Journal: Eikon
Volume: EIKON 01:2 (Fall 2019)
Article: Creation And Discrimination: Why The Male-Female Distinction Makes A Difference
Author: Colin J. Smothers

Eikon 1:2 (Fall 2019) p. 9

Creation And Discrimination:
Why The Male-Female Distinction Makes A Difference

Colin J. Smothers

Colin Smothers serves as Executive Director of the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood and Associate Pastor at Kenwood Baptist Church in Louisville, KY.

World-renowned historian William Manchester could write in 1993 that “the erasure of the distinctions between the sexes is not only the most striking issue of our time, it may be the most profound the race has ever confronted.”1 Twenty-six years later, it is difficult to overstate just how prescient Manchester’s statement was. The attempt to erase the distinctions between the sexes has not only accelerated apace in the ensuing decades, it has evolved and eked into nearly every realm of contemporary life. How should we think about the inevitable confrontation before us? The task at hand is proper discrimination, the drawing of distinctions, and this according to God’s original design.

Eikon 1:2 (Fall 2019) p. 10

Creational Normativity

Written into the creation account is a self-understanding that the depiction of God’s creative acts in Genesis 1 and 2 is not merely an accountant’s schedule — as if supplying a rote list of things God created is the primary aim. Instead, the creation account communicates a morally normative narrative whose aim is to illustrate God’s revealed will for the world — not only in the what of creation and its order, but also in the how. The norming nature of this narrative can be seen most clearly when the author of Genesis breaks the fourth wall and looks into the camera, as it were, to prescribe a normative definition of marriage: “Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh” (Gen. 2:24). In saying “therefore,” the author grounds his “Thou shalt” for marriage in the foregoing narrative of God’s creation of man and woman.

The New Testament everywhere confirms the morally normative nature of Genesis 1 and 2; for instance, when Jesus counters the teaching of the Pharisees on divorce, he appeals — seemingly against Moses and the Law — to these initial chapters in Genesis. In so doing, he articulates a normative hermeneutical principle: “from the beginning it was not so” (Matt. 19:3–9). In other words, God’s original creation presents what ought — and by implication what ought not �...