Alastair's Adversaria - Q&A on Gender and Sexuality

Episode Date: October 4, 2025

Question and Answer session on issues related to sex and gender at the South Carolina Study Center (https://scstudycenter.org/). Follow my Substack, the Anchored Argosy at https://argosy.substack.com/. See my latest podcasts at https://adversariapodcast.com/. If you have enjoyed my videos and podcasts, please tell your friends. If you are interested in supporting my videos and podcasts and my research more generally, please consider supporting my work on Patreon (www.patreon.com/zugzwanged), using my PayPal account (bit.ly/2RLaUcB), or by buying books for my research on Amazon (www.amazon.co.uk/hz/wishlist/ls/3…3O?ref_=wl_share). You can also listen to the audio of these episodes on iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/alastairs-adversaria/id1416351035.

All right, well, welcome everyone. Feel free to get up and grab another sandwich if you want. I wanted to get started because we are, what we said 1130, but also Alster has to leave at the airport right around 1230. And I wanted this truly to be a Q&A and I've opened any questions. That could be a little gongting, I know, because it's a big topic. So I just thought I'd launch. Well, why don't you tell you to give us one to two minutes on just this?

How many of we were at the event last night? Just a few of you. Would you give us just one to two minutes on who you are and kind of what led you to study this topic so much? Sure. And so I'm asked Robics. I work for the Fiatelisk Endowment Institute. I was raved from the Republic of Ireland,

but have lived in the UK since the age of 16. I'm particularly interested in biblical fial. I'd studied at the University of Durham, my PhD on the Red Sea Crossing and Christian baptism, Serbian, Littian and Typology. And my work since then has very much clade in that sort of area. I did a look with my friend, Andrew Wilson, Ecklers of Exodus, is treating that theme as it plays out for the Bible. And my interest in the area of issues related to sex and gender, how

has a lot to do with the fact, with my prostration, with the conversations that were taking place. And the prostration that was for a number of different causes. First of all, I felt that the scripture was being used in a way it was not attentive to the Bible's own witness. People came to the text with a certain set of burning questions, a certain agenda, whatever. And the text was made to interrogated to answer those questions

or to serve that agenda, rather than actually to discover what voice it speaks with to the issues of identity, the issues of male and woman more generally. And there's a lot within scripture that is missed because people are focusing upon the burning questions of our society. So a lot of it was that sense of frustration. Also a frustration with a lack of a sort of peripheral vision, the way that we're thinking, about these issues can often be narrowly focused upon certain biblical questions, certain questions that are very animating within our culture, and there's a lot that we can learn from history, the social sciences, we can learn things from philosophy, and yet many of those things were

not included in the conversation. A further frustration was the failure to take stock of why are we having these conversations now, and why in this particular way? A lot is downstream of a series of modern developments. Modern developments in the form of business, for instance, managerial structure, changes in forms of identity and the Internet digital age, the way that we articulate who we are, and then changes in patterns of family, as the family is increasingly displaced as a primary unit of production within,

society and becomes more of a retreat from the realm of activity and production and becomes more defined by share case assumption than by production. And so a lot of things like that just are not included within our debates about man and woman within the church, within the family, within society more generally. So I wanted to extend our peripheral vision, we get a greater sense of why are we having these conversations, why are we standing where we are. What are some of the animating forces within our society that provoke some of the concern, the anxieties, the opposition to various Christian positions? What are also some of the wider ways in which the Bible speaks to these debates? What can we learn for a book like Song Songs, for instance, which is saying a lot of things that aren't really being heard within the gender debates?

It's a whole book about man and woman in relationship to each other, and it has very little play within the gender debates. Why not? So that's a very broad description of my interest. My areas of research have also intersected with this in various respects. A lot of the concern about the loss of biblical voice is motivated by my desire to read the Bible really widely of the last year my big project

has been a chapter by chapter commentary on the Bible and the free online audio commentary and seeing just how much the Bible speaks to the issue of man and woman but gets excluded from the debate because it's not answering our German questions that has been one of the things that has animated me to get into these discussions

so questions anywhere from specific textual Bible verses all the way to the Manosphere podcast on character fair game you mentioned song or songs who is that about is that about

man woman is about Christ and church is both yes and I think maybe a good pace to start is by thinking about the use of song songs in John and Revelation.

So John and Revelation, the evangelist, takes aspects of the song and relates it to Christ. If you're reading the story of John's Gospel, you can see all these nutshell themes of marriage that are there from the very outset. Jesus' ministry begins at a wedding piece. Jesus described as the bridegroom. John the Baptist describes himself as the friend of the bridegroom.

Jesus provides the wine for the wedding piece, which was the Pothas for Brighorn. He meets with the woman at the well. The patriarchs met their wives at Wells. It's a scene that Robert Alter has described as a type scene as it appears within the Old Testament. A sort of scene that appears on various occasions and has all these commentations and associations

because of these numerous appearances. I think that Rebecca and Abraham Servants, or Jacob meeting with Rachel at the well, or Moses meeting with Zeport. and her sisters of the well, and various other women at wells like Haygard at the spring and these sorts of things. And so you have that association. Go further on within the book, and Mary of Vakeney annoysseekes at this meal, and it says, talks about the nard, that she pulls, and the whole house is filled with the fragrance, and it's picking up a text from Song Song's chapter one, while

the king was on his cup of the couch, my Nard gave Orthick's fragrance. Go further on in the book, and Jesus meets with Mary Magdalene in the garden. She searches everywhere, but can't find him, eventually finds him in the garden. And that's the same thing as happens in the song of songs. The one looks for her beloved can't find him and then eventually finds him in the guard. The way that Jesus' burial place is described, it's a garden chamber, it's a place that's filled with the sense of myrr and aloes. It's a garden chamber that is opened,

and within the song's songs, this is described, I can actually read the passage. Listen to the passage and think about the resurrection as it's portrayed within John, and hear some of the resonances. You are a garden locked up, my sister, my briar. You are a spring enclosed, a sealed fountain. Your plants are an orchard of pomegranates,

with choice fruits, with henna and nard, nard and saffron, calumous and cinnamon, with every kind of incense tree, with myrrh and aloes and all the finest spices. You are a garden fountain, a well of flowy water, streaming down from ledmur. Awake north wind, and come south wind, blow on my garden, that its fragrance may spread abroad, let my beloved come into his garden and taste its choice fruits.

I have come into my garden, my sister, my bride, I had gathered my my my my my honeycomb and my honey. I had drunk my wine and my milk. And it goes on. But the image is in many respects. Christ comes to the garden chamber, opens up the garden chamber of the bride and goes. The wakened north and south wind is the spirit blowing out, the living water that flows out. That's a constant theme within John's Gospel.

And then you have the final scene, which is the woman meeting, were eased in the garden. It's returned to the Garden of Eden, but also through the lens of the Sun of Psalms. Now, you find the same thing in Revelation, and the description of Christ in the opening vision is what we might call a wasif, a description of a figure from head to toe or toe to head. There are several of those in the Son of Psalms, and then go further on, stand at the door and knock. Anyone will hear my voice, and then this invitation to come and dine together, and this charge to get dressed. That's the same. thing as we see in some songs.

You go further on in the book and you can see all these natural themes continuing. The book ends on similar notes to that of the song's songs, the song's songs, and make haste my beloved, be like a gazelle upon the mountain expices, and then in the end of Revelation, come quickly, Lord Jesus, the Spirit and the Pride. And so essentially, John is reading

Song of Songs allegorically. This is not something that the early church pioneered. This is something that was taking place in the very earliest readings that you point within scripture. And so it seems to me that it's appropriate to read it that way. And part of it is just the more general symbolic force of sexual relations,

that there is a sense in which the church and its relationship to Christ has always been figured for in marriage. When Paul talked about these things in Ephesian, and justify. He says, and Mani, his father and mother, and he rejoined to his wife, and he become one flesh. And this is

a mystery about Christ and the church. Maybe even in the earliest expression of the union of man and wife, we have a symbol of a greater union that's still awaited. And so I think there is that, those pecks need to be

read at both levels. So, yes. Thank you. Um, with, yeah, scripture clearly, um, highlighting the importance of, um, sexuality, what meets the relationships associated with it? Um, what, what are your thoughts on kind of the silence, especially in the law on, uh, protecting a mononymous, uh, relationship? And, and also a lot of silence even throughout the whole testament of,

you know, Kay, Dave, and so forth, who were not doing that, and he didn't seem to have any, you know, instructions to the contrary. Yeah. Well, I would make a dispute the statement about the law, and it's worth remembering that in Deuteronomy Chapter 17, the law of the king has three key things, not returning to Egypt to gather many horses of fullness standing army, and charge not to multiply much gold,

and charge not to mock multiply wives. So I think that's already part of the law, and it's warning, particularly against the king for the king, because, I mean, the king would multiply wives to form all these treaties and these alliances with these surrounding peoples and with important stakeholders within the kingdom. So if you get a multitude of wives,

you're in a situation where all these powerful families are allied with you. their state is with the success of your dynasty. So I think there is a warning against that. And there's also a warning that I think sheds light back on earlier stories. For instance, the charge not to take of why because a rival to her sister. The obvious thought that comes to our mind is Rachel and Leah. It's a commentary on the ancestral story of the two mothers.

And if you read the story of gentlemen, So much of it is downstream of that. The rivalry between the brothers. The attempts of certain sides of the family, of one side of the family to rebel against the other. You think about the actions of Rubin, the actions of Judah and the brothers in selling Joseph into slavery, the anger of Levi and Simeon when their father does not take action to deal with the rape of his sister diner. All of these things are a result of that situation. And so the law warns us about that in explicit law,

but also warns us against it in the narrative because bad things happen when this is done and all the consequences are themselves a warning. Besides that, I think the Seventh Commandment, the emphasis upon the union of manner-wide and the danger of adultery, that is, I think, a central truth of the law that gets unpacked in various ways. You have a similar thing implicitly, perhaps, in the Fifth Commandment,

your father and your mother, the unity of that as the heart of the family. There's a sense in which the integrity of the family is seen in the single father and single mother rather than a plurality. Now, more generally within scripture, I think there is a lot of witness to the practice of polygamy within early Israelite and other societies, and particularly among the kings,

and Solner being an extreme example. But what that describes is certainly not the ideal, as it is put forth. I think a good example for this would also be the way that the early situation in the garden is one man, one woman, and that is the paradigmatic case, the union of one man of womaness, the two halves of humanity being born together. And so the dynamic of polygaming is, scripture does not forbid it directly.

It speaks against it, it undermines its certainly a paradigmatic character, and it undermines it in various other respects by warning gets its consequences. In the New Testament, Elder needs to be a man of one wife, and it is far more restrictive, but I think even within that context as a recognition, there will be people who have multiple lives, and that is not the ideal situation. It's a negative thing.

Likewise, lots of these things seem to be premised upon the, the relationship between God and his people. The logic of that requires a sort of, it can't work with polygamy in quite the same way. It requires something with the unity of the bride and the unity of the bride, ultimately God is not going to take many brides. He's going to take the church

and bring all people in people from all nations and tribes and languages, Ingstatt, a bride. But the bride is a single. right. And so I think within biblical symbolism, within the foundational narrative of Genesis, within the law and in various ways, of monogamous relationship is idealized. And that's in a society where polygamy widely practice and it's discouraged, but it's not explicitly forbidding. As regards to identity of men and women and their relationship, it's degradation. It's in the modern world.

I think typically I've been taught to think about that as a product of post-modernism and self-sovereignty. But you last night and just now, today, have mentioned several things that I've never considered that between like technologies, stone degradation and institutions that may be factored into some of the big historical shifts we've seen. What would you say is maybe one of the most under-emphasides

causes, like factors? Yeah, I can say. And there are, I think, institutions that have unified men and women in having common goods that they, a sort of reality that they're producing, that they share in common. And the loss or a kenuation of those, I think, has had huge consequences. So you might think about the household, as it existed in the past, was a place within which men and women both were.

and shared the goods of that realm that they were created. It was not a situation where the men were going outside to work and outside of the context of the household, and the women were working at home within this domestic retreat away from the realm of labour. There was a common realm of labour, even if they were doing very different sorts of work, it was toward the shared good of the household.

And I think the change in Adon, from that with the migration of work to factories to a wider to organizations outside of the home and increasingly those being organized according to logics that are just not hospitable to either men or women and kind of force them into a shared mold or force men or women into mules that just are either geared toward men or geared toward women. You might think about a way that A lot of certain, you might think of a certain vision of women's progression in the workforce has been premised upon making women more like men. And then there are other contexts where it's the opposite dynamic that's taking place.

And that's not helping. Within society, there needs to be some recognition that men and women are different, and those differences are good things. It's not that we need to become less like a society. We need to be more like ourselves, but in a way that enable both men and women to rise with that called satcha. So neither is being stunted by trying to fit into a mould that is even neutralising, nor forcing them into the mould of the other sex. So I think you might, let's list a few examples. If you want to read up on some of the maybe economic forces and some alike,

Yvonne Ellich's book, gender, is very thought-provoking on what he called the shit from vernacular gender to economic sex. What he's describing is the movement from old custom-bound societies to the societies in modernity framed around mass production and the gender-neutralized workplace and workforce, and the way in which that's created situations that have been impisputable both men and women. For instance, he talks about the way in which the home is, it's strict of its dignity, it becomes a sort of support centre producing things that serve the realm of labour outside of it. And increasingly that shadow labour, for instance, as he called it, being placed upon women's shoulders.

And so there's an injustice that takes place there. And a lot of what feminism is responding to is that shift within modernity. Now, that doesn't mean that going back to the age before that is what we should be doing. But we need to recognize the injustices that exist within the modern systems of production and things like that. Might also think about the rise of the suburb. And Chris Palash writes about this at length. and the way in which that limited the scope of women's cultural and social involvement and increasingly outsource things that women once did to professionalized agencies.

And that, I think, is another aspect. You might think about the rise of a society that's built around money and the structures of money that you had very little dignity, to those incommensurable, incangible, and non-fungible realities that women particularly have historically formed. So, for instance, the value of a hope is not something you can put and money to add upon. There's something unique there. It can't be exchanged for anything else.

It's a unique world that a unique set of persons have created. And that world is something that is, if it's not protected, if it's not guarded and given dignity and given a sort of central place within society, either you end up with the devaluation and the marginalization of women, or you end up with a situation where people just and opt-ed. You aid up with a situation where people can escape that from, and all the goods that that represent, will be locked with it.

And so increasingly, I think people recognize the precarity of that and they seek to find wealth, value, whatever it is, in realms realms that can be rendered fungible, exchangeable, commensurable, and according to the logic of a society built around money.

So you mean there are societies that are not built around money? Well, historically, so much life just was not built around money or measured the same percent. Because the Buda Sandel, what money can't buy? Yep. So good book talks about some of his issues. A huge issue is also the cut. And we live in societies that have been optimized for easy movement and opting out of any particular rooting commitments.

And those rooting commitments are the things that foster intangible goods and allow for the development of something unique, something that we can't necessarily put a value on, but that's the place where B-Sox-a-B-B-Svut-a-Fosser. And if we can easily opt out and move elsewhere, and those whole realms become devalued because they're not protected, and people opt out of them.

I think Carr is the most revolutionary, is one of the most revolutionary ports in Zisarhi. We emphasize ideas far too much. I think far too little about material matters. And we actually, this is a unique moment is we have in this room two people who don't have cars. Our sir, and... So if you want to know, what is life like without a car?

You've been... Oh, tomorrow, this, sir. You ask you're saying, so you're saying, a side of your car. I'm not saying... But I'm saying, know which your car represents. Know which your car represents in a society built around the car. Part of the problem is that in many societies,

you cannot sell your car and still participate in society. Your car is part of the basic level of... It's a requirement for participation in all the things that in the past, you would not need a car to participate in. But now you do need a car because society has been built around it. And if y'all sold your cars, we wouldn't have our parking lot full every day. And most of you were not able to come yet. Yeah, about too.

So, we kind of spent some years here. I wanted to ask you to ask you if you could talk about any, some of the research behind people who struggle with same-sex attraction. And, okay, what exactly, how much does. environmental factor claimed of this? But also maybe is there any room for

genetic tendencies? If they were if they had parents that may have had similar struggles, but also, lastly, how do you engage with someone who might say like

God gave me a special batch of a racial set? A special batch for original. Yeah. Well, first of all, I think it's very helpful to bring Christian thought into dialogue with the broader scientific research on these questions. I don't think we should be pitting Christian thought overly dense the scientific considerations of these questions.

There's, I'm trying to think of the name of the researchers, but the best and extensive recent study on the science, I think, and was Michael Bailey's long paper or several other people and long paper on the questions of sexual alpine, what the science suggests.

I think it's there are a number of questions that people have that have not arrived at the bint of answer. There does seem to be some genetic component but it does not seem to be as strong as was once expected. So Pyn studies are certainly not as clear

and in favour of a genetic component. There is something. The genetic question is also maybe to be distinguished from the effect of conditions in the Wu, for instance, which many have raised as a possible. I think beyond that, we should also think about the sociological ways of which these things play out. So even if there are tendencies,

there are ways in which we interpret what it means to have such tendency. So, for instance, if we think about the preferences and taste that we have regarding food, and if you think about what it would mean to live in a society before the range of modern sort of things that can find out of Shelton, the local supermarket, you would articulate what had meant to have a particular preference and food rather differently.

You certainly wouldn't attach it to your identity in the ways that we tend to do today. And I think that's an important development in the conversation around sexuality. the way in which it's become a form of identity and the way in which we are looking for bespoke categories to describe our particular cases, form of romance, are you aromantic, are you bisexual,

are you pansexual, whatever it is, all these bespoke categories. That's a very novel development, and it's doing something more than just recognizing there may be, some sort of innate dispositions or proclivities, there's something more going on in our adoption and foregrounding those sorts of categories the weight that we put upon it. Another thing to pay attention to

is the difference between different... We categorise, for instance, LGBTQ and identities all under the same umbrella, as it were. And it seems to me that there are a variety of different ways that those things can relate to genetic or innate, Hoplimati-Bata predispositions. The degree, for instance, to which women with lesbian identities, the research on the level of teenage pregnancy among women with lesbian identities, significantly higher than women without.

It seems strange, but identity, I think, in that case, maybe functions differently than it does for many and men with gay identities, because if you think about even the development of the discourse, the foregrounding of gay identity in the earlier movement of the LGBTQ movement, the earliest phases of that tend to emphasize born this way narratives. And I think that may is more applicable to many gay identities

than it is to lesbian, to queer identities, to trans identities. You might look at something like, for a more scientific discussion of this, Lisa Diamond's work, where she gets into some of the fluidity around identity and I think particularly for women's sexuality. and I think beyond that, it's worth, I mean, the sort of discourse that increasingly develops

after someone like Judith Butler is a very different sort of discourse from the born this way type of discourse. So I think that's important to take into account. And also, same thing with Crown's identities. there are types, as it were, trans identity. There's the type that tends to be more common in the context of younger women.

And there's a certain type that is very common among men who often very seriotically male activities who develop identities as women. But those types, they're not as it, those are the only types, but they are very common types. and they're gendered in complicated ways. So I think it's important to maybe disaggregate some of these Hatterbury's

and to recognise that there may be very different dynamics at play and behind the cipher of categories that people align more. And when it comes to gay identity, I think there's a particular relationship with maybe born this way now, that does suggest there's been, I think, more recent pointing to innate components in the case of gay identity. And there, I think, Christian thought needs to just be careful in the degree to which we think that things are just going to change if someone accepts a biblical set of principles about sexuality, that they're just going to change there and does. desires that those things are just going to go away. That's not necessarily going to be the case. But I do believe that it will lead to a different way of understanding what those things mean

and how they are relains to that person's good and their end. Could you share a little bit about how you think about the use of language, particularly in these conversations, right? So you've got same-sex attraction, you've got gay and lesbian identities, transgender identities, gender spore you. As you think about kind of maybe both within the church but then also out in the world as we think about living incarnationally with neighbors that where often it can feel like using language incorrectly and immediately shuts down the door to any further conversation. Like where you land on kind of, yeah, how you think both biologically about the language but also incarnationally about how you use language in these conversations. Yeah. And it's a very good question.

I think it's one of the key challenges that we face, in part, the challenge of communication. You have to adopt categories to allow for communication to take place, and the sort of categories that might be more native to Christian discourse, the sort of categories that might arise from reflection upon the Bible, those are not necessarily going to be very effective in getting through to people. And I do think it's helpful to try to, we need to understand people's language on its own terms and understand where that language is coming from and what social realities it might correspond to. So for instance, if you're talking about someone like Judith Thutler, the whole language of performativity

really resonates with what light online and identities online are like. Your identity is very much something that's constructed through a way. it's not that you just have it's going beyond the idea of performing an identity of woman or man there's a sense in which in the very active articulating things

you're constructing some identity and there's always an artificiality to it we go online and we relate to self-representations as ourselves and there's a degree to what that encourages something of talking about earlier, these highly

disposed categories into which we try and slot ourselves, because we're part to express who we are, without the givenness of categories that you have within a society before the internet, where it's a lot more apparent to who you are, and there's

far more of an incarnation of ballast given by the body itself and its objectivity. So I think that's always going to be a feature, thought a factor within our environment. And we need to understand where that's coming from, what the language corresponds to,

but also in various ways push back against that language and not necessarily completely dispensing with it, but trying to ask questions that expose maybe in a choreo in the way that it's playing out. There's some gap, there's some problem, it doesn't quite match, there's something miss it, or there's some aspects of reality that can be brought to the surface that have become questions for it. And I think that's one of the things that we should do is Christians.

And as for using language and in garlog with people in situations where it might have allegedly closed things out, I think many people have this posture where to be faithful, we need almost take confrontational, and you need to make very clear, I am not going to use your pronouns, I'm going to pointedly make an issue of using the pronouns that I think are appropriate, your birth pronouns or something like that. I think that can be a very unhelpful posture to pake.

I do not use people's preferred pronouns in situations where I think that they are inappropriate. And I'll go out my way to find second recutions and things like that. But I don't want them to feel that I'm not, I don't want to be a cause of offense to them. I don't want to be inviting confrontation. In some ways, because they can feel that that's what I want to bring to them. It's not what I want to bring to them.

And in many ways that whole framework that Christians want to confront an attack and invalidate your identity, that that is the Christian impulse, and I'm doing that in order to validate my own identity. That is simply not how I'm seeing the situation, and so I don't want to play into that frame of reverence, which is one that they're placing upon the interaction, perhaps. It's not one I want to reinforce.

And I think, Octum, it will be a bit more of a challenge, but to signal that we actually care about that person and we care about that person the way that will cause us to wrestle with the task of communicating goodwill where there are a number of barriers to it be heard and that can take imagination and creativity it also takes often knowledge of that particular person what they're bringing to that situation

and often it's a lot of hurt there's a lot of baggage from maybe prior encounters with Christians who have taken a far more hostile approach maybe because Jacob threatened by that person's right yesterday and so I think one of the things that's a knowledge of and people talk a lot about natural law arguments and things like that I don't emphasize natural law arguments

but what I do believe is that we are creatures within God's world. And this world, God's world, is the world that everyone inhabits. Everyone we're talking to. And God's reality bears the grain of that reality, moves in a particular way. I don't have to fight to get through to someone the fact that God's reality is this way or that. They are living in that reality. My intent is more to elicit and evoke from their own experience.

by asking certain questions or something like that, what they already know, and often what they're trying to suppress in various ways, what might seem threatening to. And I don't want to be the one who's in the position of the one who's trying to push that prayer. I don't want to be the threat. I want them to recognize that this is the hospitable world within which they were created. When God's a good God, God is not there to and destroy their ideas. to undermine Dan but to give

them a fuller understanding of through they are. And I ideally want to position myself so that I'm able to minister that reality and that requires a certain negotiation around language

that would be immediately hostile. Likewise, they're afraid of tones if we're talking about identity. Just put an asteris on that because there's so much that commies bundled here. And we talk about sexuality, gender,

all these terms, they're key terms with inherent debates, and a lot of the weight that they're bearing is weight that we want to be cake on them. And occasionally, what can be helpful is to do any key terms, or thinking about those terms of suitcases. They have extensive contents, and maybe what you want to do is unpack the,

So take that term out of commission for a while and get people to unpack, what do you mean by that? And maybe unpack more particularly what those terms represent. In part also because these terms have symbolic and personal associations for people within the debates that we have. There are big symbolic narratives and people factor their individual experience into these. and those narratives are lightning and those particular turns are lightning rods for issues within their own experience which can be far more particular

and they're having this ideological lightning rod for maybe their relationship with their parents or painful experiences of relating to their own body and it seems to maybe disconnect those things from the ideological toys and maybe try and stick to them in a far more human level to look beyond the ideologically framed antagonisms and just relate to them as another human being

that we care about someone made in the image of God, someone who has dignity, that we need to speak in terms of one thing. Car related, anything about Richard said like the man of smear there's a lot of like machismo like tape back to culture fight for the right kind of stuff

what is that this is a broad category but what's the problem and the root of like the misunderstanding not seeing there and that and what is it where the dangers and I think especially my generation being warped into online

even like far right scout up, but even in my Christian circles, like, what are, what's the cause of that? What's the flaw in the thinking or maybe the hurt that's causing it? Delvin, the danger involved. I think there are a number of factors. Getting back to the material, in this case, digital factors. If you look at the charts, just the trend lines of where couples knit up for the first kind, and they end up getting married.

Have any neat through friends, churches, and neighborhoods. Those were the big things in the past. And now increasingly, everything is eclipsed by the internet. And there has been on the internet this, men and women don't cease to be men and women on the internet. Men and women within their groups and individually have tendencies and patterns of relationship. and social media is a sort of nomadsland where everyone is imposing their own principles of engagement and men have their own expectations of engagement with other men

and their own sense of how their space they should operate and women have their own sets of how spaces it should operate. And on social media these are constantly coming into collision and then the way that men and women relate to each other through dating apps and things like that is increasingly it is just dispiriting

and for one a black killer it's depressive there's a deep fundamental distrust and antagonism between the sexes and within that context

it's very easy for separatist gendered ideologies to a right and there's a certain form of communism can be like that and there's a certain form of the malaspia that can be like that There's also a loss of partly because of these radical changes in our life worlds, because so much of our lives are now lived online, so much of our society has now played out online,

there's the loss of the intergenerational dynamics, whereby formerly we'd be able to look to the advice of older generations, how they related to each other as man and woman, and how it worked out for them, and they can give human human, humanizing a dignified ways to bring the sexes together. Because we are different, and we find a struggle to understand each other. There is a sense in which it would be much easier at men were from Mars or where you

were from Venus. It's the fact that we're like aliens to each other, but inhabiting the same planets. That's the challenge, because we both have very different ways, but subtly different ways, subtly different ways to go all the way down, of seeing the same things. It's like your two eyes. They're right next to each other. They see things, just everything is slightly different. But when you get those two eyes together, you can see things and project it.

It's one of the wonderful things about having the duality of the body, two hands, two legs, two years, two eyes, etc. The duality of the body enables us to have a coordination and a perspective that the duality of humanity is male and female also enables us to achieve. Now, the more that you try and navigate the world through a rejection or antagonist, that duality being turned into an antagonism,

the more your humanity will be sunned at. One of the things that helps human beings to develop well is for men to learn from women, and for women to learn from men, about how their own sense of why it needs to be a man or a woman can be tempered and directed. There's something good, for instance, about a man who has learned how to work with young kids well.

That's part of what it means to be mature, not to have this constant formation into extreme masculinity formed by other men. There's a place for that. That's really important. You need to be a man among men, but you also need to be a man who's able to relate to women And that dynamic requires something more than just collapsing of men and women into the same spaces, but also it requires something other than a separatism where each goes there are aware. It requires different spaces coming into a fruitful and friendly relationship,

respectful learning from each other, recognizing and appreciating valuel differences. And in my experience, you see the manosphere, and there's not a deep respectful woman, there's not an appreciation for what men can learn from women. There's a sense of threat there, and also deep bitterness. A lot of that is arising from personal hurt. People have been in a situation where that breaking down of the relationship between male women has caused a lot of personal hurt. And maybe it's from their own backgrounds as well.

They've seen the way that this antagonism was paid out from the relationship between their terrorists. Maybe it's the way that they have experienced the wreckage of broken personal relationships and all of us will have baggage of that kind to deal with. But as Christians I think we have a vision

of what it means for men and women to relate together well and to appreciate each other and value each other that we need to bring these conversations. And I do think that the Manosphere is bringing some important thing.

For instance, it's recognizing the importance of men being formed by other men. There is something particularly about the intergenerational formation of that. Old and mature man, forming a younger man, and giving them a sense of dignity as men among men, that you'll recognize among male peers, as someone with competence, with strength, with honor, all these sorts of things that are things that men really care about. That's how you have face in many respects among your fears.

But then also being able to have something of the dignity that we give each other that allow other people to be vulnerable. There's something of the way that men and women's relationship play out online that strips both parties of dignity and the dignity that enables us to open ourselves up to each other. It's one of the reasons I think marriage is so important. there's something about the vulnerability as we expose ourselves to other people and are able to give ourselves completely that requires a commitment, an openness to have that exposure to each other

without destroying each other in the way you can often find in the culture of just hooking up because hooking up creates, you're not just using sort of physical propylactic, You're developing emotional prophylaptics where you're not actually learning to be open with each other and the openness with each other. The loss of that and the hardening of both men and women

is a sort of reaction against wounded vulnerability in many cases. And what we need is to create spaces where that vulnerability is taken very seriously. Men are emotionally vulnerable, and women are emotionally vulnerable. And the sort of facade that both will place is not healthy, it's not true either. It's martinning something that peaked down,

both want to relate to each other and be open to each other and vulnerable to each other without being destroyed by that. Beloni-in-a-ho-who kind of mentioned previously about, when you touched on us being made in the angel like this God, and related to the idea of, like, the love between fathering sign in the Holy Spirit and its kind of procreative nature of the Trinity,

and how that kind of relates to the family unit in the Bible, in like our modern day, and then like being made in God and region-wideness in that sense, but also in like in individual, like the gestation of between men and women, be made in the image and the eyes of the same God, but still being made to take this together. Yes, it's an important question. I think we tend to think about image in very individualistic terms because we're a very individualistic society. and yet there's something

I think the image that's often paying out from the higher level. If we think about we talk about being created in the image, who is the image? Christ. He is the image of the invisible God, first born of all creation. And so in some sense the true reality of the restoration

of the image of God is as we're formed in Christ. And it's not just an individual reality, it's the social reality of the church, where man and woman, people from all tribes, eitums, nations, languages, people rich and core, and people, all parts of society, are brought together in one body.

That's part of what it means to be in the image of God, this broader reality of humanity. I think likewise, there is something about the alterity, the otherness of man and woman, is at table to that. In God created a man in his own image, in the image of God, he created him. Male and female, he created that.

There's singularity. In the image of God, he created him, singular. Male and female, he created that. And that sense of, it's not just diversity. It's not just that men and women are different. The reality is one of, there are a number of aspects to this. We might think that as a disjunction, that you're either man or woman,

and those two are, always related to each other. It's impossible for me fully to the man without understanding who I am relative to woman and vice versa. There's always that sense that your identity, think about the way that Adam's creation is described, he's created from the dust of the earth, and then the woman is created from the side of the map. Now there's a sense in which when man relates to himself after that creation of the woman, he can never

relate to himself as a self-contained being. part of consult has been taken outside of insult and now relates to hence other. And so the relationship between man and woman, that is one of the places within which the image of God is most seen. It's the way in which we are different, but in an inextricable relationship. We're bound up with each other,

and that's a beautiful and a good thing. God has made us so that we become more ourselves as we relate more to each other. other. And it's one of the experiences, I think, of marriage or something like that, that you become, in some sense, entangled with this other person in a way that makes you more yourself, but not in a separatist way, but in a way that you grow into a fuller version because you're learning that to be more fully a man, I need to relate to women. But in that relationship, I'm also feeling myself more fully distinctive in Guwahmius BMA.

And so that dynamic is played out in that disjunction. It's also something that pays out on a larger social level. So the difference between man and woman is not just between each individual man, each individual woman, but between men and women as two halves of humanity. And there's a variety that you'll see within that. I'm not, and I'm one type of man. And there are many different types of men. I'm not the man who's going to be leaving any sports team any time soon.

But I'm a man who relates to a man who have those sorts of interests, and they relate to me. And we're part of a group of men who represent something about masculinity over against women, who also represent different facets of what is glorious about being woman. That women are not all the same. There's a lot of tendency, I think, in an individualistic society, to look for definitions, universal categorizations. They either strip people down to something less than what they could be, or that suggests it's a prequel. There's no meaning of what a mystery matter one playing out and are more, is seated and idiosyncratic and other aspects that are maybe not universal. every person of our sex.

And so I think that sort of dynamic is another one that tends to be lost. And as the image of God, there are ways in which we reflect God's rule within the world that are gendered. So if you think about the way that the church is, the church is a gendered reality, as it's described in scripture a lot of the time. The church is the bride. the church is described in a way also that has a real there's a sort of affinity with the word for spirit

now we need to be very careful about gender at God God is not male God's not female God is beyond sex God does eat to have and does not reproduce God is also beyond gender in various respects and we shouldn't project our images of what it needs to be masculine or feminine of God. However, when we talk about God in Scripture, there is a consistent use of grammatical masculine pronouns. And I think that's important. On the other hand, there's also a recognition,

for instance, with the spirit, this affinity with women, the way that the spirit is associated with, for instance, the spirit and the bride stand together. The spirit is the source of unity. the spirit is the source of life the spirit is the one by whom Christ has conceived in the womb of merit the spirit is again and again connected with fruitfulness and all these things that are connected

with women in script also have affinities with the spirit there's something that's important likewise with wisdom there's a gendering of these sorts of concepts lady wisdom it's important that lady wisdom is gendered tell there something about wisdom

and the association of the spirit with wisdom, likewise. And that the fool was always the man. Yes. The story of the story of Proverbs is in many ways there is a sort. It's a man leaves his father and mother and joins to his wife, and the two become one plash. The story of Proverbs is the story of the young man leaving the teaching of his father and mother, and how to choose a wife? and that choice is placed between Lady Wisdom and the woman following,

but also on the less metaphorical level between the white of the youth and the adulterous woman. And then at the end of the book, you have the apostic poem in Chapter 31, the woman about it. And what that poem does is kick up all these expressions that are the use of Lady Wisdom earlier on, and it applies them to a tick the woman. she's a repraction of that reality of wisdom herself and she sums up the entire message of the book in this acrosic is the sort of A to Z or A to Z

under you adapting to my cultural symphony and the A to Z of what it represents to have that reality and if you think about that's in many ways also what choosing a spouse involves you're giving your heart to someone is that person going to

and guard your heart and seek to lead your heart into whistle? Is that person going to be is that person a suitable chief counsellor? Is that person someone who's going to labour shoulder to shoulder with you not just enjoy that face-to-face

relationship which is integral to the relationship between man and the woman? But also that shoulder-to-shoulder relationship as you form a world around yourself and the vision of some of proverbs is also, it's noteworthy, that that teaching is framed as the teaching that the mother gave to her son, Kinlanjou. And now King Langior is sharing the lesson that his mother taught him about the woman that he ought to marry with those who are listening to him.

He's internalized his mother's lesson and his mother teaching him what to look for and in the woman to marry. So I think the book is very much framed by that pattern, which is in many respects, the pattern that wisdom takes in our lights. Who do you give your heart? Are you going to dig your heart to lay your wisdom? Are you going to pursue wisdom with your whole might? It's not just intelligence, it's what you give your heart to it. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.

So these explorations, I think, are tied up with symbolism that is often gendered and is related to deeper truths about Bougades and help us, I think, to navigate the relationships that we have between the sexes to. We probably need to close it down right now. If you have a pressing question, we might can stick around to a couple of minutes, so you can ask individually. But thank you all for being here.

Let me pray for us. We'll be done. Father, we thank you for this day, for this couple days with Alistair and his ministry. Thank you for his wisdom and insight into the scriptures into what it does. means to be a man and woman. And we pray that you would help us live this out and welcome to step with the truth. You guys. Amen. Thank you. Appreciate it.