a word before we begin
I am going to tell you something in this booklet that will sound, at first, like one of the most offensive things a person can say in our moment, and I am going to spend the whole of these pages showing you it is simply true. Here it is. Men and women are not nearly as different as you have been told. Not by the world, which lies about nearly everything, and, more painfully, not by the church, which took the world’s lie and preached it back to you as though it came down from heaven.
Hear me carefully, because the ground has to be laid exactly right or the whole thing will be misheard within a sentence. God made them male and female. I believe that with my whole heart; it is the plain word of Genesis, and I will not give back an inch of it. There are real differences between a man and a woman, woven into the body by God, good and purposed and not to be erased. That is not what I am contesting. What I am contesting is the vast catalog of differences piled on top of that, the ones about temperament and feeling and the inner life, the notion that women are the soft, emotional, tender sex and men the hard, stoic, unfeeling one, that we are two nearly separate species who can barely understand each other across the divide. That picture is not from God, and it is not from your Bible, and it is not even very old. It was built a couple of centuries ago, and it was handed to you as nature when it was only ever nurture, and it has done more quiet damage than almost anything else the age has sold us.
So let me tell you where I stand before we take another step, because I do not fit the boxes and I will not pretend to. I am not an egalitarian; I do not believe men and women are interchangeable, and the people who say so are ignoring the plain design of God. And I am not a complementarian in the way that word is now used, because that camp, whatever its intentions, has swallowed a great deal of the temperamental lie and called it doctrine. I hold a third thing, and since it has no name I have given it one. I am a Wholist. And in a moment I will tell you exactly what that means.
noun · a belief system
one who holds that man and woman, though truly made male and female, are far more alike than different. Each is created a whole person, made to feel deeply and act bravely both, and the splitting of humanity into a soft, emotional sex and a hard, unfeeling one is a manufactured lie, not the design of God.
- That God made humankind male and female, truly and bodily and on purpose, and that this design is good and is not to be erased.
- That the differences between the sexes have been wildly overstated, and that most of what we are taught to call natural, the soft woman and the hard man, is manufactured, not made by God.
- That every person is created whole, to feel deeply and to act bravely both, and that the splitting of the human being into an emotional half and an active half, and the handing of one half to each sex, is a lie.
- That the Scripture alone is sufficient to tell us what a man and a woman are, over against a world, and a church, that has believed a counterfeit.
- That headship and submission are a matter of order and covering between a husband and a wife, and have nothing whatever to do with temperament or worth, and are a separate subject from this one.
That is the view. Everything in this booklet is the unfolding and the defense of it, from history, from anthropology, and above all from the Word of God. Come and see whether it does not hold.
And if you wonder why I would call it Wholism, the root of the word is right there in the second chapter of Genesis, in the moment the woman is first made. When the man beholds her, he names her with his own name. He is ish, and he calls her ishah, which is simply his own name carried over into the feminine, the same word, as if to say she-man, or a female version of himself. And what does he say in the same breath? Not how unlike him she is, but how like: this is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh. Sameness first. Kinship first. The likeness is what he marvels at, and the difference, real as it is, comes second and quieter. That is the whole of Wholism in a single verse: one flesh, one image, the same clay, named nearly the same name, alike before they are ever contrasted.1
chapter one
the lie of mars and venus
You know the slogan even if you have never read the book. Men are from one planet, women from another, two alien species who must labor with charts and translators just to understand each other across the void. That single idea, in a thousand forms, is the background hum of nearly every conversation our culture has about the sexes. It sold tens of millions of copies as a book and then soaked into the water until no one thinks to question it. And it is worth noticing, before we go a step further, how strange a claim it actually is, once you say it plainly: that half the human race and the other half are so fundamentally unlike that mutual understanding is nearly hopeless.2
I want to hand you, at the very start, the single test that this whole booklet runs on, because once you hold it you can weigh the claim for yourself. It is this. If a difference between men and women is truly natural, truly built into us by God, then it will show up everywhere and in every age. It will be a human universal, because human nature does not change with the century or the country. Real design is constant. But if a supposed difference keeps changing, if it looks one way in this age and the opposite way in that one, if one culture assigns a trait to men and another assigns the very same trait to women, then you are not looking at nature at all. You are looking at a costume, something sewn by a particular time and place and then mistaken for skin.
Real design is constant. A thing that keeps changing its mind about which sex it belongs to was never nature to begin with.
Hold that test up to the soft-woman, hard-man picture, and watch what happens to it, because it does not survive contact with history for even a moment. The traits we are told are eternally masculine and eternally feminine turn out to wander from one sex to the other across the centuries, to reverse, to trade places, to mean one thing in one age and the opposite in the next. And a thing that cannot make up its mind about which sex it belongs to was very obviously never bolted to either one by God. That is the thread I mean to pull, and the whole garment of the modern lie comes apart as I pull it.
chapter two
it came from babylon, not the bible
If the modern picture of the sexes did not come from God, then where did it come from? It has a birthplace, and a fairly recent one, and knowing it is half the cure. The soft-domestic-woman and the hard-public-man were not handed down from Sinai. They were manufactured, in large part, by the Industrial Revolution and the Victorian century that rode on it.
Think about what industry actually did to the ordinary household, because it was a change without precedent in human history. For all the ages before it, work and home were the same place. The farm, the workshop, the trade were in and around the house, and the whole family labored together at the business of staying alive, husband and wife and children side by side in one shared economy. Then the factories came, and for the first time work walked out the front door. The man followed his wage into the factory and the office, out of the home and into a separate public world, and the home was left behind and quietly redefined as a soft and sheltered place, a refuge from the hard world of labor, and the woman was sealed inside it and told this had always been her nature. Historians have a name for the ideology that grew up to justify all this. They call it the doctrine of separate spheres, and its softer religious dress the cult of domesticity, and they can date its rise and its hardening with real precision, to the decades on either side of 1800 and its peak around the 1840s through the 1860s.3
And here is the detail that gives the whole game away: it was a luxury, and a class marker, not a truth about womankind. The soft, idle, sheltered woman of the parlor was a picture only the new middle class could even afford. The working woman, the poor woman, the farm woman, never stopped doing hard physical labor for a moment; she worked the fields and the factories right alongside the men, because her family would not eat otherwise. So the delicate-female ideal was never a description of what women are. It was a status symbol for the few who could afford to keep a woman ornamental, dressed up after the fact as the eternal nature of the sex. That is the thing the church would later baptize.4
The delicate-female ideal was never a description of what women are. It was a status symbol, dressed up afterward as the nature of the sex.
If you want to see how arbitrary the whole business of assigned traits really is, consider something as small and as telling as color. We all know, everyone knows, that pink is for girls and blue is for boys, and it feels eternal, feels like it must reach back forever. It does not. For most of history little children of both sexes simply wore white. The fixed rule we treat as timeless, pink for her and blue for him, did not harden until around the 1940s, and it hardened not by nature but by marketing, by clothing manufacturers who discovered there was money in telling parents which colors their children must wear. Before that the coding was unsettled, and where it existed at all it sometimes ran the other way, with pink, a near cousin of red, thought the stronger and more masculine color, and blue thought delicate and fit for a girl. A thing cannot be written into the nature of the sexes by God and also be reassigned by a garment factory in living memory. One of those is nature. The other is a sales campaign. Learn to tell them apart, and you have learned the lesson of this entire booklet.5
So the church did not invent this thing, and I want to be fair about that. It came from Babylon, from the factories and the parlors and the marketers of a particular century, not from the Bible and not from the people of God. But the church did something nearly as bad as inventing it. It let it in without testing it, wrapped it in a few verses, and began to preach it as the very design of God, until a Victorian status costume had become, in the pew, indistinguishable from Holy Scripture. And that is the thing we have to strip back off, because it was never ours to wear.
chapter three
history doesn’t hold it up
Go and look, then, since the whole question can be settled by looking. If men are by nature the hard and unfeeling sex and women the soft and emotional one, then history should show it plainly and everywhere. It should show us stoic, tearless men in every age and tender, weeping women in every age, the pattern holding steady across all the centuries. It shows nothing of the kind. It shows the opposite so often, and so comfortably, that the modern picture simply falls apart in your hands.
Take the idea that a real man does not weep, that tears are womanish, that the manly thing is the stone face. This is perhaps the most recent invention of them all, and the ancient world would have found it baffling. Open the Iliad, the great war poem at the fountainhead of Western literature, and you find the mightiest warriors weeping openly, without shame, in front of their armies. The whole Greek host bursts into tears together more than once. Achilles himself, the supreme killing hero of the age, weeps aloud for his fallen friend. A scholar who studied these tears closely concluded that they do not diminish his manhood at all but confirm it; that the stone-faced, inexpressive ideal of manhood we take for granted runs directly against the epic’s whole vision of what a hero is. And it was not only the Greeks. The knights and kings of the Middle Ages wept openly in the historical chronicles, whole audiences of hard fighting men sobbing together at a moving speech. The tearless man is not the ancient norm recovered. He is a modern costume, only a couple of centuries old.6
And the Bible, our own book, is full to overflowing with strong men who weep, and never once treats it as a failure of their manhood. Joseph, ruler of Egypt, breaks down weeping again and again until the whole house hears him. Jacob and Esau, two grown and powerful men, fall on each other’s necks and weep at their reconciling. David and Jonathan, warriors both, weep together at their parting until the Scripture says David wept the longest. David, the giant-killer, the man of war, pours out tears through half the Psalms and God calls him a man after His own heart. And the Lord Jesus Himself, perfect man, very God, stood at a grave and wept, in the shortest and one of the tenderest verses in all of Scripture. If the King of kings wept, no one may tell you that weeping is beneath a man.7
If the Lord Jesus Himself stood at a grave and wept, no one may tell you that tears are beneath a man.
Now turn it the other way, and look for the supposedly impossible creature, the strong and hard-laboring woman, and you find her everywhere the delicate-female myth said she could not be. For most of human history the ordinary woman was tough out of plain necessity, working the land, running the trades, bearing and burying and building, because survival did not excuse anyone on account of sex. And the Bible’s own portrait of the ideal woman is not a fainting ornament but a powerhouse. The word it uses for her in Proverbs is chayil, a word of strength and might and valour, the very word used elsewhere for armies and mighty men of war. God’s model woman is, quite literally in the Hebrew, a woman of valour, and the verses that follow show her buying and selling and planting and trading and laughing at the days to come. Soft and delicate is not the biblical picture of a woman. Strong is.8
So the test does its work. The traits will not stay put. Tears were manly for most of history and then, suddenly and recently, were not. Strength and hard labor belonged to women in every age until a Victorian parlor decided they were unfeminine. The picture keeps reversing itself, century to century, which is the one thing a genuine, God-given nature could never do. What reverses like that was never nature. It was always fashion, mistaken for the fixed design of God.
chapter four
two spheres, one nature
Now I have to be careful, because someone will hear all this and go galloping off the far side of the horse, and start insisting that men and women are simply identical, the same in every respect, and that all difference is a fiction. That is not what I am saying, and it is its own kind of foolishness, a mirror-image lie that ignores the plain design of God as badly as the other error does. So let me draw the line exactly. There were real differences in how men and women lived across history. What there was not, is the difference the modern age claims: the difference of nature, of temperament, of the inner life. The division was of labor and of sphere, not of soul.
Look at how the old world actually ran, because it is quite different from the soft-woman-at-home picture we project backward onto it. Yes, the men and the women often did different work and spent their days in somewhat different company, but both were busy, and both were in community, and both were active. The men were out at the hunting and the heavy labor and the trades, and the boys went with them as they grew, a son apprenticed to his father and to the company of men to learn a craft. And the women were at the home, but the home was not the idle sanctuary of the Victorian imagination; it was a workshop and a marketplace and the beating heart of the whole household economy. The woman was buying and selling and trading and managing, keeping the accounts and running the production, with the younger children about her and the other women of the community beside her. Both spheres were full of work. Both were full of fellowship. The lives differed. The nature underneath did not.
And if you want that proven straight from Scripture, look no further than the famous woman of Proverbs 31, and look at her honestly, because she quietly overturns the whole modern arrangement. What is she doing? She is running an economy. She considers a field and buys it; with the fruit of her hands she plants a vineyard; she perceives that her merchandise is good; she makes fine linen and sells it and delivers girdles to the merchant. She is, in plain terms, the entrepreneur and a chief breadwinner of that household, tireless and shrewd and strong. And where, meanwhile, is her husband while she runs the trade and the fields? He is sitting in the gates among the elders of the land. That is to say, he is in governance, in leadership, in the counsel of the city. Here is the biblical picture with the modern stereotype turned exactly inside out: the woman is the hard-driving woman of commerce, and the man’s honor is his seat in leadership, and both are good, and neither is soft or hard by virtue of being male or female. The headship is real; he sits in the gate. And her strength is real; she runs the enterprise. And the two sit side by side without the slightest contradiction, because headship was never a matter of temperament in the first place.9
The woman runs the enterprise; the husband sits in the gate. Headship and strength, side by side, because headship was never about temperament at all.
And here is the sweet thing that falls out of seeing it rightly, the thing the age has stolen from us and that a Wholist can take back. If men and women are not two alien species but one kind of creature living in two spheres, then the other sex is not a mystery. Let me say that plainly, because so much misery is built on the opposite lie. Your husband is not a riddle you will spend your life failing to solve; your wife is not an enigma no man can hope to read. That whole weary idea, that the sexes are fundamentally unknowable to each other, that you must resign yourself to never really understanding the person you married, is a direct child of the Mars-and-Venus lie, and it poisons a marriage slowly. The truth is kinder and far more hopeful. The other person is not a mystery to be given up on. They are a human being, like you, to be known, and known better and more deeply every single year you are given together. You do not unravel a person. You grow to know them. There is a world of difference between those two, and only one of them leads anywhere good.
chapter five
how we manufacture it
If the difference is not born in us, then it has to be built, and it is worth watching exactly how the building is done, because most of it happens so early and so quietly that we mistake our own handiwork for the work of God. We manufacture the difference in our children, and then we point at the manufactured thing and call it nature.
Watch how it goes with a son. He falls, he cries, and from the time he is very small he is told: do not cry, be tough, toughen up, boys do not cry. Piece by piece, year by year, the tenderness is drilled out of him, or rather driven underground, taught to hide, until by the time he is a man he has learned that the whole department of feeling is shameful and unmanly and must never be shown. He has not lost the capacity to feel; God built that into him and it cannot be removed. He has only been trained, at great cost, to bury it, and to call the burying strength. And watch how it goes with a daughter. She is handled more gently, kept softer, permitted and even encouraged in every tenderness, and steered away from the rough and the strong and the daring, until the toughness and the boldness that God put in her too are left to wither for want of use. We take a whole child, made to feel and to act both, and we amputate one half according to the sex, and then we hold up the two halves we have made and say, behold, how different they naturally are.
We take a whole child, made to feel and to act both, amputate one half according to the sex, and then call the amputation nature.
And here the Bible corrects us again, quietly and completely, because it never divides the work of parents the way we do. We are forever assigning the tender, nurturing half to the mother and the firm, disciplining half to the father, as though God handed each parent one tool and one only. He did not. The Scripture gives both parents the same whole task. The father is told to bring up his children, and the very word for it is a nurturing word, and he is warned in the same breath not to provoke them but to raise them tenderly. The mother has her law and her instruction for the children just as the father has his. Both are to love; both are to discipline; both are to nurture; both are to teach. There is no sorting of the job by sex in the Word of God, only in the traditions of men. A father must know how to sit with a weeping child, son or daughter, and a mother must know how to correct one, and both must be teaching the same one lesson to all their children alike: to feel their feelings deeply and honestly, and yet not to be ruled by them, and to act rightly even when the feeling pulls the other way. That is the whole-person lesson, and it is for sons and daughters equally, taught by mothers and fathers equally.10
chapter six
two sermons god never wrote
You want to see the church confess the whole lie out loud? Go and listen to it preach two Sundays a year. Sit through the Mother’s Day sermon, and then sit through the Father’s Day sermon, and notice that they are not the same sermon, and are not even close. To the mothers: be gentle, be nurturing, be soft, be the tender heart of the home. To the fathers: be strong, be the leader, be the provider, step up and be a man. Two completely different messages, two different sets of virtues, handed out strictly by sex, as though God had written one moral law for women and a separate one for men.
But He did not. Open the Scripture and see for yourself: the overwhelming mass of its commands are given to everyone, to all believers alike, with no sorting by sex whatsoever. The fruit of the Spirit, love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, self-control, is commanded of every Christian; no one ever taught that gentleness was for the women and self-control for the men. Be strong and of a good courage is said to all of God’s people, not to the men only. Be tenderhearted and kind is said to all, not to the women only. Weep with them that weep is a command to the whole church. The one-another commands, love one another, bear one another’s burdens, are laid on everyone. When you actually count them, the commands aimed specifically and only at one sex are a tiny handful against the vast ocean of commands given to all. So if you are preaching to a room full of Christian souls, the sermon to the mothers and the sermon to the fathers ought to be very nearly the same sermon, because the Christian life is one life and it is the same for both. That the two sermons are wildly different is the church testifying against itself, twice a year, that it has swallowed a lie.11
If God gave one moral law to all His people, why does the church preach a different one on Mother’s Day than on Father’s Day?
You can even see it in the decorations, which would be funny if it were not so telling. The flowers and the pinks and the soft pastels come out for the mothers; the dark blues and the browns and the camouflage come out for the fathers. Now there is nothing wrong, nothing at all, with a woman who loves those colors or a man who loves those others; that is not the point and I am not making a rule about paint. The point is that the church has taken mere colors and coded them by sex and made them into a kind of law, one more little liturgy of the difference it has come to believe in, the whole thing broadcasting the same message from the very walls: that men are one sort of creature and women another, and never the twain shall meet.
Now I must guard this carefully, because there is one place a sharp reader will push back, and the answer matters. Does the Bible not speak differently, sometimes, to husbands and to wives? It does. There is a real order given for marriage, the headship of the husband and the submission of the wife, and I believe it and I am not touching it here, except to say this: that is a matter of structure and of covering, of how a marriage is ordered under God, and it has precisely nothing to do with temperament, or with who is the soft one and who is the hard one, or with the worth or the inner nature of either. We already watched the Proverbs 31 woman run an empire while her husband sat in the gate; the order was intact and her strength was full-blooded, both at once, because the one was never about the other. Do not let anyone smuggle the temperament lie in under the cover of headship. They are two entirely different things, and the whole confusion of our day is built on welding them together.12
chapter seven
the church made it worse
I have said the church did not invent this lie, and that is true, and it is the only mercy I can extend, because what the church did with the lie once it had it is nearly unforgivable. It did not test it. It did not hold it up against the Word and find it wanting, which it plainly is. It embraced it, deepened it, systematized it, and began to sell it back to the people of God with a Bible verse stapled to it, until it became one of the most unquestioned doctrines in the modern church, believed more firmly than half the things that are actually in the Book.
Walk into the bookstore and look at what we have built on it. There is a whole industry now, a river of marriage books and conference series and study curricula, founded on the flat assertion that men and women are so profoundly, natively different that they practically require an interpreter to live together. The men are taught they cannot really be expected to understand a woman, that she is a mystery to be managed. The women are taught that their husbands are simple creatures of a wholly different make. Both are handed the Mars-and-Venus lie with a Scripture reference bolted on, and both go home a little more convinced that the person they married is a foreign country. It is the world’s error, purchased wholesale, given a Christian cover, and sold at the church door.13
It is the world’s error, purchased wholesale, given a Christian cover, and sold at the church door.
And I will tell you plainly, from having sat through a great many of them, that this is not the failing of one odd congregation. I have listened to the men’s conferences and the women’s conferences and the marriage seminars, and I have heard the same lie preached in almost every one, across the denominations, from the Baptists to the Methodists to nearly all the rest. So let me say it with the only softening I can honestly give. I will say that ninety-nine percent of the church has believed and preached this, to be gracious. But understand me: when I say ninety-nine, I mean very nearly the whole of it, and I say so because I have sat in the rooms and heard it with my own ears. The near-unanimity does not make it true. It never has. A thing is not correct because your pastor says it, or your favorite teacher, or ninety-nine out of a hundred voices you respect. It is correct if it is in the Word of God, and this is not.
Someone will want me, right here, to stop and deal with the opposite camp, the ones who say men and women are exactly the same in all things, no real difference anywhere. I will not spend much ink on it, because it does not deserve much. It is plainly false, it denies the design of God written into the body and visible to every honest eye, and it collapses the moment it meets reality. I mention it only so no one mistakes me for holding it, because I emphatically do not. To flee the church’s lie by running into that one is to leap from a ditch on one side of the road into the ditch on the other. The road itself, the narrow truth between the two ditches, is what I am calling Wholism, and it is the thing almost no one is standing on.
chapter eight
the same hunger
Now let me take you down beneath the history and the anthropology to the deepest floor of all, the reason men and women are so much more alike than different, because until you see this you have only the evidence and not the root. Here it is. At the very bottom, a man and a woman are the same kind of creature, and they want, and have always wanted, in every age and every land, the very same things.
Strip away the surface and look at what every human heart is actually reaching for, and it is the same short list for all of us, male and female alike. We want to be known and to belong; we want community, a people, a place. We want our lives to mean something, to matter, to count for more than the moment. And underneath even those, deepest of all, we want something to worship. That is not a female longing or a male longing. It is the human longing, the same in the woman and the man, because it was built into the creature at the making.
For this is the truest thing that can be said about a human being, of either sex: he was made to worship, and he will worship something, without exception, whether he ever admits it or not. The one who bows to no God still bows; he has only chosen a different altar, his own comfort, or his career, or his appetites, or his own reason, or the vague modern god he calls science, or simply himself. There is no such creature as the human being who worships nothing; there is only the human being who has misplaced his worship. The heart was built with a throne in it, and the throne will not sit empty; something will always be set upon it. Mankind was made to worship, and does, universally, man and woman alike, and that shared and defining hunger runs a thousand times deeper than any of the surface differences the age is so obsessed with.14
There is no human being who worships nothing. There is only the one who has misplaced his worship. And that is equally true of the man and the woman.
Do you see what that does to the whole quarrel? If the deepest fact about both the man and the woman is that each is an image-bearer made to worship, made to be known, made for meaning, then the two are alike at the very core of their being, alike exactly where it matters most, and their much-advertised differences are shallow things floating on the surface of a shared and enormous sameness. We are not two species. We are one kind of creature, bearing one image, hungering with one hunger, and made in the end for one and the same God. That is the ground the Wholist stands on, and it is bedrock.
chapter nine
the cancer that spreads
I have called this lie a small thing in one sense, a costume, a fashion mistaken for nature. But do not hear me saying it is harmless, because it is not. It is a cancer, and like a cancer it does not stay politely in the one place; it spreads, it sends its threads out into everything, it corrupts far more than the single thing it started with. And to understand why it does that, and where it truly comes from, we have to go all the way back to the beginning.
God made the bonds between human beings, and He made them good: the bond of man to woman, and the bond of man to man and woman to woman, friendship and family and fellowship, the whole web of human love. And then came the Fall, and sin entered, and every one of those good bonds was cracked and corrupted, because now every person in the bond had a fallen and selfish nature working against it. And there is one who has hated all of it ever since, one whose whole program, the Lord told us, is to steal and to kill and to destroy, and who works tirelessly to ruin every good thing God made, by any means he can find. The corruption of how men and women see and understand one another is one of his oldest and most useful instruments, and the modern lie is simply his latest version of it, a fresh costume for a very old campaign against a very old target. This is not merely a cultural mistake. It is one more skirmish in the long war against the work of God, and it helps to know that, because it tells you why it is so stubborn and why it does so much harm.15
A lie this close to the root does not stay put. It spreads into everything built on top of it.
And spread it does, into every relationship it can reach, because it sits so near the root of how we understand ourselves. It poisons marriage, teaching a husband and wife to see each other as unknowable aliens instead of growing to know each other as persons. It poisons friendship, telling men that real tenderness between them is unmanly, telling women that strength and directness are unwomanly, cutting everyone off from half of what they were made to be and half of the people they were made to love. It poisons the way the sexes regard each other across the whole of society, breeding suspicion and contempt and the weary war of the sexes we all take for granted. And worst of all it poisons the next generation, as we raise our sons and our daughters into the very halves we were split into, and hand the whole broken inheritance down intact. A lie at the root will always be found in the fruit.
So what does a Wholist do about it? You refuse it, in yourself and in your house. You be a whole person, and you raise whole people. You let yourself feel deeply and act bravely both, whichever sex you are, because you were made for both. You teach your sons that tears are not beneath a man and your daughters that strength is not beyond a woman, and you teach them both the one whole lesson, to feel honestly and act rightly and be mastered by neither the feeling nor the fear. You look at the other sex, and at the person you married, not as a mystery you have given up solving but as a human being to be known more truly every year. You worship the God you were made to worship, and you know your neighbor as a fellow-worshipper made in the very same image as you. And you trust that the God who made them male and female, and made them one in Him, is at work in the holding of the line, long after your part in it is done.
And as always, My Friend,
may God’s grace and peace be ever with you.
Your Sister in Christ,
Hannah ♥
a closing word
There is an old way of mending a torn thing that the modern world has mostly forgotten. You do not throw the garment away because it has been cut in two. You lay the two halves back together along the tear, and you sew, patiently, until the seam holds and the one whole cloth is a cloth again, stronger sometimes at the mend than it was before it tore.
That is the work, My Friend. The age took the whole human being and cut it down the middle, and handed one half to the men and the other to the women, and told each that the missing half lived in the other and could never be their own. It was a lie, and a cruel one, and it tore something God had made whole. But a tear can be mended. You can be a whole person again, feeling and acting both, tender and strong both, and you can raise your children whole, and refuse the cut in your own home, and know the people around you as persons and not as strangers from another planet. Lay the halves back together. Sew the seam. And trust the God who made the cloth in one piece to be pleased at the mending of it.
Soli Deo Gloria
sources & notes
- Genesis 2:23, where the man, ish (אִישׁ), names the woman ishah (אִשָּׁה), the same word in feminine form, “She shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man,” preceded by “bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh.” The naming emphasizes correspondence and likeness (so most of the older commentators, e.g. Adam Clarke and Keil-Delitzsch, who render the sense “she-man” or “female man,” as Latin virago from vir). Some modern philologists note the two Hebrew words may not share a deep etymological root; the text nonetheless uses them as a deliberate wordplay of sameness, which is the point drawn here.
- The “men and women are from different planets” framing is popularized by John Gray, Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus (1992), among the best-selling nonfiction titles of its era. It is cited here as the representative popular expression of strong sex-difference essentialism, not as a scholarly source.
- The “separate spheres” doctrine and the “cult of domesticity” arose as products of industrialization. Barbara Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820–1860,” American Quarterly 18 (1966); Nancy F. Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood (Yale University Press, 1977). Historians locate the ideology’s rise in the decades around 1800 and its peak roughly 1840–1860, tied directly to the Industrial Revolution’s separation, for the first time, of waged work from the household. Before industrialization, family members generally worked together in and around the home.
- That the domestic ideal was class-bound is standard in the historical literature: the sheltered, non-laboring woman was a middle-class status marker made possible by a single male income, while working-class, poor, and farming women continued in hard physical and wage labor throughout. See Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood; and general treatments of the Cult of Domesticity, which note it applied only to families who could afford a non-earning wife.
- Pink/blue sex-coding is recent. For most of the nineteenth century small children of both sexes wore white; no fixed color-to-sex rule existed. A 1918 trade journal and a 1927 Time survey of U.S. department stores show the coding still unsettled, with several major stores recommending pink (as a shade of red, deemed “stronger”) for boys and blue for girls. The now-standard pink-for-girls, blue-for-boys convention did not fix until roughly the 1940s and was driven by marketing. See Jo B. Paoletti, Pink and Blue: Telling the Boys from the Girls in America (Indiana University Press, 2012). (Some scholars, e.g. Marco Del Giudice, argue the earlier “reversal” was less uniform than often claimed; either way, the fixed modern coding is recent and commercial, not natural.)
- Honored male weeping in antiquity and the Middle Ages is well documented. The Iliad (c. 8th century B.C.) repeatedly depicts warriors, including Achilles, and the whole Greek army weeping openly and without shame. Hélène Monsacré, The Tears of Achilles (French 1984; Eng. trans. Harvard Center for Hellenic Studies, 2018), argues these tears confirm rather than diminish heroic manhood, and that the “stoically inexpressive” male ideal is a later development. Medieval chronicles similarly record kings, knights, and assemblies weeping publicly; see Johan Huizinga, The Autumn of the Middle Ages (1919), on the era’s open emotionality.
- Strong men weeping without shame in Scripture: Joseph (Genesis 42:24; 43:30; 45:1–2; 46:29); Jacob and Esau reconciling (Genesis 33:4); David and Jonathan at their parting, “they wept one with another, until David exceeded” (1 Samuel 20:41); David’s tears throughout the Psalms (e.g. Psalm 6:6); and the Lord Jesus at Lazarus’s tomb, “Jesus wept” (John 11:35). None is treated as unmanly.
- The Hebrew chayil (חַיִל), used of the woman of Proverbs 31:10, denotes strength, might, valour, and force, and is used elsewhere of armies and “mighty men of valour” (e.g. Joshua 1:14; 1 Samuel 16:18). The “virtuous woman” is literally an eshet chayil, a woman of valour. W. E. Vine and standard Hebrew lexicons (BDB). On women’s continuous participation in production and trade across pre-industrial history, see general economic and social history of the household economy.
- Proverbs 31:10–31: the woman “considereth a field, and buyeth it” and “planteth a vineyard” (v. 16), “perceiveth that her merchandise is good” (v. 18), “maketh fine linen, and selleth it; and delivereth girdles unto the merchant” (v. 24); while her husband “is known in the gates, when he sitteth among the elders of the land” (v. 23). The passage places her economic enterprise and his seat in civic leadership side by side without tension, the interpretive key (v. 30) being that “a woman that feareth the LORD, she shall be praised.”
- That parental duties are given to both parents, not divided by sex: “My son, hear the instruction of thy father, and forsake not the law of thy mother” (Proverbs 1:8; cf. 6:20), pairing father and mother in the same teaching role; “ye fathers… bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord” (Ephesians 6:4), assigning the nurturing task to fathers; and the general commands to train and discipline children (Deuteronomy 6:6–7; Proverbs 22:6), addressed to parents without distinction of sex.
- That the overwhelming majority of Scripture’s commands are given to all believers without distinction of sex: the fruit of the Spirit (Galatians 5:22–23); “be strong and of a good courage” (Joshua 1:9; Deuteronomy 31:6), to all; “be ye kind one to another, tenderhearted” (Ephesians 4:32), to all; “weep with them that weep” (Romans 12:15); and the many “one another” commands (e.g. John 13:34; Galatians 6:2). Sex-specific instructions (as in Ephesians 5:22–33; 1 Peter 3:1–7) are comparatively few and concern the ordering of marriage, not temperament.
- The marriage order of headship and the wife’s submission (Ephesians 5:22–33; Colossians 3:18–19; 1 Peter 3:1–7) is a matter of structure and covering within marriage, not a statement about temperament, capability, or worth, and is treated here as a distinct subject. Proverbs 31 demonstrates the distinction: full female economic strength and enterprise coexisting with the husband’s civic headship. Conflating the marriage order with temperamental stereotype is the specific error this booklet identifies.
- The reference is to the broad genre of popular Christian marriage and “gender difference” literature and conference material built on strong essentialist premises, treated here as a category rather than by singling out particular titles. The critique is that it imports the popular Mars-and-Venus framework (see note 1) and attaches proof-texts, rather than deriving its anthropology from Scripture.
- Humanity is inherently worshipping. Romans 1:21–25, describing the exchange of the worship owed the Creator for the worship of created things, i.e. misplaced rather than absent worship; Ecclesiastes 3:11, God “hath set the world” (eternity) “in their heart”; Matthew 6:24, no one can serve two masters, implying all serve one; and the classic formulation of Augustine, Confessions I.1, “Thou hast made us for thyself, and our heart is restless until it rests in thee.”
- The Fall’s corruption of the God-made bonds between persons is the root here (Genesis 3, including the fracture in the man-woman relation, 3:12, 16) and the adversary’s settled program against the works of God: “The thief cometh not, but for to steal, and to kill, and to destroy” (John 10:10); “your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour” (1 Peter 5:8). The distortion of how the sexes understand one another is framed here as one front in that longstanding opposition.