Manhood and womanhood

“So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.”

— Genesis 1:27 (ESV)

Manhood and womanhood names the doctrine that God created every human being as one of two sexes, male and female, both equally bearing his image (Gen. 1:27), a bodily distinction that is good and given rather than incidental or self-chosen. Two people so different together constitute a single image of God; how much that difference dictates about role in marriage and the church is answered differently by the complementarian and egalitarian positions. A newer, distinct dispute asks whether sex is even a fixed bodily reality at all, rather than a social construct subordinate to an inward “gender identity.”¹

Confessional Witness

The Second London Baptist Confession states, in language it shares verbatim with the Westminster Confession and the Savoy Declaration, that after making every other creature,

“he created man, male and female, with reasonable and immortal souls… being made after the image of God, in knowledge, righteousness, and true holiness.”²

The confession settles the fact of the two sexes and their shared image-bearing without adjudicating what, if anything, follows from that difference for role in marriage or the church; that question belongs to complementarianism and egalitarianism’s own confessional engagement, not to this chapter.

Biblical Basis

One image, two sexes

Genesis presents the divine image as borne jointly: “God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them” (Gen. 1:27), and both together receive the same commission to “have dominion” over the rest of creation (Gen. 1:26, 28). Neither sex bears the image alone or more fully than the other.

Distinct, and made for union

Genesis 2 slows to narrate the second sex’s creation specifically. Man’s aloneness, not mere loneliness, is what God names “not good” (Gen. 2:18); Ken Magnuson observes that the “fuller context of Genesis 2 suggests that the woman is provided as a helper for more than companionship,” a good in its own right rather than only a remedy for isolation.³ Formed from Adam’s own side, the woman draws his exclamation, “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh” (Gen. 2:23). The text then names the result: “the two shall become one flesh” (Gen. 2:24), one flesh precisely because they began as two.

Jesus’s own appeal to creation

Jesus grounds marriage in these two texts read together, not in surrounding custom: “Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’?” (Matt. 19:4-5). Colin Smothers reads this as Jesus fusing Genesis 1 and 2 into a single point: “our maleness and femaleness bear witness to their complement in the other by design, a complementarity that finds meaning in the institution of marriage and family.”⁴

A sign of Christ and the church

Paul reads the “one flesh” union itself as pointing further still, quoting Genesis 2:24 and adding: “This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church” (Eph. 5:31-32). The distinction and union of the sexes is a creation ordinance, and Paul reads it as a sign built into creation itself of Christ’s own union with his people.

Historical Development

The early church against Gnostic denial of the body

Second-century Gnostic teachers described the flesh as base and disposable: “unclean from its first formation… worthless, weak, covered with guilt.”⁵ Tertullian’s On the Resurrection of the Flesh answered that a lowly origin does not diminish the body’s worth: “the privilege has been granted to the flesh to be nobler than its origin.”⁵ Because body and soul are so united that “they cannot then be separated in their recompense,”⁶ the flesh is not a disposable shell around a “real” self elsewhere, but is itself included in the promise of resurrection. Meagan Stedman argues this patristic response to Gnosticism bears on a modern claim as well: both the ancient Gnostic and the view that a person’s “real” self and sex can come apart from the body treat the body as an accident the true self merely inhabits.⁷

From a dispute over role to a dispute over reality

American evangelicalism’s twentieth-century debate over manhood and womanhood, carried at complementarianism, egalitarianism, and feminism, concerned what role, if any, follows from the sexes’ difference; it did not doubt that the difference itself was a fixed bodily fact. Mark Saucy traces a later and more radical turn in the broader culture, an “anti-essentialist” trajectory running from Simone de Beauvoir’s 1949 claim that “one is not born a woman but becomes one” to a point where, in many circles, “even male and female bodies were irrelevant to one’s gender identity.”¹ Where complementarianism and egalitarianism disagree about what sex difference means for role, this newer position disputes the difference’s own fixity.

Opposing Views

Within the older debate, egalitarianism holds that Scripture assigns no role distinction to the sexes even though it treats their difference as bodily fixed; complementarianism holds that Scripture assigns distinct roles precisely because that difference is real. Both positions are argued fully at their own articles.

A newer position denies the premise both share. Describing the view often called transgenderism, Meagan Stedman quotes Oliver O’Donovan’s account of it: “the body is an accident that has befallen the real me; the real me has a true sex, male or female; and I know immediately what that true sex is without anyone needing to tell me.”⁸ On this view, a person’s bodily sex and their true self can come apart. Saucy describes this as the far end of a decades-long “anti-essentialist” current in which bodily sex itself, not only social role, comes to be treated as constructed rather than given.¹

Objections and Responses

Scripture’s words for “male” and “female” name social gender roles, which can be revised, not a fixed biological fact. Smothers responds that the Hebrew terms Genesis uses, zakar and neqebah, denote biological sex throughout the Old Testament: “There is no case I can see in the Bible where either term is used in reference to gender rather than sex.”⁴ The distinction Scripture draws at creation is bodily, not merely social.

Insisting on a fixed sex binary flattens the real differences of personality and temperament found within each sex. Saucy’s own proposal takes that concern seriously rather than dismissing it: a biblical account of the sexes, he argues, must be “sensitive to both the sexuality of the body as well as the relationality of the soul,” not the body alone.⁹ Variation within each sex is real; on his account, it does not unsettle the more basic difference between the two sexes themselves.

Related Doctrines

References

Mark Saucy, “The Future of Difference: Evangelicals and Gender Essentialism,” Themelios 50, no. 1 (2025): 13. ↩ ↩² ↩³
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (London, 1677), chap. 4, “Of Creation,” para. 2. ↩
Ken Magnuson, “7. Marriage and Sexuality,” in Invitation to Christian Ethics: Moral Reasoning and Contemporary Issues (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Academic, 2020). ↩
Colin J. Smothers, “The Image of God and the Plight of Man,” Themelios 49, no. 3 (2024): 560. ↩ ↩²
Tertullian, On the Resurrection of the Flesh, quoted in Meagan Stedman, “‘Ancient Gnosticism in New Garb?’ Gnostic Anthropology, Transgenderism, and a Response from Tertullian,” Themelios 50, no. 1 (2025): 33. ↩ ↩²
Tertullian, quoted in Stedman, “Ancient Gnosticism in New Garb?,” 34. ↩
Stedman, “Ancient Gnosticism in New Garb?,” 28-29. ↩
Oliver O’Donovan, quoted in Stedman, “Ancient Gnosticism in New Garb?,” 35. ↩
Saucy, “The Future of Difference,” 14. ↩