What is "Unnatural": My Defense of LGB Relationships Part 5

Note, this post is Part 5 in a series (which starts HERE) on my Christian defense of LGB relationships and sex, however it is my hope that this piece in particular can also stand alone as a response to what I believe is the larger impetus behind much of the Evangelical (and Roman Catholic) church's rejection of LGB sex.

For my series in defense of the identities of transgender folk click HERE 

Introduction

"It's just unnatural."

It is fascinating to me that this is what much of the discussion over the sex lives of LGB folk so often seems to come down to. In the case of most non academic and theological types the discussion can get there pretty quickly, when it comes to discussions with people who do focus on academic and theological arguments, it can take a little while but if you stick around long enough, work through the "clobber passages", the exegetical discussion, and the examination of hermeneutical principles(1) you will get to this point eventually as well, albeit with a significantly different emphasis.

In the case of the non academic "regular person" the phrase "unnatural" seems to mean basically something that is "weird and makes me uncomfortable". It isn't particularly complicated, a straightforward smattering of socially acquired homophobia or unease with deviations from what the person thinks of as "the norm". That doesn't justify it—it is still deadly to the LGBT folks who regularly suffer hate crimes and discrimination here and around the world—it just accounts for it. However, in the mouth of an academic or theologian, the phrase unnatural or maybe counter to natural law means something very different and actually forms the foundation on which all of the other interpretations of the bible and exegetical conclusions often turn out to have been built. It all goes back to "Natural Law", Thomas Aquinas, and Aristotle.

Some Background

Feel free to read past this is you are familiar with Aristotelian and Thomist theories of Natural Law and sexual ethics.

I wanted to point out the separate ways the term natural is used when talking about LGB (and T) folks in order to say that I am not going to be talking about the non academic or theological use of the term—that use is about feelings and what people are exposed to so the proper response doesn't have a lot to do with formal arguments, it has a lot more to do with experience and actively engaging with people. What I want to focus on in this piece, is the argument that academics, theologians, and philosophers are making when they say that homosexuality is unnatural or that it is contrary to natural law(2).

Natural Law Theory is a way of thinking that dates back to the famous Catholic philosopher St. Thomas Aquinas who, in turn, built much of his thinking about this subject on the work of the Greek philosopher Aristotle. In brief, natural law theory argues that we can know how a person ought to behave based on our knowledge of what humans exist for. In pretty much the same way that a good knife is a knife that cuts well, and a good light bulb is one that provides illumination, a good human is one who humans well. The theory that Aristotle put forward starts by asking why we do things generally and then rather elegantly moves to the observation that if we keep asking "but why do you do that?" we end up working our way to the answer "in order to flourish (3)". From there Aristotle wants to ask what flourishing looks like for a human person and his conclusion is that flourishing for humans means something like "doing human-specific things as well as possible".

For Aristotle, the method you should use to figure out the particular flourishing of a being is to examine what characteristics or powers are unique to that being. So living things live (in contrast to inorganic things) and so to flourish as a living thing is to live; further, animals are distinct from plants in that they can move on their own, so moving well is part of flourishing for animals; skipping a bunch of stages here, humans are the reasoning animals, so for humans flourishing means reasoning well. With that said, reasoning for Aristotle could (if we are generous) include what we think of as emotion and relationship (4). Ultimately then, for Aristotle Natural Law would say that a person ought to do those things which are particular to them as well as they can without violating the doing of things that are particular to their other, broader, identities (human, mammal, animal, living-thing, existing-thing).

But when most Western Christian people talk about Natural Law they are generally talking about the version of the theory that St. Thomas Aquinas adapted from Aristotle, or at least they think they are. St. Thomas was willing to look to more sources that merely reason and his environment when it came to determining what a thing (or person) is for. For Aquinas the Bible, and Church tradition also get a voice (5). So when Aquinas thought about human sexuality, he thought about it in terms of its purpose—at least he sort of did. If we back out a little, Aquinas (following Aristotle and the general attitude of the church in his day) understood sex and sexual arousal to be an unfortunate development. Aristotle criticized sexual attraction and sexual intercourse for interfering with clear thinking. Aquinas focuses mostly on this same aspect of it when he categorizes sex as an activity (and a drive) which can be put to some good uses, and is not therefore wholly bad, but ultimately comes up short in comparison to total celibacy. Sex for him isn't quite evil but is a compromised sort of good, specifically it is something which can only be made good when it is put to the right uses within the right context. (6)

It is worth taking a minute to notice that this view is in pretty stark contrast to the way most western Protestants (conservative or otherwise) tend to have taught about sex. In western Protestantism, sex is generally thought to be fundamentally good, but subject to being used wrongly. The results are similar (both groups conclude that sex should only take place within marriage) but the orientations towards it are mirror images. Where Aquinas sees sex as a redeemable thing which is otherwise unfortunate, western Protestants have historically seen sex an inherently good thing which can be corrupted by wrong use. It is important to keep this in mind when thinking about contemporary Evangelical use of Natural Law theory.

This image is brought to you as a reminder that LGB folks

can and do raise children

For Aquinas then, sex can be redeemed by putting it to two specifically good uses, both of which he thought supported the purposes of marriage. So of course, we need to look at what Aquinas thought was the purpose of marriage. In broad terms, Aquinas thought that marriage could be good if it served the purposes of providing a context for fully rearing children, and of providing other-serving-fidelity between the spouses (7). Correspondingly, sexual intercourse becomes a good, in Aquinas' thinking, when it serves the purpose of raising healthy children and of uniting spouses in intimate fidelity. The procreation mandate is "according to natural law" in Aquinas's view because it is good for humanity to extend as a macro level application of the fact that it is good for people to keep living (8). The intimate fidelity mandate is a little harder to for Aquinas to pin to any distinct natural law reasoning and Aquinas sort of punts to some circularity (sex is only good within marital fidelity and marital fidelity is good because it provides a context wherein sex can be good) but seems to be derived from the observation that sex does, in fact, help/cause partners to form a bond with one another. From there Aquinas argues that sex should be oriented towards bringing the spouses together as a couple and toward providing pleasure for one another. He sums this up with the word fides but to make sure it stays clear, I will use fidelity/intimacy.

In summary, Aquinas taught that in order for a given sex act to not be sinful it had to be oriented towards raising healthy children and towards increasing the fidelity/intimacy of the married couple.

Evangelical Culture-War Modifications to Natural Law Theory

Insofar as contemporary biblical scholars and theologians are referencing the sexual ethics of natural law they are referencing this. It is a rigorously Roman Catholic view of sexual ethics, closed to non-procreative sex acts, to all birth control, and to any sexual intercourse or expression outside of marriage(9). It is, quite notably, not a particularly western Protestant view of sexual ethics(10). In fact, most western Protestants (and most notably Evangelicals) have been accepting of birth control and of marriages wherein the couple chooses not to have children for between 50 and 90 years depending on the denomination. This move was facilitated theologically by two distinct steps: First, during the Protestant reformation, the reformers shifted from a view of sex as basically-bad-but-able-to-be-redeemed-by-marriage to the view that sex is basically-good-but-is-corrupted-when-it-happens-outside-of-marriage. This didn't change their view of birth control as such but it did position them to make the second shift during the middle of the 20th century (and if that seems recent, keep in mind that birth control wasn't really available in the US until 1938 and the pill didn't show up until 1960; in that context western Protestants were early adopters, not holdouts) when they justified the use of birth control on the theological grounds that sex was a good thing within marriage and served the fidelity/intimacy purpose.

This is actually a really big deal because Western Protestants on the whole have not held to Natural Law theory when it comes to sexual ethics (they have used other ethical models—predominantly variations on utilitarianism, Kantian deontological ethics, and divine command theory—to think about sexuality). It is hard to read their recent attempts to recover Natural Law Theory as anything but an after-the-fact desire to shore up their disapproval of same-sex marriage. Fundamentally, traditional Natural Law Theory sees sex as something which has to be justified whereas Protestants traditionally see sex as something to be celebrated.

This is Al Mohler

There is actually pretty solid evidence for this after-the-fact response by Evangelicals (11).  Up until the prospect of same-sex marriage became a significant likelihood within the US, the legitimacy of birth control was all but assumed by most public Evangelical (and Western Protestant) theologians and ethicists (12). There were concerns and debates over birth control but they were centered around the question of abortion and generally started from the assumption (or explicit argument) that all birth control forms which work by preventing conception are perfectly legitimate within a Christian marriage. But it was only when the US started what turned out to be final push towards legalizing same sex marriage that, Al Mohler of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and self-appointed spokesperson for conservative Evangelical sexual ethics, published an article (which he later recapitulated in his culture-war book against LGBT Christians) questioning Christian acceptance of birth control and explicitly arguing that

In reality, the Pill allowed a near-total abandonment of Christian sexual morality in the larger culture. Once the sex act was severed from the likelihood of childbearing, the traditional structure of sexual morality collapsed.

or as he put it in his 2015 book/culture-war-manifesto We Cannot Be Silent (13)

 In more recent years, many evangelicals have begun to reconsider the morality of birth control and contraception and, on the positives side, have come to affirm the unconditional goodness of the gift of children. Even when evangelicals do not accept the Catholic admonition that each and every act of marital sex must be equally open to the gift of children, at the very least, evangelicals must affirm that every marriage must be open to the gift of children and that , should pregnancy occur, it is to be seen as an unconditional gift rather than as an imposition. (emphasis in the original) 

He did not (and does not) try to shift fully to the Thomist Natural Law view that each and every sex act must be open to procreation but tries to carve out a position wherein the marriage itself is "open to procreation" in principle. I would submit that he has to land there because the broader protestant understanding of sex (that it is a good thing to be celebrated within marriage) doesn't really leave space for the full Natural Law approach—in fact I suspect that it would be something of a catastrophe for Southern Baptists if the people studying in their seminaries all read Thomas Aquinas. Mohler seems to be trying to tie Evangelical theologies of sex back to Natural Law without erasing the distinctions between Roman Catholic and Evangelical views of the subject. The problem is that this isn't a particularly coherent approach; Mohler and his fellow conservative evangelicals want to use a Thomist purpose based Natural Law approach to ethics without actually accepting all of the logical implications of that view. Instead they dismiss the full Thomist implications of Natural Law theory as "too Catholic" without providing an explanation of how they still support their modified position. Complex and detailed systems like Aquinas' Natural Law Theory can't be modified on a whim; any modifications have to be justified in a way that demonstrates how the overall modification still fits with (doesn't contradict) the theory as a whole. Conservative Evangelicals have not provided the necessary careful justification of their modifications and until they do, this appropriation of Natural Law should be treated as incoherent (14). As it stands, people in the Mohler position have to somehow argue either that procreation is the purpose of marriage but not of sex, or that marriage must be judged by how well it fulfills the purposes they assign it but that sex should not be held to this standard—either argument would seem to be a really big theological/philosophical lift and I don't see how they would/will manage.

Bubblegum Rejoinder

In any case, my response to both of these positions (the Roman Catholic Thomist argument and the conservative Evangelical culture-war modification) is that they are wrong in shifting from the claim that "procreation is a purpose of marriage/sex" to the conclusion "procreation is an irreducible purpose of marriage/sex". In the first case, a defensible claim is being made. But that first statement simply isn't the same thing as the second. As someone who is reasonably fond of Natural Law theory on the whole, I don't have any problem with an ethical methodology which works to figure out what things are for and uses those conclusions to work on thinking about how those things should and shouldn't be employed, so I don't have a particular problem with saying that marriage/sex exists for the purpose of child rearing/procreation among other things. You see, both groups recognize that while procreation/child rearing is a purpose of marriage/sex, it is not the only purpose. Intimacy/fidelity (in the Roman Catholic version) or intimacy and mutual delight (in the Evangelical culture-war modification) are also recognized as a vital purpose of marriage/sex. That being the case, a given sex act, or a full marriage which serves to create or enhance intimacy/fidelity between spouses is fulfilling one of its purposes. Put another way, while it is true that procreation/child rearing is a purpose of sex/marriage, it is also true that intimacy, fidelity, and mutual delight is a purpose of sex/marriage. What is happening is that these theories are sneaking in an assumed premise, that things which have more than one purpose but do not fulfill all of them are sinful  Or in other words, we need to apply this argument to the act of chewing in order to know whether or not bubblegum is sinful.

Now, we know that chewing exists for two purposes: chewing (more broadly mastication) exists as one stage in the digestion process, and chewing exists to bring out the taste and pleasure of food. So one purpose of chewing is the nourishment of the body. The second purpose of chewing is enjoyment of the good world God has made. Most examples of chewing that we voluntarily engage in are able to fulfill both of these purposes. We eat things that taste good. However there are some things we choose to chew which serve only the first purpose, they may even contravene the second purpose (kale for instance, nourishes the body but tastes bad). Other things we choose to chew fulfill the second purpose but not the first. This is where bubblegum comes in. Bubblegum does not serve to nourish the body at all (in fact our mothers will collectively remind us that moving it to further stages of digestion is a bad idea); it does, however, serve to provide taste and pleasure. If the Roman Catholic and Evangelical culture-war modification assumed premise—that it is sinful for a thing to fulfill only one of multiple purposes—is correct, then it must be sinful to chew bubblegum. And as this is ridiculous in the case of chewing bubblegum, it is also ridiculous in the case of sex and marriage.

If same-sex sex/marriage is able to fulfill the purpose of fidelity/intimacy and mutual delight, then same-sex sex/marriage is able to fulfill the purpose of marriage by the standards of Natural Law theory if they are consistently applied, the Christian who wants to object to them will have to find other grounds.

The Academic Evangelical Use of Natural

There is still another use of the term Natural in connection to arguments over LGB sex and relationships which I have seen employed by evangelical academics who are more theologically moderate than their conservative culture-war modification counterparts. While they use the phrase Natural Law and the term natural they don't seem to be referencing Aquinas or Aristotle but what they take to be Paul's understanding of natural.

The clearest example I have encountered of this was by Scot McKnight in his book A Fellowship of Differents (15). The argument is that, in Romans 1, Paul's use of natural (the Greek word in question is phusis φύσις) represents the idea of a created design which was intended to be perpetuated and not deviated from so that any deviation from said design would have been wrong. When people take this approach they often do not directly reference Natural Law Theory and usually stay away from directly associating questions of procreation with the concept of natural. Instead the focus is on the Genesis account of creation (a concern I have addressed HERE) and on what is usually referred to euphemistically as the "physical complementarity" (McKnight uses the phrase "anatomical design" which could suggest an oblique reference to Natural Law "purpose" thinking) of male and female bodies i.e. the fact that a penis can be inserted into a vagina. In effect this approach seems to want to understand the word natural (phusis) to mean something like "the way it was made" or "the way it was designed".

There are two distinct problems with this view, and either would be fatal to the position. The first problem is that such a definition of natural is wildly anachronistic. It is the way a modern, post enlightenment person might use the word natural but it is not at all the way 1st century Greeks and Romans would have used the term phusis. C.S. Lewis has actually provided a careful etymological and philological analysis of the history and meaning of the term in Studies in Words. He explains that in the first century, the most common usage of the term phusis was to talk about things developing in an un-interfered-with way. If something developed on its own, without being messed with by an outside influence, that meant it developed according to its phusis, its nature. We actually still use the term nature  this way when we say that a particular food is natural. We mean that the food in question wasn't altered by humans.

The second problem with the "moderate" evangelical usage of natural is that it doesn't reflect the way Paul actually uses the term in Romans 1. Paul is clearly using unnatural to denote "interfered with" and not "contrary to anatomical design" in Romans 1 since he is specifically talking about behaviors people engage in as the result of a cause, namely denying God. In fact, the example he gives as unnatural in verse 26 is a first example of the full list which follows in verses 28-30 (16). The first example and the rest of the list are connected by the phrase "and just as" in verse 28 which indicates that Paul is going to give further examples of the effects of denying God. All of these actions are characterized with a word which Paul treats as synonymous with his verse 26 use of unnatural: unjust/unrighteous (adokimon/ἀδόκιμον). This is the un-doing of the righteousness/justice (dikaosune) (17) which Jesus calls us to in the sermon on the mount (Matthew 5:10). It is the impact of people warping or interfering with the way of being they would by nature have otherwise inhabited. Thus, what Paul is clearly not talking about is a person who, of themselves and their own healthy development, developed into a person who is attracted to those of their own sex. He is instead working off of the contemporary dominant understanding of most homosexual activity which was understood to be an outcome of hyper-sexuality and unbridled lust (18). McKnight's interpretation of natural as "different from some original design" or "nonconforming to anatomical design" just isn't based in 1st century usage of the term; nor is it compatible with Paul's actual usage of the term in the passage in question.

Conclusion

So I think it is pretty clear that while the term unnatural has had (and I am sure will continue to have) a significant impact on the way Christians think and write about homosexuality. Despite the fact that, as I have tried to show, the word does not in fact condemn or in any way count against the real attractions and relationships of LGB people who marry and are intimate in as loving and beloved-honoring ways as their heterosexual counterparts, its use against them and their relationships has led to incredible harm and pain. To tell a person that they themselves, or that their most intimate one-flesh, unions are not only unnatural but are especially sinful because of it, is to dehumanize and devalue them. The unconscionable outcome of this thinking has been all too predictable. From the Church's historic persecution and sometimes torture of people who engaged in LG sex, to the dire mental health impact on LGB youth who are raised in non-inclusive communities, the designation unnatural together with its Old Testament derived counterpart abomination (19) has enabled and even encouraged a homophobia and dehumanization of the LGB community for which the Church must repent.

He will reply, 'Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for

one of the least of these, you did not do for me.

Footnotes:

(1) I don't mean to be flippant, I think those discussions are important.
(2) To those of my readers who are part of the LGBTQ community and have had this term leveled at you and used to degrade, deride, and dehumanize you, I want to say that I am sorry and that I hope my exploration and attempted rebuttal of the use of this term in connection to your lives and relationships can be helpful in a way that justifies the pain of this conversation and term.
(3) Aristotle's term was eudaimonia or "good-soul-ed-ness".
(4) Aristotle did have a significant hyper-cognitive bias but that need not interfere here.
(5) Though he did really like to take it back to merely observing nature and reasoning whenever he could.
(6) I am working, largely from the Summa Theologica Questions 49, 153, and 154
(7) Aquinas' third justification for marriage was that, at as a sacrament it has an intrinsic good, but he conceded that non-church marriage could still be good if they fulfilled the other two requirements, so I will focus exclusively on those.
(8) This is the reasoning by which Aquinas is able to shift from sex having to always be procreative to sex having to always be "open to procreation". The procreative purpose of sex (or at least of marriage since Aquinas doesn't do much to distinguish "marriage" from "the context of legitimized sex) does not end at conception but continues on to include the full healthy rearing of a child.
(9) Aquinas does work out a way to excuse nocturnal emissions (it isn't sin if you didn't mean to do it, so don't worry about it unless you went to bed fantasizing about something arousing—then it would be sin)
(10) Anglicans were the first major Christian group to give the official OK to birth control in 1930
(11) I shift my focus here from Western Protestants to American Evangelicals largely because it is Evangelicalism which has presented to most strident opposition to LGB relationships from within the larger Western Protestant community. Mainline and other Protestants have taken a somewhat different approach, in some cases standing in partial or full support of LGB relationships.
(12) For a good overview of pre-culture war Evangelical sexual ethics I would recommend Stanley Grenz' Sexual Ethics: An Evangelical Perspective.
(13) Mohler Published the book in October of 2015; the US Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage in June of 2016.
(14) If anyone is aware of such a justification please link to it in comments and I will look forward to interacting with it and updating this post.
(15) I have responded to McKnight's argument directly over at the Third Way Newsletter so a portion of this post will recapitulate the arguments I made there.
(16) It is worth noting that this puts "disobedient to parents" (verse 30) on the same moral footing as the activity Paul discusses in verse 26.
(17) For my thoughts on this incredibly rich word, you can read THIS PIECE
(18) I have covered this in PART 2 of this series but Sarah Ruden also does an excellent job demonstrating it in her book Paul Among the People.
(19) Part 3 of this series contains my analysis of the OT texts and one of the many ways in which they have been misunderstood and misapplied.

Book Review: Still Christian

I love it when I get to review books which I can recommend without hesitation or caveats and am glad to say that David Gushee's Still Christian: Following Jesus out of American Evangelicalism is one of them. This is a book which should be of interest to quite a few different people for different, if compatible, reasons. Before I get to that though, let me start by describing the book a little. Still Christian is in the format of a memoir, Gushee isn't trying to persuade his audience(s) to do much of anything other than maybe to be more aware of what Evangelicalism is, and how it has come to be what that. It is a fairly short memoir because it focuses with pretty laser-like intensity of the single story of the role of Evangelicalism within Gushee's life. Thus it isn't the sort of full-orbed analysis of Evangelicalism as a historical, social, theological phenomenon of the sort that we are all probably waiting for Mark Noll to write. Instead, this book is important because it will provide you with a narrative (and if you spent any part of the 80's, 90's, 00's or 10's as an Evangelical it will likely be a decidedly relate-able narrative) through which many of the beauties, thorns, and ultimately rot of evangelicalism can be more easily recognized.

In terms of style and readability, Gushee has a warm and winsome style and the book is tremendously easy to read. I blew through it in less than 48 hours (probably 4-5 hours of reading time over two evenings).

So who will benefit from and enjoy reading this book and why?

Ex-Evangelicals:

For those of us who grew up or spent significant time as evangelicals this book is incredibly easy to relate to and will almost certainly give you that "you are not alone" encouragement—particularly given Gushee's status as a Christian Ethicist and president of the Society of Christian Ethics and of the American Academy of Religion. Of course much of that has to do with shared experiences (his comfort with Evangelicalism was shaken by the "Women in Ministry" debate and by the Evangelical right's celebration of torture and his final break occurred over his affirmation of the full inclusion of LGBT folks), but it has a lot more to do with his carefully recorded process as he worked and lived through those experiences. Throughout the book he is unwaveringly gracious towards those with whom he has disagreed. Where people come across negatively he nearly always has something positive to say about them as well and even though Al Mohler does not come off especially well, he refuses to engage in any personal denouncement of him. Neo-Calvinism receives his single full-throated denouncement in chapter 7 Finding a Home and Leaving It  where, when discussing the various perspectives operating at Evangelical colleges (and specifically Union where he taught) he says:

This is my best chance to say that I believe the resurgence of a doctrinaire Calvinism in contemporary evangelicalism is among the most odious developments of the last generation. I abhor its version of God and most of its version of Christian ethics, and I believe it could only have emerged among relatively privileged, hyper-cognitive, compassion-challenged white men, as it has. But I digress

That passage stands out because it is such a total break with the otherwise irenic tone he takes throughout the book. I am not condemning him for including it, but thought the fact was worth pointing out.

I think what gave me hope in reading this was not just that I could identify so much with Gushee's experience, but that he seems to have managed to get through it with so little bitterness and so few scars.

Evangelicals:

I am frankly not quite certain whether evangelicals will enjoy reading this, I do know that those evangelicals who seek to be well informed will appreciate reading this. This is a memoir by someone who was one of you, who experienced the "tent" of Evangelicalism shrinking around him (though his ultimate exit did involve movement to a place you had told him you would not go), and who will describe to you, winsomely and charitably, what it was about you that has caused him to feel relief on leaving. Surely this is something Evangelicals want to know.

Successful organizations need to conduct exit interviews. When someone leaves them, if they do not take the time to find out why, they are almost certainly doomed to eventual collapse. This is a charitable and kind voice (though he doesn't pull punches either) who will tell you what is going on and will challenge you to think about your culture as well as your practices. I don't think the goal of this is to convince anyone to leave or stay within evangelicalism, but it is a vital perspective for anyone who wants to understand evangelicalism as it is today.

non-Evangelical Christians:

If you are not and have never been an Evangelical, you are likely nevertheless well aware of them. As one friend of mine put it: "The thing about Evangelicals is that they do things". For better or worse, Evangelicals have come to "represent" much of Christianity, or at least Protestantism, to the western world. While there are many great resources out there to help you understand the genesis and theology of evangelicalism (I have mentioned Mark Noll haven't I?) this book will be your best tool to date in understanding the experience of Evangelicalism from the inside. It is rare to get a reflections from someone who was so recently a member of a "tribe", is now excluded from that tribe, and is nonetheless, compassionate, gracious, and fair towards them. 

non-Christians:

Remember how 81% of Evangelicals (who voted) voted for Trump? If you think that understanding that dynamic is important to navigating the world. Or more broadly if you realize that political Evangelicalism is still a major power player in US politics and in globalizing culture, then you probably already know that it is important to have an accurate understanding of this group of people. This book will provide some stunning insights into what is really going on with that. It is, for you, serendipitous that Gushee is a professional ethicist as his perspective is one you will find particularly enlightening.

A Final Addendum on Fortuitous Timing

I can't think of it as anything but God-given grace that this book was released the same week as the Nashville Statement. Still Christian provides a lens on what is going on with the so called Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, the Southern Baptist Convention, and the rest. It is no coincidence in my mind that Al Mohler figures prominently in both works (his is the seventh signature on the Nashville Statement). In Chapter 6 Finding a Voice While Not Losing a Soul Gushee recounts his experience with Mohler at Southern Seminary:

Al Mohler, only thirty-three years old when he was named president, turned out to be a relentless implementer of the conservative agenda for Southern Seminary. He was committed to purging any faculty who strayed from conformity to the seminary's doctrinal statement, elevating faculty voices that would take visible conservative stands on key culture-war issues, and moving the school to a traditionalist position on the top question of the moment—namely, whether the Bible permitted women to be ordained or to serve as pastors in local churches.

...

...a new policy came down from the administration, one that would change everything at Southern. At an epic, miserable faculty meeting, the president [Mohler] declared that those who believed that women should serve as pastors would no longer be hired, promoted, or tenured at Southern Seminary. While some details of this policy remained to be addressed, the implications were clear enough. A school that had, over the years, worked its way around to a largely egalitarian understanding of gender roles was now, by decree, overnight, a place that required faculty both to believe and to teach that Holy Scripture clearly bars women from the highest office of church leadership. Dissenting tenured faculty members might survive but probably ought to leave, untenured faculty members who held the now-erroneous belief had no future at the school, and no new faculty members would be hired who were egalitarian. 

This meant the end for pretty much all female faculty members. I vividly remember one of my younger female colleagues getting up from the meeting in which the policy was announced, running from the room, and throwing up in the hall. It's not every day that you are professionally executed by public decree. It just might make you physically ill. 

If that doesn't frame the context for the recently released Nashville Statement I don't know what does.

A Christian Defense of the Identities of Transgender Persons Part 4

If seeing this image anywhere near the word "transgender"
freaks you out, you might want to reflect on what baggage
you are bringing to this conversation.

This is Part 4 in a series which starts HERE

My separate series in defense of LGB relationships starts HERE

My post in defense of Intersex persons is HERE

Introductory note: I have worked as hard as I know how to avoid creating a straw-man argument for the non-recognizing position. I have endeavored to present as fair (while still critical) a representation of those exegetical arguments I have been able to find, as possible, but am conscious of the fact that those arguments are (in my understanding) remarkably weak. I should point out that non-recognizing folk also make more general theological-anthropological and philosophical-anthropological arguments and that I have not addressed them in this post. I will do my best to address them in future posts. In the meantime if you know of stronger forms of the indirect exegetical argument I would encourage you to post them in the comments box where I will make every attempt to respond to them in  a timely manner. 

Here it is, the long delayed take on the oblique passages. Those parts of the Bible which are often thought to be relevant to the situation of transgender persons though they do not address transgender people directly. While I certainly have been working on a number of other things (did I mention I put a book out this summer?) I have also been doing my reading and my research so that I am now able to return to you, a more read and researched blogger.

What I have found is that the arguments against recognizing a transperson's identity generally boil down primarily to Genesis 1 and 2 (the creation account) and occasionally utilize Psalm 139:13 (God having created David while David was still in utero) and usually Matthew 19:4 (where Jesus quotes Genesis 1 as support for an argument about marriage and divorce). That is certainly not a whole lot to go on but it pretty much sums up the passages the anti-trans-identity Christians routinely cite in defense of their position (if you are in this group and there is an important passage you think I am missing please bring it to my attention, I am drawing predominantly on the work of Albert Mohler and Denny Burke). The key texts here are:

So God created man in His own image; He created him in the image of God; He created them male and female. (Genesis 1:27)

and

For it was You who created my inward parts; You knit me together in my mother’s womb. (Psalm 139:13)

The argument that is then constructed from these passages and - in the case of the Genesis text - their surrounding context, is that since God created humanity dimorphically (male and female), it must be God's intention that humanity restrict itself to a gender binary as any attempt to embrace a third (or fourth or fifth) sex or gender category (the passage is generally taken to refer to both sex and gender after an attack on any possibility of distinction between the two categories is made without reference to Scripture) would constitute an attempt to move beyond God's plan for the species.
Now I realize that the argument so far, regardless of how good or bad it is, doesn't actually speak to Wanda's situation (for an update on the extended illustration I am using for the series you are going to need to start at PART 1 - Short version: Wanda is a trans woman who was known as "Bob" for a while and would like to have her female gender recognized by her church). Wanda, like many trans persons in America today, isn't particularly interested in identifying or being recognized as a third gender, she identifies as, and would like to be related to as, a woman. However I think it is worth stopping here for a second to point out that the non-recognizing crew are presently deriving their conclusions from a philosophy which is built on the perceived implications of a mere one to three passages.

This break in the argument is brought to you by trans pride.

Back to the argument: Having established that God's sexually dimorphic design for the species implies God's intention that sex and gender remain binary in human society, the argument then moves to assert that since God is the one designing humanity, and (per Psalm 139) individual human bodies, we need to read the morphology of our bodies at birth (including genitalia and chromosomal makeup) as prescriptive of our sex and gender identities (remember that the necessary congruence of sex and gender is stated but not defended on any particular Scriptural basis). The experience of gender dysphoria and the physical non-binary morphology of intersex people is explained as a result of creation's fall into a sinful and broken state. Thus, the reasoning goes, when there is an experienced incongruence of sex and gender (or of sex morphology to conform to a dimorphic pattern), the goal is to help the afflicted individual achieve restoration to the binary ideal.

In principle this ought to leave open the possibility that the tension could be relieved through hormone replacement therapy and sexual reassignment surgery thereby bringing the sex into alignment with the gender. However it is very important to folks who are thinking along these lines to insist that these actions would constitute an attack on healthy organs and bodily processes and that the only legitimate way of restoring the individual to the desired pre-fall state, is to take them through therapies (either religious or psychological) which will help them to re-orient their gender identities in order to bring them into congruence with their physiological sex. This is often supported by an appeal to a semi-Thomist "natural law" idea (pointing to reproduction as the healthy purpose of genitalia) while some theological accusations of the Gnostic heresy (which, among other things, denied the moral importance of the body to spiritual development) are occasionally deployed.
If all of this seems weak, I should point out that it is generally bolstered by a number of ancillary, but non-Scriptural arguments. Transgender people are generally compared to folks suffering from mental delusions in an attempt to account for the testimony of trans people. Thomistic natural law theory is not infrequently employed to make teleological arguments about the "proper" purpose of the body. Examples of mental illness are emphasized while examples of physical illness are generally downplayed (the mind is generally taken to be more fully subject to brokenness and the fall than the body is) and, in the worst cases, (certainly not all) emotional appeals to disgust, pity, and fear are combined with hand wringing over the advance of "liberal" thought and the advance of "secular society". But these arguments, strong or not, are not part of the exegetical conversation and so ought to be put aside for the purpose of this portion of the discussion.

Fountainheads not Paradigms

What we are left with is then the argument that God created humanity as a sexually dimorphic species (male and female), that any deviation for a gender or sex binary must therefore be a result of human brokenness in the fall, and that restoration consists in changing the individual's mind to conform with their genitalia or in a supernatural relief of the individual's dysphoria. The problem then, is that this argument is flawed in each major step.

First, while the Genesis and Matthew passages could be legitimately read as a confirmation that humanity began as a dimorphic species, there is nothing inherently prescriptive in those passages (I encourage the reader to go check them out). As Megan DeFranza points out in her excellent book Sex Difference in Christian Theology: Male, Female, and Intersex in the Image of God :

Reading the Genesis account in light of the larger Biblical narrative, we are able to affirm the goodness of sex difference as the fountainhead of human difference without requiring the male-female pattern to become the paradigmatic form of the other. (loc.4517-4545 Kindle Edition)

Essentially, the Genesis account doesn't set up male-female as the pattern to which the species must perpetually conform but the origin from which the diversity of humanity is derived. This is made especially clear when we notice that there are all sorts of wonderful creatures and species which do not fit into the Genesis categories. As DeFranza points out elsewhere, bats, amphibians, platypoi, sunsets, and fungi all arguably fall between various Genesis categories and yet they remain "good". At the very least, the claim that Adam and Eve ought to be seen as the paradigm for human sexed-ness and gendered-ness rather than as the fountainhead is a legitimate exegetical debate.

Furthermore, there is Biblical warrant to conclude that redemption from a fallen state is more likely to look like a progression towards something new than a return to what was before. In term of Biblical narrative: humanity is restored to a city, not a garden; marriage is not restored in the Kingdom, but replaced with something else, and eunuchs are not (apparently) healed to become procreative, but given "a name better than sons and daughters" [Isaiah 56:4-5]. In short there is no biblical warrant to assume that healing the brokenness of the fall must look like a return rather than a progression to something new.

This is Allyson Robinson, a
transgender Baptist pastor.
She is confusing to
complimentarian theology

But even if the first points are granted, the third falls flat as an argument against recognizing Wanda as a woman. Even if humanity is necessarily reducible to a sex and gender binary such that any apparent deviation from dimorphic humanity must be credited to the brokenness of the fall, that does not imply that restoration must require changing a person's mind to conform to their body. It is just as possible, and arguably more likely given the existence of transgender Christians, that restoration to a gender binary would consist in conforming the body to the mind. This seems to be the position of Peter Kreeft who argues that gender dysphoria (he doesn't use that term) might be reasonably healed by a "sex change" either surgically on earth or supernaturally "in heaven [theological sic.]".

Ultimately the oblique exegetical argument seems to be almost as weak as the direct exegetical argument. In my next post in this series I intend to revisit the positive theological and exegetical arguments for recognizing Wanda in her own self-perceived gender identity before I go on to address some of the broader philosophical, social, and theological concerns which are being raised by those who would deny the legitimacy of Wanda's feminine gender identity.

P.S. If you are interested in cool ways you can show support for the transgender community, check out #illgowithyou they are pretty awesome.
Also for way more information that I have provided, you should head over to youtube and check out Austen Lionheart.

Part 5 is HERE