Vanhoozer Hits a Home Run on the Gender Debate

The idea that we are trapped in women’s bodies or women trapped in man’s bodies collapses the distinction between sex and gender with a Gnostic, even docetic, disregard for bodily reality (he only seems [dokeo] to be made)…

In refusing one’s biology, the creature refuses what is ultimately not merely a natural given but a gift of God. And in doing that, the creature exchanges the truth for a lie – and not for the first time. Paul in Romans 1:18-28 speaks of sinners as those who prefer to have their own way, thus worshipping the creature rather than the Creator. The Gentiles ‘exchanged’ the truth about God for a lie; others exchanged natural relations with members of the opposite sex for relations with their own sex…Paul goes on to say that these men and women ‘did not see fit to acknowledge [have knowledge of] God.’ (Rom. 1:28 RSV). Sin is and has always been the denial of reality…It is hard not to see the transgender liberation movement as transgression; an overt rebellion against the binary divide between male and female bodies and behavior…to perform sex reassignment is to encourage the worst kind of playacting: hypocrisy. The irony, as with all sin, is that in trying to find oneself, one loses oneself. Those who seek to rewrite their roles make God a bit player in a drama that exchanges the gospel for the pottage of self-determination.

Who do we say that we are? How does God see us? The transsexual belief that male souls are trapped in female bodies and vice versa has little to justify it other than one’s own subjective feeling: “What it is to be a male or female becomes a matter of what is to feel male or female.’ Even after a sex change operation, however, there is a conspicuous lack of real-world fittingness: a male-to-male transsexual could not conceive a child, and a female-to-male transsexual could not father one. In the final analysis, human creativity is unable to alter the created order…to be male or female is not for us to decide.” – Kevin Vanhoozer, Four Views of Moving Beyond the Bible to Theology, 195-197

The first thing I said (outloud) when I read this, especially regarding page 194 “The ultimate issue concerns our human identity as embodied persons. The stakes are indeed high,” was “it’s about time!” The second thing I thought was, “how on earth did I come across this in a book on how to do theology?”And the third thing I thought was, “and this guy is the Professor of Theology at Wheaton?” (Wheaton’s sociology, social psychology, and some of the other social science departments are a breeding ground for various kinds of feminism).

The Gender (Sex?) Debate

It might seem out of place at first, but since the issue of female pastors, homosexuality, and gender roles were some of the primary topics of discussion in the book Four Views of Going Beyond the Bible to Theology, transsexuality wasn’t really off the mark. In fact, it was a lot more relevant than all of the other discussions about gender roles, marriage, women in ministry, etc. put together. How so?

Contrary to popular belief, the real “gender debate” isn’t complimentarianism vs. egalitarianism, female vs. male pastors, or mutual submission vs. female submission in marriage. No, those things are surface level issues, the manifestations of more fundamental and more important principles of creation. “The battle,” as Kuyper said in his opening remarks to Lectures on Calvinism, if it is “to be fought with honor and with hope of victory,” must array “principle against principle.” Indeed, the battle is not over gender roles, but over gender itself.

Vanhoozer summarizes the classical distinction between sex and gender:

Sex is something biological (chromosomal marker): gender, is something sociological associated with perceptions of masculinity and femininity (cultural marker), and gender identity, something psychological (consciousness marker).

The question many people have at this point is, regardless of the definitions of such distinctions, why any distinction? The Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is helpful at this point:

Along with psychologists like Stoller, feminists found it useful to distinguish sex and gender. This enabled them to argue that many differences between women and men were socially produced and, therefore, changeable. In order to distinguish biological differences from social/psychological ones and to talk about the latter, feminists appropriated the term ‘gender’. Psychologists writing on transsexuality were the first to employ gender terminology in this sense. Until the 1960s, ‘gender’ was used solely to refer to masculine and feminine words, like le and la in French (Nicholson 1994, 80; see also Nicholson 1998). However, in order to explain why some people felt that they were ‘trapped in the wrong bodies’, the psychologist Robert Stoller (1968) began using the terms ‘sex’ to pick out biological traits and ‘gender’ to pick out the amount of femininity and masculinity a person exhibited. Although (by and large) a person’s sex and gender complemented each other, separating out these terms seemed to make theoretical sense allowing Stoller to explain the phenomenon of transsexuality: transsexuals’ sex and gender simply don’t match.

…Distinguishing sex and gender, however, also enables the two to come apart: they are separable in that one can be sexed male and yet be gendered a woman, or vice versa (Haslanger 2000b; Stoljar 1995)…

So, this group of feminist arguments against biological determinism suggested that gender differences result from cultural practices and social expectations. Nowadays it is more common to denote this by saying that gender is socially constructed. This means that genders (women and men) and gendered traits (like being nurturing or ambitious) are the “intended or unintended product[s] of a social practice” (Haslanger 1995, 97). – Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

The discussion in the book continues for several pages, summarizing the endless views of “gender” and “sexuality.” And as if the debate couldn’t be confusing enough in feminist theory, just consider what’s happening in the church. In Britain, “under the aforementioned Gender Recognition Act, a man can have a male-to female transsexual surgery and then legally marry another man, even though for all biological (chromosomal) purposes, he is still male. This raises the prospect of whether the church would recognize such a marriage, if it were not strictly speaking between ‘a man and a woman.’ A further issue in the church is whether ministers who undergo transsexual surgery may remain ordained,” (Beyond the Bible, 193).

If these things don’t leave one utterly confused as to what it means to be a man or a woman, it at the very least leaves one looking for something more profound, something solid, something biblical.

The Principle Battle and the Real Villain: Gender Relativism

Vanhoozer does just that. Using transsexuality and transgenderedness as a less popular (although remarkably more effective) example, he asserts that changing your sex to match your gender is just as wrong and misleading as your desire to change your sex in the first place. The irony of transgendered people who assert that gender is relative to their preference is that they often try to change their sex – as if their gender (psychology) is more absolute than their sex (genetics/biology). In the end, Vanhoozer strongly suggests that not only is sexual relativism wrong, but so is gender relativism. Gender relativism says that not only are gender roles relative but gender itself (masculinity and femininity, maleness and femaleness, the non-biological distinctions between men and women) is relative. Biology may not be plastic, it is admitted in many gender relativist circles, but masculinity and femininity are infinitely plastic.

Instead of falling into this ideology and the endless battles of preference, Vanhoozer does what is most sound and fruitful: he argues from principle. He asserts that being “male” and “female” has far more implications than sexuality and biology because of God’s design. That is, there is such thing as objective masculinity and femininity; there are principles of the sexes that go beyond sex/biology. God didn’t create male and female bodies and implant within them a genderless soul; human beings are psycho-somatic so that biology and psychology, sex and gender, the manifestation of purpose and the purpose itself cannot be separated. As such, not only is the gender/sexuality distinction misleading (although sometimes helpful), there is a set of principles (a purpose) about what it means to be a man and a woman, and biology clearly reflects that divine purpose (it’s the same for virtually any creation, ie spoons don’t have prongs like a fork because that’s not its purpose). Therefore, gender itself, the non-biological differences between the sexes and God-given purposes for male image-bearing and for female image-bearing, is the subject of the debate. Indeed, as I noted several months ago, the real gender debate is over gender relativism and whether there is a knowable, objective, trans-culturally-relevant way in which a male bears the image of God and the way a female bears the image of God.

Of course, Vanhoozer is in the minority for suggesting something contrary to the ever-growing trend of gender relativism – which permeates 21st century Christianity. Indeed, gender relativism is the bread and butter of egalitarianism. The popular evangelical feminist movement builds off its feminist roots and, although are usually keen enough to resist sexual relativism (transsexuality is addressable and wrong), are willing to store the rotting corpse of gender relativism in their closet of “empowerment,” “mutual submission,” and “liberation” (transgenderedness is unaddressable and unknowable to be wrong). Actual physical changes to one’s maleness/femaleness is crossing the line, but all other change to the distinction in creation is OK.

Why? Because, again, gender is relative – or, we simply cannot know what God’s non-biological intentions for sexed human beings really were at creation. In the words of Rebecca Groothuis, editor of Discovering Biblical Equality (Gordon Fee, Craig Keener, I Howard Marshall, etc. contributing) and Good News for Women:

…it is not possible to ascertain which of these general differences between men and women may have been established by God in the original act of creation, and which have developed as a result of the fall…Similarly, it is impossible to decipher which generally apparent gender differences are due to nature and which are due to nurture, or what mixture of nature and nurture there may be in these generalizable differences. Because of the powerful and pervasive influence of environment on human behavior, innate gender differences cannot be isolated and then manipulated and controlled in scientific experimentation. Yet it is evident that in every culture there are general behavioral differences between women and men, some of which seem to be more or less consistent across culture; but even this does not necessarily show these differences to be ordained by God. (emphasis mine)

In other words, other than biology, it is impossible to know if there are God-ordained differences between the sexes. But what we can objectively know, it is argued, is that the sexes are similar and that, somehow, we just know they’re different:

Although the points of difference between men and women can vary from time to time and culture to culture, the consistency of complementarity (in the true sense!) is indicative of God’s creationally ordained differentiation of male and female humanity. This we can know to be God’s design! What is not warranted from either nature or Scripture is a flat-footed stance on what men and women ought and ought not do in terms of ministry and vocation in order to be truly feminine or truly masculine in accordance with what God “clearly” ordained at creation.

The basis for Groothuis’s objection to complimentarianism (“what is not warranted…”) is gender relativism. There are no principles in creation marking the non-biological differences between the sexes. We can only speculate on what it means to be a man and a woman. (But we can know that – as Karl Barth said almost a century ago – that people as sexed human beings are objectively different. There is, according to Groothuis and Barth, “differentiation.”)

You might notice a problem: the egalitarian asserts on the one hand that we can’t know the non-biological differences between the sexes (or at least God’s intention for creational masculinity and femininity), but on the other hand says that we can know that there are non-biological differences between the sexes. The evangelical feminist appears to be gender-confused.

Sparks in the Classroom

It reminds me of one of the major events that shoved my focus on the subject of gender in the first place. I was sitting in the GEN300 sexuality subcourse I took in college. The lecture hall was packed with over 100 students, and it was the last 5 minutes of class. After drawing a line between “man” and “woman” on the board, my professor talked about the New Covenant, Galatians 3:28 (“there is neither Jew nor Gentile, nor male nor female”) and then erased the line. I could tell he was nervous; he was by no means prepared to back up these assertions. But he did what most egalitarians do: he subconsciously and confidently asserted that Paul in Galatians 3:28 is somehow abolishing not merely gender roles, but abolishing gender itself. There really isn’t such thing as being male and female in the New Covenant (except for a biological sense, of course), and even if there was, it’s not something we can know about to the point of addressing it in church ordinance or societal law.

This was enough to get my attention, but I knew too little to object (confronting professors in front of other professors and a room full of confused students is always risky). But finally, in his last statement, I knew it was time to speak up. He concluded his presentation thus, “our world is changing, and we have to learn how to apply these principles in Scripture regarding gender in different cultures and contexts.”

These principles?!? These principles?!?! I thought. My hand shot into the air while my mouth spewed out the obvious, “But, aren’t you assuming there are transcultural principles in the Bible about what it means to be a man and a woman in the first place? You have to have a principle to apply if you’re going to apply a principle, but you haven’t actually shown any principles about masculinity and femininity…”

He was pissed. And while approaching my seat and lowering his eyebrows he said with great frustration: “Well what do YOU think it means to be a man or a woman?!?” Of course, that was the million dollar question that he (and the other three “professors” presiding) were supposed to answer during the 80 minute lecture. And, of course, this put me on the spot as much as I put him on the spot, which I appreciated. I said, “I honestly don’t know right now, but there is a strong, undeniable pattern throughout all of Scripture and human history that suggests something to the nature of male-strength and female beauty.” In that context, of course, I was asserting something beyond mere physical strength and physical beauty – and that in fact, gender and sexuality are inseparable. The precise implications of this basic truth of nature must be put on hold for another essay.

However, this puts the fire back on the evangelical feminist/gender relativists toes: how can we objectively know “God’s creationally ordained differentiation of male and female humanity” (Groothuis) without objectively knowing the actual differences between gender? That is, how can we know there’s difference without defining the differences? The best  egalitarians have to offer is “besides biology, men and women are different, but we don’t know how and we can’t really know how with certainty.”

The debate can thus be (roughly) summarized in the following visual form (moves from left to right) – and keep in mind these visuals are only designed primarily around the differences and distinctions between the sexes, not the similarities:

A Version of Gender and Sexuality from Biblical Christianity

Generic Evangelical Feminism

Liberalism/Secularism