As I mentioned in a previous post, I have been preparing for an upcoming conference on Christian friendship and have been contemplating the possible ways in which Christian friendship and claims specific to Christianity are superior to claims found in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics.
Below is a new possibility that I am considering addressing in my paper.
As John 15 declares, Christ informs his disciples of a radical change in their relationship with Him, viz., they are no longer called servants, but are now called friends because they have been brought into the circle of intertrinitarian love. With this claim, we encounter a concept of vertical and horizontal friendship that is not possible on Aristotle’s view. Not only has a way been opened up for the most intimate communion between God and human beings-a relationship in which Aristotle’s god (noesis noeseos) has no interest-but also on the horizontal level, those who accept the Trinitarian God’s invitation of friendship are proclaimed both as equals with reference to one another ontologically speaking and with regard to their status before God. If we compare St. Paul’s claim in Galatians 3:28[1] with Aristotle’s view of the moral superiority of men over women in book VIII of the Nicomachean Ethics, the contrast is striking. According to St. Paul, “[t]here is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus (Gal 3:28, ESV).”[2] Whereas Aristotle, although placing the husband/wife relationship under a type of virtuous friendship, he nonetheless further qualifies this relationship as unequal because the male is taken to be the superior partner, who confers a greater benefit on the female, and therefore, ought to be loved more than he loves (1158b13-29).[3] As John M. Cooper explains,
Aristotle’s idea seems to be that men as such are morally superior to women, so that a friendship between the absolutely best man and the absolutely best woman, each recognized as such, would be an unequal friendship. In such a friendship the disparity in goodness does not imply any deficiency on the side of the lesser person with respect to her own appropriate excellences; she will be perfect of her kind, but the kind in question is inherently lower (emphasis added).[4]
In other words, for Aristotle, female qua female is in some way inherently deficient and the assumed human standard of perfection is the male. On St. Paul’s view to assert that either a male or a female believer is somehow intrinsically lacking or that one is superior in nature to the other would involve serious soteriological, anthropological, and Christological problems. After all, the Christian claim is that fellowship with the Father comes only through union with the Son by way of the Spirit. To suggest, for example, that female Christians are deficient because they are of an intrinsically lower kind would be in some significant way to downgrade their status as human beings, and consequently, to deny that both male and female are created in God’s image. Such a position seems to entail at least the following rather unpleasant theological consequences. For example, being less than human, how could women fully partake in the redemption effected by Christ who became everything that human beings are excepting sin? In addition, such a degraded view of women would no doubt have serious ramifications in connection with a proper understanding of the importance of Mary’s role in the history of redemption.
Up to this point, I have only addressed the equality between genders with relation to friendships among Christians. As one would expect, this exclusivity naturally raises the question of how or whether this equality translates to non-Christian females. Although an honest Christian would have to admit that the Church has been inconsistent and has often failed to recognize that by virtue of their creation imago Dei, which is essential to human beings qua human beings, all men and women (whether Christian or not) are created equal in nature and possess an intrinsic value. From a Christian perspective, one would also have to affirm that male/female friendships between Christians and non-Christians, though genuine and often long-lasting are in a significant sense incomplete because the two do not share faith in Christ. However, that which is found wanting in such friendships has nothing to do with a putative gender deficiency, but everything to do with whether or not one has by grace through Christ entered into intimate fellowship with the Triune God. And as St. Paul makes emphatically clear, entrance into such a relationship with God is not the result of any intellectual, moral, or other alleged superiority on the part of the Christian (Eph 2:8-9; 1 Cor 1:20-31).[5]
Notes
[1] N.T. Wright argues that it is significant that Paul in Gal 3:28 says, “no male and female,” rather than the common mistranslation, “neither male nor female,” because he is actually quoting Gen 1:27. With this Wright is emphatically not suggesting that Paul is advocating an undoing of the creation order, or that we adopt of a kind of gnostic perspective so as to deal with gender differences, or that we have moved into a kind of enlightened, sexless, genderless view of humanity. Rather, Wright’s argument “is that Paul’s main point in this passage is that God has one family, not two, and that this family consists of all those who believe in Jesus, that this is the family God promised to Abraham, and that nothing in the Torah can stand in the way of this unity which is now revealed through the faithfulness of the Messiah” (p. 5). Wright goes on to say that Paul “is controverting in particular those who wanted to enforce Jewish regulations, and indeed Jewish ethnicity, upon Gentile converts. Remember the synagogue prayer in which the man who prays thanks God that he has not made him a Gentile, a slave, or a woman. I think Paul is deliberately marking out the family of Abraham reformed in the Messiah as a people who cannot pray that prayer, since within this family these distinctions are now irrelevant.The presenting issue in Galatians is male circumcision. We sometimes think of circumcision as a painful obstacle for converts, as indeed in some ways it was; but for those who embraced circumcision, it was a matter of pride and privilege. It not only distinguished Jews from Gentiles; it also distinguished them in a way that automatically privileged males. By contrast, imagine the thrill of equality brought about by baptism, the identical rite for Jew and Gentile, slave and free, male and female. And that’s not all. Though this is somewhat more speculative, the story of Abraham’s family did of course privilege the male line of descent: Isaac, Jacob, and so on. What we find in Paul, both in Galatians 4 and in Romans 9, is careful attention-rather like Matthew 1, in fact, though from a different angle-to the women in the story. If those in Christ are the true family of Abraham, which is the point of the whole story, then the manner of this identity and unity takes a quantum leap beyond the way in which first-century Judaism construed them, bringing male and female together as surely and as equally as Jew and Gentile. What Paul seems to do in this passage, then, is rule out any attempt to perpetuate male privilege in Abraham’s family by an appeal to Genesis 1, as though someone were to say, ‘But of course the male line is what matters, and of course male circumcision is what counts, because God made male and female.’ No, says Paul, none of that counts when it comes to membership in the renewed people of Abraham” (p. 6). N.T. Wright, “The Biblical Basis for Women’s Service in the Church,” Priscilla Papers Vol. 20, no. 4 (Autumn 2006): 5-10. (This article is available online at: http://www.cbeinternational.org/new/pdf_files/wright_biblical_basis.pdf).
[2] This is not to suggest that maleness and femaleness are eradicated and that what remains is a kind of genderless individual. One possible way that a Christian might begin to successfully navigate the commonness and difference between males and females is to proffer a Trinitarian analogy. That is, just as the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are equal in nature, they exhibit different functions.[3] Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (VIII.7), p. 152.
[4] Cooper, “Aristotle on Friendship,” p. 307, as found in Essays on Aristotle’s Ethics.
[5] “For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, 9 not a result of works, so that no one may boast” (Eph 2:8-9, ESV). “Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men. For consider your calling, brothers: not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God. And because of him you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption, so that, as it is written, “Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord” (1 Cor 1:20-31, ESV).
