Upholding Clarity in an Age of Confusion: The Nashville Statement, Part 6

An Open Door

[A] marriage with Christ at the center of it pulls you right out of yourself. It teaches each partner, the husband and the wife, to forget about self for a while in care and sacrifice for the other. We come to ourselves by losing ourselves.
—J. Budziszewski—

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Key point: The teachings of nature and the Bible offer release from the confining and false ideas that males and females are interchangeable and that one’s sex or gender is not biologically determined. True freedom is found in embracing rather than denying reality.

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You can access summaries of all the articles in this series here.

Last time we highlighted an event from Harry Houdini’s career that illustrates a vitally important truth. It was the one time in Houdini’s career when he was unable to pick a lock. Why? The door to the safe from which he was trying to escape was closed, but not locked at all! Houdini had difficulty because his assumptions in the situation did not coincide with reality.

Similarly, the prevailing cultural narrative regarding sexuality and gender identity is based on a false premise. The door already is unlocked! Walking through the doorway to freedom involves accepting reality as it is. Males and females are alike in that both sexes are human, but they are different in countless ways. Accepting these differences—and accepting one’s own biological sex as indicative of one’s gender—is not ultimately confining. In fact, it’s liberating! This truth will be difficult for many, and even extremely difficult for some, to accept. We do not make light of these difficulties. Yet we declare forthrightly that this is the way to freedom for both individuals and society.

One does not have to be a Christian to affirm what nature teaches about the sexes, but believing in the God of the Bible affords people a sense of purpose and meaning that eludes others. Why? Because God created human beings —both males and females—in His image.

Article 3 of the Nashville Statement emphasizes this truth.

Invisible Realities

It’s especially important for Christians to understand and affirm, not only the innate differences between males and females, but also the purposes the Creator had in instilling sex differences in the members of His highest creation. God’s purposes are invisible realities manifested in visible ones. Dr. Adrian Rogers has done a masterful job of explaining male and female differences from a theological perspective. I encourage you to listen to his sermon on the subject at your earliest convenience.

For now, I’d like to briefly mention ten important truths Christians need to understand and appreciate about God’s creation of humanity as male and female. Genesis 2:18-25 tells us

¹⁸ And the Lord God said, “It is not good that man should be alone; I will make him a helper comparable to him.” ¹⁹ Out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to Adam to see what he would call them. And whatever Adam called each living creature, that was its name. ²⁰ So Adam gave names to all cattle, to the birds of the air, and to every beast of the field. But for Adam there was not found a helper comparable to him.

²¹ And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall on Adam, and he slept; and He took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh in its place. ²² Then the rib which the Lord God had taken from man He made into a woman, and He brought her to the man.

²³ And Adam said:

²⁴ Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.

²⁵ And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed.

The Creator’s “Fingerprints”

Consider these truths. While we have stated many of them previously, we reiterate them here because Article 3 sets the stage for emphasizing them. These principles testify to God’s having left His “fingerprints” all over humanity. While sin has marred the ways in which members of the human family reflect God’s nature, these reflections still are evident and discernible.

1. “God created Adam and Eve, the first human beings, in his own image, equal before God as persons, and distinct as male and female.” This the first part of Article 3 of the Nashville Statement. Men and women, boys and girls, did not evolve out of a random-chance process. God created them. Moreover, He made them different as males and females, and He did so by design.
2. At the same time, it is not true that “the divinely ordained differences between male and female render them unequal in dignity or worth.” The second portion of Article 3 rightly refutes any notion that either sex is superior or inferior to the other. Women have been the direct beneficiaries of the Christian view of the sexes. Throughout history, Christianity has elevated the status of women in the home and in society. That’s not to say the church always advocated treating women according to the biblical ideal. Even so, the ideal has existed throughout history and remains today.
3. Since males and females are different, men reflect God’s image in a variety of ways that women don’t, and women reflect His image in a variety of ways that men don’t. Both are fully human, and both reflect God’s image—but neither does so in any complete sense.
4. God made the woman as a helper “comparable to” the man (see v. 18). The strong implication is that he also is comparable to her. Differences make for compatibility. In other words, the man and the woman make a great team because of their differences. She is better at doing some things, and he is better at doing others. They are different, but neither is inferior to the other. Although we can mention it only briefly here, these differences have implications for gender roles in the family. Christian psychologist W. Peter Blitchington has said, ““The strength of a nation can be fairly effectively gauged by the strength of its families, and the strength of a family can be estimated by the quality of its sexual roles.”¹ If we as Christians cringe at this, we are demonstrating that to a significant degree, we have been influenced by politically correct thinking.
5. In creating human beings as male and female, God also created and established the institution of marriage.
6. Marriage is the arena where a man and woman come together to form a family. In that family, the two together can reflect God’s image in a much more complete way than either the man or the woman could as an individual.
7. Building off of our observation in point 5, we affirm that marriage and family reflect the unity and diversity we see in the triune Godhead. The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are not the same, yet each is God. Similarly, the husband and wife are not identical, but each is a member of the same family. This also can be said of any children resulting from their marriage union.
8. No same-sex relationship, no matter how loving or committed, ever can showcase this kind of unity and diversity.
9. Children form their initial view of God in their early years, and they do so primarily through their experiences of interacting with their parents, as well by observing their parents’ interactions with each other. Only kids with two married parents of the opposite sex can get the kind of picture of God that He Himself ordained they would receive when He established marriage as the world’s first and most basic institution.
10. As Adrian Rogers declared, “These differences, believe it or not, shouldn’t divide us. They should unite us. God made us different that He might make us one. These are more than mere psychological proclivities; they are there by divine design. Aren’t you glad that God made us different? It’s time to stop trying to be the be the same or resenting each other because of our differences. It’s time to start celebrating the difference!”

With an understanding and appreciation of these theological truths, as well as the scientific truths we highlighted in part 5, Christians can confidently point others to the open door that nature and the Bible affirm.

Ashley McGuire says it well.

 

image credit: top photo—www.lightstock.com

Copyright © 2017 by B. Nathaniel Sullivan. All rights reserved.

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture has been taken from the New King James Version®. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Note:

¹W. Peter Blitchington, Sex Roles and the Christian Family, (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale, 1981), 13.