Jesus, while kind and gentle to His sheep, was fierce toward those who perpetrated evil, false religion, and deception. John Calvin understood this when he wrote, “The pastor ought to have two voices; one for gathering the sheep; and another, for warding off and driving away wolves and thieves. The Scripture supplies him with the means of doing both.” 

Throughout much of the West, we have forgotten what it is to be a man. Or worse yet, we have demonised men and manliness. We have condemned men and masculinity. This is proving to be a recipe for disaster. And the Christian church should have no part in this. We need to get back to the Bible here.

The fact that the Bible overwhelmingly portrays God in terms of maleness, be it in his attributes, actions and designations, does not mean there are no feminine terms ever used about him. Sometimes we hear things like this: “As a mother comforts her child, so will I comfort you” (Isaiah: 66:13).

But in the vast majority of cases, we find God being called Father, and we see masculine names and masculine pronouns used about him. See more on this topic here: https://billmuehlenberg.com/2015/10/29/god-and-gender/

The same with Jesus. He was born a male, and lived as a man, and is always designated as God’s son. We never read in Scripture that Jesus is the daughter of God, or that God is his mother. But we live in an age where there is mass confusion – much of it deliberate – over things like sex and gender. And there has been a massive feminisation of culture in the West. See here for example: https://billmuehlenberg.com/2025/03/04/the-demasculisation-of-society-and-church/  

In that piece I looked at various aspects of the war on men and masculinity. The whole attempt to push the “toxic masculinity” narrative has caused all sort of trouble. And the church has not been immune from feeling the impact of this. Too many folks now think that Jesus was some wimpy soy boy who would never hurt a fly, or was some androgynous character who needed to get in touch with his feminine side.

No one actually reading the gospel accounts could ever come away with that sort of nonsense. In the second article I linked to above I mentioned a recent volume on these matters: The Manliness of Christ: How the Masculinity of Jesus Eradicates Effeminate Christianity by Dale Partridge (Relearn Press, 2023).

That short book is worth revisiting here. Indeed, Chapter 2 is on “The Maleness of Christ” and Chapter 3 is on “The Masculinity of Christ”. Both are worth quoting from. As to the former, Partridge says this:

[I]f you hate masculinity, you will despise the biblical Jesus. He wasn’t interested in “getting to know His feminine side” nor was He the macho and chauvinistic domineer that some failing men have become. Jesus was the epitome of manhood—a stalwart in mission, bold, obedient to the point of death, fearless in His proclamation of truth, sacrificial in His acts of love, and resolved to do His Father’s will. Jesus had force, authority, and control in a way that marked Him as virile and robust. Yes, it is true that our Lord also exemplified gentler traits, but these marks are not effeminate in nature they are, in proper placement, the completion of true masculinity. (p. 21)

In the next chapter he looks at how the masculinity of Christ is manifest in five primary ways. 

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