Tim Keller, Allender and Longman need a refresher course in biology.
This passage is from the Redlands Community Church When You Say “I do” pamphlet by Timothy Keller and Jeffery White, 2009, page 48. They cite Allender and Longman’s book, Intimate Allies, 1995. So, first off, I want to admit that this is a little dated. But it does closely represent the attitude of Larry Crabb in recent interviews from this past summer. BTW, I think these men identify more closely with egalitarians, so they might not realize the effect of what they are writing. Nonetheless, it is out there and needs to be dealt with.
Allender and Longman’s analysis are helpful: Men tend to reflect more of God’s power, strength and holiness. Women reflect more of God’s tenderness and mercy. A man often moves into chaos to create order, while a woman tends to shape order into a connected beauty that reflects the relational heart of God.
Their sexual acts reflect these tendencies. A man is a planter. A woman is a receiver. A man tends to see the chaos in the world and enter it in order to create, shape and form. He enters the world with strength and courage that form a new being. A woman is created with the physical and internal makeup to receive, gestate, and shape relationships out of the beauty of form.
“A man is to plant his stamp on ideas, objects, and institutions. A woman is to incubate relationships. She is to make connections. A man takes chaos and forms it into a distinct, different, ordered idea, object, or institution; a woman takes his work and draws it into a context that honors the higher principle of love. A man courageously creates, and a woman creatively shapes his creation into a lovely, relational enhancing beauty.”
Women are warriors of relationship. While men certainly desire relationship and are called to cultivate it, women are more likely to cultivate relationship both inside the marriage with their spouses and as a couple with other people.
This was written by Keller and White, citing Allender and Longman. Clearly, they have missed a basic point in biology. The man does not “form a new being.” He does not create a life form that he places in the woman so she can incubate it and gestate. This seems to be Keller’s view of sex, encouraged by Allender and Longman. Women do not exist on earth to take the work that a man had done and shape it into a thing of beauty. Women are not magicians for one thing!
Basic, freshman biology teaches us that the woman has an ovule and the man has sperm, and the sperm fertilizes the ovule so that it becomes a new life form. We can talk about the relationship between men and women in three ways:
1. Men plant the form in the woman and she incubates it.
2. Men fertilize the form which already exists in the woman, and she is then able to bring it to life.
3. The ovule and the sperm fuse to create a new life form.
Clearly, I think only the third is acceptable, although the second one is close. But none of these are an analogy for Christian community. Many all female or all male groups have done wonderful things. Many single women and single men have created works of art, beauty and utility. It does not take both a male and a female to produce material or spiritual forms or make them beautiful. It takes a male and a female to reproduce physically, and ideally, to raise a family, so each child has a parent of both sexes to attach to.
Not only am I concerned about the alienation of women from work and creativity, but also the alienation of men from beauty.
Larry Crabb’s contribution to this, is that not only does he remark on women as “capable of being entered”, but he also constrains women in very awkward ways. He writes, when asked if he is egalitarian or complementarian,
That question doesn’t lead one to be either egalitarian or complementarian but it does lead me toward recognizing that the opportunities for a woman are not limited, other than by her relational style. And the opportunities for a man are not limited, other than by his relational style.
I think my relational style is feminine, but what if it isn’t? What if I don’t make myself all soft and inviting and nourishing. I don’t feel like nourishing men. So then what?? What if I don’t want to be entered by a man? This language is sexual harassment already.
What is needed here is a guide book and sensitivity sessions, put on by Christian publishing houses for authors, men or women, writing about women. We are not boxes with a hole bored in the lid, we are not incubators and gestators, we are not planted by the male with a new being, we do not exist for the single and dedicated purpose of nurturing men, and shaping their creations. Something is desperately needed here. Even Dan Allender admits this need, as he writes about women, in a work pamphlet for his course,
Dan mentions one of the biggest challenges women sometimes experience is failure to utilize their voice, becoming silent in the midst of conflict or to the other extreme, becoming cruel.
How on earth can a woman do anything else, when confronted by the notion that she exists purely to shape male creations while the man makes order out of chaos, and puts his stamp on ideas, objects and institutions? And if a woman does not accept this, she is not relationally feminine?
There are very serious problems about the way these men have expressed themselves in the past about women. Someone needs to let them know that it is time to send out signals that they recognize that women are fully human, just like them. The work a woman does is as important as the work a man does. (For goodness sake!) Its sad because there should not be this enormous, gaping chasm between men and women in the Christian community. But there is. (Except here on this blog, of course, where we all love each other!)
Soon it will be time for women to make a case of sexual harassment against men who write in this way. I feel my whole body recoil as I read this kind of thing. If these men have progressed in their thinking recently, and no longer hold these views, that would be great. I hope they let us know.
BLT 
They reflect, of course, a popular medieval view of human reproduction, which still can be found in some modern expressions of medieval philosophy (I have seen similar presentations in some recent Chassidic writings, for example.) This world-view arguably had its intellectual peak in Nicolaas Hartsoeker’s animacule observations. (For those who forget the scientific history of optics, Hartsoeker claimed to view tiny homunculi inside human spermatozoa through his newly invented barrel microsocope.)
However, I do not believe “planter/receiver” terminology will have much of a future among most American Evangelical communities — it too quickly brings to mind contemporary “pitcher/catcher” slang.
You mean “pitcher/catcher?” Your comment about the homunculi is interesting. I had heard it but forgot.
But this terminology has been around for a good deal of time, for pehaps 2 decades if not more. Remember Dan Wallace used the language of “responder” in his Biblical Gynecology series. I asked him to changed the title, and he did not, but later a male blogger asked him to take down the title and he did. Of course, he still calls women responders, except of course, women like me who are rebellious and don’t respond, but tend to initiate at times. But you can see that he would not, as a man, respond to a request by a woman.
Tim Keller has a lot of traction also and growing. I do think that it will not change until women take action. I would never put up with this in my workplace!
Thanks for your correction (which I have used to update my comment). I originally had it right, but had an HTML error, and then when I went to correct it, I put in the wrong terminology. I think it is right now, though ….
I suspect that you are right that these individuals will not change their underlying views, but terminology changes all the time. Unfortunately, the Evangelical community does not have any prophet who can change church opinion overnight.
My wife and I met Dan Allender at a conference he was leading. (Some friends of ours bought us the tickets to go with them to it.) I’m pretty sure you are correct to say that he would “identify more closely with [us] egalitarians.” There is a point, nonetheless, where he also “might not realize the effect” of what he’s co-written with his Bible scholar friend Tremper Longman III.
There does need to be some care taken with quotations and summaries and characterizations.
For example, in the brochure you link to, the following appears as a paragraph right before the first four-paragraph bit you show us:
Those who’ve read Carol Gilligan’s works, even her most famous, In a Different Voice , will know that she focuses on difference in her research. Outside of the academy, we hear people popularly referring to her as the mother of “difference feminism.” In studies of feminisms, nonetheless, there is acknowledged quite a spectrum of consequential work from various researchers that fall under the umbrella “difference feminism.” The general opposition within feminisms to such is another group of scholars and writers whose scientific and / or philosophic research gets called “equality feminism.” (Here’s a draft paper posted by Political Scientist Dr. Nadine Changfoot on this whole issue.)
So if we jump out of the brochure that summarizes Allender and Longman summarizing Gilligan, then we see more of what these two male authors are up to. And we can pay attention to their language.
In Intimate Allies (which I’ve read), they characterize Gilligan as being different from feminists. In fact, on page 152, they infer that she is scientific vs. feministic (and the bold font here indicates my emphases):
They go on to provide a few direct quotations from In a Different Voice. And they conclude their “scientific” section with something very interesting. It’s interesting mainly because Allender’s work has, at times, focused on recovery from abuse, especially sex abuse perpetrated by adults on children.
So, right after he sums up and quotes from Gilligan (as a scientist, not presumably one of those radical feminists who distort philosophically — a mis-characterization of inference indeed!), Allender writes this:
Well, that’s quite a statement. Difference is everything here. Am I quoting Allender and Longman correctly?
What is flawed here is the thinking that feminists are different and their causes are different: in essence radical and distorting and lacking in research and unscientific.
What is dangerous is to keep different the sin of men and the symptoms of the sin of men from the sin of women. What if Nature is not the cause of such difference? What if, as feminists who are mild or moderate or radical sometimes suspect, it is a sort of social construct of difference that is largely responsible for what appears to be, and is simply what Allender and Longman merely claim there must be, “a fundamental rather than merely sociological difference”? What if both the sex violence of men and the struggles of women (that these two men identify as they parse out difference) are causally related to binary thinking? What if, as Nancy Mairs says, “the fundamental structure of patriarchy is binary“?
I disagree. Studies that cross cultures show that in some cultures women have the moral ethics that men have here, and women vice versa. I have read lots of scientific data and been friends with cross cultural psychologists all my life, and I just don’t agree with all this difference. Of course, there is difference, but is it fundamental? Is it hard wired? No, I think this is just an excuse to reject feminism.
In real life, I am a pretty toned down, ordinary little woman who taught special needs kids, and sews and knits, but I like lots of typically masculine things to0, and am task oriented. I don’t want to be shoved into a relational box. But lots of women disagree with me. However, I have been reading cross cultural psych stuff all my life, so I am not saying this from a biased, feminist viewpoint, but from a scientific one and a lifetime of listening to psych reports.
I agree that there are differences, as Gottman outlines, but he does not go on to extrapolate into all areas. He does emphasize the “emotional flooding” which men experience and may lead to more violence. That may be biological. But I think all this stuff about men being after a “great dream,” and women not so much, is just diminishing to real women.
I can understand Mairs better, but I think some of it is still cultural.
You know, I really my husband’s “great dream” — the thing he wanted, and wants, most in life– is foundationally relational. His primary value is having a family, a wife and kids. And he certainly is masculine!
All of this stuff is, consciously or unconsciously, patriarchal in perspective. Why do we say a man “plants” and a woman “receives” instead of that a woman “encompasses” and a man “is encompassed”? No other reason than that the male way of looking at sexual relations is considered the default. But the idea that men are creative while women simply organize what the man creates is fundamentally unsound. Since the nature of God is Creator, to remove creativity from women is to say they are less in the image of God, and therefore less human, than men. Dorothy Sayers’ book “Are Women Human?” makes it clear that throughout the generations, the impulse of the man has been to answer, “No, or at least, not as human as I am.” The creativeness of the man should therefore be turned to forming a new attitude that says “Yes, she is just as human, and just as creative, as I am.”
“Difference” and “equality” cannot be merely scientific or objective. The categories of “man” and “woman” or “female” and “male,” for example, are always fuzzy, subjective, and in the eye of the beholder.
An analogy is the physics of color and the phenomenon of color terms. The famous Berlin and Kay studies, crossing cultures and languages, get at this. If anything is “obvious” in “Nature,” then it is the spectrum of colors. We all recognize color (and understand color blindness and even complete unsightedness). There is a reality to the hues. But is green “different” from blue? Can we native speakers of Vietnamese distinguish between them although our basic color term xanh cannot? For those of us who grew up communicating using tiếng Việt, this word, and that color, is what we are forced in English to call “grue” or “bleen.” These are two equals, no difference. There are blue shades and green shades in xanh, but so what?
It's the "so what" that is the critical thing. Women can have babies; so therefore women must in the US of A earn on average and year after recent year merely 77 pennies to each $1 each man (who, by Nature, cannot biologically have babies) earns on average. Men have penises; so therefore men must be more sexually violent toward women and children. Women must wear headcoverings and be silent in the churches – because they are not men. Men must be the popes, the priests, the pastors, the elders, the teachers of other men – because women are not men and are sooooooo different ("hard wired" and "fundamental" and "scientific" not just "sociologically" and not ever equal really as this would be in the subjective eyes of those feminists, radical, philosophists). Suzanne, You make such a good point about crossing cultures to help us all see that, of course, there's difference, but in many ways and among many peoples of many eras of history, "so what"?
Pearl S. Buck, who also was named 賽珍珠 (Sài Zhēnzhū), correctly did "not believe there is any important difference between men and women." She also wrote "If the white, Gentile, adult male believes that his nation is a democracy, let him remember that there are others — and perhaps nearer to him than he knows or cares to believe — to whom he appears only as a dictator." One can only wonder if Ms. Buck was also able to see these things "equalities" and "differences" because she was – as she claimed – "mentally bifocal"; in other words, she was able to live in "my several worlds," including that "small, white, clean Presbyterian world of my parents," and that "big, loving merry not-too-clean Chinese world."
I read another interesting tidbit today. A Harvard study in 2009 concluded that one of the main barriers to women in leadership had to do with the relationships men find it easier to “incubate” (using Keller and White’s word) among business associates. It is not that men don’t “incubate relationships” – it’s that the woman’s time and other constrictions (she still does the vast majority of the housework and childcare even when she’s in the business world) tend to keep her relationships centered in the home and family.
The idea that women are relational while men are creational is thus entirely false. The difference is in the nexxus of power in where the relationships are primarily cultivated.
Thanks for all your comments. It is the kind of thing one can offer endless opinions on.
I think the best women can do is ask for equal treatment. Some people also see the sexes benefit by having differences taken into consideration. for example, more women in the workplace want time off to care for children and parents, but i am aware of more men moving into this role as well.
i don’t like Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus, but a young man told me recently that he had read the book and everything came clear to him. He is now very happy in his marriage. His view is that if he doesn’t always understand his wife, that’s okay, we’re normal. They seem happy. i didn’t criticize the book to him.
There are physiological and cultural differences which are huge, but when I interact with men I don’t know, I expect them to treat me as someone who has the same goals in life as men, to generate one’s own ideas, to communicate and dialogue on par with others, to contribute and interact as equals. That’s the fun of being here. We are as bloggers more alike than we are different. We love systematizing and obscure posts that may or may not relate to anyone else. Of course, I see myself as culturally feminine, but only a portion of my posts fit into that characterization.
I think that the issue is that these writers are dealing with a subject deeper than biology. They are addressing spiritual issues that are beyond what you are referring to as freshman biology. As a woman, who has some feminist tendencies myself, i do not take issue with their assessment, rather, I believe they are giving dignity to women and men and the interrelationship of their roles in love, relationships and life.
Sheila,
Timothy J. Keller and Jeffery O. White write the following in the pamphlet Suzanne has quoted from:
Aren’t they referring to biology if going beyond it?
“A taste of the character of God is found in sexual foreplay, heightened arousal, orgasm and quiescence. God is a God of passion. He . . . “?
Suzanne, when you say “I feel my whole body recoil as I read this kind of thing.” It sounds like there are some deeper issues here with you that you are not addressing. I know being a feminist is a noble cause in our post-modern society, but it also is a defense mechanism that can block allowing God to penetrate deeper into our souls and reveal something that needs to be addressed. I heartily disagree with how you have interpreted Allender, Longman, and Keller. Granted I disagree with most modern feminist assertions, but I can do so without it calling forth something in me that might bias me from learning from others or prevent me from personal growth.
Dear Ms. D. Hawxhurst,
Please know that Ms. McCarthy passed away earlier this year:
https://bltnotjustasandwich.com/2015/06/16/suzanne-mccarthy-sad-news/
She would have been happy, I imagine, that you were interested in what she was not addressing and might have been amused that you saw her as first and foremost “being a feminist.” She would have chuckled at “feminism” itself as being a defense mechanism against the work of God upon ones soul, perhaps. Once in a comment after her post at one of her blogs, she did write, to try to clarify, “I am a feminist in that I believe that women should have equal rights. I don’t know why someone would give up that belief.” And yet to put Christianity and Feminism together in the title of another post spoke to her understanding of feminisms of various sorts for different peoples: http://powerscourt.blogspot.com/2007/12/feminism-and-christianity.html. In the book she was writing, I’m not sure feminism per se figures at all. It would have been really nice if you and she could have talked privately about these sorts of things. Sometimes, as you suggest here to her in public, what goes on personally is not always all one desires to address. If only we all understood how profound our own individual biases. Thank you for taking time to comment.
Sincerely,
J. K. Gayle
D. Hawxhurst, I don’t know whether you are a man or a woman, and I can’t speak for Suzanne, who is in a place where such things can no longer hurt her, but I don’t know why it would be surprising for a woman’s “whole body [to] recoil” at the idea that she is essentially a receptacle, that she is there to receive whatever men give her– particularly in light of what has also been mentioned here about the percentage of abusers who are men! Women who don’t feel any recoil at such a thought perhaps have not thought through the implications of these statements, or the results of certain kinds of real men believing them in the real world.
As for bias– we all have bias. Your own bias may have something to do with the fact that youare not emotionally moved at the idea that women don’t (can’t) have original creativity of their own, but can only take what men create and “shape” it. As a woman, this implication that I am less human than a man does emotionally move me, because it affects my self-image as a woman and a creative (I hope!) writer in a way it may not affect you.
There is no reason to assume that Suzanne’s bias was such that it prevented her from “learning from others or personal growth.” Such an assumption may reveal another bias of your own.
J.K. Gayle and Krwordgazer: I occasionally browse my mothers posts on this blog, when I am particularly missing her, or needing to hear her voice in her writing and discussions mostly with you two, and a few others. As you can imagine, it is hard to read some comments, like the above by D. Hawxhurst. I want to thank you for being her ever faithful friends. Many Thanks.
It may also interest you to know that Jay is working hard to finish the editing of her book.
Dear Helen,
Your mother, as you know so well, was very thoughtful to give time even to those who trolled her blogposts and who disparaged her views. What Ms. Hawxhurst neglects and what she therefore may find herself missing is your mother’s engagement with her online in ways that gets all of us thinking better. I am sad you miss her. When I was missing my father, who had fought cancer but lost, she emailed me to sympathize and to empathize and to encourage me as she herself was struggling:
Thanks for sharing the good update on her book as Jay works on completing the editing.
As I did last year, I will think of you and your sibling and Jay’s children again this year on Mother’s Day! And here’s where your mother once blogged about her mother (and notice how she engages with and gives sympathy to the one commenting at the end). This is a good place to “hear her voice in her writing”:
https://powerscourt.blogspot.com/2006/05/theology-and-sphere-of-women.html
Sincerely,
Kurk (aka J. K. Gayle)