Saturday, August 1, 2026
Friday, July 31, 2026
Thursday, July 30, 2026
Wednesday, July 29, 2026
Tuesday, July 28, 2026
Monday, July 27, 2026
Sunday, July 26, 2026
Friday, July 24, 2026
Thursday, July 23, 2026
Wednesday, July 22, 2026
Tuesday, July 21, 2026
Monday, July 20, 2026
Sunday, July 19, 2026
Saturday, July 18, 2026
Friday, July 17, 2026
Thursday, July 16, 2026
Wednesday, July 15, 2026
Monday, July 13, 2026
Sunday, July 12, 2026
Saturday, July 11, 2026
Friday, July 10, 2026
Wednesday, July 8, 2026
Tuesday, July 7, 2026
Monday, July 6, 2026
What is biblical manhood? (Got Questions)
In the postmodern world, few topics invite as much controversy as discussions of gender. Adding a religious dimension makes the concept even more prone to distortion and emotional reactions. Some of what the Bible says about men and women, how they relate, and what God’s expectations are for them may run contrary to our preferences. Those ideas may conflict with our cultures, upbringing, or the opinions of our peers. And yet the definition of biblical manhood (and womanhood) is exactly that: biblical, not opinion-driven.
All the same, even within Christianity, there is significant debate over the best way to apply the Bible’s concepts of manhood and womanhood. How to live out the unique, God-given roles of men and women isn’t quite so easy in practice as it is in theory. So, rather than attempt a detailed explanation of every aspect of biblical manhood, our intent here is only to highlight the topic in broad strokes.Biblical manhood can be boiled down to five basic principles, which each man is expected to conform to. These are 1) humility before his God, 2) control of his appetites, 3) protecting his family, 4) providing for his family, and 5) leading his family. Men who fail to meet these expectations are not behaving as “men,” biblically speaking, but as something less noble (Psalm 49:20). Some good examples of biblical manhood in Scripture are Daniel, Caleb, Joshua, Paul, and, of course, Jesus.
Men and women are created in the image of God (Genesis 1:26–27), something no other creature can claim. This makes every single human being valuable and worthy of respect. And yet males and females are not identical. We are biologically, psychologically, and emotionally distinct. This is not in any sense a bad thing; God called His original creation, which included distinct genders, “very good” (Genesis 1:31). Biblical manhood must include a godly view of women. Mistreatments of women such as forbidding education, sexual abuse, or denying civil rights are violations of the image-of-God principle. So, too, are attitudes that ignore meaningful differences between the sexes or erase gender roles.
Critically, note those things that Scripture does not include as part of biblical manhood. Men are not called to be tyrants, ruling a home with an iron fist and a dictator’s attitude. Nor are they instructed to be cowed and weak-kneed toward their families. Nor are men called on to enforce, in any sense, the biblical ideals of womanhood in their wives. Humility, self-control, protection, provision, and leadership are the man’s responsibilities and his tools. Men are accountable for spiritual leadership within their families, yet each person is ultimately accountable to God for his or her own life.
The proper perspective for this leadership comes from Ephesians 5:25–32. The goal of every believer’s life is to become more and more like Christ (Romans 8:29). For men in their God-given role, this means leading and loving their wives in the same way Christ loved the church: sacrificially (Ephesians 5:2), through service (John 13:14–15), and in selfless love (Ephesians 5:28). Just as the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are equal yet serve different roles, so, too, can men and women be equal in value and in spiritual worth yet have different roles to play.
The fundamental requirement for biblical manhood is a proper relationship with God (Micah 6:8). This informs and empowers every other responsibility a man has in his life. Humility means an acknowledgement of his imperfection (Romans 3:23), acceptance of Christ for salvation (2 Peter 3:9), and a continual sense of dependence on God (1 Peter 5:7; Hebrews 13:15). A godly man will study, learn, and understand the will of God (Matthew 6:33; Romans 12:2) through the Word of God (Hebrews 4:12). This gives him the tools to meet all of his other obligations; it does not automatically make his life biblically sound (1 Corinthians 3:2).
Knowing what God wants is only the first step, as biblical manhood also requires submission to that knowledge. Men are called on to control their urges and appetites (1 Thessalonians 4:3–5), relying on God to overcome temptations (1 Corinthians 10:13). Men, according to the Bible, are not to twist the Scripture in order to get their way (Mark 7:8–9) or to match their own preferences (Proverbs 14:12). Instead, they are to follow God’s commands (Proverbs 1:7) instead of their own urges (Romans 6:12; 1 Peter 1:14). This includes the other requirements of biblical manhood, which can be difficult to apply in a humble, godly way.
Biblical manhood includes the responsibility to protect one’s family. This may mean physically, to the point of laying down his life (Ephesians 5:25). In the Bible, men are called to fight to protect their wives and children (Nehemiah 4:13–14); women are never called to do the same for their husbands. This also involves spiritual protection—consider that Eve sinned first, but Adam was blamed for failing to lead her (Genesis 3:11, 17). Men are instructed to “honor” their wives as a “weaker vessel” (1 Peter 3:7), a phrase that in context invokes something precious, expensive, and valuable. Protecting one’s spouse and family from harm, both spiritual and physical, should be a natural instinct for Christian men.
Men are also called to be the primary providers for their families. Obviously, this can take different forms, and particular circumstances can change who contributes to family finances. Unemployment, illness, injury, and so forth are circumstances, not deliberate arrangements. Adam’s punishment at the fall was increased pain in his primary responsibility within the family, which was to be a provider (Genesis 3:17–19). Passages such as 1 Timothy 5:9 describe support for widows but not for widowers. Rather, it is men who are singled out to provide for their own families, in the clearest of terms (1 Timothy 5:8). Repeatedly, the Bible calls on men to provide and for women to care for the home.
The role of leader, both within the church and within a marriage, is also part of biblical manhood. This requirement originates even before the fall, where Adam and Eve shared equality in differing responsibilities (Romans 12:4–5). It is also seen in Adam’s naming of Eve (Genesis 2:23), an act which symbolizes authority. As already referenced, Christ has to be the model for this type of leadership. A man is called to lead through love, through service, and through sacrifice. This is not a domineering leadership or a repressive arrogance. Male leadership in the home and in the church is meant to reflect the relationship between Christ and the church.
Of course, these principles of biblical manhood are easier to understand than to apply. Our fallen nature leads us to resist God’s will (Hebrews 3:15), even when we don’t reject it outright (Romans 7:23–25). Biblical manhood is particularly important, however, as a fundamental part of living out God’s commands. There is nothing “manly,” worthwhile, or commendable about a male who shirks these responsibilities (Proverbs 19:1; 29:1). Nor is there anything admirable about a society that despises the characteristics of a godly man (Jude 1:10).
Individual Liberty and the Responsibility to Protect: Toward a Neolibertarian Foreign Policy
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-70525-0_5
It has become conventional wisdom that libertarianism stands opposed to overseas military intervention in principle, in particular after the military (mis)adventures of the United States in recent decades. This conventional wisdom is challenged in this contribution, relying on the cosmopolitan nature of libertarian minarchist principles. Using the contemporary notion of the responsibility to protect, a responsibility to protect liberty that looks more favorably upon the use of military force to protect and advance the liberty and property rights of individuals across the globe is formulated.
Self-defense and its libertarian enemies by Walter E. Block and Oded J.K. Faran
https://www.jns.org/opinion/walter-e-block/self-defense-and-its-libertarian-enemies
(June 23, 2026 / JNS)
A great many libertarian leaders, loyal to every other aspect of the creed, lose their footing the moment the subject turns to war. They can recite the non-aggression principle in their sleep and then abandon it just when it matters most.
Start with Antiwar.com. Asked to explain itself, the site declares: “Our politics are libertarian: our opposition to war is rooted in Randolph Bourne’s concept that ‘War is the health of the State.’ With every war, America has made a ‘great leap’ into statism, and as Bourne emphasized, ‘it is during war that one best understands the nature of that institution [the State].’ At its core, that nature includes an ever-increasing threat to individual liberty and the centralization of political power.”
Bourne was a gifted writer and, on much else, a sound libertarian. Look at the load-bearing word in the site’s creed: its opposition to war is “rooted” in the claim that war fattens the state. The claim is true, and worth shouting from the rooftops. But a reliable tendency cannot by itself condemn a whole category of acts. Hospitals spread infection, but a man still has his broken leg set there. That war usually grows the state is reason to watch it warily, but not to fault the man fighting off an invader. From a genuine aspect of what war tends to do, Antiwar.com has rendered a blanket verdict on what war always is. A tendency has been mistaken for a principle.
Hand the microphone to Murray Rothbard, Mr. Libertarian himself, who drew the line his admirers at the site have erased: “My own view of war can be put simply: A just war exists when a people tries to ward off the threat of coercive domination by another people, or to overthrow an already-existing domination. A war is unjust, on the other hand, when a people try to impose domination on another people, or try to retain an already existing coercive rule over them.”
Defense on one side of the ledger, aggression on the other. A libertarian foreign policy fits within that single sentence.
Next, there is LewRockwell.com, whose masthead announces three commitments: “Anti-State, Anti-War, Pro-Market.” The first and third are beyond reproach. The middle one trips over its own author. Lew Rockwell has defended two American wars as just: the War of Independence in 1776 and the South’s part in the Civil War of 1861-1865, due to what he claims is the legitimacy of Southern secession. A masthead that forbids what its proprietor endorses is a masthead in want of editing.
Third, there is the Future of Freedom Foundation, which offers as a kind of catechism these lines from Frank Chodorov’s 1938 essay “When War Comes”: “Every day we must repeat to ourselves as a liturgy, the truth that war is caused by the conditions that bring about poverty; that no war is justified; that no war benefits the people; that war is an instrument whereby the haves increase their hold on the have-nots; that war destroys liberty.”
The Foundation salutes Chodorov as “arguably ... the most effective voice of isolationism.” Effective he was, and on most questions a genuine sage. But that one line, “no war is justified,” reads beautifully and ends in disaster. It throws over the right of self-defense, which is the bedrock upon which the whole libertarian structure rests. Tell a man he may not lift a hand against the aggressor at his door, and you have not made him peaceful. You have made him prey.
Fourth, there is the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity. Prosperity, by all means, but “peace” as the headline virtue is where the trouble starts. “Justice and Prosperity” would be far more honest, since justice every so often calls for a defensive war that no candid person would describe as peaceful. Ron Paul himself knows this, whatever his institute’s letterhead says. The Congressional Record reveals that, on Dec. 4, 2001, Paul called for legislation authorizing, in his words, “the President to issue letters of marque and reprisal to appropriate parties to seize the person and property of Osama bin Laden and any other individuals responsible for the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11.”
Letters of marque, the seizure of persons and property, and the hunting of bin Laden across the globe are many things, but peaceful is not among them.
Four organizations, one mistake repeated four times. The truth is that libertarianism stands against aggressive war, the war of the initiator, the war waged to conquer or to keep an unjust grip on a subject people. It has never objected to defensive war and never will. It objects just as fiercely to the deliberate killing of innocents, on any side and under any flag, because repelling an aggressor never licenses the murder of his civilians.
Erase that distinction and “anti-war” quietly becomes pacifism in libertarian dress; pacifism blown up to the scale of a nation. A libertarian may, of course, be a pacifist, should his conscience demand it, but their philosophy requires nothing of the kind.
None of this is a matter of slogans for us. We have argued the case at length in a study of what we call Rothbard’s “foreign-policy paradox,” in which the very universalism that forbids the killing of a foreign innocent in wartime ought, carried through honestly, to permit the rescue of that same innocent from slaughter at the hands of his own government. Rothbard balked at that second step, and the four organizations above balk at the first. The libertarian principle they all profess to serve is steadier than any of them.
Picture the thing at its simplest: Country A attacks Country B without cause. B fights back. Both are now “at war,” and the antiwar purist, counting only the noun “war,” drops them in the same file. The libertarian, however, reads the verbs: A initiated, B defended.
Suppose Canada or Mexico were to invade the United States tomorrow morning. The president could repel the attack immediately, the Constitution squarely behind him, and Congress could argue later about the wider war. No one calls that aggression.
Anyone can condemn Washington’s adventures, but the libertarian principle only holds when one can still name aggression for what it is, even when the victim is politically unfashionable.
Here, the mask slips. The antiwar passion of these libertarians is directed, time and again, at Israel, and seldom at the parties that attacked Israel. A man who opposes war as such, all of it, in every instance, would have no earthly reason to keep training his guns on one side of a Middle Eastern fight while waving the other through. One might expect even-handedness from so principled a pacifism, but one would be expecting too much.
This selectivity is no abstraction to the authors of these lines.
After Hamas invaded Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, one of us, Walter E. Block, said plainly that Israel had the right to ward off the assault, which is to say, to fight a just war by Rothbard’s own definition, with the obvious proviso that the innocents of Gaza not be deliberately harmed. For saying so, Block was stripped of the unpaid senior fellowship he had held at the Mises Institute for the better part of a lifetime. LewRockwell.com, whose masthead we analyzed a few paragraphs ago, walled him off from more than a hundred articles he had written for it. The self-styled heirs of Rothbard had excommunicated a man for taking Rothbard at his word.
The episode has been set down in full in an essay on what the affair laid bare about the libertarian movement’s fragility. We will not reiterate it here. The point for present purposes is narrower and sharper: An “antiwar” libertarianism that too often excuses the aggressor, reserves its moral fury for the defender and at last turns that fury on its own founders has inverted the very doctrine it professes to inherit from Rothbard.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)