MOST CULTURES have ways to initiate boys into manhood. Being a man is thus seen as an earned status that must be maintained, which can generate tremendous anxiety. (This is similar to what Simone de Beauvoir observes in The Second Sex about being a woman—one is not born but rather becomes one.) I’ve felt this anxiety myself in social spaces where masculinity is outside of the norm: I’m forced to think through how I am a man and what that means.
Nate Pyle confronts some of this anxiety in Man Enough. He explores how being rooted in Christ can seat the Christian man’s identity more firmly in Jesus.
Rather than trying to frantically maintain any particular form of masculinity, we can rest our identity in Christ.
This is key to freeing us from ridiculous posturing and status games. Pyle fleshes his argument out not only through scripture and ethical reflection but also by powerfully recalling his own personal development as a man.
Still, as Pyle puts it, “saying Jesus defines what it means to be a man is easy; actually defining manhood in light of Jesus is harder.” We have so many pictures of Jesus in the New Testament, from the righteously angry Jesus condemning the false teachers of his day to the Christ restraining his power and submitting to death on a cross. Perhaps, Pyle argues, this is the point: Jesus is complex, so any picture of how to be a man (or a woman) needs to be similarly complex.
A focus on Jesus to define masculinity snaps apart rigid gender roles, since both men and women are called to follow him in their Christian paths. Although Jesus was biologically a man, his moral example can’t be defined as male or female. Self-giving love is a model for both genders and all people.
Not only does looking to Jesus give us a healthier picture of what manhood is, but it properly locates attempts to be men in God’s grace. Putting on Jesus is an initiation, but it is one that happens by grace. In that grace, men need not be anxious about the perceived need to compete with others for a limited pool of patriarchal power, but can rest in God’s abundance.
This gives us the ability, as Pyle sees, to make space for healthier relationships with women as well as healthier relationships with other men, since we are free from a constant pressure to prove our masculinity. We can build honest relationships with others since our masculinity is not based in ourselves but in Jesus.
As Stephen Covey puts it, the main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing. Pyle does just that in Man Enough by constantly drawing our attention to Jesus and the grace found through him.
If these are the main things on which we focus, then men have the chance to find some answers to deep-seated anxieties about masculinity.
Greg Williams works in digital communications at an advocacy organization in Washington, D.C. He tweets @gwilliamsster and blogs at fourthconfession.
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