“Strengthen me just once more”: Samson, the Ethiopian Eunuch, and the Medicalization of Masculinity”
Brewer Eberly, MD, Family Physician, Fischer Clinic, McDonald Agape Fellow, Duke Divinity School
The patient I will call Adam is a man in his late 70s who, after surgery for prostate cancer, experienced erectile dysfunction that persisted long after the standard physical therapy and pharmacologic options. It was paramount to Adam that he be able to maintain an erection, to the point of undergoing a series of complex and expensive surgeries with long and difficult recoveries. This patient had become captured by a certain expectation of what it means to be a man in the later decades of life.
The patient I will call David, on the other hand, is a man in his late 40s, who was formally diagnosed with male hypogonadism and placed on hormone replacement therapy. At first, he found the experience invigorating, but over time the benefit faded. After years of therapy, he shared he was able to find peace as a man not in his testosterone level, but rather by being filled with the spirit of God and reoriented to his relationships with others.
Both of these men are representative of a larger phenomenon in primary care, specifically a medicalized masculinity movement which reduces the male life to sexual performance and physical strength. As a primary care doctor, I am asked questions surrounding hormones, aging, and the male body more than ever before, following calls in academic medical journals, continuing medical education podcasts, and the popular press to re-up my attention to when it is appropriate (or not) to pursue hormone replacement therapy. This is a cultural liturgy around pathology, enhancement, optimization, and what it means “to be a man” that warrants attention—perhaps even a prophetic interruption.
Drawing from the Christian tradition, I will look to the lives of the judge Samson (Judges 13-16) and the Ethiopian eunuch (Acts 8:26-39), as a prophetic correction to medicalized masculinity.
Samson represents an apogee of a certain vision of masculinity in the evangelical Christian imagination. But it is in his loss of strength (including his hair and sight) that he subverts expectations. Samson becomes fully man not because he is restored to incredible physical strength, but because he is filled with the spirit of God, pulling down the entire structure of performative masculinity around himself.
In the pericope of the Ethiopian eunuch we find a man whose sexual function is broken beyond repair. And yet he too offers an account of the spirit-filled life that subverts competing accounts of where men might place their hope: in recognition, dominance, procreation, wealth, status, etc. In his new baptismal identity, he is invited into a vision of life that is “neither male nor female” while also looking to the prophet who promises “Let not the eunuch say I am a dry tree” (Isaiah 56:3).
Finally, I will also draw on C. S. Lewis’s Cosmic Trilogy, and specifically the character Elwin Ransom’s journey from boy to man in Out of the Silent Planet (under the masculine formation of Mars) and man to prophet in Perelandra (under the feminine formation of Venus), which prepares him to be filled with the spirit of God, in service to others, as the Pendragon in That Hideous Strength, leading the character Mark Studdock through his own wrestling with masculinity.
In this paper I will not pursue a definition of Biblical masculinity, but rather will suggest that through the lives of Samson, the Ethiopian eunuch, and Ransom we find prophetic witnesses who, as they are filled with the spirit of God and reordered in their purposes, interrupt cultural liturgies surrounding masculinity . This is not a construal of manhood in opposition to womanhood, but rather a vision of being a man that can only be understood insofar as man is in relationship with others: with God as a creature, with parents as a son, with fellow man and woman as brother and friend, and—for some—as husband and father.
Many of the male patients I encounter on a weekly basis—including teenagers and young men—are captured by the idea that something is wrong with their hormones and therefore they are deficient in their masculinity. In this sense, my male patients are increasingly asking me for gender-affirming care. I will conclude with the recognition that this presumes a thick account of the doctor-patient relationship, in which primary care doctors might risk making normative claims about masculinity with their patients, gently and humbly correcting a cultural narrative that moves men to ask their doctors, rather than their God, “strengthen me just once more” (Judges 16:28)
The patient I will call David, on the other hand, is a man in his late 40s, who was formally diagnosed with male hypogonadism and placed on hormone replacement therapy. At first, he found the experience invigorating, but over time the benefit faded. After years of therapy, he shared he was able to find peace as a man not in his testosterone level, but rather by being filled with the spirit of God and reoriented to his relationships with others.
Both of these men are representative of a larger phenomenon in primary care, specifically a medicalized masculinity movement which reduces the male life to sexual performance and physical strength. As a primary care doctor, I am asked questions surrounding hormones, aging, and the male body more than ever before, following calls in academic medical journals, continuing medical education podcasts, and the popular press to re-up my attention to when it is appropriate (or not) to pursue hormone replacement therapy. This is a cultural liturgy around pathology, enhancement, optimization, and what it means “to be a man” that warrants attention—perhaps even a prophetic interruption.
Drawing from the Christian tradition, I will look to the lives of the judge Samson (Judges 13-16) and the Ethiopian eunuch (Acts 8:26-39), as a prophetic correction to medicalized masculinity.
Samson represents an apogee of a certain vision of masculinity in the evangelical Christian imagination. But it is in his loss of strength (including his hair and sight) that he subverts expectations. Samson becomes fully man not because he is restored to incredible physical strength, but because he is filled with the spirit of God, pulling down the entire structure of performative masculinity around himself.
In the pericope of the Ethiopian eunuch we find a man whose sexual function is broken beyond repair. And yet he too offers an account of the spirit-filled life that subverts competing accounts of where men might place their hope: in recognition, dominance, procreation, wealth, status, etc. In his new baptismal identity, he is invited into a vision of life that is “neither male nor female” while also looking to the prophet who promises “Let not the eunuch say I am a dry tree” (Isaiah 56:3).
Finally, I will also draw on C. S. Lewis’s Cosmic Trilogy, and specifically the character Elwin Ransom’s journey from boy to man in Out of the Silent Planet (under the masculine formation of Mars) and man to prophet in Perelandra (under the feminine formation of Venus), which prepares him to be filled with the spirit of God, in service to others, as the Pendragon in That Hideous Strength, leading the character Mark Studdock through his own wrestling with masculinity.
In this paper I will not pursue a definition of Biblical masculinity, but rather will suggest that through the lives of Samson, the Ethiopian eunuch, and Ransom we find prophetic witnesses who, as they are filled with the spirit of God and reordered in their purposes, interrupt cultural liturgies surrounding masculinity . This is not a construal of manhood in opposition to womanhood, but rather a vision of being a man that can only be understood insofar as man is in relationship with others: with God as a creature, with parents as a son, with fellow man and woman as brother and friend, and—for some—as husband and father.
Many of the male patients I encounter on a weekly basis—including teenagers and young men—are captured by the idea that something is wrong with their hormones and therefore they are deficient in their masculinity. In this sense, my male patients are increasingly asking me for gender-affirming care. I will conclude with the recognition that this presumes a thick account of the doctor-patient relationship, in which primary care doctors might risk making normative claims about masculinity with their patients, gently and humbly correcting a cultural narrative that moves men to ask their doctors, rather than their God, “strengthen me just once more” (Judges 16:28)