Christian Pogonology

Filed Under Ethics

The subject is the beard. ‘Are you going to grow a beard like Joe and Grant?’ I’ve been asked about a dozen times over the last month. I can still sense the itchiness of my 2001 goatee on a warm day. Then Joe shocks the church by shaving his off yesterday! These are confusing times, indeed. I love to quote the saints of days gone by, and here are some from an early Church father, Clement of Alexandria:

“How womanly it is for one who is a man to comb himself and shave himself with a razor, for the sake of fine effect, and to arrange his hair at the mirror, shave his cheeks, pluck hairs out of them, and smooth them!…For God wished women to be smooth and to rejoice in their locks alone growing spontaneously, as a horse in his mane. But He adorned man like the lions, with a beard, and endowed him as an attribute of manhood, with a hairy chest–a sign of strength and rule.” Clement of Alexandria, 2.275
“This, then, is the mark of the man, the beard. By this, he is seen to be a man. It is older than Eve. It is the token of the superior nature….It is therefore unholy to desecrate the symbol of manhood, hairiness.” 2.276
“It is not lawful to pluck out the beard, man’s natural and noble adornment.” 2.277

OK, then–so Clement would think me effeminate for lathering up and using the razor every day. But what about the spirituality of curtailing those unruly nose hairs that make me twitch and those renegade eyebrow hairs that descend into my field of vision? Have the Amish been right all along?

This is a good time to remember a basic lesson or two in Christian ethics from the New Testament. First, the believer’s life is a life of Christian liberty in grace, governed by love. In Galatians 5:1 Paul asserts this in the face of those who would require circumcision of Gentile converts to the faith, and one could certainly make a better biblical argument for that than one can for the growing of beards! If I am reading Romans 14 and 1 Corinthians 8 correctly, Clement has no biblical ground to judge me for shaving, nor should I enroll him in the Gillette shave test panel and have free razors shipped to his address in Alexandria every month. Shaving is a matter of ethical indifference. Clement is correct in his concern that men be men and not adopt effeminate ways. In our current cultural context, though, dragging a razor across my face in the morning seems pretty manly compared with the practices of the cross-dressing, trans-whatever subcultures in the West. Now there’s something to rail against!
We will always encounter issues in which we find fellow Christians condemning certain actions (wine, dancing, etc.) as always evil. What is condemned as evil may indeed be used wickedly, but that does not mean that it is evil in and of itself. Christ has purchased for us a liberty that is to be exercised for good of the Body of Christ. As we mature in Christ, we find ourselves seeing the world with new eyes. We see patterns of sin and unbelief where we never recognized them before. We find motives that are more mixed than we once discerned. We discover areas of our life which resist the lordship of Christ.

A believer is to endeavor to have and maintain a ‘good’ or ‘pure’ conscience before God and man (Acts 23:1; 24:16; 2 Cor. 1:12; 1 Tim. 1:5; 2 Tim. 1:3; Heb. 13:18; 1 Pet. 3:21). Here’s a good summary from Carl F.H. Henry’s Christian Personal Ethics:

The great purpose of God in separating for himself a people is not that they develop a negative or passive attitude toward certain areas of life. Rather, it is that they be conformed to the character of the Living God. Jesus reserved some of his most scathing denunciation for those whose separation was only legalistic negativism. Separation unto God does not imply that separation fro evil is unimportant, but only that separation from evil is the correlate of an intimate personal fellowship with the Living God.

Clement was a vegetarian too–but, well, never mind…

Below are pictures of (L-R): Clement, Joe, and Grant: