This is the sixth installment in my series reviewing Preston Sprinkle's book Embodied: Transgender Identities, the Church, & What the Bible has to Say. Click HERE for the Intro to this series where I discuss my thematic concerns with the book and for an index for the full series.
Preston Sprinkle opens Chapter 4 by asking If someone experiences incongruence between their biological sex and their gender, which
one determines who they are—and why? What does the Bible say about this question?
so finally it seems as though we are about to get his argument. As a word to my readers, it is going to be important to read some of the previous installments in this review series before reading this post so that you will be familiar with what I have already said about Dr. Sprinkle's rhetorical approach and the various assertions he has made which depend on either insufficient evidence or outright scientifically inaccurate and/or discredited sources.
In this Chapter Dr. Sprinkle wants to link maleness and femaleness to each person's participation in the imago dei—the Image of God. He structures the argument around 8 propositions (or "thesis statements") and the bulk of the chapter is made of of defenses of his propositions. Sprinkle's 8 theses are:
- The body is essential to our image-bearing status.
- Male and Female in Genesis 1 are categories of sex, not gender.
- Adam and Eve's bodies are viewed as sacred.
- Jesus views Genesis 1-2 as normative.
- Paul sees the body as significant for moral behavior and correlates the body with personhood.
- Scripture prohibits cross-sex behavior.
- The incarnation of Christ affirms the goodness of our sexed embodiment.
- Sex difference probably remains after the resurrection.
Dr. Sprinkle then offers a brief summary of three short paragraphs and two teaser questions for the following chapter. My plan for this installment in the review is to work through each of Dr. Sprinkle's "thesis statements" and to then respond to his summary. So buckle in, this is going to be a long post.
1. THE BODY IS ESSENTIAL TO OUR IMAGE-BEARING STATUS
Sprinkle's opening claim in this section is "Whatever the image of God points to, one thing is rather clear: our bodies are essential to bearing God's image." The statement comes at the end of a paragraph recognizing that there is significant scholarly debate as to what it means to bear God's image". He then supports this claim by highlighting interpretations of "image" and "likeness" which derive from the concept and terms for "idol". It is worth noting that at no point does Dr. Sprinkle engage with the multiple theological positions which do not think that our bodies as such are "essential to bearing God's image" though he does reference a text (The Liberating Image: The Imago Dei in Genesis 1 by J. Richard Middleton which presumably does so. Regardless there are, as Sprinkle began with, quite a few takes on what is essential to being Image-of-God bearers. Here is the Wikipedia link but the subject of what constitutes Imago Dei endlessly fascinating.
Dr. Sprinkle's primary argument for his claim is based on an analysis
On the one hand it seems more than a little unfair to demand that Dr. Sprinkle adequately address every significant theory of the Imago for the purposes of a book in which his use of the question is only one portion. On the other it is worth remembering that Dr. Sprinkle is writing a book with profound implications for how individual Christians will treat actual transgender friends, siblings, children, spouses, and parents and that it also seems more than a little unfair to demand that Dr. Sprinkle be excused from making an adequate case before prescribing some sort of attitude towards, or beliefs about, trans people. If you were to have your parent deny the reality of who you are would you be satisfied if the book they were relying on had cut corners in research or in the complexity and thoroughness of its research or argumentation?
What I find even more concerning is that the conclusion of this section (the last two sentences) upon which Sprinkle goes on to base a great deal of his argument, isn't even argued for. As a Christian, a thinker, a trans person, and a theologian I don't have a huge objection to the premise that being embodied (at least at some point in our existence) is an important aspect (I hesitate to say "essential" as I believe that the dead do not lose their status as divine image bearers and only regain it at the resurrection) of our divine image bearing, but I do think that after spending 95% of the words in this section arguing only that embodiment is essential, Sprinkle then just asserts, as though it were the conclusion of the section despite his not having brought it up until this very moment, in a sentence fragment that "not just our embodied nature, but our sexed nature [is highlighted by the most fundamental statement about human nature]. A claim which is highly debated to say the least. He does attach a footnote to the claim in which he cites two texts (God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality by Phyllis Trible and In His Own Image and Likeness: Humanity, Divinity and Monotheism by Randall Garr) as evidence that "male and female" are "important" to human's relationship to the image of God but he neither summarizes their arguments to that effect, nor provides his own, and it is worth noting (this will become more clearly relevant in my response to the next of Dr. Sprinkle's thesis statements) that Dr. Phyllis Bird, in her paper "Bone of my Bone and Flesh of my Flesh" argues that The parallel terms "image" (selem) and "likeness" (děmût) have a single meaning in combined usage and do not describe distinct attributes. They qualify each other to suggest wholistic but noncorporeal resemblance and representation. [bold emphasis mine, italics original]
Conclusion:
By the end of this section Dr. Sprinkle has provided some evidence for his claim but has successfully argued at most that maleness and femaleness are important (he doesn't really even argue for "necessary" or "essential") in understanding what it means for humans to be created in the image of God. It is important that he has not argued (much less demonstrated) that the Image of God requires maleness or femaleness.
2. MALE AND FEMALE IN GENESIS 1 ARE CATEGORIES OF SEX, NOT GENDER
Dr. Sprinkle's argument for this thesis statement begins with the argument that "the command to reproduce [in Genesis 1:28] wouldn't make much sense if 'male and female' were highlighting social or psychological aspects of being male and female." Already there is a bit of rhetorical equivocation in the claim since since Preston is reducing what trans people will describe as a fundamental sense of self as a given gender" to "social or psychological" and then merely saying that such an aspect of ourselves isn't being "highlighted". Of course it is entirely possible for something to be included or even integral without it's being "highlighted" so taken strictly, Sprinkle's claim here is rather uncontroversial but also doesn't claim as much as he is later going to suggest (he goes on to behave as though he had proven the statement "the command to reproduce wouldn't make much sense if 'male and female' necessarily included aspects of being male and female".
Dr. Sprinkle's primary argument in this section consists on a citation of Phyllis Bird's Paper "Bone of my Bone and Flesh of my Flesh" published in Theology Today (1994). Sprinkle introduces the quote by noting "For what it's worth, Bird isn't a particularly conservative scholar; she's a feminist and an ordained elder in the United Methodist Church. She's probably not going to be invited to speak at the Gospel Coalition's national conference anytime soon. Anyway she argues that the creation accounts of Genesis present the categories of male and female as 'indispensable to their understanding of humankind by explicit attention to the sexual differentiation of the species'." and then introduces the quote that forms the center of his argument for this thesis statement: Sex is the constitutive differentiation, observable at birth and encoded in our genes, essential for the survival of the species, and basic to all systems of socialization. It plays a fundamental role in the identity formation of every individual. It must consequently be regarded as an essential datum in any attempt to define the human being and the nature of humankind—and thus provides a primary test for false notions of generic humanity.
Out of curiosity (and, by this point, a little suspicion) I went and found the paper he is citing. It turns out that in the original, Dr. Bird included a footnote (footnote 27) just after the word "genes" in the above text which reads:
Modern biological and psychological understanding of sex reveal a much more complex phenomenon than the dimorphic classification recognized by most societies, with wide variation of expression and disparities between observable and genetic indicators. Theological assessments and "common sense" views of appropriate behavior based on a simple dichotomous view of sex are no longer adequate? See Bird "Genesis I-III, p. 44. Alongside this recognition of grater complexity in the markers and meaning or sex as a human attribute, there is also new attention to the cognitive consequences or correlates of sexual identity. On its implications for faith, see James B. Ashbrook, The Brain and Belief: Faith in the Light of Brain Research (Bristol, Indiana: Wyndham Hall, 1988), and "Different Voices, Different Genes: 'Male and Female created God them,' " Journal of Pastoral Care 46 (1992), pp. 174-183.
which would seem to indicate that Dr. Bird is in fact saying almost the opposite of the claim Dr. Sprinkle is defending in his citation of her work.
I should further note that Dr. Bird's conclusion in the paper specifically notes (in a gloriously trans affirming way) that
In a world of multiple "others," I will fail to represent them all or adequately, but this does not lessen the obligation, and the inadequacy of my formulation can only be corrected by the word of the other. We do not need to hear every voice to gain a sense of common opinion or see every exemplar to grasp the essential nature of the species. But we do need every voice and every exemplar to know the fullness of that nature formed in the image of God. Thus our answer is never complete; it is always subject to modification by new experience, and it is the diversity of representatives that testes the adequacy of the statement.
Sprinkle ends this section with a sort of pseudo-feminist celebration of Genesis 1 as affirming the value of women as co-image bearers with men. It is not clear to me how this claim depends in any way on the thesis statement that Genesis 1 is using sex and not gender as its categories. He does say "If sex differentiation is irrelevant here, then the profound elevation of females as distinct from males loses its significance" but the claim is rather confusing. If all humans are created in the image of god then a statement to that effect is just as liberating to marginalized female humans and is also liberating to all other oppressed humans. If Sprinkle is interested in a liberatory reading of Genesis 1: 27, restricting its liberatory implications to "females" would seem to be a backwards move. Further, Sprinkle's choice to use "females" rather than "women" in order to highlight the "sex not gender" point he is trying to make here feels more than a little physically reductive. He promised earlier to address concerns around intersex people in Chapter 7 but having not yet done so, this phrasing would seem to suggest that Sprinkle views God as seeing uterus-people as equal to penis-people which...sure, but there is a lot more to it than that and putting it that way just seems dehumanizing. And that is a point that Dr, Phyllis Bird makes admirably in the paper Preston cites in this section; one wonders, almost, whether Dr. Sprinkle has bothered to read it.
Conclusion:
I am not really that concerned with this thesis statement per se. I do find Dr. Sprinkle's reasoning and citation choices to be lacking but if I were sitting down to a debate with him I would likely want to point out that insisting on a sex/gender distinction for Genesis is anachronistic but would mostly shrug and grant this point. The problem with it is primarily in what Sprinkle doesn't say but later acts as though he had. He doesn't ever say that "male and female" in Genesis 1 being about sex rather than gender means that those categories are immutable in individual humans or that said reference amounts to a divine affirmation of those categories, but he will go on to build arguments that act as though he had. And that is a problem since those latter claims are far harder to defend and significantly more problematic.
The most significant issue is Dr. Sprinkle's use of a source which is, in fact, arguing the precise opposite of the claim he cites it to support.
3. ADAM AND EVE'S BODIES ARE VIEWED AS SACRED
This is a strange little section. The argument is only that Genesis 2 shares architectural language with the descriptions of the temple and that therefore human bodies are sacred. I actually agree with Sprinkle's thesis statement as it is given though I found his argument rather weak. Wouldn't it have been better to have merely quoted 1 Corinthians 6:19 and have done with it? Perhaps he was concerned that that would have communicated that only the bodies of Christians are sacred. Regardless the claim itself is benign.
Except that, after not arguing for anything regarding sexed-ness in this section, Dr. Sprinkle ends with
Genesis 1-2 speaks about our sexed embodied nature as something significant for human identity. Our sexed bodies are like sacred pieces of architecture. [emphasis mine]
You see what he did? After arguing merely that our bodies are sacred he then slipped in the strong implication that the sexed-ness of our bodies is sacred. Yes, our bodies are variously sexed; yes our bodies are sacred but that does not imply that sexed-ness is necessary to the sacredness of our bodies. Of course Sprinkle hasn't outright said that it does. He doesn't seem to like saying these things outright.
Conclusion:
At this point in the chapter, Sprinkle's project is starting to become clear. He has been making largely inoffensive or generally accepted statements, making arguments in support of them, and then sneaking in specifically anti-trans implications so that the reader leaves each section with the impression that Sprinkle has demonstrated something that undermines the transgender Christian position without his having to actually forward said arguments.
4. JESUS VIEWS GENESIS 1-2 AS NORMATIVE
Here it is.
This claim is the one that seems most often to stand between people who disagree over whether or not God affirms the gender identities of trans people. Sprinkle has set himself squarely on the side of those who claim that God does not affirm our gender identities and it was something of a disappointment to find that his argument for this crucial point consisted entirely of three short paragraphs and a quote from Matthew 19. But I was excited to dive into the argument he would make on this critical point. After all. If, in his citation of Genesis 1 in Matthew, Jesus was claiming that all humans are supposed to conform to the "male and female"-ness of Adam and Eve(1)then that would, at a minimum, seem to strike a blow against biblical support for the validity of non-binary gender identities and would lend some validity to the now-exhausting tendency of non-affirming theobrogians to quote "in the beginning God created them male and female" at us though it were some sort of anti-trans incantation.
Strangely Dr. Sprinkle's argument for this thesis is rather...lackluster might be the best word. His support for this thesis consists entirely of quoting Matthew 19:4-5 and then restating the thesis, a citation from a single commentary on Matthew, and then a rhetorical retreat by admitting that it would actually be a mistake to read too much into what Jesus says in Matthew 19 than what He intended which Sprinkle records as "a rather simple point—taken for granted in Judaism at his time—that marriage is a union between two people of different biologicals sexes [Dr. Sprinkle fails to notice the anachronism here], male and female. Embodied sex difference is assumed, but it's not as if Jesus is directly addressing a question about trans* identities" [emphasis mine]. So Sprinkle asserts, cites a single commentary, re-asserts, then backs off to the caveat that actually this isn't the point Jesus was making in this passage and it would be a mistake to read to much into what He did say.
So far as I can tell, Dr. Sprinkle is once more attempting to have his cake and eat it too. He makes a bold assertion and will use that bold assertion (it is one of his eight thesis statements after all) throughout the rest of the book but his actual defense of it is paper thin (more on that commentary in the paragraph below) and the only position he is actually staking out is one far easier to defend if challenged: that Jesus seems to be taking certain things for granted when answering a question which has nothing to do with the question of trans identities—a rather good example of the motte and bailey fallacy but hardly worthy of a text which purports to help Christians think about one of the most contentious cultural/social topics of our day.
But Dr. Sprinkle's Bailey does come with one citation: page 10 of the third volume in W.D. Davies and Dale C. Allison's A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Gospel according to Saint Matthew. I was eventually able to track down page 10 of that text. Sprinkle's use of it is first to assert (without citation) that "The idea of "male and female" is not just relevant to the beginning of creation" and then to cite Davies and Allison on for the following sentence to the effect that "Jesus operates with the conviction that "the created order" was expressed in Genesis 1-2 "is a guide for the moral order" and technically Dr. Sprinkle is not misquoting his text here. Page 10 of vol. 3 of the Critical and Exegetical Commentary does indeed contain that quote. But... well let me just give you the full paragraph:
Jesus continues by quoting another Scripture, Gen 2.24 (a secondary interpolation which appears to be 'generically antipolygamous and implicitly antidivorce'). Again the created order is a guide for the moral order.
I have two items to note. First the section of Davies and Allison that Dr. Sprinkle is quoting here does not reference "male and female he created them"; that passage is Genesis 1:27. Gen 2:24 is "a man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife and the two become one flesh", which does indeed seem to have a lot more to do with divorce than it has anything to do with "the idea of 'male and female'" except as accidentals. In particular, the citation for this sentence has nothing to do with the claim Dr. Sprinkle used to set up the sentence. Further Sprinkle very clearly ignored the clarification that his source so helpfully provides, that this reference to the created order is, in fact, a reference specifically to divorce and not to "The idea of 'male and female' as Dr. Sprinkle insinuates. Second, Davies and Allison do in fact address Jesus' reference to "male and female he created them" a page earlier, but there they even more unavoidably insist that Jesus reference to Genesis 1:27 "responds to the question about divorce by raising the question about monogamy"(2). Nowhere in this section of the commentary do Davies and Allison seem to be at all interested in "the idea of 'male and female" as having anything directly to do with the point Jesus was making in Matthew 19.
Conclusion:
In this section Dr. Sprinkle declines to actually support his thesis statement aside from providing a single commentary which itself doesn't even claim to support his statement before retreating to an acknowledgement that his thesis statement is "assumed" (though he provides no evidence in support of this weaker claim either) and not the point of what Jesus was actually saying.
5. PAUL SEES THE BODY AS SIGNIFICANT FOR MORAL BEHAVIOR AND CORRELATES THE BODY WITH PERSONHOOD
I am going to be a bit more brief in my response to this section the chapter. If Sprinkle had ended his thesis statement at "behavior" my only significant complaint would be that he is being a tad rhetorically slippery in his use of "significant" where he will go on to act as though he had said something like "necessary" in its place. His habit of carefully nuanced claims which he later treats as sweeping statements notwithstanding the first clause is generally accurate. In fact trans people (despite ubiquitous Evangelical claims to the contrary) generally also see the body as "significant for moral behavior" and that forms a significant part of the spiritual justification for our transitioning. If the body matters then surely having a body which conforms to our total person is a good thing.
Unfortunately Dr. Sprinkle chose to add a second claim to this thesis: "Paul ... correlates the body with personhood". This could have been salvaged—the claim is debated but not implausible—if he hadn't chosen to treat this debate as something settled. In fact one of the more rancorous theology debates of the last decade hinged on Paul's view of the body. Here the sources that Dr. Sprinkle cited were better than we have seen from this chapter so far and mostly lacked any serious acknowledgement of the debated-ness of the claim within theological circles. Here again we see Preston's unfortunate habit of presenting debated subjects as settled in his favor while exaggerating fringe objections to well-established positions as representing a "real debate on the topic.
As to the claim itself, that "Paul...correlates the body with personhood" my own objection is simply to point out that both the Holy Spirit and the First Person of the Trinity are persons who are not embodied; that most Christian understandings of the blessed dead hold that they are still persons even in the period of time prior to the resurrection in which they do not have bodies, and that Paul himself speaks as though the "great cloud of witnesses" are persons despite their having bodies. Which all suggests that while Paul does certainly see bodies as important (both for good and for evil) he does not actually correlate "the body with personhood".
Conclusion
This section is relatively innocuous but it does demonstrate a few of Dr. Sprinkle's more unfortunate rhetorical habits.
6. SCRIPTURE PROHIBITS CROSS-SEX BEHAVIOR
Dr. Sprinkle spends significantly more words on this thesis statement than on the previous ones. He sets the section up with a bold (if anachronistic) claim:
Scripture doesn't often mention people publicly presenting themselves as the opposite sex. But when it does, it always prohibits such behavior.
Footnote 15 is almost as long as this whole section. In it Dr. Sprinkle puts forward an argument that Deuteronomy 22:5 really is about crossdressing, and was "...to safeguard the division between male and female" a claim for which he cites P. J. Harland [check that source!!] before saying that we need to know "whether this command still applies today", observing that the surrounding passages all don't apply today and then rather than concluding that the context would argue against a modern application, concludes "The near context doesn't give us much help in determining modern applications of this verse". He then goes on to address the objection that the verse in question only refers to cultic activity but rejects that on the grounds that "nothing in the near context of Deuteronomy seems particularly concerned with cultic practices" and also that "the generic termsgeber ("man") and ishah ("woman") would be an odd choice if cultic practices were meant. Honestly I find his reasoning somewhat baffling since most of Deuteronomy has in view the separation of the Hebrews from the cultic practices an allegiances of the nations around them, and secondly because there is no particular reason why the use of generic terms for "man" and "woman" should be an odd choice to use in prohibiting cultic practices.
Finally, Sprinkle concludes with an argument that the same themes are recapitulated in the New Testament and he cites the 1 Cor 11 passage about head coverings and two of the clobber passages to that effect. His conclusion to this footnote is, rather sedate: "we shouldn't just thoughtlessly cite Deuteronomy 22:5 as if it self-evidently applies to the church, we can say that the driving principle of the command very much resonates with how the rest of Scripture celebrates maintaining certain differences between the sexes (3) [emphasis mine]". So Sprinkle's long citation for the claim "I see more evidence in favor of X" turns out to be an argument for "X would resonate with my interpretation of other passages". It is worth noting that all of the New Testament passages Sprinkle cited as "resonating" with his preferred interpretation of Deuteronomy 22:5 are themselves highly contested and that Sprinkle is choosing interpretations of them without providing justification or any argumentation for those interpretations. In fact two paragraphs later he is about to admit that 1 Cor 11 "has more interpretive difficulties that Donald Trump has Twitter typos" though acknowledgement of that fact is absent from the footnote. (4)
I hope you see the problem here: Dr. Sprinkle is nodding to the fact that his citations are contested, using further contested passages to support his contested interpretation and then presenting all of this as though he had actually proved the thesis (or at least as though he had supported it with strong evidence and meticulous reasoning) when if fact he hasn't said much beyond "I find this interpretation most compelling".
Sprinkle does include an additional paragraph on the term malakoi but again he is choosing a highly contested term and the only citation he provides for his assertion is from William Loader. I have already written about the term (I lean towards "morally pliable" as the best translation in context). Loader is a fine scholar but I was again disappointed to see that Sprinkle neither acknowledged the fact that this term is hotly debated nor provided any reason for preferring Loader's argument over, say, James Brownson's.
The rest of this section consists of a more-than-slightly homophobic reading of Romans 1 without any acknowledgment of the wildly contested scholarship on this passage for which Sprinkle cites a single source (Kyle Harper's From Shame to Sin), an acknowledgement that the passages he has used are often used poorly, the sentence "I can't emphasize enough that we shouldn't assume each of these passages speaks directly or definitively to modern questions about transgender identities" which is more than a little strange since that is what Dr. Sprinkle seems to be doing in the book—or at least he is behaving as though his theses rest on more than indirect contested readings—, and an announcement that he will hold off on his interpretation of Galatians 3:28 (the "there is no longer male and female" passage) for Chapter 6 and the questions raised by the existence of intersex people for Chapter 7.
In response, my own interpretation of Romans 1 can be found HERE and I would certainly recommend a thorough reading of multiple biblical interpretations to anyone who is working to understand and apply that passage (5). I also want to just highlight the fact that, while it is, on the one hand, reasonable for Dr. Sprinkle to postpone a long and complex analysis of a tricky passage to a separate chapter, doing so can create the impression that the objections apparently raised by this won't prove to be of any concern. And because Dr. Sprinkle is going to be building his later arguments on the claims he makes in this chapter the canny reader will have to remember that any conclusions Sprinkle arrives at between now and then will have to be held provisionally with the possibility that, if he fails to make a compelling argument in Chapter 6, this thesis from Chapter 4 will have to be abandoned, and that is a very hard thing to do. Generally best practice for presenting an argument is to begin with premises and build to conclusions. Using a conclusion as a provisional premise while asking the reader to remember throughout that it is provisional is inelegant at best and slippery rhetoric at worst.
Conclusion
Dr. Sprinkle's support for this thesis is, on examination, by his own admission throughout the section, not as strong as he seems to project. A more accurate reading of Dr. Sprinkle's claim here might be something to the effect of "Based on limited research, I have provisionally concluded that Scripture can be interpreted to prohibit cross-sex behavior." though notably, Dr. Sprinkle never seems to define quite what he means by "cross-sex behavior".
7. THE INCARNATION OF CHRIST AFFIMRS THE GOODNESS OF OUR SEXED EMBODIMENT
This is a bizarre section and it is really hard not to question Dr. Sprinkle's motives in structuring it the way he did. Certainly the way he "supports" the thesis is bizzare insofar as he never actually argues for it. If the thesis statement had merely been "The Incarnation of Christ Affirms the Goodness of our Embodiment" there really wouldn't be much to say about it in a popular text and Dr. Sprinkle's sources and citations for the claim would be sort of minimally adequate for a generally non-controversial claim, if not comprehensive (He cites Marc Cortez, Stanley Grenz, Rikk E. Watts, and John Stackhouse). But in the second paragraph Dr. Sprinkle puts forward the claim that "If Jesus didn't have a body—a sexed body—he wouldn't have borne God's image" which is just...strange. He doesn't provide really any justification for this second claim, he just asserts it.
Why did Jesus' body have to be sexed in order for Jesus to bear God's image? What is Dr. Sprinkle trying to argue about the hypostatic union here? Does Dr. Sprinkle believe that the Holy Spirit (who does not have a body) does not bear God's image? What would it even mean to say that Jesus (Dr. Sprinkle is orthodox enough that he does affirm the divinity of Jesus) didn't bear the image of God—that the one who is Very God would not bear God's image if that One wasn't sexed? On what basis is Dr. Sprinkle claiming that it was necessary for Jesus to be sexed rather than that sexed-ness was an accident of Jesus' being human (Jesus is both fully God and fully human and humans are generally sexed so Jesus ended up sexed). Would Dr. Sprinkle also say that Jesus being a brunette was necessary for his bearing God's image?
There are so many questions and obvious objections that this claim raises which Dr. Sprinkle seems to just ignore. His only other footnote to this section is to the final claim in it that "Jesus' sexed embodiment challenges the notion that biology is irrelevant to identity" and I will address that footnote but before I do I want to point out the claim itself doesn't particularly support the thesis it purports to. Even if it were true that Jesus sexed embodiment challenges the notion that biology is irrelevant to identity, it doesn't follow that the incarnation affirms the goodness of sexed embodiment any more than it would follow from the (odd) claim the Jesus'brunette embodiment challenges the notion that hair color is irrelevant to identity would imply somehow that the incarnation affirms the goodness of haired embodiment.
Now the footnote. Footnote 21 appears at the end of the sentence about Jesus' sexed embodiment challenging the notion that biology is irrelevant to identity, which might give a casual reader the impression that Dr. Sprinkle has provided sources, evidence, or argumentation for this claim. Instead the footnote is entirely taken up with whether or not Jesus' maleness means that women do not bear the image of God. Rather alarmingly Dr. Sprinkle doesn't even reach a conclusion on this question. Instead he goes back and forth on it citing different passages from Pauline epistles before providing a list of readings for people who want to further explore the question. He does not categorically rule out the possibility that only humans of the male sex actually bear the image of God.
Conclusion
In this section Dr. Sprinkle begins with a strange claim, proceeds not to actually defend the strange part of his claim, makes several further odd claims without support or argument and then ends with a footnote in which is is skeptical towards, but not categorically closed to, the possibility that only male humans bear the image of God. It seems almost as thought Sprinkle hoped that his readers would accept his addition of "sexed" to the thesis statement without really noticing or questioning where it came from and then panicked, waved to general support for the less controversial (and less relevant) part of the claim before very strangely choosing to include a footnote that holds open the possibility of a wildly misogynistic claim which, if true,would totally undermine points he makes elsewhere in the book about the full equality in dignity and image bearer status of men and women.
Beyond that though, I am struck at this point that Dr. Sprinkle is creating here the impression that trans people think that biology or sexed-ness is irrelevant to identity which just isn't true. After all when I call myself a trans woman, the importance of biology it is necessarily implicit in that identity claim. In saying that I am a trans woman I am saying that I am a woman who was assigned male at birth due to my sex being characteristic of males of our species. Sexed-ness and biology are all over that.
8. SEX DIFFERENCE PROBABLY REMAINS AFTER THE RESURRECTION
This is another of the longer sections of the Chapter. Sprinkle begins by developing the idea that resurrection bodies are important including the claim "What we will be like then provides a moral basis for how we should live now. [emphasis original]" which he defends using the 1 Cor 6 passage about uniting the Body of Christ with a prostitute. In this he seems to assume that the moral argument Paul is making rests on the fact of resurrection (Paul does reference resurrection just prior) rather than the idea that what we do with our bodies is done by Christ's body because we are all members of Christ's body. He concludes the first paragraph with the assertion that "Christian ethics is rooted in bodily resurrection". I don't know that I would say "rooted" but certainly I would agree that resurrection is really important to Christian ethics.
Sprinkle then moves on to address the further contention that resurrection bodies will be sexed. While I am generally inclined to agree with him that they will—they will be sexed or unsexed according to what best aligns with our total person as we have become and will be becoming—I found it a little disappointing that, rather than address those texts which challenge his view, Dr. Sprinkle merely lists a few and then, again, points to Chapter 6, repeating his rhetorical move from the previous section.
Having recognized that there are passages which challenge his claim and then punted on them, Sprinkle proceeds to make his case in four parts only after emphasizing that "there's a good deal of ambiguity in what exactly our resurrected bodies will be like. We don't know far more than we do know. [emphasis original]" which, again ought to emphasize the degree to which any conclusions he will later base on this chapter must be read as tenuous. In fact it seems to me that, if Dr. Sprinkle is so uncertain in his reasoning it may not be appropriate for him to be recommending even a posture of skepticism towards the accounts of the transgender people who have the benefit of first hand experience of gender incongruity.
Regardless, Sprinkle's reasons for thinking that "it's more likely that our bodies will be sexed in the resurrection [emphasis mine]" are: 1. Thesis Statement 2; 2. Thesis Statements 7 and 3; 3.The claim that Jesus' resurrection is a model for our own resurrection; and 4. The claims that our bodies are important to Paul and that (per Thesis Statement 1) the sexed-ness of our bodies is "significant to our embodied existence and our personhood" suggest that "sex differences will be part of our resurrected state". Since reasons 1,2 and 4 recursively depend on previous Thesis statements (go back now and ask yourself how convinced you are that those statements are accurate and what it means that Dr. Sprinkle is not building another premise on them) the only one to address here is reason 3. So while I would agree that Jesus' resurrection is a model for our own, I don't see where Dr. Sprinkle has any grounds to act as though he knows even that Jesus' body was sexed after the resurrection. At least in any way that Dr. Sprinkle seems to mean the term "sexed" (remember from Chapter 2that he never does quite define the term) the New Testament doesn't give any indication as to Jesus' post resurrection sex, which makes this rather an odd claim for Sprinkle to base his Thesis Statement.
Conclusion
For my conclusion to this section I want to simply quote Dr. Sprinkle's conclusion and add emphasis (bold and italics) to the ways in which he qualifies his Thesis Statement:
Again I want to hold these four points with an open hand, and I recommend that you do too. We're trying to fill in several silent gaps with assumptions—theologically informed assumptions, but assumptions nevertheless. And yet, it does appear more likely that our future resurrected bodies will be sexed and less likely that we'll be given androgynous bodies in the resurrection. If our future glorified existence will be in a sexed body, then it would seem reasonably consistent that we should honor our embodied sex now. This approach does at least resonate with the dominant way in which Scripture values our sexed embodiment as integral to our humanity.
Notice please that the last sentence is merely a re-statement of Thesis Statement 3 and, if you go back and re-read you will remember that Dr. Sprinkle did actually establish the "sexed" part of "Adam and Eve's Bodies are Viewed as Sacred" in that section but is acting here as though he had.
Chapter Conclusion
Dr. Sprinkle ends the chapter with three paragraphs and an additional sentence that he calls a "Summary". In fact the summary is contained in the first paragraph of the section and consists of restating Dr. Sprinkle's oft-stated but never demonstrated claim that "Scripturally, biological sex is a significant aspect of human identity" a claim that is not, in fact, challenging to transgender identities—I don't know of any trans person who views the parts of their physiology that Dr. Sprinkle here is presumably referring to as "biological sex" as being insignificant. If we thought those aspects of our bodies were insignificant then those of us who chose to change them wouldn't really have any reason to do so. The problem of course is that Sprinkle seems to be slipping in the unspoken claim that because they are significant, it is wrong to change them. He will get into this question more directly in later chapters (he sort of has to) but it is worth noting here that none of this chapter has even claimed to support that conclusion. At most Dr. Sprinkle has spent a chapter offering heavily qualified and too-often poorly sourced reasons for believing that "biological sex is a significant aspect of human identity".
After that Dr. Sprinkle acknowledges (to his credit) that "We need to hit the brakes if you think we're ready to say that biological sex and not gender (identity or role) define who we are", reiterates that this isn't something the Bible speaks to directly, and spends several sentences reminding us of the importance of being "thorough and cautious, humbly considering all angles in the discussion" which risks giving the impression that he has done or is going to do anything of the sort, and reiterates his summary statement. He ends with a hook into his next chapter dealing with questions of masculinity and femininity. I will do likewise.
Series Index
Footnotes:
1. I am not here commenting on whether Adam and Eve ought to be read as literal or true-mythical figures as I don't see that it makes any difference for the purposes of this topic.
2. I am not here personally commenting on the legitimacy of divorce as that is not the focus of this review series. For what it is worth I do not in fact believe that Matthew 19 constitutes an outright ban on divorce and remarriage.
3. I was disappointed to find that at no point does Dr. Sprinkle ever seem to say precisely which differences he believes God is trying to preserve.
4. I have provided my own, different interpretation of the Romans 1 and 1 Cor 2 texts Dr. Sprinkle cites Here and Here and you can find one of many discussions of the 1 Cor 11 HERE
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