Nancy Pearcey in her book Love Thy Body makes the statement that “Human life and sexuality have become the watershed moral issues of our age.”^[1] These issues are not only impacting society in general but affecting the church as well. In the introduction to her book, she gives some data regarding five areas where we find a significant co-opting of the church by the secular worldview: pornography, cohabitation, divorce, homosexuality and transgenderism, and abortion.

We quote her work regarding homosexuality and transgenderism, “These issues are dividing even conservative religious groups. In a 2014 Pew Research Center study, 51 percent of evangelical millennials said same-sex behavior is morally acceptable.”^[2] We add to that the following alarming statistics: According to a 2022 Pew survey, 1.6 percent of U.S. adults claim to be transgender. In 2023, a Gallup poll found that within Generation Z, the LGBT population doubled in just four years, from 10.5 percent in 2017 to 20.8 percent in 2021.^[3]

Nancy Pearcey then goes on to state: “In the words of theologian Stanley Hauerwas, a moral act cannot be seen as just an isolated act but involves fundamental options about the nature and significance of life itself.”^[4] In effect, in every decision we make we are not just deciding what we want to do, we are expressing our view of the purpose of human life.

We will return to Nancy Pearcey toward the end of this essay, but first let’s look at some verses from both the Old and New Testament. The Bible has long been looked to for timeless guidance on what it means to honor God with our lives. The following verses referencing the heart, soul, strength, and mind leave no doubt that our whole being, including our sexuality, is what is being referred to.

“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might” (Deut. 6:5 [ESV]).

“And he answered [the lawyer who had asked how he might inherit eternal life], "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself"( Luke 10:27 [ESV]).

To honor God with respect to our sexuality is to understand and appreciate His purpose and love in creating us male and female and to have respect for the power of sexuality and its purpose in bonding together families and bringing new life into the world.

The author Preston Sprinkle raises the question in his book Embodied: “If someone experiences incongruence between their biological sex and their gender, which one determines who they are – and why?”^[5] What does the Bible say about this question?

He goes on to say, rightly, that there isn’t a verse that nicely and neatly says something like this: “If thy gender identity does not match thy biological sex, then thine body is who thou really art.” But he then goes on to point out that the Bible has quite a few relevant things to say about human nature and the importance of our biological sex. It is our intention with this essay to spend a little bit of time with these Bible verses in the hope of seeing any questions connected with the whole area of transgenderism as God would want us to see and understand them.

In the first chapter of Genesis, verse 27 (ESV) we read:

“So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.”

There are a number of ways of reading and interpreting this passage and determining what it means to “bear God’s image”. This has been a subject that theologians have wrestled with for centuries. Perhaps the most meaningful interpretation relative to the subject at hand is a consideration of the Hebrew word tselem. The word almost always refers to “idols” throughout the Old Testament. When we look for a definition of idols we see that they are a visible representation of an invisible deity. The term can be expanded to mean a carved or hewn statue or copy. When we apply this to Genesis 1:27 this “statue or copy” is humanity and the non-physical being is Yahweh. Marc Cortez in his book ReSourcing Theological Anthropology puts it quite well in stating that the image of God is a “declaration that God intended to create human persons to be the physical means through which he would manifest his own divine presence in the world.”^[6]

We would like to shift the thinking slightly to a consideration of whether the whole thinking that is evident in much of the area of transgenderism is really a resurgence of Gnosticism, which some claim to be one of the default American religions particularly for the last 200 years.

We refer you to a podcast of a dialogue between Justin, head of apologetics and theology for the organization Premier Unbelievable and N.T. Wright who, at the time of the original recording in 2019, was Senior Research Fellow at Wycliffe Hall, Oxford University. The complete podcast is available at the Premier Unbelievable website (see Resources below) as #162 Ask NT Wright Anything – Questions on Sexuality and LGBT. The podcast is about his thoughts on cohabitation, homosexuality and transgenderism with the transgenderism segment beginning about 21:00 minutes into the podcast.

The interviewer, Justin, has opened the dialogue by bringing up a letter by N.T. Wright published in the London Times in response to two articles that were basically viewed as “sort of cultural analysis type pieces.” Justin reads from N.T. Wright’s letter, which says,

The article by Claire Fojas, Gender Fluid World, is muddling young minds and Hugo Rifkin’s Social Media is making gender meaningless. And the letters about children wanting to be pandas, dogs or mermaids show that the confusion about gender identity is a modern and now internet-fueled form of the ancient philosophy of Gnosticism … The Gnostic “one who knows” has discovered the secret of quote unquote "who I really am" behind the deceptive outward appearance in Rifkin's apt phrase, the ungainly boring fleshly one. This involves denying the goodness or even the ultimate reality of the natural world. Nature however tends to strike back with the likely victims in this case being vulnerable and impressionable youngsters who as confused adults will pay the price for their elder’s fashionable fantasies.^[7]

N.T. Wright responds:

… There's a lot of that [denying the goodness or even the ultimate reality of the natural world] in the second and third centuries. And it's very interesting, the rise of Gnosticism in roughly the middle of the second century onwards then chimes in with the fact that Gnosticism has been one of the default American religions particularly for the last 200 years… Harold Bloom says this in a famous book and you find it in Jung and other psychologists, the idea that who I really am, is what I discover when I look deep inside my heart. And then I discover, and then if I look at my body, oh, dear, this doesn't quite match.^[8]

N.T. Wright continues:

Gnosticism is ultimately dualistic… Who I really am. Now, I have known, as, we most of us have, some people who have had transgender issues, shall we say… These are genuine, dear people who one loves and wants to help and affirm and so on. However, as with some other styles of behavior, if I as a pastor see somebody doing something which I deeply and with care believe is really destructive in some way, I need to say something about that. And particularly, I worry about children …. I have grandchildren now. I worry about them being in a world where somebody might ask, you know, a seven-year-old, do you want to be a boy or a girl, as though this is in the whole rhetoric of saying, you were assigned that gender at birth, but actually you may be somebody else. This idea [about] gender is a purely socially constructed phenomenon.^[9]

While Nancy Pearcey does not necessarily refer to Gnosticism per se, in the introduction to her book Love Thy Body she discusses the body/person split and the philosophies that have led up to this thinking that is so current in our society today. She writes:

The key to understanding all the controversial issues of our day is that the concept of the human being has likewise been fragmented into an upper and lower story. Secular thought today assumes a body/person split, with body defined in the “fact” realm by empirical science (lower story) and the person defined in the “values” realm as the basis for rights (upper story). This dualism has created a fractured, fragmented view of the human being, in which the body is treated as separate from the authentic self.^[10]

In a section of her book entitled I Am Not My Body, Pearcey presents an example of the type of material that is offered by the transgender advocate. Here she states that they deny that gender identity is rooted in biology. Their argument is that gender is completely independent of the body.”^[11] Other statements convey the same understanding: “the authentic self has no connection to the body. The real person resides in the spirit, mind, will, and feelings … Our physical traits give no signposts for the right way to deploy our sexuality.”^[12] She sums up the views of this material in the following words: “If the meaning of our sexuality is not something we derive from the body, then it becomes something we impose on the body. It is a social construction. Sexual identity is reduced to a postmodern concept completely disconnected from the body.”^[13]

References

1. ^ Nancy Pearcey, Love Thy Body: Answering Hard Questions about Life and Sexuality (Baker Books, 2018), pg. 9

2. ^ Pearcey, Love Thy Body, pg. 11

3. ^ Bill Donohue, Cultural Meltdown, Pg. 123

4. ^ Stanley Hauerwas, Vision and Virtue, (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1974), Pg. 155

5. ^ Preston Sprinkle, Embodied: Transgender Identities, the Church & What the Bible Has to Say, (David C Cook, 2021), pg. 63

6. ^ Marc Cortez, ReSourcing Theological Anthropology: A Constructive Account of Humanity in the Light of Christ, (Zondervan Academic, 2018), pg. 109

7. ^ N.T. Wright, “Ask N T Wright Anything – Questions on Sexuality and LGBT.” Premier Unbelievable podcast, reposted March 2023 within https://www.premierunbelievable.com/ask-nt-wright-anything/ask-nt-wright-anything-162-questions-on-sexuality-and-lgbt/15214.article

8. ^ Wright, Questions on sexuality and LGBT podcast

9. ^ Wright, Questions on sexuality and LGBT podcast

10. ^ Pearcey, Love Thy Body, pg. 42

11. ^ Pearcey, Love Thy Body, pg. 31

12. ^ Pearcey, Love Thy Body, pg. 31

13. ^ Pearcey, Love Thy Body, pg. 31