The Christian Household as Act of Resistance and Beautiful Alternative: A Series of Reflections on Titus 2 (Part 3)
Part 3: Valorous Older Men
What if the real “toxic masculinity” is not about masculinity as such, but about the relative success of a narrative constructed to provide a justification for the endless extension of male adolescence? In Titus 2:2, Paul addresses “older men” as the first in a series: “Older men are to be sober-minded, dignified, self-controlled, sound in faith, in love, and in steadfastness.”
Men Who Won’t Kill
In a fascinating book that caused quite a stir soon after its initial publication in 1995, Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, a former army Ranger, paratrooper, and psychology professor at West Point, made an expansive and detailed empirical case for men as inherently and surprisingly nonviolent. His book, On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society (1995; revised edition, 2009), begins with stories from World War II, in which the statistics consistently indicate that only 15-20 out of 100 men ever engaged their weapon. Grossman than moves to the Civil War, where approximately 90% of the 27,574 muskets found on the field after the Battle of Gettysburg were found loaded, half of them misloaded. He then proceeds to explore many other examples of this phenomenon and examines the extensive steps taken by the military to overcome this natural resistance men have to killing, and their efforts to condition men to kill. Page after page, Grossman documents a story that strongly contradicts the prevailing narrative of our day. Most soldiers do not try to kill the enemy. “Most of them appear to have not even wanted to fire in the enemy’s general direction… Most soldiers seem to have an inner resistance to firing their weapon in combat” (23). He has returned to the data many times since the original publication of his book, including in a 2013 essay co-written with Richard J. Hughbank (in War, Peace, and Human Nature: The Convergence of Evolutionary and Cultural Views) focused on how this resistance to killing is overcome by extensive training, and even then often breaks down.
Grossman’s central claim is that human beings possess a deep, innate resistance to killing members of their own species, and that this resistance is the hidden variable in the psychology of combat. Drawing on S. L. A. Marshall's controversial World War II research, along with ethological work on intraspecies aggression, Grossman argues that the options in confrontation are not simply “fight or flight” but “fight, flight, posture, or submit,” and that most soldiers historically chose posturing over lethal action. Killing must therefore be enabled, and Grossman maps the factors that do the enabling: the demands of an authority figure, absolution and accountability within the group, the perceived legitimacy of the target, and above all distance. He builds a continuum from the bomber crew who never sees a face, through rifle and pistol range, down to knife and hand-to-hand killing, where resistance and subsequent trauma are most severe.
The book’s second movement argues that modern militaries solved this problem through conditioning rather than instruction. Replacing bullseye targets with man-shaped pop-ups, rehearsing the kill until it became reflex, and combining this with desensitization and denial mechanisms raised firing rates to roughly 55 percent in Korea and, by Grossman's account, over 90 percent in Vietnam. But the resistance was bypassed, not removed, and the psychological bill came due afterward: he attributes much of Vietnam’s psychiatric casualty rate to conditioning administered without the rationalization, ritual, and community reception that traditionally helped veterans absorb what they had done. Grossman then extends the argument to civilian life, contending that violent film and interactive video games apply the same effective conditioning to children who lack a soldier’s discipline or safeguards. This is the founding thesis of what he calls “killology.” Readers should know that the empirical foundations here are disputed, and I do not pretend to be an expert in this area and to be able to weigh in on the debates, but the data which these writers interpret, even if occasionally incorrect, on the whole bear out a rather remarkable point: it would appear that men are not naturally violent and destructive beasts driven by testosterone in the same way a bull shark or a rhinoceros is. Men aren’t naturally violent creatures in the way that they are often portrayed. The virtue of self-control is real, but it does not ordinarily belong to a story of a fomenting, volcanic masculine nature that must be restrained so it does not erupt and destroy. There is another story to which a man’s call to self-control belongs.
Becoming a Man Along the Way
I suggest we reconsider what it means to “be a man” on Christian terms. While occasionally we are told in Scripture that we should act as a good man (e.g., 1 Cor. 16:13), God doesn’t call men to be men. This is, I readily admit, a familiar and somewhat defensible way of speaking in shorthand, and it is also certainly a widespread assumption, but in a key respect it is fundamentally and importantly mistaken. Men are men. God does call each man to be a certain kind of man, to be sure, but becoming “a man” is more indirect than direct. There is no prescription for what a man is in general which, when followed, results in having become a man. There is your life as a man, the conditions and circumstantiality of that life, and the people, places, promises, and perils that make up that life. There is your life, this life, and there is therefore your life as a man, your calling as the man that you must be in those conditions. There is before us all the question whether we will embrace or resist, even reject, the calling to be the particular kind of man that receives the circumstantiality of our actual life as the gift it is and as the burden it is. In this life we are given, we are called to be a certain way as a man. Becoming a man is neither discoverable by reading the right book about manliness, nor by conforming oneself to the profile of manliness from a customized, selective narration of an earlier era, nor by fitting ourselves to the putative manliness ideal of our own day. Becoming a man is indirect, not direct. Becoming a man is what happens along the way of being honorable, of doing the hard thing, of extending protection to those around us as a consequence of how we are, of holding one’s tongue and temper, of persevering, of stepping into–instead of stepping away from– the calling to be honorable in these and other ways from within the circumstantiality of the life, the age, the era, the conditions we have been given, and not another.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Our first task is to pause over what Paul says to these men.
To clear the table a bit in doing so, it may be tempting for some to regard it as significant that older men are addressed first in Titus 2. After all, Adam was created first, before Eve, and was created mature. He has special responsibilities for the care of other things and other people, especially the Eve who is made after him. We might want to make much of this in terms of Paul’s strategy in Titus 2. But elsewhere Paul addresses Christian wives before addressing their husbands, as in Ephesians 5:22 and Colossians 3:18, and with no less a concern for the welfare of the home and congregational fellowship. Furthermore, Paul will address men again (younger men) later in Titus 2, after addressing older and then younger women (vv. 6ff.). So it seems prudent to resist the temptation to make much of the ordering in this case.
Older Men, Wiser Men
The Apostle Paul begins by referring to them as “older men.” In fact, Paul’s Greek calls them “old men,” but as some commentators have noted the conventional “older men” translation sounds more diplomatic. We made some observations about being older as a man in our initial post in this series, so in what follows we are building on those reflections. Paul calls them “presbutai,” a term used for older men in a few other places in the New Testament and in extrabiblical literature. The Greek word may lead us immediately to think they must be church officers (presbyters, or elders), but this is mistaken (it’s a slightly different word)—and yet not entirely. While Paul is not addressing church officers here, there is something to remember about why the ruling church office is called a presbyter or elder. Simply put, since the days of the first elders who served with Moses, the men who serve in this office are ordinarily older men, and this is because it is expected that older men will be wiser men on account of their long experience of life and of grace.
While not all older men are wiser men, it is so strongly expected in Scripture that they will be that the exception to this rule is a sad, even shameful tragedy. It is a tragedy (for both older Christian men and women) that we may think far too infrequently about and give far too little weight to, despite the continuing avalanche of books and other media focused on what makes a church healthy, strong, and effective. A healthy church is a church in which those more experienced in years are more experienced in grace and thus wiser in matters of faithfulness. The older teach the younger not merely because they are older, as we will see later in this chapter, but because it is expected the older are wiser and can thus serve as a source of wisdom for others. The church needs this. An older Christian man (as we’ve noted before, think of someone at least in their 40s) who does not behave and think in sober, wise, and distinctly Christian ways is a contradiction to the ways of God’s grace in the heart over time. This is why older men (presbutai) are the general category of the church from which the officers called presbyters come: if older ordinarily means wiser, we expect to find wise caretakers of God’s people among these older saints. When being older does not mean being wiser, which is sadly not difficult to find in the reality of the church, it is a dissonant note sounded where we expect beautiful harmony. The dissonance is exponentially greater and more egregious, of course, if that man who is immature or foolish in speech or conduct is not only a church member but a church officer. That dissonance is set opposite the symphonic beauty of the well-ordered, godly mature man, which we recognize by what Paul goes on to say about these older men.
Sober, Respectable, Self-Controlled, and Sound
He first says that older Christian men are to be “sober-minded.” The sense of Paul’s word choice here is “temperate,” as in the well-ordered rather than foolish use of alcohol. The only other times we find this word in the New Testament are in the associated remarks in 1 Timothy 3:2, 11 (where it is used for both deacons and their wives). But like the word “sober,” what is true in one commonly recognized scenario (use of alcohol) is only an instance of a wider, deeper category of interest: being a temperate, sober person. A sober person is clear-headed about things in general. He is moderate in matters that sinful humans notoriously pursue to excess. Titus is to encourage these men to continue to live against the grain of the indulgent Cretan culture surrounding these congregations, and to do so by being men of sobriety.
A sober man is, secondly, a man that is dignified, worthy of respect, a man with a sense of gravity about him, not because he cannot laugh and have a good time but because he carries himself in a way that elicits worthy regard. He’s a serious man, again not in the sense that he lacks joviality, but because he lives as one who voluntarily assumes the weight of a faithful life and lives it, who knows living well is a serious thing.
Thirdly, he is “self-controlled.” He is not fickle, and thus unreliable. He is not mastered by his passions, neither reactionary nor rash, neither combustible nor risky. As an older man who learned when he was younger how to handle himself in different conditions, he is expected to have outgrown all that. He is well-tempered, not ill-tempered. And so he is prudent, thoughtful, not only with a view to a particular question or challenge but in general.
Lastly, he is—in most translations—“sound” in three areas: in his healthy “trust” in God, “love” toward others, and the holy stubbornness of “perseverance and endurance.” These three marks of the Christian older man recall the common New Testament triad of faith, hope, and love (with patience here occupying the place of hope). Yarbrough notes that Paul says “in” rather than “and” for these three virtues, and suggests that we might imagine Paul “pausing over them one by one, as if relishing the prospect of old and respected believers given over to these great, gospel-enabled practices” (510).
We know from other times faith, hope, and love are found together (such as in 1 Cor. 13) that this triad is supposed to distinguish all Christians from the world, not just especially accomplished older Christian men. Indeed, this may be among the most important takeaways from Paul’s list: these are not extraordinary Christian men, “super Christians,” exceptional examples of wisdom and faithfulness. This list is just what an older Christian man—all older Christian men—are expected and called to be. These virtues will be gravely threatened by the presence of false doctrine, and so Titus must combat dangerously errant views and the disordered lives they spawn. But when the faith and practice are sound, this is simply what an older Christian man is expected to be, by this stage in life and in grace: solidly grounded in his faith in God, generously and practically loving toward others, and leaning forward in perseverance and endurance—despite difficulties—to his upward calling to God in Christ Jesus. He is a rugged man in the best sense: not because he is brash, curt, or coarse, but because he is hardy, solid, reliable, tried and tested, and thus a source and example of wisdom and help to those around him.
We have lost much of our public adulation of such a valorous man, but he is still admired by the people of God, or ought to be. We are rightly bothered by men who do not act their age, who will not grow up in speech or action or hobbies or dress, who fill their time in the often foolish ways that young men might, who should know better but clearly don’t. These are frivolous men, not serious men, and those who refuse the way of seriousness do not deserve to be taken seriously. In contrast, we do notice those men who exhibit in their manner and speech that they have been weathered by years of hard-won faithfulness, of sacrifices and losses, of experiencing God’s real even if often mysterious faithfulness in times good and bad. We look up to them. We look to them. And so we should. They are respectable, and so we respect them. We know such a man can be trusted with even the most delicate things, for his solid grip on life is of that beautifully wise sort that won’t crush even the most fragile flower petal placed in his palm. This makes these men “elder material” even if they never occupy the office. We honor such men. We do not, and ought not to, honor and look up to the man whose very “carriage” (to use the older term) or manner of life discourages younger men around him from aspiring toward true maturity and wisdom. Older men are to be respectable, which is to say deserving of respect. They have no business expecting or demanding respect without being respectable, no matter their age or position. Older men must be sober-minded, worthy of respect, says the Apostle, as the church as a whole needs them to be.
That said, there are two further ways in which we need to ensure our hearing of the Apostle’s words helps us understand the Christian man’s identity and calling. One of these is inward, and the other is outward, but both are essential.
Facing Inward: The Domestically Shaped Man
What are the relational realities in which we imagine the man of Titus 2 will prove to be sober-minded, dignified, self-controlled, and sound? Perhaps we imagine him in his place in the world at large, especially as a worker among other workers, negotiating the complications and challenges of economic and social relations in the community and marketplace. Perhaps we imagine his faithful church life as a life shaped to a great extent by how he is faithful in these ordinary contexts of his everyday existence.
In fact, however, it is in his domestic relations—his relations at home with his wife, his children, his wider family members, and where applicable his servants or slaves—that these characteristics of his faithfulness would have their real substance. The reason for thinking this way is important. It is customary to blame modernity for driving women out of the home to work in the marketplace. But long before the modern world chased women from the home to the office, it chased men from the home to the office. Traditionally, all the way up to the era of modern industrialization, men worked in the home environment, not out in the wider world. Nancy Pearcey has recently summarized the literature on this history and its effects on perceptions of real masculinity (on this and related matters, see her recent book, The Toxic War on Masculinity). Before industrialization required that workers go to a factory, an office, a workshop away from their home in order to earn money and provide for their families, men ordinarily worked at home. This means they worked as well as rested, ate, celebrated, mourned, and carried out all other ordinary activities of life right alongside their wives, their children, and the others who made up their household. Men were ordinarily shaped by having to relate constantly to women and children, just as women and children were shaped by having to relate constantly to men. This was normal life, and it would be reasonable to expect that it had the salutary effect of forming men, women, and children whose vulnerabilities and weaknesses could thus be compensated for, restrained, and mitigated by having to live constantly alongside the others who make up that household, just as their strengths and virtues could be enhanced by that regular environment of communal interaction and dependence.
Industrialization not only chased men away from the home to the factory, however. It also stripped away this ordinary gift of domestic relationality and replaced it with a community of all or primarily men, accenting their proclivities toward rivalrous competition, and baptizing it as manly ambition. Over time, men became evenings-and-weekend domestics, with a severely reduced quantity and quality of ordinarily relational interaction with women with whom they must truly live (and not just co-exist or cohabit), as well as their immediate family members and other household members.
There are many interesting and fruitful directions we could go with those observations, but for our purposes it’s important simply to note that we should not confuse what we now think of as normal with the world the Apostle Paul is speaking to. The ordinary contexts in which the faithful old Christian man will have proved to be sober-minded, dignified, self-controlled, and sound are domestic, in his home relations, and by extension in his church-home context, and then, where applicable, in the world at large.
And yet, in an important respect, our own faithfulness today—heeding our call to manly valor—requires that we begin with the sober acceptance of the fact that that is no longer our world. The world has changed, and domestic life with it. This change is not simple, neither in its nature nor in its moral meaning; like all providential transitions, the turn toward modernity is ambivalent. It carries significant advantages and disadvantages. For a Christian man to be sober-minded, dignified, self-controlled, and sound in the world as it now is requires wisdom, discernment, and—perhaps most frustratingly—time for the Church as a whole and for individual Christians to figure it out. From the outset we should be clear, however, that faithfulness today is not a matter of only and always lamenting that the world as it used to be no longer exists.
Facing Outward: Help from Julian Marías
Recognizing a man of genuine valor on Pauline terms also requires knowing certain features of what valor is in the first place, especially those features that relate to what we can call man’s “outward orientation” in life. For this, we need additional perspective, and here, as elsewhere on these topics, I find the work of the Spanish Christian philosopher Julian Marías especially rich and helpful. Marías’s treatment of masculine valor is embedded in his broader anthropology, most fully worked out in Antropología metafísica (1970; in English, translated as Metaphysical Anthropology) and later developed in La mujer en el siglo XX (1980), La educación sentimental (1992), and La felicidad humana (1989).
In keeping with much of what is explored rather fully in Greystone courses, Marías insists on the meaningfulness of man as man and woman as woman. Despite the truths protected by speech of “man” as “humanity,”—a way of speaking which clarifies that human beings hold various precious things in common (such as the image of God, equal dignity, and the like)—there is in the real world no such thing as “man” in the abstract. There is only man (varón) or woman (mujer), two irreducible, complementary modes of being a person, each “installed” in a body, a psychology, and a way of inhabiting the world. This “sexuate” condition (an attempt at the impossible task of translating condición sexuada into English) is importantly distinct from mere sexual activity; it shapes the whole of a life, not just one province of or activity within it.
Created upright but needy, man and woman approach the shared human condition of vulnerability and need in polar-opposite (but not opposed) ways. Unlike woman, man understands and defines himself by attributes such as security, knowledge, decision, and resources. Elsewhere I have explained that, in distinction from Eve who is created after him, Adam is made as a who in a world of whats, and he is disposed to relate to the world accordingly: instrumentally. He is oriented from the start toward action, toward matters of ability, security, and decisiveness, especially as they are opposed to what he would otherwise experience without them: weakness, insecurity, and disorientation. (With Eve’s creation, now adding a who which results in a world of a who and whats, Adam will need to acquire a new mode of relating that clearly distinguishes between relating to whats for use and relating to whos for care.) Crucially, Marías insists this isn’t a contradiction of man’s native neediness; it’s not as though man was created inherently strong but woman was created inherently weak. (We must leave until later an observation or two on the Apostle Peter’s routinely mischaracterized words on women’s relative weakness.) No, the male does not possess these attributes a priori, but must aspire to and strive to acquire them, since for Marías man is essentially “futurition,” projected toward the future. This is where valor comes in. Valor is not a given nature but a task, an achievement lived out prospectively, never simply or automatically possessed.
Marías names the proper masculine virtue andreía (fortitude/courage), explicitly distinguishing it from mere physical strength or sexual potency. Fortitude consists rather in strategy, intelligence, experience, authority, security, capacity for expression, and the aptitude to reveal (or deceptively pretend to have) these faculties through word and presence (“carriage”). Valor is thus a holistic capacity for competent, authoritative presence in the world, not brute force.
Importantly for Marías and for our purposes in hearing Titus 2 well, valor is never self-enclosed; it does not exist for oneself. We may say that valor, theologically understood, exists not as or for man as man (and certainly not as or for man as a singular, individual man) but as and for the sake of the fruitful asymmetrical relation between the sexes. Marías is explicit that, strictly speaking, and in a certain sense, the male does not himself protect the woman: protection is her own instinct, directed toward children primarily and toward others generally. Rather, he offers her security, the security of who he is and what conditions he secures as a valorous man, so that she may subsequently choose her own protection. This is a subtle but critically important distinction. A man who insists on seeing himself as woman’s protector simpliciter might insist on this because he needs to feel the woman as inferior to himself. This is a man who may be boisterous about his strong masculine protectiveness, about masculinity as such, about men’s issues in the church and in culture, and so on, but, for Marías, he is in fact a man who is insecure in his own masculine condition. This is valor turned pathological.
The Recovery of Valor
What, then, is the valorous older Christian man of Paul’s concern here? Where is his meaning, his plenitude, in a world that often thinks he is the problem? Much can and should be said, but we can focus on this: he is happy in who he is and is called to be, and is uniquely gifted with the ability to pursue this calling despite (and within) a world of resistance. When masculinity as such is attacked, as it is attacked by some in our time, it is easy for a man to opt for the mode of masculinity that is in fact toxic, always ready to excuse immature behavior and speech, and to blame women—especially feminists—for all that is wrong in how the world sees and treats men. Ironically, those most critical of the victim mindset in “woke culture” can easily and thoughtlessly adopt it for themselves here. It is also easy for such a man to secretly (or publicly) wish he lived in another era than this one, one which (in his romanticized vision of it) he is sure was better than our own, often in part because (for such men) it ostensibly included a far higher regard for men paired with a clear social and political subjugation of women. But a valorous man is a man who takes responsibility for himself here and now, who understands “here and now” to be a loving gift of God who orders all times and the people in them, a man who is restless for the Gospel to thoroughly impress itself on his life as a man. Being such a man is a tall order. But when he receives such a calling down into his very bones, he may discover joy where he least expects it.
In La felicidad humana, Marías explains how valor illuminates specifically masculine flourishing and satisfaction. Male happiness, he notes, is marked by a high degree of transitivity—ambition, achievement, and the overcoming of obstacles—a set of concerns that recall our opening concern. This is an important observation. To be a man is a calling, not merely to a state of affairs rooted exclusively in one’s physiology and biology (although it is always at least this), but to something that extends from that physiology and biology and is signaled by it. To be a man is to be called to be valorous, and the valorous man is the man whose “transitivity” is of the fruitful rather than destructive sort, leaning in rather than away from the hardships faithfulness as a man entails. (The woman, too, is called to lean into the hardships that faithfulness as a woman entails.) We note, in this connection, the special relevance of this calling to “lean in persistently” to what Paul wants to see among Christian older men: they are called to be (and become more) sober-minded, dignified, self-controlled, and sound in faith, in love, and in steadfastness—not because they are otherwise ravenous and destructive beasts driven by testosterone and always prone to violence, but because they are made oriented outwards, toward God and others. Men are called to lean faithfully into the blessed life which such “outwardness” requires of them, whether in joy or sorrow, plenty or loss. They do not resist the call, or seek to escape it. They do not pretend they live in another age, a better era, in a more ideal set of conditions. They embrace the goodness and wisdom of God’s providence in locating them in the here and now, and they face the wind, swallow hard, steel themselves, and step into it. They are, in short, valorous.
Perhaps this is why it is best not to isolate this or that action of our Lord’s life and ministry as the “manly” example we are to emulate. Christ’s manliness isn’t a matter of a discrete or separable manly actions or states, but something we should recognize in the totality of his life taken as a whole. Otherwise we will be tempted to identify those parts of his story as “manly” only when they align with our personal ideology of “manliness.” But that’s precisely backwards. He is the Measure of manliness to such a degree that he, in his total life as the true Man, defines manliness for us. Taking that view of things, he is the Man who is truly manly not only because he truly received and assumed human nature to his Person as a state of his being (the incarnation), but precisely because, uniquely and utterly, he stepped into—rather than step away from—the calling that belongs to being that Man, and full-filled it (filled it full), from beginning to end. This is his offering: himself, not only an action of his. His perfect manliness is not in his acting in this way or saying this word, but in his lifelong acceptance of the bitter cup even after having asked that it pass from him, and in his persevering to and through the cross “for the joy that was set before him,” all while welcoming the weak and slaying the dragon.
All this returns us to where we began, so permit me to restate my earlier remarks, now in light of what we’ve explored in the meantime: God doesn’t call men to be men. Men are men. Becoming “a man” is more indirect than direct. We may have good reasons for wishing our lives were different than they are, for feeling as though we are ill-fitted to this age. We may even be correct in believing this, in some sense. But this is not all that matters. This isn’t ultimately what matters at all. There is your life as a man, the conditions and circumstantiality of that life, and the people, places, promises, and perils that make up that life. There is your life, which is this life, and there is therefore your life as a man, your calling as the man that you must be in those conditions, these conditions. Not there, but here. Not back then, but today. Not in the life you could have had, but in the life you do have. The only question is whether you will embrace or resist—even reject—the calling to be the particular kind of man that receives the concrete circumstantiality of your life as the gift it is and as the burden it is. In this life we are given, we are called to be a certain way as a man. This is what I mean when I suggest that becoming a man is indirect, not direct. Becoming a man is what happens along the way of being honorable, of doing the hard thing, of extending protection to those around us as a consequence of how we are, of holding one’s tongue and temper, of persevering, of stepping into–instead of stepping away from– the calling to be honorable in these and other ways from within the circumstantiality of the life, the age, the era, the conditions we have been given, and not another. This is valor.