Blessed are the barrel-chested
For theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are those who bench 220
For they will be comforted
Blessed are the grunters and the spitters
For they will inherit the earth
Blessed are those who hunger for angus burgers, and thirst for real ale
For they will be filled
Blessed are those who can shoot, fight, and hunt
For they will see God
Blessed are those who can chop wood
For they will be called the children of God
Blessed are the hairy, the sweaty, the musky, and the bearded
For theirs is the kingdom of God.

Not really.

There was a post on a popular Christian youth work forum earlier in the week asking for ‘manly activity’ ideas for his boys-only Bible study group. They were about to start looking at ‘biblical masculinity’ and wanted activities that supported the venture.

“Biblical masculinity.” I’d like to make war on that phrase.

The responses to this forum post were as you’d expect. A ready list came within minutes from multiple people that included fishing, shooting, camping, chopping wood, making fires, and even axe-throwing. There was also carpentry, ‘making stuff’, and life skills like how to change a tyre or grill a burger. Y’know… ‘things men do.’

My question is: from what part of the Bible do we derive at these object lessons for ‘biblical masculinity’? Why have we attached exactly these types of activities to a concept of biblical manhood?

Are we in reality propping up a cultural view of masculinity with a flighty idea of manhood that we think is in the Bible, but might not be?

Is it what the Bible says?

What we often think of as ‘biblical masculinity’ is simply not in the Bible. Instead, I believe we have arrived at a composite idea of a very particular type of manhood from various cultural perceptions throughout history. I’d even go as far to say that you can trace many of these ideas back to Homeric philosophy, and the Greek pursuit of challenging the Olympian gods through raw strength and power.

As odd as it might seem to some, many boys don’t want to be known by their aggressive prowess – and this shouldn’t be a reason for us to make them feel like any less of a man by how we program or teach on manliness.

Now, I have no problem with wood-chopping, fire-making, or even axe-throwing as youth group activities (post risk-assessment!). Sounds like fun! But I don’t see anything in the Bible to assume these should be limited just to ‘the lads.’ In fact, I’m pretty sure many of the girls in my group would enjoy these adventurous activities just as much, if not sometimes more, than the boys.

My issue is indiscriminately attaching these activities to ‘biblical masculinity.’ Frankly, I don’t believe the Bible says what we think it does about masculinity – and I think we’ve been guilty of some pretty simple interpretive mistakes in our haste to create this skewed version of manhood.

Let’s take a step back. If I asked you to go and find me the ‘biblical masculinity’ passages in the Bible – where would you go? What verses, passages, characters, or ideas come to mind? Now are they explicitly or exclusively about manhood?

Edwin Louis Cole in his best-selling ‘Maximized Manhood’ starts in 1 Cor. 10:6-9, a passage that applies to all of Israel, but Cole makes it exclusively about men. John Eldredge takes a similar approach in his successful book, ‘Wild at Heart’. He uses passages that apply to men and women equally, and then overlays them onto his particularised construct of manhood.

I’d accuse both of these authors (and others like them) of several Bible-reading errors, for instance:

1. Putting the cart before the horse – having an idea, then wedging verses in later to prove it.
2. Spring-boarding – starting with a verse, and then using a word or an idea within it to bounce off into a completely different point.

When you’ve been through books like this, however, the cumulative weight of these prooftexts, along with the ways the authors have connected them, can feel very convincing. That is until you stop yourself at each verse and ask the question: Is this actually talking about masculinity? In most of the cases, the answer is no.

Why does this matter?

Many of the traits that we assign to ‘biblical masculinity’ are simply not limited to men.

If I asked you to write down a list of traits that might be considered biblical masculine, what would it include? Have a go. I’m guessing your list, like mine, would include ideas like ‘strength’, ‘endurance’, ‘protection’ and ‘provision.’ These are important traits – but now try and find the Bible verses that tell us to pursue these virtues.

You will find verses; however, they won’t be speaking just about men.

Instead, you will find passages about parents, prophets, elders, devout followers, or those seeking holiness. You will find passages about developing childhood, engaging in worship, dealing with outsiders, or developing a healthy community.

That’s the issue with applying these traits just to men when they are linked to godliness within all of God’s people. Are we really not going to teach girls to be strong or protective? In fact, in the case of the four traits above, the only place you find them specifically linked to gender is in Prov. 31 – and that ain’t talking about men!

It’s about relationships

The problem is we have turned ‘biblical masculinity’ into what I call a ‘vacuum category’. That is something that you can build in isolation from other people. So, we become very inward focused, looking at traits like ‘healthy-strength’ or ‘self-control’ or ‘properly-directed aggression’ as if they just existed in us, regardless of whether we ever meet other people.

However, teaching on being a healthy man in the Bible is almost always (if not entirely) spoken about in relationship to another party. So, we learn about godly men because they are good husbands, or dads, or mentors, or followers of God.

This makes masculinity far less inward than we treat it. I believe we’re too concerned with ‘what a man is’ rather than ‘what a man does.’ Or, to use the language the Bible speaks in more often, ‘how a man treats others.’

Being any kind of person is importantly shown in how you treat those around you. We don’t learn about who we are in isolation and then drag-and-drop that identity into a community. Community and relationships are utterly essential to our formation. Learning about ‘biblical masculinity’ as a vacuum category of abstract traits simply doesn’t work.

This isn’t to say that the Bible doesn’t celebrate differences between men and women, I think it does. However, that sits way below a much more fundamental pursuit – and one that should colour any concept we have of masculinity. Let’s end with that.

So, is biblical masculinity dead?

No, but I think our concept of it is far too narrow and has bounced way off the court of truly being ‘biblical.’

As a rule, when the Bible doesn’t use our categories, we have to look for what categories the Bible does use and extrapolate from them. The Bible doesn’t have a cleartext theology of masculinity, but it does have a theology of leadership, of parenting, of worshipping, etc. all of which can play out differently for different types of people – men included.

These are the categories the Bible uses to help us pursue whole and healthy identities. Let’s start from there, instead, and see if we find a healthy version of masculinity within these pursuits.

The overwhelming pursuit in the Bible, then, is not manliness, (or womanliness for that matter); it’s nearness to God. This is achieved though worship, obedience, and imitation.

The godliest men I know are not pursuing manliness, they’re pursing nearness to God. This will ordinarily shape itself around how God designed them to be. Trying to do that bit first, however, is like learning to play the violin by drawing the instrument over the bow, rather than the other way around. It’s clumsy, it’s uncomfortable, and it makes crummy music!

If we want our boys to grow into fantastic men, then let’s spend less time teaching them how to be men, and more time helping them to draw near to God. It’s a far more effective tool – and it allows them to grow as they’re designed to be.

Photo by Craig McLachlan on Unsplash