Home
/
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
/
Imago Dei—male and female
Imago Dei—male and female
Apr 4, 2025 7:03 AM

The PowerBlog es Lisa Slayton with her review of A Woman’s Place: A Christian Vision for Your Calling in the Office, the Home, and the World by Katelyn Beaty. Slayton joined Pittsburgh Leadership Foundation in 2005 to develop a leadership offering, the Leaders Collaborative, that integrated a biblical worldview with vocational discipleship and organizational effectiveness for the flourishing of our city. She became the President/CEO in 2012 and is passionate about moving faith/work/vocation from theory to praxis.

Imago Dei—male and female

By Lisa Slayton

Book Review: A Woman’s Place

In her book A Woman’s Place: A Christian Vision for Your Calling in the Office, the Home, and the World, Katelyn Beaty does a masterful job of thoughtfully defining (or maybe re-defining) our understanding of who God created women to be and why their work in the world is essential to a flourishing economy. She illustrates how cultural shifts over time created a view that women’s ability to create economic value for the munity was second-class work, and a diminishment of their feminity. Even the church’s assimilation to these shifts have left women whom God gifted and called to the workforce feeling as though making money while female was not God honoring.

I’ll admit when my good friend and bookseller Byron Borger recently approached me with an “immediate must read” book called A Woman’s Place, I was skeptical. My experience over time has been that many Christian books about women in leadership, women and work, or what the bible has to say about women’s roles have left me frustrated and annoyed.

At best, they try and smooth over the angst that women feel around the pull of their many roles including daughter, wife, mother, munity volunteer, and worker. At worst, they espouse flawed and reductionist theology referencing poorly interpreted passages of Scripture that define the role of women to be exclusively relegated to home and hearth.

By way of disclosure, I am a generation older than Beaty, and grew up under the shadow of Betty Freidan’s “Feminine Mystique.” I was taught, and truly believed, that a woman could do anything a man could do. I am a product of the first wave of Feminism in the late 20th century.

But I trust Byron who told me it was a “Faith Work and Economics” book, and I started to read.

Beaty had me hooked at her opening statement: “Every human being is made to work. And since women are human beings, every woman is made to work.”

The starting point for any conversation about women and work, vocation, the Christian faith and biblical economics must be the Creation narrative and a robust understanding of the “Imago Dei” — that we all bear God’s image and are designed to co-create with Him in all aspects of our work.

As she states in her opening salvo, women are created to work. Much of the recent conversation generated by the Lean In movement, she notes, has been focused on the How of work, but without establishing the Why of work first we risk losing the necessary context:

Women are image bearers and therefore co-creators. We are equally mandated to reign, to have dominion, over all of God’s creation. We also learn from the Genesis text that we cannot fulfill the creation mandate without each other… the word “coworker” rightly underscores that Adam and Eve were meant not just to live and grow a family together but to also work together.

A woman’s contribution to oikonomia—the economy of places where we live, work, play, and worship cannot be overstated. When we limit women’s ability to contribute, through paid or unpaid work, everyone loses. The vocation or calling of every human being on the planet starts with contribution, not remuneration. In our Western culture we have reduced vocation to “paid work” in a job or career, but it is so much more than that. Economies can only flourish when all its contributors can bring the very best of themselves and do their part.

When women contribute through their work, the world “yields far more in return upon our efforts than our particular jobs put in” ( Beaty quoting Lester DeKoster).

If we look at one of the most misinterpreted passages of Scripture when es to a woman’s role in the world, Proverbs 31, we see that this woman was a shrewd negotiator (v16), A merchant (v18& 24) an artisan (v19) an effective manager (v14-15& 27). Yes, she is a wife and mother, and apparently quite a good one, but as Beaty notes, most of this passage focuses on her work, her value creation, and her business acumen. Women were true partners, co-laborers in the economies of their day. If women stopped working, the wheels merce and flourishing would have ground to a halt.

In western culture the onset of the industrial revolution in the early 18th century radically changed the role of women. When paid work moved increasingly outside the family and into the factories and office buildings, women were left in the home to care for children and other family members, and when they did enter the workforce were still left with brunt of the responsibility for home and childcare. This historical shift had significant implications on our modern economy and in our churches that still resonates in our current times.

New work options began to open for women in the mid-20th century and with it came a “churning” for many women. Women often seek the myth of work/life balance and believe whatever choice they make, they will diminish their identity and miss out on some other part of life.

Women are indeed meant to bring their gifts through their femininity, not in spite of it. But it is not simply a “feminine touch’ that is needed:

Rather, I mean that male and female bear the image of God together; together they bear the image of God…And what women bring to the table is not simply a feminine touch but half of humanity’s gifts, passions, and experiences.

Beaty notes, rightfully, that the missing piece in the Lean In movement and in much of the current Christian concept of women’s vocation and work, is a theology of Shalom. True biblical shalom is evident when the people of God, all of them, “are free to pursue whatever culture making enterprises they choose to undertake.”

This book is not a “woman’s book,” it is a book for every thoughtful Christian who looks at the brokenness of our world and recognizes that in every square inch of His Kingdom, God desires His people—men and women in partnership—to be agents of truth, beauty, justice, goodness, and human flourishing.

Comments
Welcome to mreligion comments! Please keep conversations courteous and on-topic. To fosterproductive and respectful conversations, you may see comments from our Community Managers.
Sign up to post
Sort by
Show More Comments
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
Wichita Business Journal: The Call of the Entrepreneur
Pat Sangimino wrote an article for the Wichita Business Journal titled, “Documentary seeks to dispel negative images of entrepreneurs ” (subscription required). A premiere of The Call of the Entrepreneur took place in Wichita, Kan., on November 14th. Sangimino noted in his piece: Some consider Wichita to be the Midwest’s cradle of entrepreneurship. Evidence of that is the original Pizza Hut building, which was moved to the Wichita State University campus in 1984 to serve as a reminder of what...
Alarmism and Corruption
Regis Nicoll over at The Point notes a WaPo story that is getting a lot of play on the blogosphere about the UN’s downgrade of the estimate of the extent of the AIDS epidemic, “U.N. to Cut Estimate Of AIDS Epidemic: Population With Virus Overstated by Millions.” Nicoll writes that while of course it is good news that fewer people are infected than were previously thought, “The bad news is that previous estimates were inflated because of politics, bad science,...
Reports on Globalization and National Capital
Last month the World Bank published a report titled, “Where is the Wealth of Nations?” (HT: From the Heartland). The report describes estimates of wealth and ponents for nearly 120 countries. The book has four sections. The first part introduces the wealth estimates and highlights the level position of wealth across countries. The second part analyzes changes in wealth and their implications for economic policy. The third part deepens the analysis by considering the importance of human and institutional capital,...
Rock N Roll ‘Jesus’
Last night the American Music Awards were televised on ABC. Among the big winners were alumni of the hit TV show, “American Idol,” whose stars won 3 AMAs. Kid Rock, the Rock N Roll “Jesus.” But there was another kind of “idol” on display at the AMAs, as Detroit’s own Kid Rock was a presenter and did a spoof of his fight with rocker Tommy Lee in edy bit with host Jimmy Kimmel. Kid Rock released a new album last...
George Hearst of Deadwood: ‘The-boy-the-earth-talks-to’
In a bit of an addendum to my review of the HBO series Deadwood in the current issue of Religion & Liberty, “A Law Beyond Law: Life Together in Deadwood,” I couldn’t help thinking of this bit from Clement of Alexandria when describing George Hearst, the über-robber baron of the Old West. In that piece I write, “Hearst fancies that he is doing his fellow man a service in his devotion to mining gold, to acquiring ‘the color.'” There’s a...
Prosperity, Sexual Sin, and Forgiveness
A recent survey by the Pew Global Attitudes Project finds that “religion is less likely to be central to the lives of individuals in richer nations than poorer ones” (HT). Given the Bible’s many warnings about the danger presented by wealth, specifically the temptation to no longer rely on God and his providential care, that probably isn’t surprising. But what might be more surprising is that “the United States, the wealthiest nation, was ‘most notably’ an exception, scoring higher in...
God Hears the Compassionate
“If a man shuts his ears to the cry of the poor, he also shall cry himself, but shall not be heard.” Proverbs 21:13 I remember being very young and hearing a minister dramatically describe the flames and fires of hell in a sermon. I know I was somewhere between the age of six and seven. At this time, I also had little knowledge of salvation in Christ, so I worried about my eternal destination. Couple this thought with a...
Giuliani and the Godbloggers
After the jump is the (hyperlinked) text of a column I filed last week from GodblogCon. Here are some related items worth exploring: “Evangelicals and Evil Empires: Religious voters have long had an interest in foreign policy,” OpinionJournal (HT: CT Liveblog).“Rudy’s Gamble: Giuliani’s audacious strategy for the nomination,” OpinionJournal.“Evangelical flocks on their own at the polls,” LA Times (HT: J-Walking).“On second thought, conservatives give Huckabee an amen,” LA Times.“Clarifying Media Distortions,” Focus on the Family.“Robertson for Rudy,” God’s Politics.“The Robertson...
A Child’s Faith
“People were bringing little children to Jesus to have him touch them, but the disciples rebuked them. When Jesus saw this, he was indignant. He said to them, ‘Let the little e to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these. I tell you the truth, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it.’ And he took the children in his arms, put...
Black America Is Just As Class Divided As The Rest Of America
The Pew Research Center released a new report stating: “African Americans see a widening gulf between the values of middle class and poor blacks, and nearly four-in-ten say that because of the diversity within munity, blacks can no longer be thought of as a single race.” Here are the key findings: • Asked whether blacks can still be thought of as a single race, given the increasing diversity within the munity, 53% of blacks say they can, but 37% of...
Related Classification
Copyright 2023-2025 - www.mreligion.com All Rights Reserved