…In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a

single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety

of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the

Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and

which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so

fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map

was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the

Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are

Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is

no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.

—Suarez Miranda, Viajes devarones prudentes, Libro IV,Cap. XLV, Lerida, 1658

Jorge Luis Borges, On Exactitude in Science

Maps or Reality?

Baudrillard coined the term ‘hyper-reality’ to describe a world where the representation mattered more than the reality, such that the reality became impossible to find. He refers to this fable by Jorge Luis Borges, where a map is drawn in such fine detail it becomes an exact replica of the empire it depicts. In the fable, remnants of the map flutter about in the furthest corners of the desert for millennia afterwards. Baudrillard suggests that in modernity our maps of reality (‘simulations’) have remained while reality itself has increasingly dissolved. The emergence of mass media, new technologies and multiple meta-narratives together untether images from realities, until the ruins of reality exist like some lost city, and most of life is lived in the ‘desert of the real’.

Baudrillard’s hyperreality helps decipher some of the current discourse around masculinity. The manosphere depicted in Louis Theroux’s new Netflix documentary may seem absurd to the casual viewer. The ‘hypermasculinity’ of men like the Tate brothers, Myron Gaines, or HStikkytokky is self-consciously exaggerated. No-one except a small minority of earnest teenagers thinks it’s manly to puff a cigar in a kimono. I’m not even sure Andrew Tate thinks it’s cool. But in a hyperreal world, appearances matter more than the substance, to the point of detaching themselves from reality, then becoming a replacement for the thing itself.

The manosphere is guilty of taking masculine symbols like wealth, status, fecundity, and power, confusing them for the essence of masculinity, then repackaging them in a bastardised form. Consider, for instance, how Tate made the money that allows him to pose with flashy status symbols like fast cars. He essentially created an early, non-consensual form of OnlyFans. With this money, he started a course called ‘Hustlers University’ where young men would learn the art of dropshipping and investing in crypto. It reeks of degeneracy, a far cry from the great men of history he seems to admire. The core difference between Tate and the men he wants to imitate is that Tate’s entire life is performed for an audience, and is therefore aesthetically oriented. He focuses on visible status symbols as ends in themselves, forgetting that they derive their value from deeper realities, or as means to higher ends.

Similarly, if you watch influencer HStikkytokky in the Theroux documentary, his persona is unwavering, even as he blatantly contradicts himself. Theroux several times challenges him on saying one thing and doing another, or simply saying two opposing things, but after a brief moment of cognitive dissonance HStikkytokky ploughs on. He is a man who will allow no compromise or defeat, because to be corrected is to be humiliated.

As an influencer who relies on his followers, he has no guiding principle for his life beyond how he presents to his followers. In one exchange, a boy comes up to greet HS and Theroux comments on how young his fans are. HS agrees - it is weird that 12-year-olds are seeking his advice on how to be a high-value male. But as his audience, he is ultimately beholden to them. HS smiles and poses for a photo with the boy.

Manosphere men are purveyors of premium-grade nonsense: they sell pyramid schemes which guarantee they will become richer at the expense of their followers; they profit from sexual exploitation while condemning the loose morals of modernity; they boast about their sexual promiscuity while enjoying the benefits of monogamy; most of it is a barely concealed lie and they know it. They are profiting from a world where the essence of masculinity has been replaced by a growing hyperreality, at which point the symbols hold as much weight as what they were initially representing.

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Gender Histories

The detachment between gender symbols and gender realities is chiefly the result of centuries of material changes in economics and technology. For most of history the value of men was demonstrable: they were physically stronger than women, and not confined by strict biological limits. This meant they could work harder, for longer, without interruption. Men and women had their own spheres of work, from which came identity. Women largely took on home-based roles which could fit around children, such as sewing, mending, cooking and cleaning, while everything else from hard labour to craftsmanship and knowledge work was primarily male. Even where men and women performed the same tasks, such as harvesting crops, they used gendered tools: for instance, women’s scythes had different handles, to reflect a difference even within the same task. Thus there was always differentiation and each gender had a discrete sphere. Symbols signified reality.

In the division of male and female labour historically the male sphere of work is defined by the female one, not the other way round. This accorded great dignity to both spheres. The building block of society is the family, and the family exists to provide stability for mother and child, in order that the human race can continue. Childbirth and rearing is a risky, costly, and intensive enterprise, relying on social order and delayed gratification, an order which stems from the husband in his role as protector and provider. As this pattern replicates, nascent society emerges. Society is itself a simulacrum of the family unit; the social contract takes its cue from the marriage contract, where the stronger party promises to protect and provide for the weaker, for the sake of the common good. Therefore, gendered roles were the building blocks upon which society flourished.

But as progress rolled on the industrial machines emasculated men, robbing them of physical power; two world wars moved women into the workplace, then the rising costs of housing and childcare kept them there; the development of contraceptive and sanitary products created new agency for women; and the service-based information economies, at least in the West, levelled the professional playing field. Meanwhile, IVF promised the possibility of children later and later in life, while new critical narratives emerged in this fertile soil, questioning the traditional spheres of masculine and feminine roles.

It was natural for these critical narratives to emerge; typically they came from focusing on the increasingly outdated map of gender scripts, a map which was never reality itself. In times of revolution, iconoclasts gleefully tear down whatever they can get their hands on, and so this map was also torn apart. We now sit in a time of tattered reality and tattered symbols, wondering where to go next.

Modern masculinity discourse is sometimes a critique of these traditional gender roles, and sometimes a doubling down on them, or a misreading of the symbols. The material landscape has changed faster than our minds or bodies can adapt, producing deep-seated inadequacy and confusion for men in particular.

Maps after Reality

If we are now more focused on the representations of masculinity than on masculinity itself, it’s not surprising we have several, related narratives emerging. Looksmaxxing (looks-maximising) has finally hit mainstream media: a meme-y name for a meme-y phenomenon (for a meme-y society, as T.J. Holland detailed in his recent article), where men use a combination of natural, bizarre and invasive methods to become as attractive as possible.

Tactics range from going to the gym and implementing a strict skincare routine (sensible), to the use of unconventional weight loss drugs like crystal meth (questionable), to bashing a trophy against your cheekbones so when they swell they look more attractive (painful). The rating system is harsh: Spiderman actor and Hollywood star, Tom Holland (not to be confused with the historian, or our fellow writer at Sacramentality), widely considered a good-looking man, receives a 4/10 rating on the looksmaxxing forums.

The methods are promoted by a community of influencers led by the king himself, Clavicular. Clavicular boldly goes where others dare not follow: he is functionally sterile from his steroid use, and currently considering life-changing surgery to add four inches to his height (from 6’2 to 6’6). He is quite autistic.

The media is unsure how to treat looksmaxxing, so it is often lumped together with the wider manosphere. Both have their fair share of rabid, misanthropic content. Both are obsessed with self-optimisation, to increase one’s value in the dating marketplace. Both are aimed almost entirely at young men, and both ultimately seem more interested in male status games than the functional rewards of female attention.

However, these similarities can mask very different economies in the two worlds: where the traditional manosphere is concerned with wealth, women and fast cars, the looksmaxxing world has the singular currency of looks. Indeed, debate rages in these forums of whether Andrew Tate is even a high-value male (based on his looks). In an interview last year, Clavicular described the renowned liberal Governor of California Gavin Newsom as a ‘Chad’ for his good looks, and arch-conservative Vice-President JD Vance as a ‘subhuman’, on account of his diminutive stature and weight around the belly. Looksmaxxing is post-political, subsuming politics into its economy.

The real overlap between looksmaxxing and the manosphere is their performativity. They have latched on to one, or a few, signifiers of masculinity, and pushed them to an extreme. And not only that, but they have identified visible, aesthetic symbols of masculinity which they can parade. There is a fragment of masculinity - the desire to provide financially, or the importance of health and strength - but the representation has become far more important than the thing itself. We are in the era of the performative male.

The term ‘performative male’, if you are online enough, may conjure up tote-bag wielding, matcha-sipping, dungarees-wearing, Virginia Woolf-reading urban males, while the manosphere may imply the opposite: macho men driving Ferraris, smoking cigars and trading crypto, but they are only shadows of each other; two sides of the same horseshoe. One version of the performative man exaggerates his maleness, while the other extreme needs to signify the opposite: in the face of a hyper-masculine onslaught, he doubles down and pursues the softboi aesthetic to show his solidarity with women, performing for them instead.

Both the softboi and the manosphere guru are deeply performative. Some men declare there are too many feminine men and perform an aggressive masculinity, others tut and shake their heads at the overcompensation of the manosphere then pull on a pair of jorts. There are more ways than ever to define and express masculinity, from the stereotypical to the subversive, but each feels more like a charade than the thing itself.

Post-Reality Performativity

The early manosphere developed a significant spin-off movement called ‘MGTOW’ (men going their own way), where disenfranchised men distanced themselves from women altogether. The MGTOW crowd felt that modern society demanded too much from men: to continue providing essentially masculine roles, without the incentives or status that traditionally came with masculinity. Nihilism rarely lurks far below the surface of masculinity movements, whether the men are chasing status, improving their looks, or lamenting the decline of exclusively male spheres. However, there was something noble, even if misguided, about their attempt to live life on their own terms, without reference to women or status.

Conversely, the modern manosphere’s success is almost exclusively defined in relation to sexual market value. But the culmination of economic and technological consequences which diminish men’s roles as protectors and providers increasingly means the pursuit of sexual value as an overt status symbol, and status is as much an intra-male performance as a performance to women. The pop-evolutionary psychology narrative goes that in times yonder, alpha males would have hundreds or thousands of women in their harem, or they’d do a Genghis Khan and impregnate whole villages. But because they either cannot achieve this, or do not want to, the modern alpha male boasts of his sexual conquests when they amount to, at best, sleazy affairs in Marbella or Dubai. It is a far cry from his ancestors.

Clavicular cannot even have children because he is sterile, and most women would find his obsessive pursuit of looks off-putting. Even the premise of ‘mogging’ (showing someone up with superior good looks) is an intra-male competition. These men have made the thrill of the hunt their goal, forgetting there should be something to show for it.

Similarly, the performative male acts, implicitly or explicitly, for sexual attention of a kind, in signalling that he is not like other guys. The aesthetic becomes simply one more way of increasing value, while his status symbols are oriented around tastes and habits (reading novels, only listening to music through wired earphones, etc.) rather than the overt, flashy objects of the manosphere.

In each of these instances, a trend latches on to a truth (of what women value, or what distinguishes men from women), but takes it to an extreme, looking for some heuristic by which masculinity can be measured. However, a concept as slippery as masculinity will never lend itself to a single measure, nor can it be reduced to a series of characteristics. The hyperreal distracts us from recovering the reality itself.

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Walking in the Desert

So where does this leave the modern man? In previous eras the maps corresponded to the real, and by studying the symbols men could learn about healthy masculinity. In an old world when women were maidens and kings fought in holy wars, knights were fitting symbols. When the old world sat fresh and unconquered, cowboys and explorers were performative males in the right ways, instilling a sense of adventure and romance. Through most of history in most places, nature was harsh and relentless so men had to be strong. In our new world, new types of masculinity are required. Short of a world war or a similar global catastrophe that reverses material progress by centuries, it is hard to imagine a return to the traditional narratives.

In the ‘desert of the real’, hyper-masculinity will continue to abound. It may be criticised, but without an understanding of where our particular map of reality came from, and therefore where it falls short, it is hard to offer an alternative. Neither map nor reality will be reconstructed overnight, so it is good to sit among the ruins for a time, recognising that our culture is lost. We lack the tools, language or framework to craft a modern masculinity.

The next step, especially when in the desert, is to look up. The night sky becomes clear and we can finally feel our smallness. By looking up, we already escape the bounds of a two-dimensional map. A man’s horizons can move beyond the horizontal, material goods of looks, status and wealth, knowing they cannot be guiding principles for the good life. Self-improvement is noble and necessary, but far more important is to escape the bubble of ourselves. Look up and see the cosmos, then feel small for a time. Upon your return, things start to find their proper place.

When you look up for long enough, you realise there is order, and our symbols of masculinity are not masculinity itself. They are guilty of exaggerating or diminishing the truth. Of course looking good matters, wealth, health and status matter, but they do not define masculinity, or flourishing generally. They are goods which primarily derive from the opinion of others, therefore they anchor us in the horizontal world and stop us from reaching the heart of reality.

At the heart of reality is an encounter with the Uncreated Creator who orders the whole world, including us and our gendered identity. This does not tell us everything about masculinity, but it gives us the confidence to move forward, knowing there is something real at the heart of all this. Answers won’t come straight away, and we will need to return to the world of the everyday to start creating an answer, but in this cultural moment we must first pause and contemplate.

The tools for the modern man therefore, are contemplation and adoration. Contemplation as he looks up, then adoration as he loves the true order of things. From contemplation and adoration flow wisdom and joy, which ought to be the hallmarks of everyone serious about finding their place in the world. Together, they break the need for performance, because they are not dispositions of striving. The old scripts are gone and man must write his story afresh, but from a place of confidence, knowing he is not tracing contours with his thumb but climbing the mountain himself. The old maps of the world will lead him down the same wrong paths, while the pursuit of reality will force him to ponder how God has created him, as an individual soul and as a man.

Practically, for most men that will look like marriage and children, following the natural desire for responsibility which stems from the God-given mandate to fill the earth. It is a way for men to leave a legacy and be fruitful. This may even mean following some of the manosphere’s advice on how to improve oneself holistically, in order to find a virtuous wife. For most men, it will look like contributing to something of lasting value: committing to a local church, seeking the renewal of a local area, developing a skillset to be fruitful for the world.

For some men, it looks like devoting themselves to religious orders or the academy, where they can contemplate freely. This is not the opposite of action. Thomas Merton writes that “contemplation is the highest expression of man’s intellectual and spiritual life. It is that life itself, fully awake, fully active, fully aware that it is alive. It is spiritual wonder. It is spontaneous awe at the sacredness of life, of being.”

What this new quest for masculinity looks like is for each man to discern based on his time, place and gifts. It is not an easy task, but crucially it cannot substitute symbols for hard realities, or define itself in relation to the female. There is no return to an imagined past, nor is it necessary to exaggerate maleness in desperation. A man’s duty is to sift through the hyper-real, hyper-masculine content and discern what is good, right and true, avoiding parodies and crafting new narratives for masculinity. It is a less glamorous work but the reward is eternal.

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1. Who’s afraid of the eschaton?

The study of the end of the world—eschatology, from ἔσχατος (‘last’) + λογία (‘the study of’)—doesn’t have the best of reputations. It is usually associated not with the kind of edifying doctrine that mainstream evangelical theologians typically aim at, but with the futile speculation of internet junkies and devotees of esoteric numerology, who publish their ‘findings’ about the imminent apocalypse on dubious websites: our latter-day equivalents of the genealogy-obsessed Cretan Christians Paul lambasts in Titus. Perhaps as a result of the repeated failings and sheer oddities of their end-times predictions, many evangelicals seem tempted simply to leave eschatology alone. Jesus will come back—we’re agreed about that—but there’s no use getting bogged down in the details of biblical teaching on the matter, especially when the relevant texts are among the most obscure in the canon. We might be aware of the scope of different eschatological positions—the various millennialisms—and even of their impact; but we relegate them to the status of ‘tertiary’ issues and the private opinions of preachers that don’t break out in actual sermons. We want to get on with the everyday calling of the Christian life, not fruitless speculation about the end of the ages.

Except: no serious bible reader can ignore the fact that eschatological teachings perforate the New Testament. It is an unavoidable truth that the Christian faith is consistently occupied with eschatological matters. And that is because the Christian scriptures are fundamentally teleological in outlook: that is, they teach that history is going somewhere, developing into a final denouement, marching towards a telos at the end of all reality. This is what Jesus, in the last moments of his earthly ministry, pointed his disciples towards. He gave them a stark mission: ‘Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.’ But this mission had a clear shelf life: ‘And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age’ (Matt. 28:19–20). Christ personally accompanies his people as they carry out his great work of making disciples of all nations, a work that is to continue until its consummation at the end of the age.

We perhaps miss the significance of this teleological sense of the mission of the church and the progress of history because it has become so embedded in our culture. The atheist philosopher John Gray makes the point that secular progressivism—the broad belief in the inexorability of human progress—is really a secularized version of Christian eschatology. The scriptures lay out a narrative, one shaped from top to tail by a sense of its final, irrevocable ending. In Gray’s words:

In Christianity, history cannot be senseless: it is a moral drama, beginning with a rebellion against God and ending with the Last Judgment.^[i]

Another way of putting it is that Francis Fukuyama could only write The End of History and the Last Man (1992) because his thought was shaped by a culture that had long assumed that this present age, history as we know it, could not and would not last eternally, because one day Christ will return. He, and many others besides him, had simply transmuted that central Christian belief into an altogether secular frame (whether wittingly or otherwise), recasting the telos of history not as the consummation of God’s kingdom on earth but as the final triumph of liberal democracies in temporal geopolitics. But if we reject this belief—and those who reject Christ ought to, if only for consistency—then there is no reason to believe in any inevitable ‘progress’. And so, for Gray, history is cyclical. His views reflect ancient consensus in the classical world. For Aristotle, the world is eternal: its matter had no beginning, and though it will never cease to change, it will persist for all eternity. For Plato, we are stuck on an endless cycle of the reincarnation of our souls. But Jesus taught something radically different: he taught that history as we know it is a temporary reality, one that will, at the end of all things, be done away with, and transfigured into something altogether more wonderful. The world awaits a dramatic transformation, a radical reckoning, one towards which the church labours by the light of faith.

But what exactly do the scriptures teach about this end of all things? This essay is an attempt to begin answering that question. Its focus is almost exclusively on scripture, and those implications which ‘by good and necessary consequence may be deduced’ therein. One temptation of studying eschatology is to spend too long speculating about how the biblical record maps onto both history and the direction in which we surmise the world to be heading. Beeke and Smalley are right, I think, to be wary of this:

Our only and sufficient authority for eschatology is the Holy Scriptures. Human opinions, personal intuition, interpretations of current events, and expert analyses of trends make for interesting conversation, but have no place in the doctrinal teaching of the church, for they lack the authority of divine revelation.^[ii]

But, at the same time, this can never fully be adhered to. All those studying eschatology do so with certain extra-biblical assumptions rooted in history or personal experience: the most obvious being a recognition that the second coming has not yet occurred, or that the mission of the church must, as a minimum, have been set to take some two millennia. It isn’t wrong to come to the scriptures with these assumptions; it simply reflects the fact that we trust that the Lord of history is the same as the God of the Bible, and that neither can be divvied up into hermetically-sealed units—even if we might be suitably reticent to draw overly definite connections between those two spheres. In what follows, then, I attempt to retain a thorough rootedness in scripture, without shying away from asking how the teachings of the Bible map onto what we know of God’s work in the world, from biblical times until our own day.

2. Apocalypse now

Those drawn to the study of eschatology might well be interested in predicting the precise time of Christ’s return: history is littered with such predictions. But not only does this contravene Jesus’ strikingly clear injunction about the fruitlessness of such speculation—‘concerning that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father only’ (Matt. 24:36)—it also overlooks the essential New Testament claim that the eschaton, the time of the end, has already come. We are already living in the last days of this world: not only in the fact that we live in the final aeon before the Second Coming, but more particularly, and mysteriously, in the fact that in Jesus Christ—incarnate, crucified, resurrected, now ascended—the final consummation of all things upon his coming in glory has already broken into our present age.

When Jesus begins his public ministry, he proclaims that ‘the Kingdom of God is at hand’. The promised Messiah has come. And that, in terms of Jewish Messianic hope, rooted in the scriptures, meant not only, or even primarily, the temporal and physical realities of political emancipation and national freedom. As it turned out, it meant far more than that: Jesus’ coming inaugurated the heaven-filled, world-altering promises wrapped up with the final Davidic king that the Messianic promises of the prophets had constantly overflowed into—promises that can only be interpreted as eschatological. In Isaiah 11, the ‘shoot from the stump of Jesse’ was promised (v1). He would not only usher in righteousness and justice (vv3–5), but would bring about a complete reworking of the created order, one where ‘the wolf shall dwell with the lamb, / and the leopard shall lie down with the young goat’ (v6). In Chapter 25 of Isaiah’s prophecy we learn that the ingathering of the nations under the aegis of ‘the root of Jesse, who shall stand as a signal for the peoples’ (11:10) in 11:12–16 has a cosmic, eschatological significance to it. The gathering in of the nations to the Lord’s ‘mountain’ will come hand-in-hand with the destruction of death itself:

[God] will swallow up death forever;
and the Lord GOD will wipe away tears from all faces,
and the reproach of his people he will take away from all the earth,
for the LORD has spoken. (Isa. 25:8)

How should this mind-stretching reality best be described? In the penultimate chapter of Isaiah, the Lord calls it ‘new heavens and a new earth’, another way of describing the same re-framing of reality pictured in chapter 11, where the same supernatural peace pertains (65:25; cf. 11:6–8). This, according to the book of Revelation, is the final consummation towards which the cosmos is heading (Rev. 21:1–8).

When Jesus announced that ‘the time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand’ (Mark 1:15), and identified himself as the fulfilment both of the suffering servant prophesied in Isaiah and the harbinger of the supernatural healing and renewal associated by Isaiah with the eschatological consummation of the kingdom (Luke 4:16–21, cf. Isa. 61:1–2; Matt. 11:2–6), he was making a very clear point: in him, as the final, promised, Davidic king, God’s kingdom of cosmic, eschatological renewal had arrived. And so, fittingly, his life and ministry throbbed with the vibrant fulfilment of end-times promises. When he is born, kings come to worship Christ (Matt. 2:1–12), in fulfilment of the psalmic promises (e.g., Ps. 72:8–11; cf. Zech. 9:10). At Christ’s baptism, the heavens are rent asunder (Mark 1:10), the Spirit descends (Luke 3:22; cf. Joel 2:28–32, Acts 2:1–41), and God speaks from heaven, in words that echo the description of the Lord’s anointed in Psalm 2:7.^[iii] In the latter case, the connection to this of all psalms is particularly telling: for no psalm is perhaps quite so brazen both in describing the antagonism between the Lord’s anointed and the rulers of the nations (vv1–3), nor the totality of the King’s final victory over and subjugation of them (vv7–12). In this sense, it points to the final eschatological reality of the world’s nations bowing before Christ, God’s anointed king—the very sense in which these words are echoed in Revelation (2:26–27; cf. 1:5). In the same way, Christ’s agonies in Gethsemane are presented in scripture in overtly eschatological terms, as him drinking the cup of God’s wrath—an image that features in John’s revelation as referring to the final judgment at large (14:10–11). Finally, there is a unique parallel between Christ’s passion and crucifixion, and the final judgment: not only in that the darkness of God’s dreadful judgment hung over the earth at that time (Matt. 27:45; cf. Ex. 10:21–22, Joel 2:1–2), but also in the many similarities between Christ’s end-times discourses in the synoptic gospels and the events of his suffering and death.^[iv] After Christ’s ascension, the Holy Spirit is poured out upon the church at Pentecost, in direct fulfilment of the end-times promises about ‘the day of the Lord’ in Joel 2:28–29 and elsewhere (Isa. 32:15, 44:3; Ezek. 39:29).

This central eschatological tenor of Christ’s teaching—what has been referred to as ‘inaugurated eschatology’—is echoed in the Pauline corpus. It is clear that, for Paul, the eschaton has come. Writing to the Corinthian church, Paul described Christian believers as those ‘on whom the end of the ages has come’ (1 Cor. 10:11). Christ’s incarnation, in fulfilment of the promises, came ‘when the fulness of time had come’ (Gal. 4:4). This sense of the end times having already come hinges on the reality of Christ’s resurrection. Christ, as the firstborn from the dead (1 Cor. 15:20), has ushered in a new dimension of reality, a new order: as the resurrected one, the one who, having conquered death, has ascended into heaven to sit at the right hand of the Father, Jesus has been given all authority on heaven and earth, placed ‘far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the age to come’ (Eph. 1:21). In this sense, the resurrection and ascension of Christ simply is the fulfilment of the promises of an Israelite king who would rule over the nations:

May he have dominion from sea to sea,
and from the River to the ends of the earth!
May desert tribes bow down before him,
and his enemies lick the dust!
May the kings of Tarshish and of the coastlands
render him tribute;
May the kings of Sheba and Seba
bring gifts!
May all kings fall down before him,
all nations serve him! (Ps. 72:8–11)

And yet there is a very real sense, at the same time, that the eschaton has not yet come. This is clearly indicated in Luke’s gospel. Luke’s presentation of Christ’s teaching on the reality of his kingdom is perhaps the most earthy, most temporally-focussed, of all the gospel accounts: ‘blessed are the poor’. Christ is presented, without qualification, as the fulfilment of the hopes of Israel for national renewal, as ‘the consolation of Israel’ (2:25), and as ‘a horn of salvation for us / in the house of his servant David,’

as he spoke by the mouth of his holy prophets from of old,
that we should be saved from our enemies,
and from the hand of all who hate us;
to show the mercy promised to our fathers
and to remember his holy covenant,
the oath that he swore to our father Abraham, to grant us
that we, being delivered from the hand of our enemies,
might serve him without fear,
in holiness and righteousness before him all our days. (1:69–75)

Christ unambiguously presents himself, throughout Luke’s gospel, as the final and full fulfilment of the promises. In him, as Luke’s account makes clear, the promised kingdom had come—ushering in a new age of peace and divine blessing.

And yet, as he approaches Jerusalem, Luke informs us that Jesus told the parable of the Ten Minas ‘because they supposed that the kingdom of God was to appear immediately’ (19:11). The consummate manifestation of the kingdom in glory would have to wait. But wait until when? After Christ’s resurrection, it seems reasonable for the disciples to suppose that the time had, at last, arrived. And so they ask him, just as he is about to ascend into the heavens: ‘Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?’ He doesn’t answer that question directly:

It is not for you to know times or seasons that the Father has fixed by his own authority. But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth. (Acts 1:6–8)

The final realisation of the kingdom that in Christ has already come would have to wait: but Christ, by his answer, links this final realisation to both the giving of the Spirit and the commission to make disciples of all nations, to carry the gospel of Christ the Lord ‘to the ends of the earth’. While the church is about her commission from the Lord, there is a now-not-yet-ness to his kingdom. In Christ the kingdom has come: the eschaton is here; we are in the ‘end of the ages’. But its final realisation awaits the day when the church militant has finished her mighty task of bringing the gospel to the nations.

This now-not-yet-ness (awaiting a more succinct theological term) features in Paul’s thought, too. For Paul, the resurrection power of Christ is now at work in believers (Eph. 1:19–20). We are already seated with Christ in the heavenly realms, where he rules over the cosmos (Eph. 2:6; Col. 3:1–4). Our present salvation, then, is a breaking in to the current age the eschatological realities that await us, but which in Christ have been brought near: our acquittal before the judgment seat of God, resurrection life, final glory. That is why, I think, Paul speaks of the whole gamut of salvation—predestination, calling, sanctification, and glorification—in the past tense, as things that God already has accomplished (Rom. 8:30). For there is a very real sense in which he has. And the eschatological structure of our salvation also explains how Paul can so clearly teach that we will be judged by the Lord, giving an account before him of our works (Rom. 2:6–11; 2 Cor. 5:10), while at the same time teaching that ‘there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus’ (Rom. 8:1). That final judgment, which will certainly happen, has in a very real sense already happened for believers—in the same way that in Christ the events of the eschaton and his final coming in glory have, just as truly, broken in to this present age. For Paul, all these future realities are made present by the resurrected Christ and the eschatological gift of the Spirit. They will still happen, and there are a series of events leading up to them, in the providence of God. But at the same time, they already belong to the believer simply through faith in Christ—the faith that unites him to Jesus, such that he receives, simply as a gift, the resurrection life, the holiness, the vindication, the glory of Christ. At present, this side of the Second Coming, these spiritual realities co-exist with the earthly realities of life in a sinful, fallen world, and with all the trappings of our sinful natures: ‘the flesh’. It is not a comfortable co-existence—it is a war (Gal. 5:16–24), one that parallels the greater groaning of all creation, awaiting the day of consummation at which the Sons of God will be revealed in glory (Rom. 8:18–25). But that groaning does not detract from the certain reality that these eschatological realities truly have indeed come.

3. The case for progressive eschatology

These are wonderful truths. But it is not always clear where they leave us. Quite what it means for Christ to have already—and yet also not yet—ushered in the final, eschatological kingdom of God is uncertain. It represents an issue over which Christians have been divided for centuries. In his 335 AD Oration in Praise of Constantine, Eusebius of Caesarea was unambiguous in regarding the conversion of the Roman Emperor as the emphatic fulfilment of the promises of God’s final, eschatological kingdom, one that spanned the whole earth:

In short, the ancient oracles and predictions of the prophets were fulfilled … and those especially which speak as follows concerning the saving Word: ‘He shall have dominion from sea to sea, and from the river to the ends of the earth’; ‘In his days shall righteousness spring up; and abundance of peace.’ [Ps. 71:7–8] ‘And they shall beat their swords into plough-shares, and their spears into sickles’; ‘And nation shall not take up sword against nation, neither shall they learn to war any more’ [Isa. 2:4].

It’s easy to look down on this from our historical vantage point today. We now know that the Christian Roman Empire did not last, that its Christianization did not (at least in the final reckoning) usher in an age of unparalleled godliness and blessing, and that the Roman Empire did not in fact reach ‘the ends of the earth’. But, so soon after the Great Persecution of the 290s—which Eusebius had himself lived through—so dramatic a transformation as the erstwhile engine of the persecution of the church itself becoming Christian must have seemed nothing short of a deeply eschatological and profoundly supernatural event.

But it was only temporary. And by the beginning of the next century, Augustine of Hippo felt bound to disentangle Rome, the embodiment of the earthly city, from the heavenly city of Christ, amidst pagan accusations that it was her Christianity that had fuelled Rome’s woes. We find a similar kind of toing and froing in the Reformation and post-Reformation eras, when many in the Reformed world became convinced that the millennium and the final realisation of the kingdom were at hand—a conviction that was undone by the failure of the Reformed churches to shape their societies in their image. After the Great Ejection of 1662, most English puritans—despite, only a few years before, being the most fervent advocates of the establishment of God’s kingdom on earth—reworked their understanding of God’s kingdom this side of glory, conceptualising it as a largely invisible, internal, and personal reality.

And similar dynamics are at work today. In the post-war period, with church attendance in the western world seeing dramatic decline (especially in Europe), the hope of the kingdom of God has, for the most part, come to be regarded as internal, spiritual, invisible, and a-political. In his Biblical Theology (1948), Geerhardus Vos argued that the kingdom exists under ‘two aspects’: the one here and now, the other inaugurated at the Second Coming. These aspects are shaped by three distinct contrasts:

(a) The present Kingdom comes gradually, the final Kingdom catastrophically;

(b) the present Kingdom comes largely in the internal, invisible sphere, the final Kingdom in the form of a world-wide visible manifestation;

(c) the present Kingdom up to the eschatological point remains subject to imperfections; the final Kingdom will be without all imperfections …^[v]

Cornelis Venema echoes this idea of the non-physicality of the kingdom, claiming that, until the Second Coming, Christ’s kingdom is not ‘earthly or physical’.^[vi] Beeke and Smalley, meanwhile—echoing Vos—argue that the ‘present kingdom’ is ‘in the internal, invisible sphere’, in contrast to the ‘final kingdom’, which shall be found ‘in a worldwide, visible manifestation’.^[vii]

Undoubtedly there is much truth to this. ‘My kingdom is not of this world’, Jesus declares in John’s gospel (18:36): and though its final manifestation will be glorious beyond measure, as a mustard plant it begins as the smallest of seeds (Matt. 13:31). But the idea that the kingdom—both because it begins in the heart by the work of the Spirit, and because its final glory has not yet been revealed—must be predominantly internal and invisible seems to me to be mistaken. Jesus’ consistent teaching throughout the Sermon on the Mount, for instance, is that true obedience to God’s law begins in the heart, and overflows into outward, physical, earthy reality—care for the poor, love of enemies, the turning of one’s cheek. As Christ makes clear elsewhere, the inward, invisible work of the Spirit is always seen externally, manifest in the realm of the temporal: ‘the wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit’ (John 3:8). That is true of other spiritual realities, as well—most notably the human soul, which like the work of the Spirit is also invisible and spiritual. Christ’s kingdom is not of this world because it is eschatological: that is, it belongs to the end of the ages, to the world that is to come. But that does not mean that it cannot be seen, that it doesn’t impact physical or temporal matters, or that it is merely a personal, private matter. The inward work of the Spirit always bubbles up into tangible and practical love, and practical obedience to God’s law.

And that means that the work of the Spirit in applying to believers the eschatological salvation won by Christ is a work that transforms the world. The Spirit begins in us a new creation (2 Cor. 5:17)—as we’ve seen, the supernatural invasion of the eschatological renewal of all things into this present age. New creation, resurrection, death transformed into life, newfound obedience to the law of God—all of these realities that encompass the salvation offered us in Christ are world-altering realities. And so, as the gospel goes out to the nations and people are baptised and taught to obey the commandments of Christ (Matt. 28:19), the eschatological kingdom promised in the prophets, in which peace and justice prevail, is gradually and progressively realised on the earth. The future invades the present—imperfectly, falteringly, yet really. Swords are beaten down into ploughshares. Lions lie down with lambs. The dead are raised, the blind receive sight, and the poor have good news proclaimed to them. As more and more people come to submit to Christ as Lord, God’s will is increasingly done on earth as it is in heaven.

The progressive, world-altering character of the advance of the kingdom is reflected in Jesus’ descriptions of it. Seeds are sown, and while they are in the ground they are, in a sense, invisible; but they then grow into stalks of wheat, progressively enlarging until they are ready for the harvest (Matt. 13:24–30, 35–43). Leaven in bread works similarly, progressing through the dough until it is all leavened (Matt. 13:33; Luke 13:20–21). And finally, the mustard seed, though ‘the smallest of all seeds’, grows, when planted, until ‘it is larger than all the garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches’ (Matt. 13:32). Importantly, the mighty tree in whose branches birds make their abode was not a new image to Jesus’ listeners. It appears twice in the Old Testament, in Daniel 4:10–12 and Ezekiel 31:3–9. In Ezekiel, the tree is Assyria, ‘a cedar in Lebanon’ (v3), a tree that ‘towered high / above all the trees of the field’ (v5). This tree was a source of nourishment for animal and bird alike:

All the birds of the heavens
made their nests in its boughs;
under its branches all the beasts of the field
gave birth to their young,
and under its shadow
lived all great nations. (v6)

In Daniel, meanwhile, the same image appears, but this time the tree is Nebuchadnezzar himself, as Daniel explains in his interpretation (4:20–22). The image is essentially the same as in Ezekiel: ‘The tree grew and became strong … The beasts of the field found shade under it, and the birds of the heavens lived in its branches, and all flesh was fed from it’ (vv11–12). It is, of course, a fitting picture of the great empires and potentates of this world: for all empires begin in humble circumstances, often as small tribal conglomerations or as meagre city-states, before slowly conquering neighbouring kingdoms until they span vast swathes of land—just as trees begin as small seeds, but grow, progressively, into towering giants of the forest.

The image Jesus uses to describe the kingdom of God is an imperial one, then. Just like great empires, his kingdom too is sown in obscurity and apparent insignificance, but grows to conquer the world—only, unlike all other empires, his kingdom alone ‘shall stand forever’, and ‘never be destroyed’ (Dan. 2:44). Its telos is the fulfilment of all the Old Testament promises of the triumph of God’s kingdom, of the rulers of the nations kissing the Son (Ps. 2:12); of the heavenly kingdom breaking in pieces the kingdoms of the world (Dan. 2:44); of the kingdoms of the world becoming the kingdoms of our Lord and his Christ (Rev. 11:15); of the kings of the nations bringing their treasures into the city of God; of the nations walking by the light of the heavenly city (Rev. 21:24–25; cf. Hag. 2:7); of the earth being filled with the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea (Isa. 11:9; Hab. 2:14). That is where we are going. Until the Second Coming, imperfections will always remain within God’s kingdom on earth (Matt. 13:24–30)—tares abide among the true wheat of God’s work. But the church still labours, in light of eternity, with the promise of this future glory—the realisation of God’s kingdom on earth—ahead of her; and, as she does so, carrying out her mission of making disciples of all nations, the eschatological realities that are given, now, to all believers in Christ, come to be realised, though but in part, in her work, her ministry, and her witness. As the gospel is proclaimed to the nations with all the weakness of a crucified saviour (1 Cor. 1:23), with the apparent insignificance of a mustard seed, having cast aside weapons of flesh and blood (Eph. 6:12), the foundations of a mighty empire are laid, and the transformation of the world begins—a world that will finally and irrevocably be transformed (we might even say transfigured) at the coming again of our Lord. Christ’s government, and the peace it brings, increases without end (Isa. 9:7)—until, that is, all his enemies have been placed under his feet (Ps. 110:1; Heb. 1:13; cf. 1 Cor. 15:25). The last two millennia bear witness to this.

4. Millennial musings

Thus far we have persisted with one lacuna that will strike many readers as inexcusable. Our attempt to sketch the contours of biblical eschatology has made no reference to the millennium, the thousand-year reign of Christ’s saints foretold in Revelation 20. This may seem all the stranger given the current vogue for hanging our taxonomy of eschatological positions on interpretations of the millennium: the sorting of the various perspectives into premillennial, postmillennial, and amillennial. But this silence has been very deliberate. Not only are these rather recent eschatological categories—as has been pointed out, ‘postmillennialism’ was likely a mid-nineteenth-century coinage, while the distinction between postmillennialism and amillennialism only appeared in the twentieth century (what we now regard as ‘amillennialism’ being understood as one variant of postmillennialism)^[viii]—but they encourage an unfortunate overemphasis on one chapter of scripture, neglecting the expansive scope of biblical teaching on eschatology. Revelation 20 is an obscure chapter in the most obscure of books. It focusses on an age of redemptive history—the millennium—that is mentioned nowhere else in scripture. It is significant, of course, given the consistent eschatological leitmotif that courses through the entire book of Revelation—and it should not be neglected when delving into the theology of the end times. But to pin our entire eschatological perspective onto its interpretation is a strangely myopic approach to take, one that suggests a failure to appreciate how thoroughly eschatological the tenor of biblical theology is, throughout the scope of scriptural revelation.

What is known as ‘premillennialism’ does seem to fit a literal reading of Revelation 20, with 1 Corinthians 15:23–26 often pleaded as another locus classicus. In this chapter, we are told that Satan is bound by an angel for a thousand years and thrown into the bottomless pit, ‘so that he might not deceive the nations any longer’ (vv2–3). The next ‘until’ concerns the fate of the saints: ‘the souls of those who had been beheaded for the testimony of Jesus and for the word of God’ are resurrected in what John calls ‘the first resurrection’, and reign with Christ, without the rest of the dead being raised ‘until the thousand years are ended’ (vv4–5). Premillennialists construct from this the teaching that Christ’s return in glory will usher in regnum sanctorum, a literal thousand-year golden age in which Christians, having experienced some kind of resurrection, reign over the earth together with Christ himself, while Satan is bound. Then Satan will be released (v7) and will gather the forces of Gog and Magog (v8) for battle against ‘the camp of the saints and the beloved city’, before being finally defeated and cast forever into hell (vv9–10). Then will come the final judgment, when the dead are raised and are brought to account for their evil and sin (vv11–15).

But there are problems with this interpretation. One is that John does not describe all Christians being raised at the coming of Christ, but specifically ‘those who had not worshipped the beast or its image and had not received its mark on their foreheads or their hands’ (v4). Nor does the passage specifically refer to the coming of Christ: we are simply told that these faithful martyrs ‘came to life and reigned with Christ for a thousand years’ (v4). It is true that the word translated ‘resurrection’ (ἀνάστασις) was typically understood to refer to the complete, bodily resurrection promised at the Second Coming; as such, interpreting this ‘resurrection’ as referring to the elevation of martyred souls to heaven, dwelling in the presence of Christ before his Second Coming, seems not to fit within the usual semantic range of the word. But the situation is equally problematic the other way round, since both the ἀνάστασις promised at the end of time and the final judgment are elsewhere in scripture exclusively associated with the Second Coming of Christ (with the exception, of course, of Christ’s own resurrection)—as a single, once-for-all event (e.g. 2 Thess. 1:6–10; John 5:28–29; Acts 24:14–15). ‘Resurrection’ has a final, irrevocable quality to it, such that any interpretation of Revelation 20 must defend a somewhat idiosyncratic understanding of it. It seems more reasonable, given both the dangers of an overly-literal reading of Revelation, and the general thrust of end-times teaching found elsewhere in scripture, to read the resurrection of the martyrs in Revelation 20:4 as referring to the promotion of the souls of saints to the intermediate state—dwelling with Christ in the heavenly realms. Since Christ already reigns over earth from heaven (Rev. 1:5), his departed saints, now by his side, likewise reign over the nations (cf. 2:26–27).

But this still leaves open the possibility of either postmillennialism or amillennialism. In modern Reformed circles, the two positions are thought to be at loggerheads, with amillennial theologians stressing the spirituality and invisibility of Christ’s kingdom, as well as the place of suffering in the Christian life, and postmillennial thinkers emphasising the importance of cultural transformation, political involvement, and an optimistic view of the gradual triumph of Christian ministry—usually tinged with an air of triumphalism that others find distasteful. In reality, though, the two positions are actually different nuances of a single position. Both understand the millennium of Revelation 20 as non-literal, with Christ returning in glory to usher in the final and full consummation of his kingdom after (post-) the millennium. Both regard Christ as already reigning over the cosmos, from heaven, together with departed saints. Both believe that the full realisation of this heavenly reality on earth—sinless, immortal life, and the reign of perfect righteousness—will only arrive when Christ returns. The difference lies in how the heavenly millennium is believed to relate to life in our temporal world, prior to that return. Postmillennials believe that, as the gospel goes to the nations, God progressively answers the famous petition in the Lord’s prayer: ‘thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven’. Amillennials, on the other hand, usually read this petition as a prayer for the hastening of Christ’s coming: the only hope for God’s will being done on earth as it is in heaven is at the Second Coming of Christ, when the union between heaven and earth is restored to its prelapsarian glory.

The latter position seems to me to be less biblical. Firstly, it is strange, if Jesus were bidding his disciples to pray for his Second Coming, for him not to have included that as a specific petition in the Lord’s prayer, of the kind found at the end of John’s revelation (21:20). But, as I have argued above, this position also seems to underestimate the sense in which God’s will really is done on earth as it is in heaven: when sinners repent, are baptized, and are taught to do all that Christ has commanded (Matt. 28:19). Jesus’ teachings and commandments reveal the will of God. The imperatives of the Sermon on the Mount, for instance, amount to the bringing near to earth of the heavenly righteousness, grace, and love of the Father: hence the command to ‘be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect’ (Matt. 5:48). So each time the will of God, rather than the will of man, is pursued by Spirit-filled believers, something of God’s kingdom—the heavenly reality of his unambiguous reign—is realised on earth. And, just as the visions of God’s kingdom and the rule of his Messiah provided by the prophets speak of political, cultural, and social renewal, so when believers obey the gospel and walk in the footsteps of Christ this world is renewed. It is not a final renewal. Creation still groans (Rom. 8:22); the last enemy, death, has not yet been destroyed (1 Cor. 15:26); Satan may have been bound (Rev. 20:2), but still he prowls around like a roaring lion (1 Peter 5:8); tares still mingle among the wheat (Matt. 13:24–30). And yet, in the midst of this, real change is ushered in by the work of God’s Spirit: men and women are freed from the shackles of their sin, the disobedient are turned to the wisdom of the just (Lk. 1:17), broken lives are made whole again. And the powers of darkness are not indifferent to this. Before the advance of God’s kingdom, they quake with fear. ‘A city set on a hill cannot be hidden’ (Matt. 5:14).

5. Conclusions

The breaking in of the end times to our present age changes everything. It fundamentally re-wires our sense of what it is to be Christians, of what the church is called to, and of where our world, in God’s providence, is heading. Without this ‘inaugurated’ aspect of biblical eschatology, Christians would be left in a similar place to Old Covenant believers: armed with the promises, and awaiting the Messiah. But the New Testament insists otherwise: the promises have been fulfilled (2 Cor. 1:20), the fullness of time has come (Mark 1:15), and in Christ the eschaton has come near. There is thus a heavenly, transcendental, and eternal quality to the new covenant church. Our worship is heavenly (Heb. 12:18–24) because we belong to the age in which heaven and earth again are united (Rev. 21:1–4), just as they had been at the beginning of time. Our minds should be fixed on heavenly things, because heaven is where we really are, united with Christ in his resurrection and ascension (Col. 3:1–4). The church militant, like the church triumphant, is saturated with eschatological glory; she basks in the majestic grandeur of the heavenly realms. She is a pilgrim and an exile (1 Peter 1:1) not because she does not belong to this world, but because she does not belong to this age. She belongs to the future age, to the eschaton, to the time when heaven and earth will be finally, gloriously, and irrevocably redeemed. She belongs to the time when all the nations will praise the Lord, when kings shall bring their treasures into the city of God. The glory of all this is, for a time, veiled. Its full manifestation has not yet come. But when that time does come, the true reality that has always been true will be made known to all. This world does not belong to the world. It belongs to the church. And soon enough that will be made clear.

But, as I have insisted throughout, this now-not-yet-ness does not map onto a neat bifurcation between the internal and the external, the spiritual and the material, or the ecclesiastical and the political. That view, I would suggest, owes more to the rise of secular liberalism and the concomitant loss of confidence felt by western Christians than it does to theology that is rooted in the scriptures. The bringing near of our eschatological resurrection—in other words, the new life promised to all who put their faith in Christ—cannot but transform the world. For we are people in this world: we live and work, we marry and start families, we rub shoulders with those of many faiths and none. We seek the welfare of the city of our exile, for in her welfare is our welfare (Jer. 29:7).^[ix] But we do so, uniquely, as those who are indwelt by the Spirit of God, and as those in whom the righteous requirements of the law are fulfilled by faith (Rom. 8:4). By the grace of God, animated by his Spirit, the church, in this sense, is a commonwealth of the eschaton, a community in which God’s law is obeyed, peace is established, and in which everyone lives under their own vine and fig tree, with none to make them afraid (Micah 4:4). She is still beset with struggles and strife: sin within and oppression without. She endures persecution amidst all her blessings (Mark 10:29–31). We await, with hope and expectation, the final eradication of these tares amidst the harvest of God’s kingdom. In the words of the old hymn:

Though with a scornful wonder
Men see her sore oppressed,
By schisms rent asunder,
By heresies distressed:
Yet saints their watch are keeping,
Their cry goes up, How long?
And soon the night of weeping
Shall be the morn of song!

And yet, by faith, ‘the morn of song’ invades, supernaturally, the dark night of the church’s sorrows. Imperfectly, and but in part, the future reality of peace and blessing that is promised to all who trust in Christ breaks into our present age. It does so every time a sinner comes to faith in Christ. And when whole families, communities, and nations come to faith, they enjoy these blessings corporately. We should not take these blessings for the final consummation of what is ours in Christ—history is littered with instances of this mistake, and it makes for sad reading. In reality, what awaits us is that which ‘no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man imagined’ (1 Cor. 2:9). But nor should we make the mistake of believing that no tangible, visible blessings fall upon Christian believers—and their communities and nations—this side of final glory. Both of these errors flow from a failure to appreciate the now-not-yet-ness of God’s work among his people in this age.

These realities should give us hope, confidence, and optimism. We belong to the only empire that will never fall. We are the only true progressives, because the certainty of the progress in which we hope—the work of God in this world—is assured by the promise of God and bought by the blood of Christ. These are not always realities we see, either in the world at large or in our own personal lives. But they are true. And that has profound pastoral implications. In times when the work of God’s kingdom seems distant and dim; when the world seems to triumph over God’s saints, or Satan possess the upper hand—then we can say to one another that Christ has come, that his kingdom has been ushered in, that we already belong to the golden, heavenly Jerusalem; that we will inherit the earth (Matt. 5:5; cf. Ps. 37:11). These future realities are ours, and we have received the Holy Spirit as their downpayment (Eph. 1:13–14).

On the other hand, understanding the scope of biblical eschatology keeps us from becoming inward-looking and monastically-minded, regarding this world as a meaningless trifle that God will one day do away with. This outlook at various times has dominated the church, and it seems to me to be more prominent today than many imagine. At heart, it is a deep-rooted secularism: a belief, implicit or otherwise, that this world (the present age—the sæculum) is not good, that it does not belong to God, that it is a sinking ship with salvation in Christ merely a lifeboat offered to those otherwise doomed to die in the depths. But the apostle Paul is adamant in denouncing this, asserting to Timothy that ‘everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving, for it is made holy by the word of God and prayer’ (1 Tim. 4:4–5). God made this world, and he made it ‘very good’ (Gen. 1:31); and though we have rebelled against our maker, he is working his great work of salvation to bring about the redemption of his creation. In this sense, Christ’s incarnation, and subsequently his resurrection, are God’s great affirmation of the created order. And so ‘to the pure all things are pure’ (Titus 1:15), and all things belong to the saints of God (1 Cor. 3:22–23). Biblical eschatology affirms this. It does not teach that the future age of blessing only belongs to the time of its full consummation; rather, it is ours now, spiritually, by faith in Christ. The future age of glory has broken into the present age. And that allows us to affirm the goodness of the world in which we now dwell, the reality of Christ’s present reign over it, and the tangible, world-altering aspects of his kingdom presently manifest in his church. It is in the knowledge of these realities that the church is called to go unto the ends of the earth, to make disciples of all nations.

^[i] John Gray, ‘An illusion with a future’, in Dædalus 133, no. 3, 10–17, quotation at 11.

^[ii] Joel R. Beeke and Paul M. Smalley, Reformed Systematic Theology (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2018–2024), 4:721. (Hereafter RST.)

^[iii] Much of this I have from RST, 4:734.

^[iv] See RST, 4:735–36.

^[v] Geerhardus Vos, Biblical Theology: Old and New Testaments (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1975), 384.

^[vi] Cornelis P. Venema, The Promise of the Future (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 2000), 271.

^[vii] RST, 4:741.

^[viii] Jonathan Baddley, ‘Whatever happened to Postmillennialism?’ (https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/whatever-happened-postmillennialism/?queryID=52802ad492bcbc185f4b2b33405de32d, accessed 27 October 2025); Venema, The Promise of the Future, 219–21.

^[ix] A verse famously applied by Augustine of Hippo to the question of how citizens of the heavenly city of God’s kingdom ought to relate to those of the ‘earthly city’: see CD, XIX.26.

This is the third, and long overdue, article in my now three-part series looking at ‘manhood’.

I started with ‘man’ as ‘human’, exploring the difference between mankind and the other animals, claiming that whilst we are animals (and explaining why it matters that we remember this) we are also fundamentally distinct from the rest of the animal kingdom, as the only creatures made in the image of God, with a unique ability to rule over other creatures and over our own desires and instincts.

I went on to explain why both humanity and (fe)maleness must be considered irreducible characteristics, not dependent on or defined by other qualities, but fundamental realities in and of themselves; that any other observable differences flow out of, but do not define, this more basic distinction. To seek to fully describe either is a risky game indeed.

So it is with caution that I turn to the question ‘Are men and women interchangeable?’. This is a question in dire need of a sensitive, nuanced and biblical answer. Arguments about sex and gender rage across all sides of the political, scientific, legal and theological spectrums. Are men and women interchangeable? If not, what are the differences? Which differences are inherent, and which are cultural, socially engineered, or forced upon us?

It’s a question of identity, as people struggle to identify with the sex they're born as and want to be able to transition to another.

It's a question of theology, as churches decide what their complementarian or egalitarian theology looks like in practice.

It’s a question of psychology, as a range of differences in behaviour and cognition are suggested and debated - both to decide whether they’re even genuine differences, and then whether they're innate or products of social factors.

It's a question of sexual ethics, as society questions the notion that sex ought to be between a man and a woman, believing that all sorts of other permutations might be possible, permissible, pleasurable and perhaps even praiseworthy.

And it remains a question of misogyny, misandry, and the ‘battle of the sexes’. Misogyny is increasingly seen as an almost terrorist threat in the UK, and the great evil of our time. It seems that there is a serious minority of men who believe that all or most women are irrational, manipulative, and not worth knowing, and a serious minority of women who believe that all or most men are either incompetent and lazy babies, or violent and abusive monsters. The stats suggest that men and women are more politically polarised than ever before. The popularity of manosphere influencers, from Tate to Peterson, demonstrates the number of young men at a total loose end, hungry for meaning and direction. Exactly how serious the issue is is hard to determine, but the fact that something has broken down between the sexes seems hard to deny.

Into this milieu of competing worldviews, I intend to offer a (theo)logical perspective. I hope nothing I say will be too radical. I'm not looking to promote anything extreme, just biblical common sense.

Throughout this article, I will use ‘man’ and ‘male’ interchangeably, and so too ‘woman’ and ‘female’. I use these terms in a biological sense, to mean those who are born as that particular sex, with the corresponding chromosomes, hormones, and sexual organs. I don't deny that outliers exist, and don't want to erase the existence of those for whom biological sex is a genuinely difficult, ambiguous or non-binary matter. However, such occurrences are rare, and to keep them at the forefront of debates is like saying we shouldn’t prosecute theft because of the Jean Valjeans who are only stealing to feed their sister’s dying child. Yes, such cases need consideration at some point, but to make them central in the argument is to muddy the waters and make everything seem more unclear than it really is, given they make up a very small minority of the population. I certainly have not thought enough about such issues to offer much insight, and so I am not going to try.

I will use ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ in line with modern usage. The idea of separating gender as to do with culture, presentation and social convention, and sex as to do with biology, is a helpful distinction that makes clear that not all gender stereotypes or expectations are grounded in biology. Of course, the mistake that much of Western society has made is to assume that because these concepts are distinct, they can be completely divorced and treated independently. To forget that social constructs actually serve a vital purpose, and that we deconstruct them at our own risk.

Before I answer the titular question, I want to briefly survey the different stakeholders in this debate, specifically those that claim that men and women are interchangeable.

Those who say that men and women are (in some way) interchangeable

There are the ‘soft’ feminists, who want equal opportunity for men and women; who believe that women should not be excluded from anything men have access to; that the right woman can do most jobs just as well as a man. Then there are the more ‘girl power’ feminists, who want not just equal opportunity but equal outcomes; who perhaps secretly (or not so secretly) think that women would do a better job of running the country and ruling the world, and are hoping for the day when women not only equal but outnumber men in the boardroom, government, and higher education.

There’s LGB proponents, who want to interchange men and women in the bedroom; who believe that the act of intercourse isn't really altered by switching the woman out for a man, or the man out for a woman. They may also believe that the same is true for parenting; that two dads are a perfectly good parenting team for a child; that switching a husband for a wife is a like-for-like replacement; that such permutations of the ‘traditional household’ are unproblematic and harmless.

There's T proponents, who want those who desire to transition between genders/sexes to be able to; who think that biological makeup does not prevent them from calling themselves something else. Ironically, they understand more than anyone that the sexes are not interchangeable. That's why they want to switch. If being a man or woman made no difference, there'd be no discontent at being born as one, and no desire to switch to the other. The trans-ideologist is, in a sense, the ultimate believer in gender difference. They know that there’s something significant about being able to call yourself ‘man’ or ‘woman’, that these words don’t mean the same thing, and don't mean nothing, and that if you are one, you’re not the other. They get that gender and sex are hugely significant aspects of our identity. But they’re unhappy with the idea that someone could have no choice or autonomy over such significant aspects. That someone could want to be the other sex, and just have to accept that they're not.

Each group is coming at this question from a different angle, and they’re not as ideologically aligned as they appear. But they’re all linked by a desire to, in some way, deny the difference that biological sex makes to a person.

The good of feminism, and the danger

Before I say anything controversial, the right place to start is to acknowledge the good that the feminist movement has achieved for the average woman. It’s easy to forget that the UK only made voting legal for any woman in 1918, and only made it possible for a woman to attend university in 1868. Since then, a huge shift has occurred, and one that has meant much greater freedom for most women. Women are still free to be housewives or stay-at-home mums if they want to be; nothing (in theory) has been lost, and a great deal has been gained. They can now choose to work almost all of the same jobs, partake in the same hobbies, and occupy the same spaces that men do. In this sense, the argument that men and women are interchangeable has done women lots of good.

But this hasn't come without cost. The problem is that once two things are interchangeable, they become redundant. You no longer need both. Logically speaking, the idea that men and women are interchangeable makes having women in the boardroom acceptable, but also unnecessary. So if women offer the exact same things as men in the police force or government, as CEOs or parents, then sure, why not let them do these things? But also, why go to the trouble of trying to see equal representation, or to actively encourage more women in different spheres of influence, if everyone is interchangeable anyway?

This is why, somewhat ironically, a true sense of complementarianism is essential to a belief in the importance and necessity of women. If one believes that men and women are different on a deep level, and complement each other, and that many women excel in aspects that many men struggle with (and vice-versa), then the idea of women being involved in and having a say regarding every aspect of society, and being represented in government, higher education, the work force, management teams, and so on, makes much more sense.

More than that, it becomes a genuine good for society that men ought to get behind to ensure human flourishing. Not just something pursued for the sake of representation alone, but because women are different to men, and have different strengths, weaknesses, and something to offer that men cannot. Both men and women benefit from a consensus that they are not interchangeable, as this means that neither can be replaced, removed, or marginalised without something being lost.

A similar point can be made within the home. To believe that two men can make a perfectly good romantic couple, and a perfectly good parenting team, is to deny our need, beyond the act of giving birth, for mothers or wives. It is to say that women offer nothing in those roles that men don't. I'm not denying that gay men can be good fathers. I'm sure there are many who genuinely care for, support and look after their adopted (or otherwise) children far better than many straight parents. But two fathers are not the same as a mother and a father. A child could have two fathers who both, on paper, are some of the best, most loving, committed, generous parents you'll ever meet. But they're still missing out on something that only a mother can offer. To deny this is to minimise the role of women in society, and makes out that mothers are not really needed in a child's life.

I've framed most of these issues from the woman's side, since historically women are the ones who have most suffered from a misapplied belief in the difference between sexes, and I want to prove that needn't be the case. But it is perhaps men who have suffered most from some of the impacts of feminism. Many young men and boys have been told that men and women are interchangeable, and therefore do feel a sense of dispensability and redundancy, like the world would be no worse off without them. This is where the good and not-so-good influences of the manosphere can gain powerful traction on a young mind, for better or worse. In the worst cases, the result is swing to an even more misogynistic worldview and a hatred of women, meaning that this male identity crisis is a problem for women as much as men. The idea that men and women are interchangeable is not only a much flimsier basis for female inclusion than the alternative, it's also a disaster for the self-worth, motivation and ambition of men and boys left wondering what they have to offer society now.

So are men and women interchangeable?

But I still haven’t answered the central question. I’ve explained why the interchangeability of men and women might be desirable. I’ve explained why, ironically, men and women not being interchangeable is stronger grounds for the inclusion of women in every aspect of society. However, the question isn’t what answer would be better for society, or more popular, or more ‘feminist’. What we ought to care about is what’s true. To what extent are men and women the same? How are they different? Can we swap women out for men, and vice-versa, in every role and relationship, and go about unchanged and unharmed, and perhaps even enriched? Or are there reasons to believe that such swaps are not without their own set of problems?

Men and women as human

Just as I started ‘Man Vs Beast’ by saying that humans are still animals, we must start this argument by emphasising that, even more so, men and women are both human. Everything that I wrote in ‘Man Vs Beast’ is true of men and women. We are all made in God’s image, to reflect his character, relate to him as children, and rule over his world under him. Men and women both play critical parts in the mandate to fill the earth and subdue it, and to go forth and multiply. As much as we might focus on the differences, there is nothing in the world more similar to man than woman. When Adam was brought all the other creatures as helpers, not one of them was fit for him. It was only when God made a helper that was of his own bone and flesh, taken from his side, that Adam was satisfied and not alone.

Genesis very much underlines this point: ‘So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.’1. In one verse we can see that men and women are made in God’s image, both created by him, with the same calling and mandate. And they are both co-heirs in salvation. ‘Likewise, husbands, live with your wives in an understanding way, showing honor to the woman as the weaker vessel, since they are heirs with you of the grace of life, so that your prayers may not be hindered.’2. Women are heirs of the grace of life as much as men. They share in the present salvation, and future glory, that God has provided for all humanity in Christ.

Hence the vast majority of the Bible’s teaching, instruction and commands is undifferentiated between men and women. We don’t get the Ten Commandments, and then the Ten Commandments for wives and mothers. Jesus doesn’t give a second sermon on the mount for the girls in the audience. The fact that Paul does often give specific instructions to wives, husbands, children, masters, and slaves is the exception that proves the rule. The fact that Paul addresses these different groups in his letters means he expected them all to be present as his letter was read out to the church. It means that the letter was addressed to them all, men and women. And that therefore the majority of what he writes, his theology, teaching of the gospel, commands, etc are completely unaffected by gender. The fact that Paul occasionally addresses husbands, and then wives, highlights the fact that such distinctions are almost always absent from his, and the rest of the biblical authors’, writings. This is because most of what is written applies to men and women alike, without distinction.

Paul goes further than saying women are as human as any man. He reminds the church that all people, men included, are dependent on women for everything. He does so with an argument that is simple and genius. He reminds men that they have a mum. “Nevertheless, in the Lord woman is not independent of man nor man of woman; for as woman was made from man, so man is now born of woman. And all things are from God.”3 All men are reliant on women for their very existence. And all people are reliant on God for their existence. So any sort of superiority that assumes one sex would survive or flourish without the other is fundamentally flawed and obviously undermined every time someone is born. Whenever a man is tempted to think he’d be better off without women (or vice-versa), the very basics of human biology and reproduction remind us that God has made both sexes essential.

So we must not overstate our differences. Even more so than humanity and animals, men and women are of a kind. There is nothing in the world more similar to man than woman. We are all human and made in God’s image, to reflect God’s glory, relate to God as Father, and rule under God, having control over self and over the natural world. Men and women are equally precious and equally essential for humanity’s success. This starting point may be even more necessary in a world where many want to overstate the (supposedly) negative ways in which the other sex is different, and seek to tarnish women, or men.

There was a book ‘Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus’ published in 1992. I haven’t read it, and I'm sure it has some useful observations about men and women. But judged by the title alone, it could not be more wrong. As a man, I should not view women as aliens from another planet, fundamentally different (and therefore incomprehensible) to me. We are formed from the same dust, given the same breath, made in the same image. We are all humans from Planet Earth.

Male and female as distinct

But there are differences. Again, this is evident from Genesis 1. God creates man in his image, and right after it's stated ‘male and female he created them’. God creates humanity in two versions, male and female. It's important to underline biology as being key to this sexual difference. This isn't to say that maleness can be reduced to biology, as if what makes a man is merely testicles and testosterone. But of all the sexual markers we have, the biological ones are the most clear-cut, least ambiguous, and most undeniable. Only the truly contrarian would deny that men are stronger, on average, than women, and that this is due to biological differences in bone density, testosterone levels, muscle-building capabilities, and other strength-related physiological features. Or that the female reproductive system is set up very differently to the male one. Right down to our cells, we are either XX or XY (excluding rare cases which, as mentioned earlier, I haven’t done enough thinking on to consider in this article).

These physiological differences are hard to ignore or downplay. When you first see someone, say a total stranger passing on the street, you can tell almost instantly (even from a distance) whether they’re male or female. The instances where it’s difficult or ambiguous are usually because they've made a conscious effort to cover up their sex, either with their clothing and makeup, or through surgery and chemical alterations. That the idea of men and women being biologically different could need defending is somewhat absurd. It’s self-evident, and we all believe it deep down.

I won't do a full survey, either of the relevant Bible passages, or what I believe to be ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ qualities. But I will mention a few differences, to make the point that humanity really does need both men and women, and that the sexes cannot just be swapped for each other.

The most obvious differences come in reproduction. Men and women play distinct roles in the procreative process, and neither role can be dispensed with. Reproduction is a core part of animal, and therefore human, life. It is the essence of God’s first command for humanity, and the only way our species continues to survive. More than that, the affluence many of us experience today is only possible because of a human population that has been built up over millennia, and has in turn built up civilisations and infrastructure. And God has ordained it that both men and women play a part in the process.

I want to pause for a moment on this, because the belief that women are ‘just baby factories’ is often seen as one of the hallmarks of misogyny and toxic masculinity. Now viewing any person as a factory is reductive and objectifying, and God clearly designed women to be more than just vessels for smaller humans. And historically women have often lacked any agency in the process, and been horribly treated as little more than breeders. But without that context, taking the phrase on its own, there’s no ‘just’ in being able to make babies. Pregnancy is not some insignificant thing, it’s a crazy superpower. To be able to grow another human inside yourself is amazing, and the idea that this could somehow be used to diminish the importance of women ought to be insane. The only reason anyone in society can do anything is because they were born. Women literally give birth to entire populations and civilisations.

And this is a female thing. Men tend to have superior physical attributes like strength and speed, but there are outliers, a significant minority of women who are much quicker or stronger than most men will ever be. But with reproduction, there are no men who can do what women do. No man can be pregnant, give birth, or breastfeed. We need to reclaim a sense of wonder at giving birth, reestablish just how fundamental to society the next generation is, and emphasise the indispensable role women play. Governments realise this. Many worry about aging populations and declining birth rates, and understand that a lack of fertility is a genuine threat. The factor that limits population recovery after a conflict is almost always the number of young women left alive, not men. Historically, women and children were spared from war because they are too important to risk, not because they’re not important enough to fight.

These reproductive differences (as well as differences in hormones, physique, and so on) lead to less clear-cut, but generally true differences. Women suffer the most in the procreative process, and breastfeed afterwards. Periods can be painful and unpredictable, sometimes making intense work difficult. It therefore makes sense that women are often more caring, nurturing, welcoming, and mothers are more associated with raising children in the early stages of life, and so on. This reflects a genuine biological reality, that mums are the essential carriers, and then feeders, of a child in their first few years.

It also makes sense that a man might take on more intensive work or labour, to look after his wife and child in this vulnerable state. This is again reflected biologically, as men don't need to worry about periods and (on average) have more muscle mass, higher testosterone (and so are more competitive, aggressive, etc), higher bone density, and are therefore stronger, faster and leaner. Men being more likely to be soldiers or farmers is not sexist, just common sense. When early societies fell into these roles, they didn’t have the luxury of worrying about gender norms. It was about what was best for survival. And many of those patterns persist in some way or another into the modern world, because it’s the way God has made us.

The danger in overemphasizing less clear differences was the focus of my last blog in the series. I'm somewhat skeptical about statements like ‘men do friendship side by side, women face to face’ or ‘men are logical, women emotional’ and so on. There is some truth to these statements. But there are also plenty of exceptions. The fact that men are more likely to punch a wall because of a football result should at least make us question whether we're really more logical and less emotional at every level. And it's impossible for a psychological study to determine which differences are inherent and which are products of society and culture.

But we all know that there are subtle differences that manifest in a multitude of ways, even if we cannot pinpoint or articulate exactly what they are. And it's important, while accepting some mystery, to insist that men and women are different, in more than just the obvious ways. That there are a series of differences in physique, physicality, temperament, cognition, relationships, socialising, and more, that mean we are not interchangeable. Some of these differences are more statistically significant than others, and no difference holds true in every case. Some are to do with sex, inherent biological distinctions in the way we're made. Some are to do with gender, the way different cultures have expressed these biological differences. These might be more arbitrary, but still speak to and manifest the deeper reality of male-female categories. And taken together, these differences form a picture of two very similar, yet profoundly different, versions of humanity.

Having pointed to some clear-cut biological differences, and how these may manifest as less clear-cut physical, psychological, cognitive and temperamental differences, I want to focus on the idea of gender.

Gender and Sex

For most of history, it has been taken for granted that these differences in sex are reflected in people's gender, and in some way determine how people express themselves and interact with the world. This could impact anything; clothing, hobbies, roles within the household and workplace, and more. In some sense these expressions could be arbitrary (pink vs blue), but in many ways they align with and help manifest deeper inherent differences like those discussed already. If men and women really are different on a fundamental level biologically, it shouldn't be surprising that societies end up expressing these differences in their culture.

This is where I need to be most careful of avoiding my own warnings. It is unhelpful to tie masculinity or femininity to any particular aspect of gender expression, as if to say you're only a man if you gym, or only a woman if you wear floaty dresses. But whilst no particular gender norm should be a deal-breaker, or seen as essential, that doesn't mean we ought to deconstruct the idea of gender completely, and give up on any sense of gendered clothing, hairstyles, hobbies, careers, and so forth.

Whilst there are negatives of having overly strong gender norms (think the girl bullied for liking maths and football, or the boy for writing poetry and wearing pink), there are also positives of maintaining some sense of binary. It makes life a lot easier and less anxious when you know where you stand.

To use myself as an example: from the moment I was aware of ‘boys and girls’, I knew I was a boy, because that's what everyone told me. The binary was reflected at school and home in gendered toys, uniforms, friendship groups, and more. I eventually came to a more biologically rigorous understanding, when I came to learn about chromosomes, testosterone, etc. I could then point to those biological facts as being decisive in determining my sex.

And this knowledge gave me a headstart in expressing myself. I was still free to wear pink if I fancied, or hang out with girls, or play with a doll. But I wasn't made to engineer my identity without a starting point. The distress of gender dysphoria cannot be underestimated, and Christians should feel nothing but sympathy for those who feel it (and certainly not judgement or hatred). To feel like your body is wrong and doubt the most basic aspects of your existence must be horrible. It is no wonder that those who do often go to extreme lengths to find a solution.

But the danger of too much sympathy is that in an effort to make life easier for those with feelings of gender dysphoria, we make it harder for everyone else. Because everyone is taught that gender is something to choose, that it's much more complicated than a simple binary, that there's no such thing as ‘boys’ toys’ or ‘girls’ clothing’, and so on. A world where gender binaries are totally deconstructed is a confusing world indeed. We ought to be aware of the risk of deconstructing too much.

As mentioned in the previous blog, I think this attempted divorce of biological sex and gender, and the deconstruction of gender binaries, also explains why questions around masculinity and femininity are so rife in our day. When ‘male’ and 'female’ are taken as simple facts of life, you don't need neat or clear definitions. You can just say ‘a woman is a woman’, and everyone knows what you mean. From there you can go on to speculate and generalise, to look at trends and patterns of behaviour. But when sex is no longer a given, you have to start questioning what gender is and what defines it. Is it about biology? Temperament? The gym? Can I be a less manly man? Is it unwomanly to wear trousers? This uncertainty is unhelpful for the majority.

The Danger of Interchange

Since men and women are different, they are not interchangeable, and so we should be wary of any setting in which a ‘swap’ is being suggested as harmless. So let's return to some of the groups concerned, and arenas in which this debate rages, raised at the start of this article.

Some dangers have already been pointed out. If gender norms are fully deconstructed, leaving no differences between the way males and females are expected to behave, it places the onus of identity formation on each individual, and may well increase the issues of gender dysphoria rather than solve them. If women are seen as needing to be interchangeable with men to ensure equal representation, that will almost inevitably lead to a devaluing of the one uniquely female thing that all society depends on; giving birth. Thinking that men and women can be swapped in romantic relationships and the home could result in many children raised without an essential mother or father figure. And a widespread belief that men are no different from women could leave a generation of men (and potentially women too) wondering what makes them important or necessary, rather than redundant or superfluous to society.

Thinking men and women are interchangeable also poses the risk of seeing both men and women in roles that are unsuitable for them. I think this happens less often with men, as it's biologically impossible for a man to be left pregnant or breastfeeding. But I think there is a risk of women ending up in jobs that are too physically demanding, or doing roles that should only be done by men, and being left the worse for it. As a complementarian, I believe that this has happened in the church, as women take on positions of authority that, in my view, should only be taken by men. Or to give an example from the secular world, the idea of lowering fitness standards for women to join the army is ridiculous. Women passing easier tests are either physically able to do the job, or not. If they are, lower the standards for men as well, as their current standards must be too high. If they aren't, it's cruel to deploy them into a role they're not physically prepared for.

On a more subtle level, there could be inappropriate expectations placed on men and women. As a man, I notice this most clearly from the male perspective. Sometimes the women in my life, very well-meaningly, expect me to be more feminine than I am. As an example, women often complain that men don't listen to their problems and show empathy, they just try to problem solve. Rarely in this discussion is it acknowledged that problem solving is important, or that men might get frustrated with too much empathy without action. Both responses surely have merit, and both are needed. It's what makes both men and women valuable, that we are different.

As a second example, some women have expressed concern to me that men aren't good enough friends with each other. I think the worry is that we don't chat enough about our feelings, or go on enough coffee dates. Again, we need to be what we assume. I’m sure many men do chat about their feelings and go for coffees. But more than that, the issue is women expecting men to interact with each other in the way that they interact with their friends, and being worried when they don't. But many men are able to have strong and supportive friendships that don't involve regular talks about feelings. Whenever we observe these sorts of differences, except in cases where one side is obviously sinful, we mustn't insist upon uniformity in either direction, but ought to look for the good in both approaches.

There are of course dangers of overemphasising the differences as well. This is why I started by emphasising similarity over difference (which I think also reflects the biological and theological reality, that we are in some sense more similar than different). Many men think of women as being very different to men, in an almost entirely negative way, where the differences are framed as defects in women. The same is true vice-versa. This is where true complementarian belief, that men and women aren't just different but complement each other, is vital. Whenever men and women differ (on average), there should never be a ‘good side’ and a ‘bad side’. The point is that we need both sides, and human flourishing will be maximised when both sides coexist and are given opportunities to manifest themselves in the right moments.

I think this over-emphasis of the differences sometimes comes as a reaction to a belief that men and women are interchangeable. A man expects that women will think and act exactly as he does, interacts with them under that assumption, and ends up being misunderstood, rejected, called toxic and offensive, or similar (because they expect him to think and act as they do). He then builds up a picture that women are irrational, sensitive, petty, and so on. If left unaddressed, this can become an entrenched misogyny. Or a woman expects men to interact the way she does, and ends up hurt, upset, feeling ignored, or similar. She starts to build up a picture that men are emotionally unintelligent, aggressive, antisocial, overly logical, and so on. Perhaps a better understanding of our differences from the outset could make interactions easier, misunderstandings more anticipated (and more easily resolved) and the similarities and common ground more obvious.

Conclusion

What do I hope the reader takes from all of this? What I certainly want to avoid is a male reader feeling burdened to be more manly, or a female reader to be more womanly.

I mainly want you to be persuaded that men and women are very similar, that over-separating them in discourse, or acting like we’re from different planets, is not helpful, and our starting point should be the considerable common ground shared by all humans. We are all made in God’s image, to reflect his glory, relate to him as children, and rule over the earth under him.

I then want you to be persuaded that God has made men and women profoundly different, and that whilst these differences can’t always be clearly articulated in a way that avoids incorrect generalisations, and can’t be boiled down to a simple set of male traits and female traits, that they are nonetheless fundamental to every aspect of us. Being male or female is part of your identity, and it is God-given (not a choice). There are core biological differences, from which flow a whole host of temperamental, physical, emotional and psychological differences, some which hold true in most cases, some with lots of exceptions. But there are genuine roles in reproduction that only men, and only women, can play, which makes both indispensable to our survival.

I then want you to see that these differences do not have to be bad news for women, and can in fact be used as a very logical basis for some feminist ideas, principles and objectives. The fact that women are not men, and are different in many ways, means they add something to a company, government, family, team or church that men do not. And if women were in fact interchangeable with men, that would make both men and women more dispensable and redundant, not less.

Both men and women are necessary and good for society, neither is redundant or replaceable, and whenever we find ourselves differing or at odds, we ought not simply paint one side as good and the other as bad, but understand how both sides might be good in different scenarios and moments, and how they might complement each other in daily life. This is part of God’s good design, in order that both men and women might learn to rely on each other and on God, and might bless and serve one another through their similarity and difference. To God be the glory!

I

Thomas Hobbes, the great bogeyman of early modern philosophy, did not lack enemies. In 1655, four years after his bombshell Leviathan had been published, Richard Baxter—the most industrious of puritan writers—lamented that infidelity to the gospel had begun to infect England. The turn away from religion, Baxter thought, was spearheaded by those who ‘read such Books as Hobbs his Leviathan, [and] have been sadly infected by this mortal pestilence.’ For many, Hobbes’ ideas—especially his radically materialist ontology and deep-seated Erastianism—smacked of outright atheism, the degradation of religion, and the decay of morality. By the 1660s, the spectre of Hobbes had come to haunt political and religious debates: rather like fascism in today’s cultural conversations, if you could land the allegation of ‘Hobbism’ against your political or religious opponent you were well on the way to carrying the debate. Few, if any, were prepared to own any influence Hobbes might have had upon their own thinking—though have it he did—and by the end of his long life he cut a something of a forlorn figure amidst polite society, his purported paranoias a warning against the folly of atheism. Samuel Lee, one of the greatest writers of the late-puritan tradition, though scarcely remembered today, glossed the verb ‘to Hobbianize’ as to ‘tremble to be in the dark, as [Hobbes] did at the Lord of Devonshires being afraid to walk abroad without Mastiffs or Pistols’. For Lee, as for many Calvinist theologians, Hobbes’ remorseless reduction of all phenomena to terms of mere matter and motion—including the being of God himself—was a darkly heterodox creed, an atheism in all but name, that could only impoverish the soul of one who espoused it. It was not fun to Hobbianize.

Amidst these visceral responses, though, Hobbes found an unlikely friend: and from the staple of English Calvinist divines (theologians), no less. On the surface, Thomas Barlow shared next to nothing with the great philosopher, beyond a Christian name and common alma mater. They came from different ends of the country: Hobbes had been born in Malmesbury, Wiltshire, under the shadow of the impending Spanish Armada (famously, he later remarked that ‘My mother gave birth to twins: myself and fear’). Barlow, meanwhile, was born in Westmorland, now Cumbria, in either 1608 or 1609; he was educated at Appleby Grammar School, where now the Gypsy community of northwest England congregate each June for the annual Appleby fair. It seems he had a happy childhood. He certainly loved his father, Richard, upon whose death in late-1636 he penned a series of elegiac poems, lamenting how

I lost a father, who deserv’d the teares
Of more [than his] children: Such a father hee
As many wish, though few injoy: to mee
So deare and tender, that I cannot say
What gratitude requires, much lesse repay.

But dulcet as his northern days may have been, it was in Oxford that the vast majority of his life would be spent: in fact, it seems that after matriculating at The Queen’s College in July 1625 he never returned to the northern lands that had borne him. Barlow matriculated as a ‘servitor’ at Queen’s, a famously traditionalist college, meaning that he entered the rigid hierarchy of this quasi-monastic world at the lowest of its rungs. Being a servitor meant that Barlow had to pay his way—fees and living costs—through working as a servant in his college, normally for wealthy students (known as ‘commoners’ or ‘fellow-commoners’). But, like many poor students of the time, Barlow soon distinguished himself intellectually: after graduating BA in July 1630, he proceeded MA in 1633, became a Queen’s fellow in 1634, and was appointed university reader in metaphysics in 1635. In 1637, Barlow made his opening forays into print: first publishing the brief anthology eulogising his late father, but secondly (and more substantially) publishing an edition of Christoph Scheibler’s metaphysics textbook. To this he appended, almost as an afterthought, his own work of metaphysics, Exercitationes aliquot metaphysicæ, de Deo (1637): reprinted in 1658, this work would remain a mainstay of late-Aristotelian philosophy (sometimes called ‘Baroque scholasticism’) well into the latter years of the century.

Queen’s was famous for its adherence to Aristotelianism, the near-2000 year old philosophical system that had dominated the European intellectual landscape since the first universities had been founded in the twelfth century. Medieval and early modern Aristotelianism was a complex beast. Because the Aristotelian corpus formed the bedrock of university education, philosophical disagreements (and philosophers love to disagree) took place on the basis of shared assumptions whose origins lay in Aristotle’s works. That gives the different schools of medieval philosophy a specious veneer of uniformity; but in fact their similarity of language and concerns belies widely divergent traditions. We can still talk about a core of Aristotelian ideas, though: a metaphysical account of substance as composed of matter and form; a treatment of causation in terms of four main categories of cause (material, formal, final, efficient); an explanation of material phenomena in terms of the four elements (earth, water, fire, air) moving according to their natural inclinations; the rejection of atomism and the existence of vacuums in nature; a careful system of formal logic built around the syllogism. At its heart, Aristotle’s was a unified philosophy of nature that saw logic, metaphysics and (what today we would call) physics as part of single whole. These are difficult ideas for us, as children of the post-Enlightenment era; but they were bread and butter to someone like Barlow.

By this point in the 1630s the contours of Barlow’s intellectual and spiritual convictions were already clear: he was an able metaphysician operating in the final decades of the Aristotelian tradition; he was a staunch defender of the Calvinist theological consensus that, under the Oxford chancellorship of William Laud, had come under significant strain; and he was a fierce upholder of the episcopalian polity that defined the established Church, and against which so many of his Calvinist coreligionists bristled. He was also a mighty bibliophile, and an intensely bookish man: much of his library of some several thousand volumes, many of them annotated in Barlow’s own hand, survives today in The Queen’s College and the Bodleian Library. That these two institutions formed the final resting place of his most precious possession is telling. For Barlow was an Oxford man through and through, someone who remained devoted to his alma mater even through the religious and political turmoil that drove away so many of her other loyal sons. And, amidst a world of political flux, religious conflict, and epoch-altering intellectual developments, Barlow was a stalwart defender of the traditional universities and their robust arts curriculums, against those who would do them harm.

Thomas Hobbes was one such enemy of a traditional Oxford: he represented what was antithetical to all of these positions. An Oxford man himself (educated at Magdalen Hall, a forerunner of Hertford College, and one of the now-forgotten powerhouses of the early-modern university), he was famous for the public disdain he expressed towards his alma mater. After the printing of Leviathan in 1651 ensured his rise to notoriety, he engaged in public spats with its dons, feuding over geometry with John Wallis (inventor of the infinity symbol, and vastly his superior in mathematics), disputing the shape of the curriculum with Seth Ward (an able astronomer), and generally making a nuisance of himself. Leviathan itself had called into question the very philosophical project to which Barlow had devoted the early years of his academic career, calling the philosophy taught at Oxford ‘not properly Philosophy, (the nature whereof dependeth not on Authors,) but Aristotelity’, since the thought of Aristotle purportedly reigned unchallenged. Hobbes despised Calvinism, hated episcopacy (at least in the 1650s), and derided scholastic philosophy. Barlow, we might assume, would not have been keen to ‘Hobbianize’.

But what evidence we have of Barlow’s relationship to Hobbes suggests quite the opposite. He was no Hobbesian—I doubt if anyone really was, save the man himself—but he was sympathetic to Hobbes’ ideas, open-minded as to his work, and catholic-spirited in his response to the great philosopher. In late-1656, Hobbes sent Barlow, then employed as Bodley’s Librarian in Oxford, a copy of his De Corpore—a private gift. Barlow’s response was effusive in praise: it was a ‘rich present … which I shall carefully keepe, as a monument of your (vndeserued) kindnesse, and Ciuility’. Barlow was no sycophant; he acknowledged to Hobbes their differences, remarking that ‘I doe not concurre with your judgement in euery thinge’. Of course not. But he had learnt not to be hasty in drawing conclusions: ‘I haue (as I thinke all sober men should) according to ye principles of naturall reason, and Christianity,’ he explained, ‘learned this much Ciuility, as to be thankefull for those discoueryes of truth, wch any man makes to me’; and over the years he had ‘by experience found (both in yours, and other learned mens writeings) that to be true at Last, wch at first readinge I much suspected as hereticall.’ Even towards Hobbes, then, he was prepared to be open-minded. It was all in the name of learning, and wisdom; writing to a fellow lover of the truth, Barlow knew that Hobbes possessed ‘too great an vnderstandinge, absolutely to condemne the seminaries, and Nurseryes of good literature’.

II

Barlow’s response to Hobbes speaks to the sheer capaciousness and generosity of his intellectual engagement: truth, not any faction, was his friend. And that meant that he read: and read, and read. His appetite for knowledge was voracious, something reflected in the reading scheme for budding theologians that he produced in c. 1650: one modern printing of the manuscript runs to some seventy pages. Many of his books still bear his scribbles—a Vulgate from 1590 is heavily annotated; his copy of Hobbes’ De Homine (like De Corpore, given ‘Ex Dono Authoris’); Roberto Bellarmine’s 1592 edition of the Vulgate; a 1605 edition of Melchor Cano’s Works; John Selden’s History of Tithes (1618)—but I shan’t bore the reader any further. Suffice to say, Barlow’s reading reflected a wide-ranging mind; and one that, as the letter to Hobbes suggests, was unencumbered by prejudice. His ‘Library for Younger Scholars’ was the first such manuscript reading scheme (at least in England) to recommend the so-called ‘new philosophers’ of the seventeenth century—the thinkers who helped usher in the ‘Scientific Revolution’ and pave the way for the Enlightenment; men like Pierre Gassendi and René Descartes—even despite his own Aristotelian philosophical predilections. And Barlow was, by all accounts, remarkably amiable, even to those with rather different political or religious beliefs to his own. He was friends with John Owen, having acted as the younger theologian’s tutor at Queen’s in the late-1620s; this friendship endured even while Owen implicated himself with the regicidal regime that Barlow so detested, during England’s brief dalliance with republicanism in the 1650s. He was a spiritual counsellor to the physicist Robert Boyle, the most significant scientist of the generation before Newton. And he even frequented the meetings of the so-called ‘Great Tew Circle’ in the 1630s—a group of radical Protestants who had connections to antitrinitarian heresies (though he seems not to have imbibed their principles).

This breadth of mind impacted Barlow’s philosophy. It’s very rare, outside particularly narrow scholarly circles, to praise the latter phases of Aristotelian philosophy in Western Europe. If this chapter in the history of philosophy is known at all, it is usually cast in a pejorative light, as the staid and stilted remains of a once-vibrant tradition that had long run its course. Certainly, the popular focus remains on those who championed the so-called ‘new philosophy’: thinkers like Gassendi and Descartes and, after them, John Locke, who claimed that all natural phenomena could be explained in terms of matter and motion alone, usually via some kind of atomist account, without recourse to the ‘metaphysical’ categories of Aristotelian physics (such as, famously, the human soul). We see ourselves in the atomists of the seventeenth century, and discern the seeds of the modern cast of mind in the febrile scientific imagination of the early Royal Society. Among these kinds of memories, thinkers like Barlow fall quite easily into abeyance, as footnotes to our collective intellectual memory.

But that doesn’t do justice to the vibrancy of his thought. Barlow operated in the scholastic tradition—beholden at some level to the writings of Aristotle, usually the first point of reference in philosophical discussion, as we've seen—but ranging through the great systems of Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, John Duns Scotus, and William Ockham, replete with lively debates about substance metaphysics, the extra-mental existence of universals, and the nature of the soul—debates that still fascinate historians of philosophy, theologians, and some contemporary philosophers. Add into that the radically naturalistic Aristotelianism of the Italian peninsula, which questioned the immortality of the soul and creation ex nihilo, and the rich scholasticism generated by Counter Reformation Roman Catholicism, and you have a potent mix for innovative thinking.

That much is true, for instance, of Barlow’s Exercitationes aliquot metaphysicæ, de Deo. Let us take, as an example, Barlow’s treatment of the architectonic question of what exactly metaphysics treats. Ask the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and you will—quite understandably—get a convoluted answer: its article on metaphysics begins with the admission that ‘[i]t is not easy to say what metaphysics is.’ The problem was bequeathed to posterity by Aristotle himself, whose work on what he called ‘First Philosophy’—later dubbed ‘metaphysics’ both because of its place in his corpus (after the Physics) and because of its subject matter—claimed that the science of metaphysics sets out to treat το ον ἡ ον, ens qua ens, or ‘entity insofar as it is entity’. But, as many medieval Aristotelians realised, that didn’t fit with Aristotle’s own definition of a science (provided in the Posterior Analytics) as a branch of philosophy whose indemonstrable axioms, subject matter, and attributes all belong to a single genus (a category that contains a group of related species). What was the solution to be?

We don’t have time to delve into the various medieval ‘solutions’ to the problem: not least because some of them amount to the most singularly vexing utterances in the whole history of Western philosophy. You can breathe a sigh of relief. But we do need to know that John Duns Scotus—‘the subtle doctor’, according to the Roman Church—suggested, amidst a variety of solutions, that the subject of metaphysics was God himself. (This wasn’t, it should be noted, because Scotus believed that ens qua ens could be equated to God: far from it; he was the first major western philosopher-theologian to suggest that, rather than God being being himself, God possesses being in the same sense that we do: in other words, that in the clauses ‘God exists’ and ‘Jacob exists’ the word ‘exists’ is doing exactly the same thing. This doctrine—‘the univocity of being’—has been slammed by later religious commentators, such as Bradley Gregory, as the first step towards making atheism and exclusive naturalism plausible. But I suppose that’s for another day.) In his Exercitationes, Barlow echoed this claim, but span it in a strikingly original direction:

When we say that God is the subject of metaphysics, we discern that there is a twofold distinction in this subject. Firstly, that which is inherent, in which other knowledge inheres; and in this sense the human mind [anima humana] is the subject of metaphysics: even in which all other knowledge is subjected. Secondly, that which is treated, which the subject is usually said to be; and in this sense we assert that God is the subject of metaphysics.^[i]

It's that first gloss that grabs the attention: because to claim that the human mind, the receptacle of knowledge, is the subject of metaphysics is to re-work the discipline in a radically epistemologised direction. Barlow was probably influenced here by the great German metaphysician Clemens Timpler, who had claimed a few years earlier that the subject of metaphysics is ‘All that is Intelligible, insofar as from the natural light of human reason, without any matter, it is intelligible with a concept.’^[ii] But Barlow’s definition takes the move that Timpler had made a step further: the subject of metaphysics moves from being what is knowable, to what does the knowing. Psychology thus becomes a central part of metaphysics. How very modern of him. Hidden amid a jungle of scholastic Latin, here is an early statement of the conceptual primacy of knowledge over being that would come to dominate European thinking about metaphysics and psychology in the Cartesian and post-Cartesian eras.

Late scholastic philosophy, barely a footnote in many histories of philosophy, was far more innovative than we might think. Barlow testifies to the creativity and vitality of an intellectual tradition even as it reaches its natural terminus: proof, perhaps, of Hegel’s famous adage that ‘the owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk’.

III

An innovative philosopher, a magnanimous scholar, a catholic-spirited thinker, and a man with a unique capacity for friendship across social and political boundaries: Barlow epistomises the Renaissance ideals of scholarly virtue and pious polymathy. But what did that do to his theology? We might recognise the image of the learned scholar-bishop, squirreled away with his books, engaging across multiple intellectual fronts at once, as one tied up with a liberalising attitude to the dogmatic content of Christian religion. And there certainly were savants of that ilk who inhabited a similar Renaissance image to Barlow: men like John Case and John Dee (most blokes in early-modern England were called John), who flirted with Roman Catholicism; or Ralph Cudworth, who left behind his impeccably puritan upbringing in the name of a more liberal theology that accorded a far greater role to human learning in divine matters. Certainly, Barlow was liberal with his time, his friendships, and his reading. But he was not liberal with his theology. He was convinced that the Reformed religion was true, and refused to budge from that position.

When Barlow first arrived in Oxford, in the 1620s, that was uncontroversial: a basic Calvinist consensus still predominated. By the 1630s and early 1640s, however, the essential doctrines of Reformed theology were being attacked by the ecclesiastical and academic authorities, and their adherents persecuted. In the 1650s, Calvinism made a comeback in Oxford as in the country at large. But its fortunes diminished after the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660, just, indeed, as Barlow’s own fortunes were on the rise. He had been appointed master of Queen’s in 1658, succeeding his close friend Gerard Langbaine (who died after studying for too long in the Bodleian during the winter); and in 1660 he became Lady Margaret professor of divinity. That put him in a good position to continue to tout the Calvinist principles which he maintained were essential to the character and beliefs of the English church. And he did so against increasing opposition: in 1670, for instance, a young pastor-theologian named George Bull published Harmonia Apostolica—cursorily an attempt to ‘reconcile’ Sts Paul and James, but really an extended attack on Reformed soteriology. Barlow responded with a series of lectures in Oxford, defending at length the traditional Calvinist view of justification, predestination, and perseverance.

This did not win him many friends. Indeed, when he was proposed as the new Bishop of Lincoln in 1675, the elderly Archbishop of Canterbury, Gilbert Sheldon, was not best pleased; Barlow only got the post after two secretaries of state lobbied on his behalf. Amidst tense ecclesiastical politics, we might expect him to have kept his head down. He did not. He continued to defend Reformed principles: in particular, he balked at decline in the belief that the pope was the antichrist—a central point of confessional Protestantism, as far as Barlow was concerned. In one anti-papist work of 1681, Barlow—by that point becoming elderly—made his thoughts on the matter abundantly clear:

And further (that I may freely speak, what I really believe) I am so far from believing the Pope and his Party to be (what they vainly pretend) the only true Christian and Catholick Church; that I do believe them … to be Ecclesia Malignantium an Antichristian Sect and Synagogue … highly erroneous, and … as highly impious.

Barlow’s antipapal writings secured for him the wonderful accolade of being the last English bishop publicly to call the pope the antichrist.

IV

I don’t want to end simply by asking about Barlow’s ‘relevance’ to today. That is to make the past dance to the tune of the present, the kind of chronological arrogance that so besets our culture. Figures of the past just stand as what they are, frozen in aspic while the ages rumble on, memories that haunt our sense of what it is to be human, witnessing to the sheer diversity of human experience, knowledge, culture, and cares. In this they challenge us, inspire us, captivate us, indict us; but we must not inflict upon them our terms of the debate. We must listen.

But when we listen to Barlow, there is much to learn. Modern evangelicalism lacks scholars and real intellectuals: men and women who are captivated by God’s world as well as his word, who thirst after learning, who find in studia humanitatis something of the finger of God at work. None of us read as Barlow read, matching either the sheer scale of his learning or the breadth and diversity of his intellectual engagement. That should give us pause, before we leap upon some aspect of his thought that seems wrong to us. But we should also ask why it is that we have let the marriage between polymathy and piety end in a divorce. What did Barlow have that we do not? Fewer distractions, a unified arts curriculum common to all the universities, a dramatically smaller library of human knowledge than that in which we roam in the internet era—all those are valid excuses. But Barlow was also driven by two convictions that modern Protestantism has largely forgotten: that deep intellectual engagement is compatible with—even essential to—orthodoxy; and that catholicity must be central to any theological project. Barlow is proof that learning and liberalism are not automatic bedfellows. And proof that rich catholicity—theology that takes stock of the full gamut of the Church’s traditions—bolsters confessional theology. In a world in which ‘engaging the tradition’ means reading Puritan Paperbacks (not something to be sniffed at, of course), and in which biblical commentary is de facto taken to have begun in the 1970s (when IVP began publishing the BST series), we would be wise to take on board these lessons.

But Barlow was also a glorious anachronism: an obstinate ambassador from a past age of church history who never quite seemed to get the memo about the dying of scholastic Calvinism. That made him an object of ridicule in his day. But he was nothing if not principled: he knew what the word of God said, and he stuck by it. I don’t agree with him on everything—particularly his Erastian and episcopalian inclinations—but I cherish his sense, in the greatest of Protestant traditions, of the unchangeableness of God’s word and the need for fearless adherence to it. Barlow embodied that fiercely Protestant trust in the absolute authority of God’s word, married to the conviction that all human knowledge should be informed by God’s revelation of himself; and indeed, that the whole scope of human learning is worth exploring, that knowledge itself is worth delighting in, and that even philology can be doxology when the pen is in the right kind of hand—a hand that worships God.

^[i] ‘Cùm dicimus Deum esse subjectum Metaphysicæ, novimus quod sub subjectum est duplex. 1. Inhæsionis, in quo scientia aliqua inhæret, sic anima humana est Metaphysicæ subjectum: in qua, scientia etiam omnis subjectatur. 2. Tractationis, quod & objectum usitatè dicitur, & hoc modo asserimus Deum esse Metaphysicæ subjectum.’ Barlow, Exercitationes Aliquot Metaphysicæ (1637), 53.

^[ii] ‘Metaphysica est ars contemplatiua, quæ tractat de omni intelligibili, quatenus ab homine naturali rationis lumine sine vllo materiæ conceptu est intelligibile.’ Timpler, Metaphysicæ Systema Methodicvm (1604), 1.