Don’t Define Gender Apart from the Bible

What Does God Say?

What it means to be men and women is a really complex issue and one that's very controversial today, so we need to be really careful not to go beyond what God has said. We can do that in lots of ways. We can add to what he said about what men should be like and what women should be like. We can sometimes exaggerate what God has said and maybe take something the Bible says to a certain extent, and then we just run further with it. Or we can take a principle the Bible gives us in one area of life and we then absoluteize it and apply it everywhere else.

What God Has to Say about Our Bodies

Sam Allberry

The Bible has a lot to say about the body. Organized around three categories—creation, fall, redemption—this book by Sam Allberry provides readers with a balanced theology of the body as they seek to glorify God in everything they do.

So we need to try to learn to say what the Bible says in the way that the Bible says it, to the extent that the Bible says it, and for the same reason that the Bible says it—particularly when it comes to what it means to be men and women and the differences and similarities between us. We want to be very humble before the word of God. It is very easy—because all of us have our own inbuilt intuition about what a man should be or what a woman should be—to assume that our beliefs come to us from Scripture and to speak into those things as if we're speaking with the authority of the Bible.

We want to be very humble before the word of God.

Actually, we just need to be willing to put our own instincts and our own cultural assumptions to one side and think, What does God say about what it means to be a man and a woman? and not to go beyond that, not to subtract from it, not to add to it, and not to twist it in any way at all.

Sam Allberry is the author of What God Has to Say about Our Bodies: How the Gospel Is Good News for Our Physical Selves.

Sam Allberry is the associate pastor at Immanuel Nashville. He is the author of various books, including What God Has to Say about Our Bodies and Is God Anti-Gay?; and the cohost of the podcast You’re Not Crazy: Gospel Sanity for Young Pastors. He is a fellow at the Keller Center for Cultural Apologetics.

5 Myths about Body Image

Sam Allberry

August 03, 2021

Unrealistic standards of beauty are being pushed on us almost constantly by the media, and the cumulative effect is that it can leave us thinking about our bodies in a seriously distorted way.