In her new book, Malestrom: Manhood Swept into the Currents of a Changing World (Zondervan, 2015), James explores the idea of manhood, a growing issue both in the wider culture and in the church. Until now, the entire discussion has been largely reduced to Western conceptions. Instead, James shows how our culture’s narrow definitions of manhood are upended when we consider the examples of men in the Bible and Jesus’ gospel. Together, they show a whole new Kingdom-way of being male and forging men and women into the Blessed Alliance.
The Malestrom
Maelstroms—those powerful swirling whirlpools in the open seas—have been known to pull hapless fishing boats, crew, and cargo down into a deadly vortex to the ocean’s dark depths.
If the vivid image of the maelstrom seems frightening and destructive, its powers pale in comparison to the damaging currents and global reach of the malestrom. While the maelstrom that [Edgar Allan] Poe’s hero [in the short story “A Descent into the Maelstrom”] encountered poses a threat to sailors and fishermen taking occasional careless risks at sea, the malestrom’s reach is global and relentless. It isn’t overstating things to say there isn’t a man or boy alive who isn’t a target. The malestrom’s global currents can be violent and overt, but also come in subtle, even benign forms that catch men unawares. The malestrom is the particular ways in which the fall impacts the male of the human species—causing a man to lose himself, his identity and purpose as a man, and above all to lose sight of God’s original vision for his sons. The repercussions of such devastating personal losses are not merely disastrous for the men themselves, but catastrophic globally.
Historically, men have had a monopoly on positions of power and leadership in the world. They have dominated the public sphere and until recently (still in some cultures) held a virtual monopoly on education. The news is filled with their achievements, debates, and conflicts. World history and church history are largely comprised of stories of men. Even in the twenty-first century, it’s still considered breaking news and something of an anomaly when a woman appears on the global stage, as happened in the 2013 election of South Korea’s eighteenth president, Park Geun-hye. the big news was not simply that South Koreans had elected a new president and what this change means for the country’s future, relations with North Korea, and international affairs. The big news was that this president is a female—South Korea’s first—with the double distinction of being also the first woman to become the head of state in northeast Asia’s modern history.
Little wonder that soul singer James Brown belted out: “This is a man’s world!” Evidence supports his claim. Even the Bible can give the impression that we live in “a man’s world.” A good 90 percent of the characters are male, and Jesus, who of course is male, used father-son terms to describe his relationship with God—which led one evangelical leader publicly to embrace James Brown theology when he confidently asserted that Christianity has “a masculine feel.”
Even this perception reflects the destructive presence of the malestrom, for the “man’s world” mind-set is symptomatic of a world that has lost its center. The assumption that men own the stage or that the Bible gives preeminence to males over females positions men at the center. Inevitably this means men have turf to protect from each other and from women. It implies that women are to center their efforts on supporting and maintaining what God is doing through men. Women who rise to prominence today are perceived as threats; consequently, strong women in the Bible cannot be taken as exemplars for they are deemed aberrations and “exceptions to the rule.”
The pervasive impact of the malestrom is as fundamental as how one sees the world. Any meaningful discussion of what it means to be male is hopelessly off track before it even starts if questions of male/female equality or who leads and who follows become the starting point. The malestrom will outwit us, and we will be thrown off in our attempts to fill in that missing chapter if we don’t ground ourselves at the outset by asking the foundational question: Whose world is this?
The Bible doesn’t risk the possibility of our getting off to a false start. It opens by plunging a stake in the virgin ground of Planet Earth that is the basis for understanding everything that follows, including who we are and why we are here. The Bible’s story launches by proclaiming: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”
This statement is not mere rhetoric or tribal folklore and certainly is not meant to inspire scientific debate. In the field of higher education, scholars Jan Meyer and Ray Land have coined the phrase “threshold knowledge,” which refers to “core concepts that once understood, transform perception of a given subject.” We are standing on the threshold of human history, and the Bible does not leave us guessing at whose world this is or who stands at the center.
These inaugural words anchor us “in the deepest reality about which we can speak,” establishing the Creator God as the uncontested referent for all reality, including and most especially what it means to be male and female. God is at the center. Gloss over the significance of this one statement, and thereafter, everything is hurtling off course. Absolutely nothing is more important or definitive than words this Creator God will say about male and female. This “threshold knowledge” transforms everything else—our self-perception as well as our perception of gender. These first words are theological in the deepest sense of the term, because they center our attention first and foremost to the study of God and his ways.
The creation narrative is the first place we must go to recover the missing chapter. This is the world before the fall, before the brokenness, before the battle of the sexes, and before the malestrom began to distort, distract, diminish, and deprive men and boys from the high calling God entrusts to them.
The first two chapters of the Bible give us God’s original blueprints for humanity—the purest unedited version of what God had (and still has) in mind for us and for his world. This text must be given primary weight in any meaningful discussion of what it means to be male or female. If we merely employ these chapters to establish basic human equality or to argue for the primacy of male over female based on whom God created first, we will miss the big vision God is casting for his image bearers. To leap forward, as many do, to construct a theology of gender based on words of a post-fall curse or even on New Testament texts written thousands of years later, is to back into the subject from within the context of a fallen world. Such an approach is to attempt construction of an edifice without first laying the foundation.
The creation narrative escorts us back to the beginning—to the missing chapter and the world as God envisioned it. This is where God is defining kingdom strategies, identifying realms, and empowering all creatures great and small (and even celestial bodies) to fulfill their divine callings. This is where the Creator speaks powerful governing statements that define what it means to be human and that hardwire into his sons an indestructible identity, meaning, and purpose that even the malestrom is powerless to undo. Ironically, instead of diminishing Adam or any man-child born subsequently, the Bible’s inaugural statement will have an extraordinary exalting effect on what it means to be a man or a woman.
The above excerpt is from Malestrom: Manhood Swept into the Currents of a Changing World. Copyright © 2015 by Carolyn Custis James. Used by permission of Zondervan. www.zondervan.com. All rights reserved. Taken from pp. 17-18 and 39-42.
Bio: Carolyn Custis James (MA, Biblical Studies) travels extensively as a popular speaker for women’s conferences, churches, colleges, seminaries, and other Christian organizations. Her ministry organization, WhitbyForum, promotes thoughtful biblical discussion to help men and women serve God together. Carolyn founded and is president of the Synergy Women’s Network. She is a consulting editor for Zondervan’s Exegetical Commentary Series on the New Testament and author of Lost Women of the Bible, When Life and Beliefs Collide, and Half the Church. Carolyn and her husband live in Sellersville, Pennsylvania. They have one grown daughter.