the bible the church and human gender

The church’s latest social war

Thursday 23 January 2025 11:56 pm

I admire those of my friends and others, the great many, who can not only write but also keep turning out gems of written communication, regularly, consistently, and over a nearly unlimited period. I wish I could number myself among them, but after almost 66 years I still cannot. It’s something about my way of processing information, I think. But I really have no answer. Somehow my mind is so eminently distractible that the intellectual juices rage between spurts of energy hitting multiple targets of interest with gusto, and the too frequent cerebral sabbaticals during which the well is dry for days, weeks or months.


These opening paragraphs truly have nothing to do with the subject I want to address. They are if you will a preamble and apologia, accounting for the latest longish absence of output in my blog. Dear friends, this is … me … And so to the keyboard at last.


On gender non-normativity

I’ve written a little before about transgender, both generally and with specific reference to the Christian community’s interaction with the LGBT+ community generally and in this case the ’T’ sub-community. My own range of views on human sexuality possibly place me in an interesting place socially. Some of them, say on marriage, would likely render me way too conservative for some of my friends. Others of them, particularly around transgender, would place me way too far to the left for the liking of other friends. And all of that especially among fellow followers of Jesus.


I’ve followed relatively closely various developments in this sexuality space over years at least, perhaps decades. I’ve not only followed the various ongoing public debates and interactions but also a range of lived experiences in personal or pastoral conversations, including with friends and extended family members. And I’ve done it also introspectively, observing the evolution of my own understanding, awareness and therefore belief. In all of those spheres the last 5 or so years have been the most intense. Intensely illuminating, encouraging and alarming, all in pretty equal measures. I feel now is the time publicly to up the ante, so to speak. Particularly in the Christian landscape.


A time to speak - 1
There are two particular triggers for the ’nowness’. One is the very recent declaration by newly re-elected and now re-installed US President Donald Trump that henceforth the American government will recognise only two genders, male and female. That’s a Christian trans moment inasmuch as I know that a great many US Christians, and plenty beyond the US too, are cheering triumphantly at this announcement in Mr Trump’s inaugural address. 


Hot on the heels of this development has been the articulate, striking, courageous and controversial sermon delivered by Episcopal Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde, complete with direct personal plea to the president on behalf of fearful American residents in the LGBT+ and immigrant communities. That in turn has ushered in a vigorous and rather polarised online debate within the Christian community, dividing substantially on lines of political instinct, left and right. To one camp Bp Budde is a prophet and hero, to the other a dangerous heretic.


A time to speak - 2
My second ’now’ trigger is in a way even sharper and more momentous, and certainly closer to home. Late last year a consortium of Australian Christian leaders announced, signed and published online, what they have called a creed for our times, setting forth a set of propositions about human sexuality and gender, to which they invite church leaders and pastors far and wide (globally as well Australia-wide) to give their assent and endorsement, to sign it in other words, to serve as a shared all-Christian statement of belief and practice. Titled
The Australian Creed for Sexual Integrity, the signatories so far include as yet few if any regional or national denominational heads. But they do include an impressive number of pastors, priests or ministers, with most mainline and quite a few independent denominations represented. There are many I know (many more I don’t) among them. Of the former most are people broadly of my own theological ‘tribe’ and whom I regard highly. Within the breadth of my tribe (‘evangelical’, in the British rather than American sense), nearly all would be at or toward the conservative end. And the content of the so-called “creed” would reasonably be classified as conservative.


Picking up again my own ‘interesting’ place in the spectrum of Christian views on sex and gender, my more progressive friends might be dismayed to hear that I could unreservedly sign-up to nearly all of the “creed”, whilst many of my more conservative associates may be aghast that the second paragraph means I cannot possibly sign it. The other clauses of the “creed” I’ll leave readers to get via the public link. The second paragraph I quote here:


We believe God created each person in His image as male or female, and any person’s attempt to deny or change this distorts God’s good design.


And that’s the reason I feel impelled, as far as I’m personally able, to raise the profile of transgender as a Christian conversation. Given that this “creed” has emerged now, and is gaining growing public endorsement among my crowd, I’m greatly concerned by where it  may take the evangelical community, pastorally, socially and evangelistically. The crux of the matter is that, contrary to popular conservative Christian belief, I don’t regard gender transition or any non-normative gender identity as sin, nor as a rejection of God’s creative purpose. And I’m alarmed at the prospect of such framing becoming a card-carrying evangelical norm.


On loving in difference
For the remainder of this post (with at least one more to come), I’ll give concise attention to just one biblical and theological consideration that seems critical to me. The subject is what godly love means (and doesn’t mean). A line of casuistic reasoning I’m thoroughly weary of hearing from evangelicals in various contexts is that since (as some are solidly persuaded) gender transition, or self-identification as other than the gender apparent at birth, is a sin, relating to a person by their chosen gender would be unloving because it affirms their sin and as such hardens them against God’s loving plan. Rather, as this thinking goes, the authentically “loving” thing is to persist in treating them as their “original” gender, against their stated preference. 


I heard that view expounded twice again today, and the more non-normative gender is in focus in news or conversation, the more it gets aired. I can only say I don’t buy it at all. And I cannot conceive of the Jesus I meet in the Bible buying it either. I’m even more saddened hearing it from fellow pastors, which alas I do.  When I hear it my mind often goes to Mark 7:9-13 where Jesus rebukes the Pharisees and scribes for using a legal sleight of hand to do the opposite of what the Lord requires. In very short I’m calling it self-righteous Pharisaism. God’s love isn’t constrained by law.


I’ll begin my next post on this theme with another, as I see it, critical biblical and theological consideration; namely a single verse Genesis 1:27, which seems central to the Christian debate. Other important human insights will follow.