Episode Transcript
Carey Griffel: Welcome to Genesis Marks the Spot, where we raid the ivory tower of biblical theology without ransacking our faith. My name is Carey Griffel. And today, well, today I have one of those hot button topics. So, be forewarned, this episode might not be one you'll want to listen to with kids around, as I will be talking about adult issues. Or, maybe I should say, what should be adult issues. I know a lot of our kids are getting their innocence in all of this snatched away from them, although I'm sure plenty of people out there think that that's not what's going on. But, look, there are times and places for things. And not every child is ready in the same way to tackle adult themes.
[00:00:56] So, I give that warning, not that I'm expecting to get explicit or anything, because you know me. A lot of this is going to be about the text, and history, and interpretation, and theology, and all of that kind of stuff. But it is a topic that is going to be strongly in the realm of adult themes.
[00:01:16] This is a topic I've been asked to address, and because of the nature of the question, I will leave it anonymous, but I will read part of the request. And actually, there's multiple pieces to it, so I'll break it up to address the specifics better. But here is the core of the question.
[00:01:37] My listener says, quote, I wanted to ask if you would be interested in doing a Genesis Marks the Spot episode on homosexuality and gender identity from a scriptural perspective. I hear all the time how scripture was specifically citing abuse and pedophilia as the sin and not homosexuality itself. I hear that argument the most, but others are just a general, Scripture isn't specific on that, or it can be interpreted many ways, and that sort of thing. End quote.
[00:02:13] All right. So, several things to be looking at here right off the bat, even before we get to the follow up questions that I have, which means that this is going to be a multi part response. The question starts with homosexuality, but I think I'll tackle the gender aspect first. So that's what we're going to be focusing on in this episode.
[00:02:34] What we're really going to be doing today is diving into the middle of this topic and this history, and later on in other episodes, I think I'm going to broaden that out. But we're just gonna dive right into some specific areas.
[00:02:50] Because this kind of a topic might be shared with people who don't know what my approach is, I want to say a brief word about that. What I'm interested in is a methodology that has several steps. This might be a bit different than what you expect to see in, for instance, a Protestant church setting.
[00:03:11] First, we look at scripture from the perspective of the ancient audience. What did they think and feel, and how did they understand their world? What was their society structured like, and how did they live within it? My encouragement is to first read scripture with this view in mind, to try to put ourselves in that world and see things as they saw them, to the best of our ability.
[00:03:41] But, we can't just leave it at that because the ancient world and ancient perspectives are not the same as what we have today. And we aren't going to expect ourselves to stay rooted in that ancient mindset. We need to bring things forward to how we think and experience the world today. And sometimes in order to do these things, we have to look at scriptural context, and we also have to look at our context today.
[00:04:08] And looking at scriptural context might be harder than we think. Let me give a concrete example. Many Christians think that they have views about sex and marriage that come from the Bible, right? Like adultery, for instance, is wrong. We know that the Bible condemns it. But what exactly is the Bible condemning? Is our definition of adultery even the same as the Bible's definition? Well, why wouldn't it be, right? Adultery is sex outside of marriage. Well, yes, but also no, at least when we're talking about the biblical world that comes from the Old Testament.
[00:04:52] The fact is, the people of the past had social standards that we don't have today, particularly in the Old Testament. Men had vastly different standards of sexual conduct than did women. A husband could have sex with another woman and it wouldn't be classified as adultery as long as the other woman wasn't married. But a wife had no such leeway.
[00:05:19] And I would get into the scriptures for that right now, but I think I'm going to put that into another episode, probably. So, I don't want to take up too much time in this episode today for that. But, that's what we see in the Old Testament in particular. And that's pretty disturbing to us today, and I'd say rightly so. That should bother us.
[00:05:41] And then, of course, we have the practice of polygamy, which I think should also bother us. We have situations that might be, from our standards today, socially accepted rape in the Old Testament. Now, maybe that's slightly unfair to characterize those things according to our standards, because there were no concerns at the time about consent and things like that.
[00:06:06] Okay, well, but we could say, let's appeal to Jesus then. Maybe the Old Testament had some things wrong, and that's why we don't want to go to the Old Testament for things. That's why some people want to unhitch from that Old Testament context because they don't understand it. It doesn't really jive with what we have today. So let's go to Jesus and what Jesus says. Maybe in the Old Testament, they were allowed to do things because of the hardness of their hearts. But when Jesus comes along, he makes it all right.
[00:06:39] Now, Jesus does do a good bit of that kind of thing, as we'll again be talking about more in depth in a future episode. But he's still giving a perspective that, to our ears, still might sound very male centric. So what are we supposed to do if we can't mine the Bible for proof texts to hold up our current standards of sexuality?
[00:07:03] The Bible doesn't outright say that sex outside of marriage is wrong. Like, there's no particular verse, and there's no commandment about that. But surely, we're still supposed to hold to that, right? Adultery is now defined more narrowly today than it was in the past, and that's not a bad thing, I think.
[00:07:26] But how do we get from there to here, and how do we know that our standards today are really biblical standards, even if they look a little bit different than they did in the ancient times? The first thing I'd say, in all of that, is that we should stop treating the Bible as if we can lift everything from its pages and plop it down into a guidebook for today. Because we really can't do that, at least not for a lot of things. That's not to say that it doesn't hold moral teachings that God expects us to abide by, because I think it does. But the Bible isn't a moral guidebook in the way that I grew up thinking it had to be. Many of the morals in the Bible are, we might say, outdated or just plain wrong.
[00:08:16] I think that's something we have to grapple with, but when we come to the question of homosexuality and gender politics, well, what do we do with that? Might it be the case that we can adjust what we believe on those things, just as we've now adjusted new standards of what adultery and marriage look like?
[00:08:38] Now, when I say that, I can feel the waves of reaction to it. No doubt, some will pump their fists in victory and say, yes, we can do that. And others would have a look of horror and say, No, of course we can't do that. On one side, we have the people who might say, Hey, if anything regarding sex has shifted in understanding from what we read in the Bible to what we have today, then isn't that license to shift it more?
[00:09:07] But the other side might want to fall back on tradition. (an irony for the Sola Scriptura crowd sometimes). Like the age old justification of, well, the church has believed this for 2, 000 years, so we're gonna keep believing it the same way. These are two sides of the coin in the conversation. And let me just tell you, I'm not afraid of adjusting understanding. Or, with following tradition, either one.
[00:09:38] But I think that biblical theology can help us figure out which one we're supposed to be doing when, and that's why I love it so very much. Now, I'm not saying that I don't have a bias and that this doesn't feed into the bias lens either way, because it can. But I really do think that biblical theology can help get a leg up on what we're talking about.
[00:10:02] The first step is to say that description is not prescription, meaning that just because something is described in the Bible doesn't make it prescribed as something to be followed or lauded necessarily. When I'm talking about something being described, I'm talking about something happening in the story, in the narrative, in the lives of the people who show up in the Bible, and the Bible doesn't really say, Hey, good job, Abraham, for being a polygamist, right?
[00:10:37] And this is why it's necessary to put our heads in the mind of the ancient person to understand them. But that doesn't mean that we have to bring all of the information we learned there forward in time to how we think today. But, okay, how far do we go with that, though? Just because polygamy is described doesn't mean it's sanctioned by God. It's one of the best examples I can think of, in fact. But what's going to stop us from saying in a similar way, That just because homosexuality is described as being a sin, that doesn't mean it has to be a sin for all time, does it?
[00:11:18] Well, I mean, I think we can easily see that there is a difference in those things, first of all. Polygamy is described and lived out by the patriarchs, and we see homosexuality actively condemned in lists of sin. So, it's a bit easy to say that polygamy is just described and not prescribed, whereas homosexuality is actually called out as bad. This isn't just a description of something. It is literally a prescription.
[00:11:52] But as was mentioned in the question I was given, there are arguments out there that suggest that what is being described as a sin isn't even how we define homosexuality. So, that definition has to be tackled. And even if it might be describing homosexuality in general, what if it's really concerned with a particular situation at the time that's problematic, but once we've moved past that situation or if we're not in that situation, maybe it's no longer a sin since that particular problem has gone away?
[00:12:32] How do we approach these really tough questions in a way that takes them seriously? These are the things I think we should be trying to listen for and approach fairly for people who are asking them. Because, honestly, they're fair questions. We don't want to just say we can do this thing for one side of the equation over here, like polygamy or slavery, and say that those aren't acceptable things. But then say that we also can't do the same type of interpretive move for the other side. For those who want to say, "so called sins" might actually be redeemed in some way, just as previously acceptable actions are now condemned.
[00:13:16] In other words, if we can condemn previously acceptable cultural practices, why can't we redeem previously unacceptable cultural practices? Particularly, if we do so with at least a desire to promote goodness with them.
[00:13:35] Well, again, if we think of time as a continuum from the past to the future, we naturally want to see things improve as we go, right? So things that weren't good before, we want our society today to improve those. But in order to do that, we need to know what good is. We need to have a target. A standard, rather than continually moving the goalposts and just calling that progress.
[00:14:07] So really, the only way we can choose whether or not to condemn or possibly redeem any particular practice, we have to have a standard that this is going to meet up with. That standard cannot be the cultural practices of the biblical times, because it's clear that not all of their cultural practices were good.
[00:14:30] As Christians, our standard is Jesus, who is the fullness of the revelation of God. Okay, great, but we still have some work to do to get from that biblical context to modern day application using that lens of Jesus. We know we need to use the Christological lens while we're doing that, but how do we do that, and what does it look like?
[00:14:56] And that's where biblical theology comes in the picture, in my opinion. I've talked more than once about the arc of History and the Bible, which both relate to one another. We go from Genesis to Revelation with Jesus at the center. So whatever we're doing with our interpretation, we need to be following along that pattern.
[00:15:21] Whatever we call good or bad needs to be seen in that construct. What we cannot do is just decide that happiness and good means whatever people decide those things to be. That's what we see in the Garden. Seeing and taking for ourselves that which we have deemed to be desirable. And it's not just a theme from the Garden.
[00:15:47] Cain sees Abel and takes his life. Lamech saw offense and took more lives. And that he did after seeing multiple women and taking them. The sons of God saw that the daughters of men were to be desired, so they took them. The people at the tower wanted to take a name for themselves. Sarai saw an opportunity with Hagar and took advantage of her. The brothers of Joseph saw their brother was favored, and so they took him and sold him.
[00:16:17] We don't see the same language in all of these stories, but we do see the pattern of being desirous of something and taking it without first consulting with God, trying to figure out for ourselves the way we should get to what we see as good. And God will use those things we do for good in the end, but that doesn't make the original desire to be good itself.
[00:16:42] The other way is harder, no doubt. Instead of seeing our own way and taking it, it's harder to do the way of studying Scripture and drawing meaning out from there instead of taking our desires to the text and seeing if we can find a justification for them.
[00:17:00] But let's be honest. We all do that. We all go to the text with our own interests in mind. The challenge is to maybe do that less and less as we go. The good news is that God's desires and plans for our flourishing will We'll always be better than ours, always. So we can be confident that going to the text and pulling out its theological message is never going to be something that will go against our flourishing. Just like we don't need to worry about finding something in science or history that will somehow disprove God. It won't happen. It's not a concern we need to have. We don't need to protect ourselves from study either in science or history or in the Bible.
[00:17:49] But, the bad news is that we often want our way and not God's way. And that's the whole problem. We think we know how to do things to our advantage, but we usually don't. At any rate, this is why I like studying the Bible using the tools of biblical theology. Because what we do in biblical theology is that we try to understand the Bible in its original context, and this is often done by studying themes, which are aspects of the text that hold theological meaning and imagery.
[00:18:23] To be honest, I've found that to be a far more reliable way to understand the theological message of the Bible. Rather than just taking a plain English reading, which might lead to some confusion, wondering why the Bible has descriptions of polygamy and war in the way that it does. When you study the Bible thematically, with an understanding of the arc of the narrative with Jesus at the center, many things become much more clear, and many things no longer can be proof text so easily.
[00:18:57] Now, of course, we also need to be careful here because you can use thematic studies badly just as you can use them well. It's an old adage that anyone can make the Bible say whatever they want it to say. We all know that the Bible has been used to justify war and slavery and unimaginable abuse of all kinds, but it can also be used to justify seemingly positive messages. Like, prosperity preaching, or claiming that since we are no longer under the law and since we are forgiven in Christ, we can do whatever we want, because sin no longer has a hold over us.
[00:19:39] This is why the Christological lens is crucial. If you understand that following Christ is a life that participates in the life of Christ, and so is going to face self sacrifice, denial, and suffering, and being part of the body of Christ in community. And you further understand that human flourishing has the whole of humanity in mind and starts with what we see in Genesis 1. Well, it's a bit harder to hit those self aggrandizing and self indulgent themes to justify the way we want to live our lives.
[00:20:18] Always at the center of things is God, following Christ as a disciple in his self giving love, knowing that creation has been organized from the start to be a place where God dwells in our midst, seeing the gospel as Jesus enthroned and victorious over all. And having that be centered in the Incarnation, the image of God as reflecting His, and not our own, glory.
[00:20:49] These should all be humbling messages. I've seen people suggest that ideas like these actually glorify mankind and demote God, because how dare it be suggested that a humble creation of God be put to such a high level to actually be God's imager or to participate in Christ. But these are the themes of Scripture.
[00:21:16] And please note, for every quote unquote elevation of man, the true target is actually God. The only glory we attain is a glory that is reflecting God and His work, that puts God, not ourselves, at the center. We can't ignore humanity's part in all of that, because there are genuine purposes that God has in and for creation. While those do involve glory to himself, we can't ignore that creation is an integral part of all of that.
[00:21:54] So the things that we see in history that can either be condemned or redeemed, they can only be so in the context of this construct of God and creation together. We can neither ignore the idea of glorifying God through what we do, nor can we ignore the aspect of the flourishing of man. And all of that is wrapped up in the gospel of King Jesus and his kingdom, the body of Christ as his active agents in that kingdom.
[00:22:26] Okay, so that's our framework to approach any question of the text or any question of morality or discipleship. So when it comes to the topic of homosexuality and gender identity, the first thing that strikes me is that word identity. This is obviously a big deal these days. What do you identify as? What are your pronouns? How do you feel? Who do you think you are? What are your preferences? Notice that what all of these have in common are self centric concepts of identity rather than a God centric concept of being the image of God.
[00:23:08] We could almost leave the answer to that, and many people do, but honestly, I feel like it's a bit dismissive to just go there and say, well, there's the answer. Of course, there's a lot more to say, and I think the angle to bring this into is a particularly cool one because it's so holistic and thematically interconnected inside Scripture. I feel like just going to the image of God and saying, that's the answer, there you go, I think that's telling a whole swath of people that the only thing they can do is just deny themselves and their desires. And while that is part of what we are all supposed to do as human beings, because we all have desires that lead to death, it's just, it's not good enough in this conversation. We need to understand better what is going on, so that we can talk with others in their paths of discipleship. We can't just give a single dismissive answer and think that's it. That's not a proper way to treat each other in the situations we're in.
[00:24:07] But also, a challenge I will give any follower of Christ who is looking at this topic. Are you truly reading the Bible and asking what it means? Or are you trying to find a justification for something that looks good and desirable to you, or maybe to someone you love?
[00:24:26] Now, I'm not saying we're all at that kind of crossroads. I think many people really just aren't yet sure how they should think, or they really believe that their ideas stem from the Bible itself. Or, they've been convinced of this or that interpretation. But it's paramount that we look into the motivations of our own hearts.
[00:24:47] Be honest with God. And I can say from personal experience that even when we see the ugly truth of a selfish motivation in our own hearts that pushes us to a wrong conclusion, and we kinda know it, that's not always enough reason for us to drop what we are thinking or feeling about something. At least, not immediately.
[00:25:09] But I encourage you to face that ugly truth and let it work in your mind. Be honest about it. I think if we're honest before God about what we think and feel and want, even when we're wrong, then God will eventually bring us to accept the truth. That's part of being a disciple. Letting God work on our hearts to bring us to where we need to be in spite of ourselves.
[00:25:34] And we all have some place or other that God is working on that in us, I'm sure. It's hardly unique to this topic. We all have our personal hangups of things that we don't want to relinquish belief in.
[00:25:47] But with that said, let's talk about this whole identity thing. And I'm excited to do so in the framework of telling you about an awesome book called The Genesis of Gender, a Christian Theory, which that's an awesome title, by the way. This is by Dr. Abigail Favale, who gives a bit of her absolutely fascinating history in the book. I feel like it's been a while since I've done a solid review of a book for you guys. So, kind of excited about this one.
[00:26:19] Anyway, Dr. Favale was raised in what we might say is our typical American evangelicalism. And then, cue the dramatic music, she went to college. This was actually before so many of this stuff got to be mainstream, but she found herself deep within the halls of feminism.
[00:26:42] For a while she tried to keep hold of both Christianity and Feministic ideals, but basically ended up letting go of Christian belief And she was wholesale into what she describes as third wave feminism. Eventually, and amazingly, she found herself back to Christianity, but this time in the tradition of Catholicism.
[00:27:05] So yes, yes, this is a Catholic book, and there are traditional Catholic ideas within it, but I really encourage you to read it even if that bothers you. Really, primarily, the particularly Catholic type of things you'll find are that she quotes from some interpretations of the popes, and, well, okay, I'll be honest, her conclusion is pretty Catholic in a way, but I think it's a good way, and I don't think it's anything that any non Catholic has to reject, but we'll get to that.
[00:27:39] I think her experience is valuable to hear because she's experienced things that a lot of us haven't. She's been deep into these various constructs only to come out at the end with clearly a deep love for Jesus and an understanding of the world that sees how visible and invisible realities are united together in a Christian paradigm of the purposes of creation and the redemption of Christ.
[00:28:08] So there, you see? You're going to love it. It's great stuff. In this book, you'll get a breakdown of the history of feminism and its connections with postmodernism and communism, by the way, and how all of that, with some historical circumstances that give birth, so to speak, to the concept of gender.
[00:28:31] Now, this is kind of the framework we're talking about here. Every time you get into the conversation of how ideas happen, you kind of have to choose a place to start and a focus to zoom in on. And that's what we're at here. In next week's episode, I think I'll probably zoom out a bit and give a broader picture of this.
[00:28:52] But for today, we're going to talk about how Dr. Favale presents it in her book. I'm going to very briefly go through some of that, because I'll be honest, I really think you want to know where ideas come from so that you can find out where and how you've been sold a bill of goods and possibly misled.
[00:29:14] You need to know where and how ideas got off track so that you can correct what needs to be corrected, and you can also see what needs to be seen in the goodness that might be there as well. sometimes a new idea isn't all bad. And it might point to something true, just as much as it might not be the best idea in the world.
[00:29:35] And we'll see some of that in this. Just as we need to understand the context of the Bible to understand it, we need to understand our modern context to understand where we are today. The ideas we have in our heads do not just come from our own learning and thinking. They stem from sources, and it's good to know what those sources are.
[00:29:57] And yes, even Dr. Favalli says she has to necessarily simplify the detail and not go into all of the different nuances. Not all feminists are the same by any shot, but these are the general trends that we can see.
[00:30:12] First of all, what is postmodernism? It is a philosophical movement that, by its name, we know it came after modernism. Which itself came after the Enlightenment. Postmodernism structures reality in human narrative. So, reality is in our stories. And it's not in something that exists all by itself on its own. Like, humans create reality through the stories that we tell.
[00:30:44] And honestly, this is a thing that we all do. It's their jumping off point and the thing that they get right. We do create reality by story. We do identify ourselves and find purpose by the historical stories we tell ourselves, by the historical stories we accept, by the historical stories of the people and families that we're born into.
[00:31:09] But for the strict postmodernist, language and social action are how reality is actually defined. And so you can just choose to change it. And it might not be the same for everyone. So, you say something is a thing, and it becomes a thing. You've probably heard of Matt Walsh's documentary, What is a Woman? And he interviews people who can't give him a definition. Well, they can't, because there's nothing inherent about a thing in postmodernism.
[00:31:44] You are what you say you are, and the ways you act actually form reality around you. A postmodernist might believe that there is a meta narrative or meta reality behind things. But it's something that we can't know. And because of that, it doesn't really matter if it exists or not. But extreme postmodernism will flat out reject anything that is universal or essential.
[00:32:13] So reality is created by language. And as Favale says in her book, in Postmodernism, quote, a claim to authoritative knowledge is simply an exercise to power, end quote.
[00:32:28] So, if someone is or feels oppressed, then their liberation is a reclamation of power, and it's done by switching the language and subsequent attached behavior. And again, the way you're going to do that is, frankly, by force. This is why it's important that people use the right language, the right names, the right pronouns. The goal in that is literally to create this reality. And in the postmodern framework, this reality exists as long as everyone's using the right language.
[00:33:04] I said before, you can change reality by changing your language or story. And you can do this as an individual and live into your own world like that. But of course, you want everyone else to accept your reality. So note that in postmodernism, it's not that truth is relative in the sense that truth doesn't exist. I mean, it doesn't exist as an essential universal for everyone. But truth does exist as it's defined by people in power. So the fight here is to redefine truth in a way that everyone has to accept. It's a power struggle, and it's an actual fight. Power is what makes reality.
[00:33:46] I know that just changing our language in order to change reality is going to sound like a wild, silly, fictional idea to a lot of people. But we need to realize these ideas have been out there for well over 50 years now. It's not really a thing that just cropped up recently. But we're seeing the results of it more and more due to a thing that Favale calls trickle down academia, which I really like that term. Maybe you've heard of trickle down economics from the 1980s. But trickle down academia is the idea that what happens in the academic world drips into society to affect it without everyone knowing the whole idea or knowing where the idea comes from. Those outside the academy have no idea what the underlying premises or concepts even are. We just kind of consume ideas without having any real idea where they come from.
[00:34:44] So through trickle down academia, Favale says feminism has now become mainstream. When she was in college, it was radical to be where she ended up, and now today it seems like you're the odd one out in college if you don't hold to these ideas. And this is functionally the way academia works. Ideas are developed and then it takes years for those ideas to really reach the laypeople.
[00:35:12] That's why the work of Dr. Heiser was so shocking and world changing. He made it his mission to give more people access to academic work. It's becoming more and more common, and I love it. But this is also why many people are hesitant to accept the work from academia, because they aren't used to seeing it in its full form. But they'll accept it once it's filtered down, because someone somewhere found a way to make the new idea palatable, or it's been taught or presented in smaller increments.
[00:35:47] We usually have no idea where these ideas come from when we receive them from our trusted sources in these trickle down approaches. We get them from someone we trust, who heard it from someone else, and so on. Sometimes ideas from the Academy are great, and we should all hear about them sooner because they're useful.
[00:36:07] But other times, we ought to hear about them because otherwise these ideas sneak in to influence us without our knowing it, and we're hoodwinked into accepting something we otherwise wouldn't accept. Of course, sometimes the ideas sound stupid enough that even if we do hear about the idea, we think, well, that's dumb. Of course no one thinks that. But here we are with this stupid sounding idea influencing society in a really impactful way. And, of course, if you package an idea in the right way, it no longer sounds stupid. It starts to make sense to some people.
[00:36:43] And don't forget what I said. It's true that to some degree, we do make or participate in our own reality. That's why we can hold on to an interpretation that we favor, even in the face of good reasons we should not hold it. That's how we deceive ourselves so well. And for a positive way that this happens, this is why certain strands of our family's history matter so much to us. And this is why it's important to develop a biblical imagination. The stories we have in our minds matter to us and they impact us.
[00:37:19] We can choose to live into something that's true. Or we can choose to live into something that is false, but you see there is something true or false that's behind the story that is essential.
[00:37:33] Now when I use the word essential today in this episode, I don't just mean that this is something important. The word essential is a technical philosophical term actually. The essence of something is what it actually is. So if something has an essence Then it possesses something inherent to itself that makes it what it is.
[00:37:59] Essence can be a universal reality that exists even before a particular example shows up on the scene. This is why we talk about God's essence, because the essence of God has always existed along with the actual reality of God himself.
[00:38:16] So even if you don't have a cat, you know what the essential nature is of a cat. But, not all cats are going to look the same or behave the same. There's going to be a wide variation in the actual examples of cats, but they all possess some kind of cat ness that makes them all cats. So you can see what happens and how things are going to break down really quickly if you take away the essential nature of things.
[00:38:46] When there is nothing real behind what a woman is, then there's no way you can define a woman in a universal way.
[00:38:55] Okay, so that's essentialism, the idea there really is something real that just exists in and of itself. One opposite of that is constructivism. A constructivist framework is where reality is constructed as it goes. So there's no creator, there's no inherent meaning to anything, we have to impose our own meaning. In that sense, language is reality and truth is a story we tell ourselves.
[00:39:28] And this is what Abigail Favale calls the gender paradigm. She intentionally doesn't use the term gender ideology, because she thinks paradigm is a better fit, since paradigm is a model for interpreting the world and our experiences. It's like a framework, or a lens. So the gender paradigm is one in which we accept the idea of gender as being something that's not inherent to the material existence of a person. In the gender paradigm, people are free to construct their own reality based on something that's not biological, or ontological, or essential.
[00:40:12] In the gender paradigm, the body is just an object with no essential meaning. And here is a way that I've seen Christians who do believe in a creator, who have bought into the gender paradigm. The explanation for them is that the supposed disparity between body and soul, they will say, is due to the Fall.
[00:40:36] "He's a woman trapped in a man's body," because nature has been so corrupted by the Fall that somehow this makes sense. And frankly, that deeply, deeply bothers me. Favale's book basically gives a good explanation as to why I'm bothered by this. But ultimately, what that seems to be saying is that, in effect, if you believe that someone has a nature that doesn't ascribe to how they've been physically created by God, then there's something very wrong with that person from the get go.
[00:41:10] They've been created wrong. This to me would seem to open the door to the idea that the person is not the image of God, or that God didn't create them, or that they are a mistake that needs to be rectified. And that genuinely bothers me deeply. I don't think any person is a mistake, and we are all the image of God.
[00:41:34] Now, I suppose you could say, if you accept the idea of a fallen human nature, which I really don't, but let's say that I did, you could say that we've all received different ways that the fall has affected our nature, so to speak. So it just happens to be that some have gender dysphoria. But, you see, that's not actually what my Christian friend was saying.
[00:41:56] The idea that someone born into the wrong body actually goes beyond a broken nature argument into the realm of ontology. Like there's something ontologically messed up with that person. Presumably the idea is that in the eschaton, they'll be given an entirely new body that matches who they are. And I have a problem with that.
[00:42:18] More reasons for why I'm bothered will come out as I talk into this series, but just fundamentally, I have a problem with calling someone a mistake. It's just not right. You're not a mistake. No one is a mistake. You're an imager of God. And though we all have a long ways to go in our confirmation into the image of Christ, and we might even have physical problems that will need to be sorted out, we are not ,at our core, ontologically, a mistake.
[00:42:50] And look, it's easier to describe what's going on with this whole gender paradigm thing as we've had the wool pulled over our eyes and we don't even know it. We don't even realize we've accepted the ideas that we've accepted. In fragmenting personhood into being about soul and spirit and body rather than a totality of soul and body, we now get to choose that the body is something that we can and that, in fact, needs to be discarded at a whim, according to how we feel.
[00:43:26] The body no longer matters to personhood in this framework. And I'm sure some of you can see further problems with that idea. If your body isn't part of what makes you a person, then that has looming implications for our acceptance of people at all walks of life, for abortion, and for all other kinds of questions about life's value.
[00:43:50] This is why a Hebraic Old Testament understanding of the person as a united whole is crucial. The idea that the person is the soul and the body together.
[00:44:03] I'm going to have to not take the time to get into all the details of how Favale describes how feminism led directly into the term gender, which inserted itself between sexed identity and embodiment. But it's absolutely riveting course of history. And so I can't leave it at just nothing. What she does is she describes four waves of feminism. The first was centered on women's voting rights and slavery and it led to the 19th amendment in 1920 where women gained the right to vote. Okay, great, we can all get behind that part of it.
[00:44:42] The second wave happened well after World War II, where women entered the work field en masse, and there were the 1950s, where society tried to reverse that course, more or less. And that didn't work all that well.
[00:44:56] So we have 1963, and the book The Feminist Mystique came out. We have the Women's Lib Movement, which this is key to all of this. It had to do with reproductive freedom. That's the turning point right there in which we'll get back to here in a bit.
[00:45:14] The third wave of feminism started in the 1990s with a heightened lens on sexual freedom, consent, and particularly zooming in on the problem of sexual harassment. So in each of these waves, we can see some positive things, right?
[00:45:33] Women should have the right to vote. Women should be able to work outside the home as they desire. Women should be treated well in the workplace, and should never be pressured into having sex. There's a whole bunch of other things that we can tack on there that are good ideas.
[00:45:49] And by the way, Favale says the fourth wave of feminism started around 2012, and is primarily an online movement that's really stopped the waves phenomenon and turned it into an ocean that's basically taken things over. Once something has become mainstream, it can no longer be said to be a movement anymore. This is now the reality we're in.
[00:46:11] While surely that doesn't mean that there are no longer any good things that can come of feminism, but it's now a different kind of thing in a big way. And again, there are different types of feminism, different views, and so this is just kind of broad brushing this history into a general type of flow and narrative that you can follow..
[00:46:33] Okay, so that's feminism, but where does gender come into that? Because, in many ways, the gender paradigm also tears down womanhood. So, how does that work? Well, this is what's absolutely fascinating about the whole thing, I think. Even before postmodernism officially came on the scene, early in the feminist movement, there was an idea of woman as the object or slave to man. You aren't born a woman, you become one as you are enslaved and used by men.
[00:47:08] So this is existentialism, which is a kind of constructivism. In the philosophy of existentialism, you have essence, the reality of something, pitted against existence. Remember, essence is the what ness of what something is. We know what a human is without needing to have one standing in front of us, because there's a meaning to what a human is.
[00:47:35] But Existentialism says that you make your meaning as you exist. Existentialism came out of Marxism, and so Existentialist Feminism said that all women should work, because only by working outside the home can you define yourself, since you don't have any inherent meaning just in being yourself. So, if you're home tending the kids, that's not real work. So, you're home with the kids and you're a slave to mankind.
[00:48:08] The horrific aspect of this feminism, and I don't even want to call it that because of what it really is, is it's a war against femaleness. Even though they're trying to tell women that they're slaves to men, they're actually siding with and empowering the masculine patriarchy. Freedom for women means being and acting like a man. And it's not just in this very obvious Marxist framework that we see that. It's all through the history of feminism.
[00:48:40] Here's a quote from the Genesis of Gender. And this is from a lawsuit between Planned Parenthood versus Casey. And it reads, quote, "At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe and of the mystery of human life," end quote.
[00:49:04] As Favale says, quote, "there is no 'givenness' to the world that we have responsibility for or over, no inherent meaning or existence," end quote.
[00:49:19] And we see over and over in the movement, any meaning or intentionality is not towards the feminine, but in fact it's towards the masculine.
[00:49:31] But really, we've only just barely scratched the surface. So we go from existentialist feminism to true postmodern feminism, which takes from identity politics and desiring to fight against the institution because the institution that holds the power is the thing that defines everything. So, language must now be twisted to our own advantage.
[00:49:56] But this probably couldn't have happened in the way that it did without the effect of reproductive freedom. Okay, so, more history. What we can call the first modern gender altering surgery happened in the 1930s, and part of the goal was to give the man a uterus, because he wanted to have another man's babies. To be a woman at the time meant that you could procreate and carry children. That was an inherent part of the definition of being a woman. The man died because his body rejected the uterus.
[00:50:33] By the second gender altering surgery, there was no attempt to implant a uterus. Not because they thought, well, we'd better not do that, because look at the other guy. But because by the 1950s, contraception was available. And suddenly, you could be a woman and have sex, and not end up pregnant. So the idea of procreation as part of who a woman was, had receded. To be a woman was now about appearance. The history of birth control is a very disturbing one, and connected to eugenics and trying to stamp out those unfit people and blaming women for their propagation.
[00:51:14] But of course, that wasn't on everyone's minds when they wanted contraception. But the fallout from the availability of easy to take birth control was that people no longer needed to control themselves, but rather we could have control over nature itself. We don't need to curb our will, we can contort nature to have our own will. And the result was, as Abigail Favale says, to pathologize femaleness. It became a bad thing to be manifesting as a female in the ways that females manifest. Again, the standard of good was man, not women. We started talking about women's health, but by health we didn't mean wholeness, but to function like a man.
[00:52:05] Because of contraception, we now see sex as recreational and not procreational. And look, this doesn't have to be some false dichotomy either or thing. Of course, sex can be fun and enjoyable. It can promote goodness in marriages. But with contraception, fertility doesn't have to be at the forefront of our minds. And because of that, sex is now primarily about what happens in our own bodies with pleasure as a focus.
[00:52:36] Autonomy and freedom for women means that we have the same thing that men have, in not having to worry about pregnancy. So we've erased a distinct difference between the sexes there, which effectively separates personhood from sex, and allows our bodies to just be things that we use for ourselves.
[00:52:58] Paraphrasing Favale, she says that we've objectified ourselves with a phantom personhood that is rooted only in our wills and the body becomes an obstacle to overcome.
[00:53:10] So in all of that, because we've erased the fundamental difference between men and women in intercourse, the word sex became used for the act and not for the type of person, which left a gaping hole in meaning that allowed the term gender to step in.
[00:53:27] Previous to this, gender was a grammatical term. Now it became a sexual one. But because it was no longer connected to differentiated bodies, the postmodernists took it and they talked about gender performance. They said you were a particular gender because you performed the particular things that that gender was assigned to do in society.
[00:53:53] And note the term assigned to. These are not inherent things to you, but things that society tells you to do. You're a woman if you act and look like a woman. You're a man if you act and look like a man. And again, to some degree, there is some truth to this. Sometimes we act purposefully into our stereotypes.
[00:54:15] But what we need to realize is they were absolutely and utterly and completely serious in talking about defining gender as performance because remember, language creates reality. Again to paraphrase Favale. Contraception allowed the idea of gender because it reshaped our understanding of the sex to body and procreation became incidental to the sterile pleasure of sex. Sex was all about erotic desire now.
[00:54:44] So it's interesting when you have the idea of gender as performance that it actually erases the amazing diversity that exists within the sexes. All you really have left after that are stereotypes. And, you know, sometimes stereotypes are not all bad. Sometimes they're pretty distasteful because they really do erase those beautiful differences, though.
[00:55:08] Quoting Dr. Favale, she says, quote, " When a girl recognizes that she does not fit the stereotypes of girlhood, she is now invited to question her sex rather than the stereotype," end quote.
[00:55:26] That quote really hit me. Instead of finding and celebrating the uniqueness of who she is, instead of bucking against the restrictions of stereotype, she might feel like she's got to fit into the opposite stereotype.
[00:55:41] Some of the statistics that Favale points out in her book is that transgenderism used to be mostly middle aged men, and since 2019, there's been an explosion in the population of teen girls. Favale says that the gender paradigm is the lens through which they interpret their inner turmoil.
[00:56:01] Femaleness is now a burden, and one of the reasons for this is probably due to hypersexualization. Sex and its impact is forced upon our children earlier and earlier and in many more unique ways than they've ever been exposed to it before. When you think about it that way, you've got to expect some problems.
[00:56:23] Favale says in the face of hypersexualization, quote, "the better rebellion, and the more difficult one, is learning to see one's beauty and dignity as a woman amidst a culture that denies it," end quote. Or, I'd say a culture that uses, objectifies, or weaponizes it.
[00:56:45] Favale says that our bodies went from meaning, creation, and nourishment, and life, to sterile pleasure. Tools for gratification. And it's no wonder that this is a negative message. Of course we need to take care not to oversimplify what's going on, and how people are entering these spaces in the meanings and for the reasons that they have. This is just one example of the pressure that someone might be under to feel things that they do and we should not marginalize or trivialize all of the unique experiences as if they're all the same thing for everyone, because they're not.
[00:57:22] There's so much more I could say about this topic and this book, but I'll just have to finish with the opposite idea that Favale suggests. Instead of a gender paradigm, she suggests a Genesis paradigm, which harkens back to the pre fall Eden, which you can see why I like this so much, because I'm all about not forgetting that the first two chapters of Genesis exist.
[00:57:49] But here's her quote unquote Catholic way that she puts this, and I actually really deeply love this idea. She suggests that we see our bodies as sacrament, and by that, she means the idea that the visible reveals the invisible. What we see in our physical bodies is what we are internally, and incarnation and embodiment are essential to life and our experience.
[00:58:21] Rather than fracturing ourselves, we need to integrate ourselves into wholeness. That doesn't mean that we're not going to have problems or difficulties to overcome in order to do that, but seeing our physical bodies as essential parts of who we are, and I mean that in a technical way. Our bodies are our essential selves, and understanding that as reflecting who we are on a spiritual level, as well, it can bring a holistic personhood into view where we can see ourselves as the embodied image of God that we are.
[00:58:57] For sure, we all need Christ to bring us into true wholeness and to overcome all of our fracturedness. That is why He Himself was incarnated, so that He could do that. And we need each other as well, the body of Christ, to walk along together as disciples. And that's probably a topic I'm going to be talking about a lot more in the next episode in particular.
[00:59:24] Dr. Favale has a really excellent ending as she talks about this, and really so many good ideas in her book. She even talks about Genesis in comparison to the Babylonian text, the Enuma Elish, And she highlights the differences in how they talk about the creation and purpose of humanity. She says, quote, " Stories of origin are ultimately stories of identity and purpose." end quote.
[00:59:51] We understand who we are by knowing where we came from. And so this whole concept of identity is absolutely crucial for us all. It's something we really need to struggle with. It's something we really need to think about directly. And when it comes to men and women and how we are both the image of God, men and women together are reciprocal gifts to life, and reducing sex to be about desire doesn't promote that meaning.
[01:00:24] We need to see and celebrate our differences and the ways that we work together and the meanings that we have that are inherent to ourselves, but we are also unique individuals. And the way that our essential meaning is expressed doesn't have to look the same from person to person. When we hid in shame after we gave in to our personal desire in the garden, we created a, quote, " war within ourselves that threatens the wholeness of the person," end quote.
[01:00:57] We are at war with ourselves and each other and our bodies. We are objectified and improper domination has entered the world. As Favale says, quote, "Man's response to the woman's desire is to dominate her, end quote. And apparently our desire, in the Marxist framework, in response to that is to try to enter man's toil in work.
[01:01:24] So we have all of human history as a testament to what happened in the garden. It's such a paradox that when women are supposedly rising up to disallow the domination of men, What we end up doing is erasing ourselves and actually going along with what that domination entails. By becoming more like man, we erase our distinctive difference that is there for the flourishing of life.
[01:01:50] And the same can be said for men in different ways as they abandon masculinity and try to enter the feminine sphere. But does that mean that women are just about having babies and that's it? And men are just about working? I don't think that's what this means.
[01:02:07] While physical procreation is the visible sign of all of this, there is so much more to it. And it's about this essential meaning, who we are and not just what we're doing with what we are. It's not that we have to be married and having babies in order to fulfill this purpose. Because remember, again, there's that essentialness to what it means and what it is to be a woman.
[01:02:34] We are this thing, and it manifests in many different ways that doesn't have anything at all to do with sex or marriage. That's another dominant idea that we have, that sex and marriage and children are what defines us in our sexed differences. And that doesn't have to be the case, that's just the visible manifestation and sign of it.
[01:02:58] All of that is again, it's a very modern, "sex as pleasure" type of idea. Being fruitful and multiplying... really it's looking at sex as a function, as something that, is necessarily something you do, rather than something you are. Being fruitful and multiplying has, as its first example, the bearing and raising of kids, of course.
[01:03:23] But it's so much more than that. It's discipleship and flourishing of life in so many ways. Remember that the ground was cursed so that by men's sweat would bread be brought forth. So, buying into the idea that all of humanity must enter the workforce for our bread is making women share in that, rather than being the exemplar of producing life in all the ways and iterations that we can and do. That doesn't mean we can't work, but it means looking at that deep, essential meaning.
[01:03:58] Here's a last quote from Dr. Favale that I hope illustrates this well. She says, quote, " What would it look like to model our praxis on the norm of female embodiment, an ethos of interconnection and radical hospitality to life, an ethos that is built on the value of integrity rather than autonomy, personal wholeness that is synergistic, opening to love to accommodate the wholeness of another, to not just be a solitary self. In truth, the human soul, like a child in the womb, is never alone."
[01:04:41] I think that's beautiful, and I encourage you to read her book and think on the Genesis paradigm of what it would look like to live according to the purposes of creation and the design of creation. And we can do that in our own unique ways. We aren't called to the same things, but we are called to walk and disciple together. And I love how Dr. Favale encourages us to see that we should not expect every human to look or act the same; we should welcome everyone into church and walk with them in what they're going through.
[01:05:16] She says, rightly, I think, that the church has not done well to walk beside those who are within this gender paradigm. We don't come alongside those people to say we will walk with you in it. I love her suggestion that we should ask people questions and be curious and journey with them, to be patient and open and listening. That was true of me before I left the LDS church, and it should be true for anyone we meet that we might be tempted to see as an outsider or somebody who is opposed to us.
[01:05:51] Eden's wholeness disintegrates into conflict and division when we seek our own destiny or when we marginalize others, either way. The question I will leave you with is this, what would promote the preservation and the flourishing of the whole rather than fragmenting into disunity?
[01:06:14] This is a question for each of us as individuals, as well as a question for the wider body of Christ. Thank you for joining me in this episode. I definitely have more to come in this whole topic. I appreciate you all for listening, for rating the podcast where you listen, for sharing the episodes with others whom you might think might enjoy them, whether that's sharing them personally with others, or on social media, or in groups, or on YouTube. or wherever else you can.
[01:06:44] Thank you especially to those of you who support me financially. You guys rock. If anyone wants to get a hold of me, you can do so either on Facebook or through my website at GenesisMarksThisSpot. com where you can sign up for my newsletter. You can find blog posts, guest profiles, and artwork, and hopefully, really I do mean it, some merchandise one of these days.
[01:07:12] All right, well, that is it for this week. I wish you all a blessed week, and we will see you later.
