Proclaimer Blog
Men or people?
I have noticed that in our conservative evangelical circles we often refer to humankind generically as “man”. We speak of “God and man” or “man’s deepest problem” and so on. We mean to refer to human beings without restriction of gender. But in our culture the words “man” and “men” no longer refer to human beings in this way. Language has changed its meaning, and as soon as we utter these words, many of our audience begin to wonder why we have excluded the women from what we are about to say.
We gratuitously alienate our hearers, who think we are being chauvinistic when in fact we are just being dated in our use of language.
It is true that there are times when the words “man” and “men” are still necessary, such as in Genesis 1 and 2, where the text plays on the double meaning of “Adam” (the first male human being) and “humankind” in ways that highlight the creational priority of males over females. But these times are relatively few.
Mostly I think we are being thoughtless rather than theological. I have begun encouraging our students at Cornhill to speak of “human beings”, “humankind”, “men and women”, “people”, “a person” and so on. We may feel reluctant to do this, worrying that we are capitulating to political correctness; personally I think we should swallow our misgivings, avoid offending people and communicate to our audience of human beings in ways that men and women understand.