Overcoming Weakness

...But the fact of bodily weakness shades a woman’s life in the world in a very unique direction. Men aren’t accustomed to think about conflict through the lens of bodily weakness. No matter how average a man we are, bodily strength is always part of our horizon of options. Not so with women. They live in a world surrounded by people who can almost always take them down in a struggle. This colors everything; thoughts about travel, work, security, and the future are judged in light of relative bodily weakness. Woman have to seek to overcome obstacles in the world not by bodily strength but by other means, namely goodness and wisdom and beauty. Women have to cultivate these virtues in ways that men cannot fathom.

But it’s this unique manner of overcoming bodily weakness that Scripture pictures as feminine strength. Most prominently, Scripture asks us to think of the Church in terms of a woman (Ez. 16; Eph. 5:23; Rev. 21:2), and Christ exhorts her to overcome the world and sin (Rev. 2:7, 11, 17, etc.). But how does she gain victory? Like a man or a woman? She overcomes not “according to the flesh. For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal but mighty in God for pulling down strongholds” (2 Cor. 10:3; cf. Jn 18:36; 1 Jn.5:4). Thus she “overcomes evil with good” (Rom. 12:21). So it is to the Church, then, to which we can turn our daughters’ eyes as the richest model of femininity. If you want to see feminine glory and strength, look first to the trials and temptations and victories of the Church in Scripture and later history. Passages like the letters to the seven churches become grand examples of feminine character. The Church is praised for being loyal and holy, but also bold, wise, and hating false doctrine.

If something like this is correct, then we can characterize femininity as the collection of all those

characteristics which flow from delighting in and overcoming bodily weakness by means of goodness. And it is this sort of indirect, subtle, often mysterious overcoming that makes women so interesting to men. Their core, their take on life is the material of grand drama and literature, the Church holy and overcoming. It’s also important to see the masculine complement. Similar sorts of arguments could be made about the glory of bodily strength that is characteristic of men’s bodies (Prov. 20:29; Ps. 18:32; 96:6). Without going into those arguments and qualifications, the masculine generalization fits nicely with its feminine complement, namely, that masculinity is the collection of all those characteristics which flow from delighting in and sacrificing bodily strength for goodness.

Credenda Agenda

Volume 13, Issue 1

The Meaning of Femininity

Doug Jones