Masculine & feminine symbolize creator & creation: a response to Matt Damico’s critique of It’s Good To Be A Man

Scripture depicts masculine and feminine as patterns, expressed in distinctions like creator/creature and male/female. Thus the connection in Romans 1 between pagan monism and homosexuality.

I would like to thank Matt Damico for his recent review of It’s Good To Be A Man, over at CBMW.

Damico is generally positive about our book, which I appreciate; but he has two critiques which, if correct, are substantive. One is about how we make statements that, in his view, are excessively general and imprecise. Michael has dealt with this in his own response here:

Responding to a It's Good to Be a Man Review

The other is a theological problem; or more correctly, a symbolic problem. Hence my posting it here. Although Michael did respond to it, I would like to say more than he has. Unlike him, I do not think chapter 5 of our book is problematic at all; I think it is the linchpin of our thesis. I would not rewrite it, but rather expand it, because it articulates a core biblical doctrine which has been essentially forgotten by modern Christianity — which I think is why Damico is having trouble understanding it. He has gotten the wrong end of a stick that I have become convinced is fundamental to reforming our churches and our nations.

(This is not a casual observation — I put my money where my mouth is with the work I am doing here at True Magic, and it is integral in my preaching also; see for example my sermon series on The Nature of the Church & Our Worship and Repentance & Transforming the Mind.)

Given the foundational theological significance of Damico’s misunderstanding, I want to respond more fully. He writes:

If I understand the claims correctly, Foster and Tennant argue that the distinction between men and women is akin to the distinction between Creator and creature. Why is this problematic? Because the distinction between God and his creation is absolute — there is an ontological chasm between God and man that finds no parallel among image bearers. Further, the Creator-creature distinction, in addition to highlighting the superiority of God over his creation, actually accentuates the similarities between men and women, not their differences: both bear the divine image, both are given the creation mandate, and both reside on the “creature” side of the distinction. 

It is, therefore, a misuse of the Creator-creature distinction to say that it is imaged in the difference between men and women.

In one sense, this is a frustrating critique because it simply ignores the careful steps of reasoning we work through in chapter 5 to prove the overt biblical parallels between masculine and feminine, and creator and creation. (It also ignores that we draw on the great minds of both Peter Jones and Bill Mouser, to prove that better men than us have come to exactly the same conclusions.)

In another sense, it is an understandable critique, because modern Christianity essentially has no category for symbolic theology — so trying to make symbolic arguments often just looks like confusing nonsense to people. They simply don’t have a mental model to make sense of it.

So let me try to correct the mistake here:

Our argument is not ontological. We are rather making an explicitly symbolic claim: that male/female is an image of creator/creature. A symbol is a visible expression of an invisible reality.

If this does not seem an obvious or theologically significant point, I would direct you to the groundwork you need here:

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Seven things that are essential for understanding God’s creation & our place in it, but seem completely insane to the modern mind

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Now, it is certainly true that the reality being symbolized is ontological. It is not merely relational/covenantal, as Damico seems to want; indeed, we don’t see how the relationship between creator and creation, or Christ and church, could be separated from its ontology! But we are not collapsing the image into the ontology. We are not suggesting that because male and female image this ontology, therefore male and female are similarly ontologically distinct — that male is infinitely, or even somewhat superior to female. That simply doesn’t follow. Male and female share a common ontology: that being human nature itself.

(Ontological concerns seem to be rife whenever sexual theology is discussed. But despite the hifalutin’ terminology, there is nothing especially hard about distinguishing between our shared human ontology, and the ontologically distinct forms of it. There is a human nature, and there is a male human nature and a female human nature. If you think there’s something troubling or contradictory about this, I think you have yet to come to grips with how deep and paradoxical God’s world is, and I hate to wonder what happens when you face genuinely difficult ontological questions, like those of Trinitarianism or Christology. This remark is not directed toward Damico, but rather many other potential readers whose charity I have sadly learned to doubt.)

To return to the issue, our argument is not only symbolic rather than ontological, but is also drawn directly from scripture. Paul tells us straight up: when men reject the creator/creature distinction, for this reason God gives them up to rejecting the male/female distinction (Romans 1:25–27). There is a tight logical connection here. But what is it? Why does Paul draw this inference? Matt does not engage with the question at all. But the logic is clear: sexual monism follows in Paul’s mind from religious monism, because the latter is symbolic of the former. Men image in their bodies and behavior the spiritual patterns of their religion.

In making this connection, Paul himself is drawing on a presupposition found throughout the scriptures, grounded in Genesis:

These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth when they were created, in the day that Yahweh God made earth and heaven… And Yahweh God formed man of the dirt of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul. (Ge 2:4, 7).

Why is Adam depicted as the generation — the offspring — of the heavens and the earth? It is actually not that complicated. He is physically formed from the earth, the dirt, the ground — which is his mother. And he is spiritually formed from heaven, from God — who is his father. This is not paganism, which destroys the creator/creature distinction, and so would have a father god physically procreating with a mother earth. It is biblical symbolic realism, in which the infinite creator condescends to join heaven and earth in a fruitful union. Adam is the union of heaven and earth; the point at which they connect. Spirit from above, inhabiting dirt, from below. Matter hosting spirit. The symbolic union of masculine and feminine as patterns.

The concept of “Mother Earth” is no more pagan than the concept of Father God. It is explicit in scripture, as the womb and the earth are described interchangeably:

For thou didst form my inwards:
Thou didst knit me in my mother’s belly.
I will confess thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made:
Wonderful are thy works;
And that my soul knoweth right well.
My skeleton was not hidden from thee,
When I was made in secret,
Curiously wrought in the lower part of the earth. (Ps 139:13–15)

In the same way, Job says, “Naked came I forth from the womb of my mother, and naked I shall turn back thither” (Job 1:21). Obviously he was not expecting to return to the womb — he is echoing the language of the curse, knowing he will return to the symbolically feminine earth: “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dirt thou art, and unto dirt shalt thou return” (Gen 3:19; cf. Ec 5:15).

As we explain in Androgyny is literally paganism, which in turn expands and applies some of IGTBAM chapter 5:

The upshot is this: the principle of male and female does not originate in Adam and Eve. It originates in God and creation. Adam is the first offspring, the generation, of heaven and earth (Gen 2:4). At the macroscopic scale, there is a masculine pattern in heaven, and a feminine pattern in the earth—representing the creator/creature distinction. And that pattern is recapitulated at the microcosmic scale in Adam and Eve.

So what happens when you consciously reject the distinction between God and creation? What happens when you start believing that God and the cosmos are ultimately the same thing? What happens when you start treating the cosmos as divine, believing that all the created order, all the natural divisions in the world, are mere expressions of a single, unified, deified reality? What happens when you try to religiously remove the infinite divide between the creator and the created, and worship what is made instead of its maker?

You start to follow your father the devil in confusing, denying, and ultimately trying to obliterate the image of that divide in the human realm. You start to sacralize androgyny.

This is actually basic biblical symbolism, which is why it is somewhat demoralizing to see teachers in the church fail so completely to grasp it. It should be obvious that human male and female are symbols of a prior spiritual pattern of masculine and feminine. It should be obvious that this prior pattern is also exemplified in creator/creation. So it should be obvious that the hierarchical, spiritual, and physical distinctions between men and women are symbolic of the distinction between creator and creation. As should it be obvious that symbols must not be confused with, or collapsed into, the ontology they symbolize.