Masculinity? - Introduction

Every Mother's Day our church holds it's baby dedication service. This is the day that all babies born into the church since the last Mother's Day can be dedicated by the parents for service to the Lord. We, the parents, make a vocal assurance that we will raise up our child (who is fearfully and wonderfully made) in the commands and statutes of God. Is it symbolic? Yes. Is it necessary? No. It's something Michele and I already committed to do. And yes over the years, the whole baby baptism vs. baby dedication thing has become just a "rite of passage" and something parents do to comfort themselves and their families.

But I think that a celebration of life is important and an event like that offers the parents a chance to contemplate just what kind of challenge is before them. It's easy to get caught up in the emotion of the day and making sure everything goes just right and "please do not let junior cry while the Pastor lays hands on him, show he is normal." But it is up to the parents to lock in on this chance and put some thought into what they are truly saying. This monumental task of raising a child and having it turn out normal is paramount. Everybody draws on their own experience of how their parents were. Whether we do as they did or opposite of what they did. Ultimately we blend the do and do not into some sort of ratio.

For me, being raised with virtually no father figure for the first 8 years of my life and then being raised with a tyrannical ogre as a father figure for the next 8 years has really put a gap into my confidence of how I am going to raise my son. I can see the effects of both gaps (effeminacy namby-bamby and "macho-like") in my life in the way I handle my life and the direction it takes with my family in tow. To put it out there, I want my son to be masculine. Masculine in every sense of the way Jesus, David, Moses, and John the Baptist were. To be a man. To walk the line between effeminacy and macho. Through some lengthy discussions, a lot of reading of specific books, and contemplation on some of this subject matter I've developed a somewhat thought process to this. I will lay some of it out here and in subsequent postings. Feel free to add to the conversation.



We live in a feminist and effeminate culture. Because of this, at best, as a people we are uneasy with masculinity, and with increasing regularity, whenever it manages to appear somehow, we call for someone to do something about it.

There are 2 basic directions a boy can take in departing from biblical masculinity. One is the option of effeminacy, and the other is a macho-like counterfeit masculinity. With the former, he takes as a model a set of virtues which are not supposed to be his virtues. With the latter, he adopts a set of pseudo-virtues, practices which are not virtues at all.

When God has assigned a place to someone, it is disobedience to desert that station. A woman is no coward for refusing to desert her children in order to enlist in the army to go off and fight in a war. But a man who refuses to fight can be charged (depending on the circumstances) with cowardice. This same pattern can be seen in all the little things of life. A man is not supposed to stand around when its important to exercise leadership. A woman might be called to simply wait for her husband to make a decision. But a man who waits around for someone to decide is abdicating his assigned role.

Of course a biblical man is to be kind and gentle, but the model for this is to be (ultimately) the Lord Jesus, and in conjunction with this, the teaching of Scripture. The overarching model for this is not our composite cultural picture of what an accomodating male looks like. When distortions occur, they can veer left into effeminacy, or right into a counterfeit masculinity.

Manhood is where boyhood should aim. So what is masculinity? What are we looking for when we describe manhood according to the Bible?

Here is what I think...

Men are created to exercise dominion over the earth; they are fitted to be husbandman, tilling the earth; they are equipped to be saviors, delivering from evil; they are expected to grow up into wisdom, becoming sages; and they are designed to reflect the image and glory of God. To satisfy our "list culture:"

• lords
• husbandmen
• saviors
• sages
• glory-bearers

Honestly, my thought process on these is not detailed at all. I do not think I could make a detailed case for any of these roles. But I have a rough outline and some description to show the features of each. I think I can also show how each one is manifested in the life of boys.

Most of the subsequent posts are done, but my anal-retentive ways do not allow me to post them all right now. Every couple days allows me to pour over them and re-edit and re-type and then finally post them. They are all kind of short for now. They will probably stay that way. I'm not long winded. They may grow or shrink. But I look forward to hopefully some fruitful discussion and a definite growing experience for me.

Next up - Lords