Does the Bible Portray Women as Emotional and Men as Rational?
00:00:00.000 | Well, back in a 2001 Gallup poll, respondents were asked to attribute the description "emotional"
00:00:11.000 | to one of the two sexes.
00:00:12.800 | Was "emotional" truer of men or of women?
00:00:15.600 | Of course, 90% said "emotional" was truer of women.
00:00:20.240 | Surveys like this one feed an old stereotype, and it's a very old stereotype, at least as
00:00:24.100 | old as Aristotle, that says the pink brain is more emotional and the blue brain is more
00:00:29.600 | rational.
00:00:30.600 | But does such a dichotomy hold true in Scripture?
00:00:33.280 | Today's question is from an anonymous woman.
00:00:35.040 | Hello Pastor John.
00:00:36.040 | It seems there's a constant narrative in our culture here in the West that women are hyper-emotional,
00:00:40.000 | irrational, crazy, incomprehensible, and almost intrinsically unreasonable.
00:00:46.360 | Attributes such as rationality, reasonability, and emotional stability are typically attributed
00:00:50.920 | to men.
00:00:51.920 | Unfortunately, I hear this same narrative from brothers in my church.
00:00:55.520 | I often feel I can't speak up, because if I spoke up, I would just simply reinforce
00:01:00.480 | this narrative.
00:01:01.960 | So can you help me outline the problem with this narrative?
00:01:04.520 | How should a renewed mind address this caricature?
00:01:07.720 | Is emotional woman versus rational man a biblical dichotomy?
00:01:12.920 | There are three things that I might be able to squeeze into this episode that I think
00:01:16.980 | need to be said.
00:01:18.460 | Number one, this narrative is not the only one that is prominent in the West.
00:01:25.740 | Frankly, unless I'm blind as a bat, I don't live in a milieu where this narrative that
00:01:33.140 | she described is prominent at all.
00:01:36.020 | I mean, the ministries that I associate with, the church I go to, the fellowship of churches
00:01:41.800 | I'm involved with, the conferences I attend, don't think this way.
00:01:47.900 | They are resistant to that kind of caricature and stereotyping, namely that women are hyper-emotional,
00:01:54.900 | irrational, crazy, incomprehensible, while men are the models of reasonableness and emotional
00:02:00.140 | stability.
00:02:02.020 | That's just not a narrative that I live with.
00:02:04.100 | I mean, in my home, I'm Mr. Emotional, my wife is Ms. Rational.
00:02:10.180 | That's one of our problems for 49 years.
00:02:13.620 | But anyway, nor do I see this narrative as prominent in television and movies, where
00:02:21.220 | it seems to me, with my little teeny bit of exposure, perhaps in reaction to that very
00:02:29.020 | woman-demeaning narrative, the dominant narrative today in the media is that woman is equally
00:02:36.980 | irrational, equally feisty, equally brash, equally violent, equally dominant in sex,
00:02:43.380 | equally strong, equally sinful in most every way that men are.
00:02:48.060 | So I wouldn't want to give the impression that the narrative that I'm being asked to
00:02:54.540 | address is the only one that is prominent in our culture.
00:02:59.460 | But she asked for it, she sees it, she feels it, it's reality where she is, and no doubt
00:03:07.940 | not just in the West, but perhaps even more outside the West.
00:03:13.100 | So I need to say something about it, and I'm eager to, especially she asks about, "Is
00:03:21.460 | emotional woman versus rational man a biblical dichotomy?"
00:03:26.380 | So this is my second observation.
00:03:29.300 | I said I had three.
00:03:30.300 | This is number two.
00:03:31.700 | My answer to that question is no.
00:03:34.260 | That's not an emotional - I mean, that's not a biblical dichotomy.
00:03:38.660 | But when I say no, I don't mean to imply that the Bible teaches women and men are in general
00:03:47.140 | emotionally identical.
00:03:49.700 | But I'll get to that in my third point.
00:03:51.820 | Abigail in 1 Samuel 25 is clearly more cool-headed and rational in dealing with David than her
00:03:59.120 | idiot husband Nabal, whose very name means "fool," and who pouts his way emotionally
00:04:05.660 | into the grave.
00:04:07.620 | Deborah in Judges 4 has to rebuke Barak for acting foolishly in response to God's word
00:04:16.140 | about going up to battle with Sisera.
00:04:18.980 | Jail was cool-headed enough to trick careless Sisera into being drugged with a soporific
00:04:28.020 | bowl of milk so she could drive a tent peg through his skull.
00:04:31.900 | Jezebel had the ruthless, shrewd, cool rationality to trap the righteous Naboth in a plot to
00:04:40.740 | steal his vineyard so that her moping husband could get out of his self-pitying funk because
00:04:47.180 | he couldn't wah-wah-wah have some little property that he wanted.
00:04:51.540 | And the Virgin Mary—I love this contrast between Mary and Zechariah—the Virgin Mary's
00:04:59.580 | question to the angel, "How can this be?" was answered, while Zechariah's skeptical
00:05:08.020 | question about, "Whoa, we're too old to have kids," was struck dumb because God
00:05:14.300 | was so upset with his unwise response.
00:05:21.340 | So you don't find a uniform paradigm in the Bible of rational man, emotional woman.
00:05:33.960 | The place where interpreters have found this, presumably, is in 1 Timothy 2:13, where Paul
00:05:42.060 | says that Eve was deceived, not Adam, in the temptation in the Garden of Eden.
00:05:50.740 | And interpreters say, "Whoa, the reason for that is because she's emotional and
00:05:56.580 | he's rational."
00:05:57.580 | Now I think that explanation, which isn't in the text, that she's emotional and he's
00:06:03.580 | cool and rational and has everything worked out, is utterly simplistic and overlooks something
00:06:10.700 | more crucial, namely, Satan knew that God's created design was for the man to be the leader
00:06:21.380 | and the protector in this relationship with his wife, and therefore, with both of them
00:06:28.660 | present, as it makes clear in Genesis 3:6, with both of them standing there in front
00:06:34.100 | of him, Satan scorns the man's leadership and scorns God's design, and ignores the
00:06:43.860 | man, focuses all his attention on the woman, thus inverts and assaults God's plan with
00:06:51.500 | the catastrophic result of the fall of humanity into sin, and they fell together.
00:06:59.500 | Adam fell in failing to step up and face this enemy, and the woman fell as the one dealing
00:07:05.500 | directly with the tempter, which is what I think Paul had in mind when he said she was
00:07:11.620 | deceived, not the man.
00:07:13.140 | She was deceived directly as the spokesman.
00:07:17.020 | But both of them accepted the temptation.
00:07:21.300 | So the point does not seem to me to be mainly that the woman is emotionally deceivable and
00:07:28.100 | the man is rationally not, since they both yielded to the tempter.
00:07:32.460 | Rather, the point is that destructive consequences follow when God's design for manhood and womanhood
00:07:41.420 | are undermined by the devil or by culture.
00:07:47.100 | Now here's my third and last observation.
00:07:50.220 | We need to be careful in defending the rationality of womanhood and the emotional richness of
00:07:58.540 | manhood that we not fall into the trap of thinking that the only way we can have equal
00:08:07.620 | value and equal dignity and equal personhood is by having identical sameness of emotional
00:08:15.180 | tendencies and identical sameness of rational tendencies in men and women.
00:08:20.900 | I doubt very much that that is the case, that there are identical and same emotional and
00:08:29.500 | rational tendencies in male and female.
00:08:33.260 | And I say this more as a caution than a biblical conviction.
00:08:38.700 | My caution is that in our rush to defend equality, we assume sameness instead of equally valuable
00:08:49.260 | differences.
00:08:51.420 | What if women—attest this—what if women in general have kinds of nurturing tendencies
00:09:00.460 | that men don't as generally have, and what if, therefore, women in general have kinds
00:09:10.540 | of empathy that men don't as generally have, and what if, therefore, women in general have
00:09:19.740 | kinds of emotional connectedness and engagement that men don't as generally have, and what
00:09:27.860 | if, therefore, women in general bring to relationships kinds of emotional support and healing that
00:09:37.260 | men don't as generally bring?
00:09:40.580 | What fool would say—what fool would say—that this is less valuable or less precious or
00:09:51.500 | less needed in the world than any particular kinds of cool, detached rationality that men
00:10:00.620 | in general might have?
00:10:04.060 | So again, I say this is just a caution, okay?
00:10:09.280 | This is just a caution lest we throw away beautiful things, crucial things that the
00:10:18.700 | world so desperately needs from men and women in our rush to see men and women as emotionally
00:10:27.180 | and rationally identical.
00:10:29.580 | My guess is that there are innumerable differences between manhood and womanhood in general as
00:10:40.380 | God designed them, and that we are far and away the richer for it, not the poorer.
00:10:49.160 | And I think we need to labor continually to prevent these differences from being demeaned
00:10:58.340 | or discounted by using pejorative words like "hyper-emotional," "irrational," "crazy,"
00:11:07.420 | "uncomprehensible," "unreasonable."
00:11:10.500 | Those kinds of demeaning stereotypes do not enhance the vision that God has for manhood
00:11:19.340 | and womanhood at all.
00:11:21.260 | Amen.
00:11:22.260 | Thank you, Pastor John.
00:11:23.260 | That is a great way to conclude this episode and to conclude our week.
00:11:27.980 | And thank you for listening and continuing to support this podcast by listening and by
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00:11:50.560 | DesiringGod.org/AskPastorJohn.
00:11:51.560 | Well, the Bible calls Christians to make peace, to be peacemakers.
00:11:59.380 | It means we're called to the very uncomfortable ministry of entering ourselves into the conflicts
00:12:05.220 | of others.
00:12:06.740 | So when do we know when to enter ourselves into the conflicts of others?
00:12:10.820 | That's a question on the table on Monday.
00:12:12.620 | It's a good one.
00:12:13.620 | Until then, I'm your host, Tony Reinke.
00:12:15.220 | Have a great weekend.
00:12:16.220 | We'll see you on Monday.
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