What is a Woman?

What I am arguing is that the essential unique calling of a man is to be a guardian, and the essential unique calling for a woman is to be a helper. Both of these callings are focused on the flourishing of other people.

This is the third article in a three-part series in which we have already answered the questions What is a Human? and What is a Man?. In the first article, we looked at how the Bible shows a large amount of overlap between men and women as humans. They are both made after God’s image and are jointly given the cultural mandate to be fruitful and multiply and take dominion over the earth (Gen. 1:26-28). 

Now, there is much we could say about being a man and being a woman—but for the sake of these articles, we are primarily looking at the creation story of Genesis 1-2 and asking, “What is essential about being a man or woman?” These are the chapters that give the most important answers. What I am arguing is that the essential unique calling of a man is to be a guardian, and the essential unique calling for a woman is to be a helper. Both of these callings are focused on the flourishing of other people. Men provide a context for others to flourish through guarding, women encourage the flourishing of others through helping. This is consistent with our Lord’s words about how humans are supposed to live: love your neighbor as yourself.

The calling of “helper” is a rich and beautiful calling, one God himself gladly fulfills, and I believe that if women embrace it, they will find much satisfaction in it.

For the woman who reads this and immediately hears the word “helper” as a kind of slave who is there to wait on the man, it will likely be helpful to know that the great Helper of the Bible is actually God himself. Consider Psalm 121: 

I lift up my eyes to the hills. From where does my help come? My help comes from the Lord, who made heaven and earth. (Ps. 121:1-2)

The word for “help” is the same root as that used for the woman in Gen. 2:18. This is not a demeaning title—it is a title of tremendous honor, and it is the way that a woman reflects to the world around her the goodness and beauty of the God who created her. It is a wonder that God calls himself our Helper—that he would come down to us and offer us strength in the midst of the difficulties of life. A woman should not hesitate for a second to rejoice that he shares such a title with her. My encouragement to the women of our church is this: when you think, “What does it mean to be a woman?” the most satisfying answer is, “I am a helper like God.” Consider these words from Jesus:

For who is the greater, one who reclines at table or one who serves? Is it not the one who reclines at table? But I am among you as the one who serves. (Luke 22:27)

The calling of “helper” is a rich and beautiful calling, one God himself gladly fulfills, and I believe that if women embrace it, they will find much satisfaction in it. Let’s look at what it means to be a helper. 

A Woman is a Relational Helper

In the first chapters of Genesis, when God was making his world, he repeatedly said over and over, “It is good…it is good…it is good.” But not until Genesis 2:18—after the man was created, but before the woman was—do we hear the first problem: “Then the Lord God said, ‘It is not good that the man should be alone…’”. I think many of us can attest to the truth of this statement: men do not do well when they are alone. It is into this problem that the woman is created. She is meant to help specifically in the area of relationship.

I have heard it said somewhere that when men evaluate their lives, they tend to ask, “What impact have I made? What have I done?” But women will often evaluate their lives on the quality of their relationships. I don’t mean that women don’t care about making an impact (my wife certainly does!), or that men don’t care about relationships (I certainly do!). But I mean, what is our first instinct? What tends to burden us more deeply? Generally speaking, men push women to go make an impact, and women push men toward relationships.

It might be asked: Which is more important, accomplishing things or relationships? They are certainly both essential to human life. But the Christian God is the God of relationship—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, who have existed in eternal love. I wonder if the woman’s focus on relationship is what makes her the glory of man (1 Cor. 11:7). She is the pinnacle of God’s creation—his last and final work before he rested in Sabbath. A man might spend most of his life thinking, “What have I accomplished?” but when he comes to his death bed, the thing that will really matter to him most is, “How are the relationships in my life?” And he will look back and find that it was often his wife who reminded him, “Don’t neglect these relationships—with me, with your children, even with your friends.” A man is wise if he is willing to receive this help from his wife.

So women were brought into the world to help with the problem of loneliness. (I think single women can also embrace that calling in a variety of ways, even if they are waiting to find a husband.) But in addition to helping with loneliness, I believe Eve was made to help Adam with the work he had been given by God to accomplish. And this reveals a second answer to the question, “What is a woman?”

A Woman is a Missional Helper

One thing I find interesting about how God has structured the home and the church is that often, women are actually more capable in a variety of areas (from piety and study, to administration and management, etc.) and yet God tells men to be heads of households and officers in the church. The modern mind wonders, “If these women are so capable, why shouldn’t they also be allowed to serve in these roles?” It may be that God chose men who have an inherent weakness for a reason (1 Cor. 1:27-29). We must be willing to trust God’s wisdom in how he has ordered the roles of men and women, in the home, in the church, and in society.

If the word helper has been a stumbling block to women in our culture, my hope is that God’s vision for this great calling would help women joyfully and gratefully embrace that beautiful title

Genesis 2 does seem to suggest there is some kind of weakness in men that makes them need a helper. It is not physical weakness (since women are called the weaker vessel in 1 Peter 3:7). But they need help. When it says that the woman was a helper “fit for him,” it means she is “opposite him.” This is part of the reason why we often marry people who are so different from us. The Lord intended it that way. I heard in a podcast recently that if you look at a really accomplished and successful man, generally you will find that he is married to a remarkable and capable woman. She gives him a power and strength that he would never have by himself. 

One of the main ways women use their various capabilities to help a husband is in the management of a home. Paul says that older women in the church should teach and train younger women to “work at home” (Tit. 2:3-5) and “manage their households” (1 Tim. 5:14). Over the past century, women have been told over and over again that the management of a home is menial and unimportant work, and that seeking a career in corporate America or at a law office is what really matters. G. K. Chesterton has explained (better than I ever could) how backwards this thinking is:

If drudgery only means dreadfully hard work, I admit the woman drudges in the home, as a man might drudge at the Cathedral of Amiens or drudge behind a gun at Trafalgar. But if it means that the hard work is more heavy because it is trifling, colorless and of small import to the soul, then as I say, I give it up; I do not know what the words mean. To be Queen Elizabeth within a definite area, deciding sales, banquets, labors and holidays; to be Whitely within a certain area, providing toys, boots, sheets, cakes and books, to be Aristotle within a certain area, teaching morals, manners, theology, and hygiene; I can understand how this might exhaust the mind, but I cannot imagine how it could narrow it. How can it be a large career to tell other people’s children about the Rule of Three, and a small career to tell one’s own children about the universe? How can it be broad to be the same thing to everyone, and narrow to be everything to someone? No; a woman’s function is laborious, but because it is gigantic, not because it is minute. I will pity Mrs. Jones for the hugeness of her task; I will never pity her for its smallness. (G. K. Chesterton, What’s Wrong with the World?)

Now let me be clear: this is not to say that women shouldn’t be using their gifts broadly in every aspect of human culture. In our church, women serve in countless ways of administration, counseling, discipleship, teaching, music, hospitality, marketing, and so on. I can’t imagine how our church would function without them. I have been indebted to the wise counsel and experience of many women over the course of our church, and have seen that managing the church is a corollary of managing a family's home. So much of how a church is run depends on women—and historically much of the practical ministry of a church has been done by women, and often single women (think of nuns in the Roman Catholic church). I feel much how the Apostle Paul spoke of the women who labored with him:

Yes, I ask you also, true companion, help these women, who have labored side by side with me in the gospel together with Clement and the rest of my fellow workers, whose names are in the book of life. (Phil. 4:3)

These women will be commended by our Lord on the last day, “Well done good and faithful servant,” and this will largely be because of their embrace of that great title “helper.” 

What about Motherhood?

I can’t finish an article about what it is to be a woman without a few words about motherhood. When we look only at the biology of a woman, and not to God’s word, the vision of what it means to be a woman is truncated.

I find it interesting that a direct mention of motherhood is not included in the creation account of the woman. It is, of course, implied in the mandate to “be fruitful and multiply” (Gen. 1:28) which is given to men and women, and so she will help fulfill this calling by bearing the children to be born.

But interestingly, the way the Apostle Paul sees the cultural mandate being fulfilled is not primarily by having biological children, but by making disciples. In that sense, parents are only truly fulfilling the cultural mandate if they are having children and discipling them. Notice how he borrows the language of Genesis 1 in describing the movement of the gospel in the early church:

Of this you have heard before the word of the truth, the gospel, which has come to you, as indeed in the whole world it is bearing fruit and growing—as it also does among you, since the day you heard it and understood the grace of God in truth…. (Col. 1:5-6, emphasis added)

Paul sees the cultural mandate of Genesis 1 being fulfilled in the gospel of Jesus Christ, through which the nations are born again and remade in God’s image.

Even though motherhood does not appear in Genesis 2, it does pretty quickly appear in Genesis 3. We read about the importance of motherhood in these two verses:

I will put enmity between you and the woman,

     and between your offspring and her offspring;

he shall bruise your head,

    and you shall bruise his heel. (Gen. 3:15)

The man called his wife's name Eve, because she was the mother of all living. (Gen. 3:20)

What does this tell us? Motherhood is an important instrument that God uses in the building of his kingdom. What do these two observations tell us about the relationship between motherhood and being a woman?

I would put it this way: Though motherhood is not essential to being a woman (because it is not in Genesis 2), it will always be celebrated in the Christian church and it will be one of the fundamental ingredients in how women fulfill their calling to build the kingdom as helper and discipler. A Christian feminine posture will celebrate having children, will be open to having children, and will generally be positive toward God’s purposes in child-bearing. 

Someone might say, “But isn’t motherhood woven into the very shape of a woman’s body? Isn’t it physically the form of her being? Doesn’t that make it essential?” That is a fair and important point. Our bodies matter deeply to who we are. But motherhood is talked about in broad ways throughout the Bible. The Apostle Paul sees the qualities of motherliness as being gentle and affectionate (he saw himself like a mother in 1 Thess. 2:7-8), and I believe generally a woman’s physical make-up corresponds to this gentleness and affection. Abigail Favale, in her excellent book on gender, captures this quality of a woman’s body in her chapter on fertility and birth control:

Women, by their very physiology, have bodies that are open to life, bodies that welcome the stranger in before the will can bar the door. (The Genesis of Gender, p. 112)

She is saying that God has shaped women in the form of hospitality. Even more, Jesus said, “My mother and my brothers are those who hear the word of God and do it” (Luke 8:21). In this sense, whether a woman has biological children or not, when she lives under God’s word, she embraces the calling of a spiritual mother of her own children, and of others. For who has been a greater help to us than a loving and affectionate mother?

I believe all of this falls under the identity of a helper. If the word helper has been a stumbling block to women in our culture, my hope is that God’s vision for this great calling would help women joyfully and gratefully embrace that beautiful title. By doing so, you glorify God, and you labor for the coming of his kingdom.