If you’ve been at Concord for any considerable amount of time over the past four years, you’ve seen the dude with the massive beard wearing Oakley’s. He was probably being really loud and riding a skateboard in front of the student center. More recently, he can still be found being loud and riding a skateboard outside the students center, but you’ll also find him preaching the gospel to his friends, being faithful to his church, and encouraging his brothers and sisters in Christ. He is one of the most poignant and vivid examples of true conversion to Christ that I have direct access to; as a millennial (who aren’t, statistically speaking, supposed to come to Christ), as a male (who, again, aren’t supposed to come to Christ; just walk into a church this Sunday), and as a former avid drug and alcohol user (who, also, don’t typically come to Christ), he breaks most of the molds of what “religious” people do and do not look like. He’s one of my closest friends and challenges me all the time to be more passionate, zealous, and committed.

It goes without saying he has an evangelical worldview. As such, he and I (and all of us) seek to align and understand all of what we do, believe, and experience through the scriptures.

Which means Zach has developed a theology of facial hair.

I mean, I can definitely see why. It’s a pretty prominent feature of his, making him look right at home if he were in West Munroe, Louisiana. So when the prominence (or should I say pre-eminence) of God meets the prominence of your beard, a decision has to be made. Zach works this out and understands his beard as representative of a fundamental statement of reality, albeit via metaphor. “I have this because I am a man. I am not a woman, because women do not have these.” Now, please understand my good friend Zach has no doubts about his own masculinity, and by no means boils his or any other man’s masculinity down to the presence or absence of a beard. No, the miniature bear cub hanging from his face is a flag planted on his jaw claiming this territory for complementarianism. Complementarianism is that belief that states that men and women are equal in essence but different in nature. Or, men and women relate to one another the same way that a painting and a poem are both in the wider category of “art” but are obviously different in both tangible and intangible ways.

For the complementarian, to be a man is an objective reality that has implications for every level of his being; body, soul, and spirit, and vice versa for women. For the complementarian, the difference between being male and being female is not simply anatomy. Masculinity and femininity are not simply social constructs, but real statuses that arise from inherent “maleness” and “femaleness.” To be human is part and parcel with being gendered; at least some portion of your identity, an arguably sizeable one, is tied up in your gender. Men want what men want, think the ways they think, and understand the way they understand, and this is by and large different to the way women do it. This is only half of the story on complementarity, however. Christian Complementarity exists to espouse and articulate not only the biblical identity of male and female, but to preserve what God has laid down as a logical result of those identities for our good and benefit. This would entail proper, God-glorifying gender roles. The discussion of these roles is complex, however, and suffice it to say that complementarity rejects both the male-dominance and abusive patriarchy of chauvinism and the egalitarian and confusing ends and goals of feminism. This is, in essence appropriating to men and women equal spiritual and human value while simultaneously seeking to affirm the special and unique expression of gender in appropriate roles.

But what about Zach’s beard? Zach’s argument concerning his beard is that the beard is one of the (many) special gifts of God to delineate man from woman, and to glorify God’s attributes, and thus nicely coincides with a complementarian view of gender. This has some historical traction within evangelicalism. Charles Spurgeon said, almost 150 years ago, “growing a beard is a habit most natural, scriptural, manly, and beneficial.” Zach’s argument is that he maintains and displays his natural, God-given manliness partially via his beard. I definitely like the sound of the idea. He posits that, in the time in which we live when the whole idea of there being such a thing as “fixed gender” is not only in question but flatly denied, one more display of masculine glory and lumber-jack rawness is a breath of fresh, mountain air.

What are we to make of this then? Are beards a very distinctly masculine feature? Yes. Do they feel awesome to have? Yes. Do they automatically signal all that masculinity is? I think not.

While one can’t deny that by-and-large only males can grow beards, we as human beings have a fundamental problem. We’re broken. Adam and Eve, even if Adam had an epic flowing neck-warmer to rival Moses, made sure that we all would enter the world as broken images of God, quite literally dead to Him in spirit. This, The Fall, has implications for every single aspect of our being. Not only is our masculinity and femininity out of whack, but our humanity is out of whack. Not everyone who possess that maleness is able to live up to it. Pride, cowardice, dominance and misogyny all hold sway over men, beard or no. The same evils are at work in women, keeping them from truly expressing the femininity that God has so graciously granted them. This tension, unresolved without God in the equation and aggravated by feminism, has been largely behind the post-modern question of “what is gender?” Without grounding ourselves on who has the right to define us, the one who made us, the one piece of us that is so intimately tied to our humanity begins to slip away and now, even what it means to be human has become open to question. So being a man is much more than appearing to be a man. Being a man is a matter of the heart, it’s a matter of being radically changed at the core of your being to begin once again to reflect God rightly. As a man, that means reflecting God’s strength, character, protectiveness, along with the things that humans were truly made for; love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, and self-control. These, and our masculinity, will never truly come until they come at the core of our being, and the core of our being will never change unless Christ makes it so.

So, does the beard make the man? In this cultural season of sexual ambiguity and relativity, I feel the beard can bring a very respectful and undeniably masculine presence to the public square. I can genuinely say I am glad that it’s becoming socially acceptable again to forego the razor. But God forbid we create an externally minded culture, wherein men are judged by the length of their beards and not the content of their character. May our facial hair point to the grace of God in gifting us with our gender and all that it means. May we strive to become the men we are made to be in God’s image and in Christ’s sacrifice. May our beards not simply allow us to indulge some macho swagger, covering up hearts that are entirely hateful, depressed, discontent, impatient, rude, evil, domineering, undependable, immoral. These things are not just evil, but also altogether unmanly.