Gender and sexuality is the most requested topic for this blog. So, this week I’m kicking off a series of (at least) six posts on it. Today, I’m going to do some introduction on the topic, talking about some general framework issues. Next week I’ll get into issues of patriarchy, followed the week after by a post on transgender issues, followed by two posts on same-sex relationships, and ending(?) with a post on relationships and sexual ethics more broadly.
So what’s my starting point when thinking about issues of gender and sexuality? Y’all are gonna get tired of this, but… love. You are made in God’s image (Genesis 1:27), and God loves you (Romans 8:38-39, 1 John 3:1), no matter what (Romans 8:38-39). We’re called to love each other (Romans 13:8-10, 1 John 4:8). Is patriarchal oppression loving? No! Is shaming, othering, and oppressing LGBT folks loving? No! Of course these things aren’t loving. So if that’s what your theology leads to, you’ve lost a step along the way.1
So what’s the disconnect? What led to many Christians believing things that supported these bad outcomes? My best read on this is that many Christians fail to realize that what they’ve been taught about the Bible is itself an interpretation. When they read the Word, they see what they think is the “plain meaning” staring them in the face, but the truth is they’re seeing what they’ve been taught to see. Take, for example, Genesis 1, which is often used to teach that gender is binary and transness is wrong:
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth…
And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.
God saw the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness.
God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night”…And God said, “Let the water under the sky be gathered to one place, and let dry ground appear.” And it was so.
God called the dry ground “land,” and the gathered waters he called “seas”…Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image”…
So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.
God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number”…
“It says it right there—God made 2 genders, not 64! ‘Male and female he created them’—checkmate liberal!” Well, not so fast… It says that God created land and sea (Genesis 1:9-10), but don’t we also see swamps and marshland? It says God created day and night (Genesis 1:4-5), but isn’t there also dusk and sunset and sunrise? There is a wide variety of beauty in God’s creation that isn’t captured in the contrasts listed in the creation account. Why then does the conservative Christian assume the same can’t be true of gender? (I’ll be returning to this passage and this idea more in-depth in a later post).
So in this series, I’ll go through several aspects of gender and sexuality. I’ll deconstruct positions I was taught, positions that nowadays are sometimes painted as “the” Christian position or “the” biblical position on those issues,2 and I’ll explain how I think we can better understand these issues; how we can approach gender and sexuality in a way that honors God’s Word and His will… How to think about these issues that I believe helps us best follow The Way.
I do want to acknowledge here that lately some conservative Christians have tried to go out of their way to maintain the same theological outlook (homosexuality is sinful, women should be submissive, etc) while recognizing some of the problematic behavior Christians engage in and advocating for a more loving outlook and behavior. I’ll get into this, and why I think it’s wrong-headed in subsequent posts.↩︎
As we’ll see, some of these theological stances weren’t even accepted by the early Church and sometimes are relatively new inventions, but of course some Christians will have you believe they’re the only legitimate way to interpret Scripture 🙄↩︎
