Journal: Eikon
Volume: EIKON 07:2 (Fall 2025)
Article: "From The Archives:" The Distinction Between Man And Woman
Author: Herman Bavinck

Eikon 7.2 (Fall 2025) p. 16

From The Archives:
The Distinction Between Man And Woman

Herman Bavinck

At the turn of the twentieth century, Dutch theologian Herman Bavinck (1854–1921) found himself confronted by a society increasingly hostile to human flourishing according to divine design. Sufficiently alarmed, he busied himself with a counteroffensive, which has been passed down to the anglophone world under the title, The Christian Family. The family was in trouble, and one of the most influential theologians of the Christian era unsheathed his pen in defense knowing it was a matter of civilizational life or death.1

What Bavinck wrote then is just as relevant today, so in this issue on anthropology,

Eikon 7.2 (Fall 2025) p. 17

we share his section on “The Distinction Between Man and Woman” as an exemplary handling of biblical anthropology, which exalts in God’s good design in creating humans in his image male and female.2

The Distinction Between Man And Woman

The Following Text Is Excerpted From Herman Bavinck, The Christian Family

Nevertheless, we can both underestimate and overestimate this distinction. The first defect often hobbled people in previous centuries. In practice people frequently viewed the woman as a being of lower order than the man, and theoretically people often denied her the status of being fully human. Over against that view, we must maintain, with the help of Scripture which alone supplies an explanation regarding the origin and essence of a human being, that both man and woman are created in God’s image, and that therefore both are human beings in the fullest sense of the term. The second chapter of Genesis presents the woman especially as a helper suitable for the man, but let us not forget that this chapter has been preceded by the first chapter of Genesis. Here we read that God created man and woman together in his image; the woman can be a helper suitable for the man only because she is his equal and reflects God’s image just as much as he does. The question that has been raised upon occasion in the past, namely, whether the woman may be called a human being, is not at all appropriate. The woman is a human being no less than the man, because she no less than he was created in God’s image. Scripture speaks in a very human way about the essence of God, but it never transfers the sexual differentiation to him; God is never portrayed or presented as being feminine. But if the woman is said to be created along with man in the image of God, then that includes the fact that the uniqueness and richness of feminine qualities no less than those of t...