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Millions tuned in last week to hear Jacqueline Kennedy in her own words recount her days in the White House. These taped interviews, now nearly 50 years old, revealed a woman who loved her husband and valued her role in helping him succeed as the youngest elected president in American history. They also opened up a new discussion in some venues on gender roles in marriage then and now.

Many were surprised by her devotion and view of women, especially when she revealed that all of her opinions came from her husband and that women didn’t belong in politics. After all, we live in a very different world today. Women are all over the political arena these days. And a woman depending heavily on a man is seen as a sign of a different generation—-one that is long gone and unlikely to return. Various pundits were shocked that a woman so revered in public life, and around at the dawn of the second wave of feminism, would believe such things. Even Kennedy’s granddaughters expressed horror that their grandmother could actually live this way.

But it was a different time back then. Now women are marrying later in life, and when they do, they bring their own opinions, values, and often paycheck. It’s not surprising that women today would scoff at a marriage like the Kennedy’s. But is there anything for us to learn as Christian women from the marriage of Camelot?

Yes and no.

Some would say that to be complementarian in your understanding of gender roles in marriage is to go back to the 50s and early 60s, with June Cleaver as the archetypal housewife who every Christian woman aspires to become. Jackie Kennedy typified that with her efforts to make their home a place of comfort for the President, along with believing everything he believed. But being a Christian woman is so much more than a simple throwback to a generation gone by. Our understanding of womanhood actually goes back much farther than the 1950s.

Still, it’s a lot easier to attempt to define God’s plan for us by the culture around us. We see what works, or look longingly at what once was, and think that surely this idyllic world is in line with what the Bible lays out. But the problem with cultural definitions is that they are always incomplete. Every culture is flawed, from the fall at the beginning of time until now. This is why we can’t rely on mere cultural representations to define biblical categories. A biblical understanding of womanhood is not changed by the culture. It is found in a rock-solid commitment to the Bible.

What We Can Learn

While we are not defined by changing cultural norms, we can see some elements of truth in how women like Jacqueline Kennedy support their husbands. Her devotion to President Kennedy is one that, as Christian women, we can admire and desire to emulate. This unswerving commitment to his success and good is reminiscent of the biblical command given to women by God in Genesis. God made woman to be a suitable helper for her husband, to submit to him and honor him. John Piper defines submission as “the divine calling of a wife to honor and affirm her husband’s leadership and help carry it through according to her gifts.”

Kennedy’s support of her husband and desire to make her home a haven of rest for him is a picture of what God intended when he created men and women. But it’s a blurry picture—-faded in black and white, not clear enough for us to see all of what God created.

What Is Missing

In all of this discussion about whether Jackie Kennedy’s marriage was antiquated and unrealistic for today’s society, something profound is missing: the gospel. When Paul tells Titus to have the older women train the younger women in how to conduct themselves in the family, it was not so they could have a perfect, well-mannered, orderly home. It wasn’t so people would look in and praise them for their devotion to their husbands. It wasn’t so the outlying community would marvel at how submissive they were. Instead, Paul tells Titus it is so God will get the glory, and people will see him as infinitely valuable (Titus 2:5). Biblical womanhood is not getting all your opinions from your husband and only speaking when spoken to. Yes, we have opinions. Yes, we offer them. But when the decision time comes, God gets glory when we graciously submit to the leadership of our husbands, even when our opinion might be different. That’s a very different rendering of womanhood than the one presented by Kennedy.

The ultimate point of womanhood, and manhood for that matter, is to reflect the One who created it—-the almighty God. So many mainstream writers and secular feminists scoff at words like submission and suitable helper because they don’t have eyes to comprehend the glory of Christ, where our gender ultimately points.

It’s not enough to simply go back to a Victorian understanding of marriage, or copy the former First Lady’s tips for keeping a happy husband, because as helpful as these examples can be, they don’t tell the whole story. The story of men and women began in a garden in the Middle East many years ago, when God the Creator made man and woman in his image, each with a role to play in this great story. When Adam and Eve fell, so did our understanding of gender. But there is still a small whisper in our souls telling us that what is now here is not how it was supposed to be. Without eyes to see the original design we balk at it just like the media pundits and ambient culture.

With the curse came the promise that all of this would one day be made right. Christians have the unique and undeserved privilege of seeing God’s plan for men and women, and by his grace living it out in this lost and fallen world. So while we can listen to the tapes of Jacqueline Kennedy and acknowledge that there is some good in her devotion to President Kennedy, devotion without the gospel isn’t enough. Submission without the changed heart pointing onlookers to Christ is ultimately meaningless. And a cultural definition of womanhood is no definition at all.

Is there enough evidence for us to believe the Gospels?

In an age of faith deconstruction and skepticism about the Bible’s authority, it’s common to hear claims that the Gospels are unreliable propaganda. And if the Gospels are shown to be historically unreliable, the whole foundation of Christianity begins to crumble.
But the Gospels are historically reliable. And the evidence for this is vast.
To learn about the evidence for the historical reliability of the four Gospels, click below to access a FREE eBook of Can We Trust the Gospels? written by New Testament scholar Peter J. Williams.

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