Perishable Goods: On Womanhood
BY: LARA RYD and HANNAH SCHNEIDER
Editor: Tell us about Perishable Goods.
Hannah: Perishable Goods is a podcast and online journal dedicated to pursuing and disseminating a theology of embodiment. By using the term “theology of embodiment,” we refer to the ways that Scripture, lived experience, and natural law commend our bodies as vital components of our relationship to God and our personal flourishing. We’ve found that conversations about the body’s significance are often confined to Roman Catholic congregations or academic settings. Perishable Goods seeks to make these conversations accessible so that every Christian can find a way forward for embodied living.
Lara: Our goal is to reclaim the goodness of the body as it was given to us by our Creator. Essentially, we want to start a conversation about what it means to live in a body that was created good but has been corrupted, and ultimately to remind other Christian men and women of the body’s significance in the story of redemption.
Why did you start Perishable Goods? What inspired you?
H: First off, I’ve got to give credit where credit is due. Perishable Goods as a project is the brainchild of our founder Jared Eckert. However, the staff’s interest in these subjects began years before as undergraduates and friends at Hillsdale, where our inspiration is universal: Dr. Schlueter’s class on the Theology of the Body. For current students or anyone living in the area: if you get the chance to take or audit his class, by all means do it!
To speak more personally of my background with these topics: I connected with the theology of the body because it filled a gap in my walk with God that had been open for years. Having grown up in a Southern Baptist church community, I had only been exposed to a certain kind of conversations about marriage, the body, and sexuality. These conversations were few and far between, conducted in hushed tones as if we were talking about something taboo, and often framed only in terms of restriction or abstinence. Taking Dr. Schlueter’s class began the healing process for my own mentality about these topics, and it’s been my mission ever since to have more open conversations about the body in the church.
L: I think we’d all been interested in the subject of the body’s significance throughout college, but I agree that that class made a lot of things click in our minds. There was still a lot missing from the conversation, though—John Paul II’s work focuses primarily on the giftedness of sex and marriage, but we felt like this idea of “giftedness,” of the body’s significance, extended beyond sex and marriage. We believed the Reformers had a lot to add to the conversation, too. Essentially, we wanted to start a project that brought more voices into the conversation in a way that was accessible to Christians who aren’t steeped in academia.
What do you consider some major differences between manhood and womanhood?
H: Rather than focusing on traits that are distinct to either men or women (our differences are often pretty obvious), I find it fascinating to reflect on how manhood and womanhood reflect the same qualities of God’s character in slightly different “shades.” For example, it’s not the case that God’s justice is only applicable to men or that His mercy is better reflected in women. God calls all of us to follow Christ, but gives us our individuality, of which our masculinity or femininity is an integral part, to do that.
I will say that it’s fascinating to see how Scripture uses embodied language, masculine and feminine, to reveal aspects of God’s redemption story. The Levitical laws center a great deal around the cycles and processes of the body, male and female; Proverbs 1-9 personifies wisdom and folly in the feminine; Hosea speaks of Israel as an adulterous bride; our anticipation of Christ’s second coming is described as labor pains (Romans 8); the church of God is called the bride of Christ.
L: It’s always difficult to create strict definitions for “manhood” and “womanhood” because these things can’t remain in the abstract—they need to be embodied in order to be intelligible. The simplest way to compare the two is to compare them in their concrete forms: to compare Adam and Eve, for example, or husband and wife, or father and mother. God gives different gifts and directives to each character in the story of creation. Adam brings order to creation, and Eve fills and nourishes it. Adam makes the earth fruitful, and Eve makes Adam fruitful. This complementary partnership in tending creation plays out in different ways, but I think experience confirms that for a woman to thrive, she needs to be fruitful: filling, nourishing, and making lovely the world God created. On the other hand, God shows man’s role in creation by placing Adam in the position of leading, building, naming, and ordering. Both do the work of cultivating, but they are different kinds of cultivation.
What aspects of womanhood do you hope to capture with Perishable Goods? How is knowing about manhood helpful to us as women?
H: Just as it was not good for Adam to be alone without Eve; the context of womanhood cannot be fully understood without manhood. This isn’t to say that a woman must be married in order to be complete, but that there is some intrinsic quality about womanhood that must be understood as it relates to manhood. In Hebrew, the word for woman means “taken out of man”. Etymologically as well as theologically, our dependence on one another as male and female defines us, regardless of the relational form that dependence takes.
L: I think we really want to capture the idea that womanhood is an exquisite gift, and that God’s design of the female body is precious in that it, too, tells the story of redemption. The cycle of life, death, and rebirth is embodied in woman and in her part in creation. We want to embrace and celebrate the creative nature of womanhood: Eve’s role is one of fruitfulness. Our bodies bear witness to this, and that is something we hope that Perishable Goods helps women see.
What are some narratives you are hoping to push back against with the blog?
H: Culture’s false dichotomy between gender and sex is a dangerous outgrowth of mind-body dualism, which is dangerous in all its forms. Honestly, we’re concerned with all the “isms” that dominate our cultural narratives and improperly position humanity among the created order. Some other examples are gnosticism, which deems the body as worthless or fundamentally evil; humanism, which grants physical reality and human agency a sense of idolatrous superiority over God; and relativism, which rejects objective truths in favor of personal opinions and leads to a moral slippery slope where “anything goes.”
That said, we want Perishable Goods to be known more for what we affirm than for what we reject. As we each busy ourselves about our Father’s work and as His Holy Spirit transforms us from the inside out, we will find ourselves reworking the cultural narrative not by protest or by debate, but through daily, embodied acts of faithfulness.
L: There’s sometimes a tendency among Christians to view redemption only in terms of the spirit, and not in terms of the body. We know that Jesus saves our souls, but we forget that our bodies, too, are destined for redemption and glorification. If we’re poorly rooted in what Scripture says about the body, we tend to affirm a dualistic vision of the human person, wherein the soul is good and the body is bad. We want to remind the saints that our Creator cares deeply about the things He created, and that includes our bodies. It’s through Christ’s body that creation is redeemed. This ought to change how we understand and use our bodies. As C.S. Lewis said, “God likes matter. He invented it.”
Why would you encourage a college student to read Perishable Goods?
H: College is an incredibly formative season of life. For me, it was the time during which I grew into myself—physically, spiritually, and emotionally—and when I gained the tools necessary for owning my own faith. There’s no more valuable time to start pondering God’s plan for our bodies and what that looks like lived out in your own life as you pave personal routines of work and worship.
