Will male-female complementarity exist in the new heavens and new earth? If so, what can we learn about the continued distinctions between men and women in the new creation?
Scriptural data on the contours of the life to come are limited, so we must admit the speculative nature of our question up front. However, we can draw reasonable inferences from what the Bible does say about life in the resurrection, particularly from how the Bible treats masculinity and femininity in creation, after the fall, and in redemption.
Grace Restores Nature
Before considering complementarity in creation, it is necessary to introduce a theological concept on which the logic of this essay depends. According to Dutch Reformed theologian Herman Bavinck, a key Reformational principle holds that grace does not destroy nature. What God created in the beginning is natural, and what is natural is good and not undone by God’s redemptive purposes. Rather, grace restores nature. Bavinck explains,
Grace serves, not to take up humans into a supernatural order, but to free them from sin. Grace is opposed not to nature, only to sin. . . . Grace restores nature and takes it to its highest pinnacle, but it does not add to it any new and heterogeneous constituents. (Reformed Dogmatics, 3:577)
Nature (which in this context is another word for God’s original design) is not inherently bad. Nature is good, but it has been corrupted by sin. In fact, sin is a privation and corruption of a created good. God’s gospel mission in Christ is to rid the world of sin and reform and restore nature in the new creation, taking it “to its highest pinnacle.” Importantly, the restoration of the created order includes God’s complementary design for male and female.
Some theological systems treat natural differences — such as those between men and women — as something bad to overcome. But after God created the world and everything in it, he called all that he had made “good,” and then he said it was “very good” after creating the man and the woman equal yet different in his image (Genesis 1:31). With God, we should confess that complementary difference is “very good,” and woe to those who call evil good and good evil (Isaiah 5:20).
Complementarity is creational, good, and part of what God redeems in the gospel.
Complementarity in Creation
Origin stories often provide crucial information for understanding a subject. The early chapters of Genesis are foundational for a properly biblical anthropology, and from these chapters we learn that complementarity — equal value with different callings — is original to and constitutive of humanity.
Genesis 1:26–28 introduces humanity’s form and function, teaching that God made mankind in his image to come in two varieties: male and female. The original Hebrew words for male (zakar) and female (neqebah) in Genesis 1 make subtle etymological references to the natural reproductive differences between men and women. These natural differences (form) ground and point toward their meaning and fulfillment (function) in marriage and procreation.
Jesus taught his disciples this connection between marriage and God’s complementary design in Matthew 19:4–5, where he connects the purpose of marriage in Genesis 2:24 (“Therefore . . .”) with God’s design in Genesis 1:27 (“male and female”):
Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, “Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh”?
Maleness and femaleness, masculinity and femininity, are inherently complementary, meaning not only that we understand one vis-à-vis the other, but also that each bears witness to and complements the other as they both point toward their fulfillment in marriage. How God created “in the beginning” informs God’s purposes for his creation. And in God’s grand design, we learn that God created marriage itself to be a mysterious sign with meaning in the gospel (Ephesians 5:31–32).
So God’s complementary design has both a natural and a supernatural purpose. The natural purpose of male-female complementarity is marriage and procreation — cornerstones of the natural family, which is the bedrock of human society. The supernatural purpose of complementarity is to display the good news that Jesus has given his life for his bride, the church.
Complementarity After the Fall
When sin entered the world, complementarity was affected but not destroyed. We see this clearly in the curses God pronounces over creation in Genesis 3:16. Procreation continues in a fallen world, but it is more difficult. Marriage likewise continues, but it is also more difficult. Strife and conflict afflict the relationship between husband and wife. The wife tends not to willingly submit to her husband, but she has desires contrary to his leadership — or she resigns herself to being a doormat. And the husband tends not to relate to his wife in love as his equal, but with harsh rule — or he resigns himself to being a pushover.
Either way, God’s original complementary design is defaced by sin, but it is not erased. In a fallen world, we continue to bear God’s image as males and females, and marriage and procreation continue as a common grace for the continuance of the human race and as a picture of God’s ongoing activity in the world.
Complementarity in Redemption
God answers sin in the gospel. Not only has Jesus paid the penalty of sin through his substitutionary death on the cross, but he has begun a redemptive work in creation everywhere the gospel takes root.
It is through complementary procreation and childbearing that redemption is both promised and ultimately realized. In the midst of cursing the world on account of mankind’s sin, God promises to raise up an offspring of the woman who will put down the rebellion instigated by the serpent. In Genesis 3:15, God addresses the serpent within earshot of the man and the woman:
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.
As the biblical genealogies testify, generations of complementary relations between men and women brought this promise to the brink of fulfillment. Then, through the supernatural conception by a betrothed-and-then-married virgin, the promise was finally realized. Jesus is begotten of his heavenly Father and an earthly mother — the God-man come to earth to redeem his bride, the church. Complementarity permeates the gospel.
The New Testament affirms the continued goodness of complementary differences, particularly in marriage and procreation. The apostles exhort all Christians everywhere to faith and good works, affirming male-female equality of value in their redeemed standing before God (Galatians 3:28). But the apostles also give the New Testament churches differing, enduring, sex-specific instructions, including to the unmarried, in places like Titus 2 and in the household codes in Ephesians 5, Colossians 3, and 1 Peter 3. Grace does not erase nature but restores it — including our complementary natures and callings.
For instance, in 1 Timothy 2:11–15, Paul instructs women to act differently from men in the covenant community. Just as Adam was created as the covenant head of his wife, men are called to covenant leadership in marriage and in the church, and women are called to embrace their God-given design under the leadership of qualified men in the covenant community. In 1 Timothy 2:15, Paul mentions the archetypically feminine act, childbearing, for women to embrace in faith, love, holiness, and self-control. Many commentators see a reference in this verse to the unique role women played in the history of redemption to bring about the birth of the Savior. It was through childbirth, after all, that Jesus came into the world to bring salvation. Men are instructed to embrace their masculinity and women to embrace their femininity in the eternal life they have in Christ.
We can see how the gospel answers sin and restores nature also in the instructions Paul gives husbands and wives in Ephesians 5:22–33. The sex-specific commands for husbands and wives in this passage directly answer the propensities toward sin listed in the curses of Genesis 3:16. As the redeemed, husbands are commanded to love their wives as Christ loves the church rather than to rule harshly over them. Wives are commanded to submit to their own husbands rather than to nurse desires contrary to their leadership.
This sampling of passages makes it clear that even as we are made more into the image of Christ (2 Corinthians 3:18; Romans 8:29; Colossians 3:10; Ephesians 4:24), we embrace our masculinity and femininity as the God-given way we image him (Genesis 1:27).
Complementarity in the New Creation
The resurrection of Jesus offers an important clue for life in the new creation. The Bible teaches that Jesus rose from the dead as the “firstfruits” of the new creation (1 Corinthians 15:20, 23). Firstfruits portend not only that more will follow, but also what will follow.
When Jesus rose from the dead, he demonstrated continuity between his bodily existence before and after his death. Jesus was born into the world as a human male, lived a perfect life as a human male, died as a human male, and was resurrected as a human male. Francis Turretin rightly connects Christ’s resurrection to the resurrection believers should anticipate:
When he rose, Christ received the same body he had before and the same flesh which he had assumed and in which he died, for what he once took he never laid aside (Psalm 16:10; John 2:19; Acts 2:31). Hence he significantly says, “It is I myself” (Luke 24:39). Such ought to be our resurrection. Our bodies ought to be no other than those which were deposited in the earth. (Institutes of Elenctic Theology, 3:572–73)
At the resurrection, all the redeemed will be raised with bodies in the same way that Jesus was raised. Men and women will be reconstituted with imperishable male bodies and female bodies, respectively. In this way, we can affirm that maleness and femaleness, which imply masculinity and femininity, will persist in the new creation.
But what will this masculinity and femininity look like? We find another clue to life in the resurrection from Jesus in Matthew 22. This passage is a hotspot for speculation, and for good reason. In this passage, Jesus answers the Sadducees’ attempt to stump him with a question about a woman who was successively married to seven brothers. To which of the seven brothers would this woman be married in the resurrection? But Jesus is not stumped:
You know neither the Scriptures nor the power of God. For in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven. And as for the resurrection of the dead, have you not read what was said to you by God: “I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob”? He is not God of the dead, but of the living. (Matthew 22:29–32)
Jesus’s reply contains two pieces of information about life in the resurrection: we will not marry or be given in marriage, and we will be like the angels. Mainstream Christian orthodoxy has concluded from Jesus’s teaching that there will no longer be marriage in the new creation. But if marriage and procreation cease, then will maleness and femaleness cease?
This conclusion does not necessarily follow, in part because of the theological logic of resurrection (presented above) and in part because of Jesus’s own words. Indeed, the words Jesus uses in Matthew 22:30 appear to affirm the continuance of differences between the two sexes. The words “marry” and “given in marriage” refer to the uniquely male and female roles in marriage. In other words, the activity will cease, but not the differentiated identities. As Augustine observes,
In the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven (Matthew 22:30). They shall be equal to the angels in immortality and happiness, not in flesh, nor in resurrection, which the angels did not need, because they could not die. The Lord then denied that there would be in the resurrection, not women, but marriages; and he uttered this denial in circumstances in which the question mooted would have been more easily and speedily solved by denying that the female sex would exist, if this had in truth been foreknown by him. But, indeed, he even affirmed that the sex should exist by saying, They shall not be given in marriage, which can only apply to females; Neither shall they marry, which applies to males. There shall therefore be those who are in this world accustomed to marry and be given in marriage, only they shall there make no such marriages. (City of God, XXII.17)
In this way, Jesus does not mean to indicate that we will be “like angels” in that we will be non-physical or disembodied. We will have resurrected bodies, which means we will be sexed as Jesus is in his resurrected male body. But we will be “like angels” in that we will be immortal, as Augustine affirms, and we will no longer procreate. The pleasures promised to Christians (Psalm 16:11), both male and female, transcend the mere physical, instead promising spiritual unity with God himself as we enjoy his goodness forever in his presence (Revelation 21).
In sum, masculinity and femininity continue in the new creation because God created us male and female — equal in value yet different in our callings — in the beginning, pronouncing it “very good.” Masculinity and femininity are not erased by the fall but are being redeemed in the gospel. We who are united to Christ by faith will be raised with sexed bodies like his, male or female, which means masculinity and femininity will persist in the new heavens and the new earth. Male-female complementarity originated in the garden, persists in spite of the fall, is redeemed in Christ, and will be fully restored in the new creation.
Male and Female Forever
If we have adequately established that masculinity and femininity will persist in the new heavens and new earth, we may now explore what this might look like. If marriage and procreation are no more, what will masculinity and femininity look like? How will they be distinguished? And for what purpose?
The differences between masculinity and femininity will persist, first and foremost, in our embodied differences. Men and women have similar yet different forms that lend themselves to different but overlapping modes of subsistence. While no longer directed at marriage and procreation, masculinity and femininity will retain their original function in imaging and reflecting the glory of God. And because we are not God, no one of us can image or reflect his glory independently. Male and female together are required to image God sufficiently.
God-created differentiation will continue in the new creation. The new heavens will be distinct from the new earth; angels and cherubim will be distinct from seraphim; trees will be distinct from rivers, and these created realities will be distinct from the men and women who will walk among them, embodied and differentiated as either male or female. Each aspect of God’s new creation will proclaim something about its Creator (Romans 1:20). Because no one created being is equal to God, which includes each of us as male or female, we will continue to experience and benefit from differentiated createdness, which will bear testimony to and give glory to God.
Second, bodily continuity between this age and the age to come points toward spiritual continuity. Masculinity in this age is typified by strength and initiative and leadership. We have reason to think that in the new heavens and new earth, masculinity will continue to typify such. Femininity in this age is typified by beauty and receptivity and nurture, and this also is likely to continue in the age to come. Importantly, one typified attribute is not better than another. Just the opposite: every attribute is good and necessary, as it is created by and participates in God himself. But they are differentiated, and this differentiation will continue in the new creation because maleness and femaleness will continue.
Admittedly, though, we have arrived with C.S. Lewis’s character Ransom at the brink of futility and wonder as we try to fully account for the beauty of complementary difference:
But whence came this curious difference between them? He found that he could point to no single feature wherein the difference resided, yet it was impossible to ignore. One could try — Ransom has tried a hundred times — to put it into words. He has said that Malacandra was like rhythm and Perelandra like melody. He has said that Malacandra affected him like a quantitative, Perelandra like an accentual, metre. . . . What Ransom saw at that moment was the real meaning of gender. (Perelandra, 171)
Complementarity participates in true reality, because it reflects God’s design. Instead of trying to define the scope of masculinity and femininity in the age to come, we should content ourselves with affirming complementary continuity, which means affirming the goodness of male-female difference, while celebrating and anticipating continued complementarity in God’s (re)created order.
God’s creation is beautifully diverse, like a multifaceted diamond, in order to catch and reflect the eternal divine Light (1 John 1:5). It will be similar in the new creation, which is described in similar terms as the first creation (“new heavens and new earth,” Revelation 21:1; “the heavens and the earth,” Genesis 1:1). We serve a God whose Trinitarian love is reflected in and refracted through all of creation, including redeemed humanity. Male-female complementarity is part of God’s original design, and this complementarity will be beautifully restored with the rest of creation, which eagerly awaits God’s redemption (Romans 8:23).
Male-female complementarity will exist in the new heavens and the new earth, and so will masculinity and femininity. As for their eternal complementary purposes, Lord willing, we will have an eternity to appreciate them, and through them the strength and beauty of our God.
Desiring God