Articles
Real Manhood
(via Christian Healthcare Newsletter, April 2015, edited for space)
There are some basic questions that every man needs answers to if he is to have true direction and fulfillment in life. These are: Who am I? What am I here for? What is my role? What does this look like in practice? I would suggest that any solution that seeks to engage men must begin with some basic answers to these questions. Furthermore, I would suggest that if the Church is to begin to answer these questions, it needs to do so in two ways:
1. The Church needs to teach what true masculinity looks like.
2. The Church needs to stop misrepresenting Jesus and instead show how He is the epitome of true masculinity.
So how do we teach what true masculinity looks like? … We go back to the book of origins. There we have a man who is given a series of highly connected tasks. Be fruitful. Multiply. Replenish. Take dominion. Or to sum it up, through him and his offspring, he is tasked with spreading the rule of God throughout the world in his capacity as God’s vice regent. He cannot do this alone, so God makes a woman and joins them together in intimate union. Now his role is not just an offensive role – taking dominion and subduing the earth – but it is also defensive – protecting, cherishing, and loving his wife.
And so we have all the ingredients for true masculinity: Dominion, Fruitfulness, Protection, Responsibility, Care, Love – the perfect mix of toughness and gentle-ness. But what happened instead? Faced with an invader and a usurper, the man not only fails to protect his wife and therefore his progeny from evil, he also gives into it himself, and then has the audacity to blame his wife. Thus we end up with all the ingredients of non-masculinity: failure to protect, dereliction of responsi-bility, cowardice, blame-shifting, fruitlessness … absconding the role of domin-ion-taker, plus a whole bunch of other evils added to the mix. The modern world has taken these failures and run with them, to the point that men are almost expected to be hopeless, unfaithful, irresponsible losers …
Which brings us to the second point, which is related to Jesus Himself … It is striking how Jesus and His antagonists often seem to talk past each other. The fault, of course, is not with Jesus; He tells the truth, and they just don’t want to hear it. But part of the misunderstanding is their constant propensity to willfully misrepresent Him. In our own day, the form of misrepresentation has changed, but is nonetheless as dangerous, so once again men don’t really hear Jesus …
In our day, Jesus is so far from being a disturber of the peace as to be almost perfectly harmless. Both the modern world and, sadly, the modern Church, have wrenched much of His masculinity from Him and turned Him into a sort of impotent hippy milksop who goes around just being nice to people. This is far from the Jesus of the Gospels. Jesus is the Man. He is the Man that Adam was meant to be, but failed to be. Yes, He is meek, lowly and gentle, but He is also the Man of courage, the Man who stands up to abuse of authority, the Man who loves righteousness and hates wickedness ...
Jesus teaches us how to take dominion. He teaches us what true responsibility looks like. When He sacrifices Himself for the church, He teaches us how to love, cherish, and protect our wife. He teaches us how to love our children by laying down His life for His disciples. He teaches us what true authority is by washing the feet of His disciples … The real Jesus teaches men how to be men. By seek- ing to present modern men with a proper understanding of masculinity, together with consistently preaching the real Jesus, churches would be giving men answers to their most pressing needs – to know who they are and what their role is.
