it out, and then we use that to draw bridges of application to new environments. And I think what's difficult about that, to quote the philosopher, well maybe not quote to appeal to the philosopher kurekerguard, is that that sort of timeless idea sounds wonderful, and to your realize, we're not timeless beings. Yeah, we're somewhere at some place in some time, and so timelessness is completely and utterly useless to us. Yes, yeah, And to begin to even take that timeless principle and distill it, we've already made it time full. We've placed it in time using certain kinds of language, in certain places, with certain people around us, with certain cultures and categories. So we've never actually arrived at it as a timeless thing. Yeah, And so what we're really doing is we're saying, I'm drawing bridges of application from my version of it or our version of it somewhere else. And I think that might be where the map problem has come in, where it ceased to be a highly specific tool to help people in a certain place do something, and we begin to confuse it in that first order way with the thing in and of itself, in this case the thing being reality, creation, personhood. So Van Hoosier talks instead of principle to talk about paradigms. Now, whether we use that language or not, who cares. But the idea that he's trying to get out here is that we're always trying to discern what it is that's going on biblically and seeing if those Biblical realities can serve as paradigms that intersect with my reality.

00:34:20
Speaker 1: Right.

00:34:21
Speaker 2: So I live in a time of indoor plumbing, as do you, right, And we have air conditioning and heating systems, we have cars, we have the internet, we have TVs like we're in a podcast. None of those things are in the biblical framework. Does that make it irrelevant to us? Of course not? But The idea here is to say there are certain certain things about us that haven't changed. We have needs, we have desires, and so there are pathosses that can move from the text and intersect with our realities, and that's the place where we get these interesting moments of meaning. But because of that, as we're not talking about timeless principles, the reality is is that we continue to have the conversation. Right, we begin to ask the question of James and people paradigmatically like James, the people exist, right, there are others like you would have perhaps a similar avenue for being able to understand within a larger holistic context, what does it mean to be a man versus the person who's going to give the hug? Right, And other people like that person who's going to give the hug have a similar sort of environment or paradigm that can intersect with the text, and both are important. Right. I gather that that's why, whether it be body imagery or vine imagery, marital imagery, that these images in scripture are constantly speaking of interjoining realities. And that's the kind of thing we want to get at, not to again say there's no use, but to also relativize what maps are because they are relative entities.

00:36:06
Speaker 1: Yeah, I appreciate the language comment. I felt dirty as soon as I said principles. So I'm with you there. I usually use patterns, you know, if we think about you know, Paul and the way he appeals to ancient Israel, and he'll draw it across and he'll say, these things were written for our understanding, these things were written as lessons to us. He's really referring not to a principle, to a whole pattern of activity that's going on in the Old Testament. We see something very similar, I think when he uses the law of the muscle docs and and so he's not really pulling a principle out of that. What he's highlighting, I think is a theological pattern, a way of relating to God and world and others that is encapsulated within this one command. And so I think oftentime that's been treated as a principle, that timeless principle idea that you're suggesting there, And I've sort of tried to shy away from that language as well. Instead of paradigm, I use patterns, but it's largely the same thing. And so I think that's a good reminder that we're not looking at these timeless truths that come out of here. What we're really trying to say is there are all these patterns that seem to recur as we relate with God, with others and with creation, and so what we're trying to figure out is what pattern to apply where? How is it that these patterns inform our activities, How is it that we participate with God and this agent arena? And what could we learn from people in the past, maybe those who are written in scripture, maybe other people around us, maybe you know, folks from church history, whatever that is. But what logics were they using to sort of maneuver this new arena and how could those be applicable to us today? I think that's probably is that close to what you're getting at it is?

00:37:56
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I like pattern Let's go with pattern.

00:37:59
Speaker 1: Sounds good? All right, Well, we're going to close this episode out. So that was sort of our initial methodological discussion. The next segment is going to be on redrawing the map, and so we're going to look at what it looks like to approach mail discipleship when the old framework has failed. What happens if we throw away the old maps, what do we do? And so we'll be a little bit more constructive in this next one. So thanks Ashiush for being here, thanks everybody for listening, and we'll catch on the next episode of Thinking Christian Take Care. I just want to take a second to thank the team at Life Audio for their partnership with us on the Thinking Christian podcast. If you go to lifeaudio dot com, you'll find dozens of other faith centered podcasts in their network. They've got shows about prayer, Bible study, parenting, and more.