“Insofar as it may be known” — Intersexuality in the Nashville Statement, a Response

(Originally published 6 September 2017)

Every few years, Evangelical leaders get together to remind each other that, no matter where public opinion sways, they remain committed to “biblical manhood and womanhood.” In academic-speak, these conservative Christians are defending cisgender heteronormativity: Most recently, a large number of Evangelical academics, pastors, authors, public figures, university administrators all signed and published the Nashville Statement, recommitting themselves to fighting for their beliefs in a “post-Christian” world.

Among the most famous signatories are John Piper, Francis Chan, John MacArthur, James Dobson. There are no surprises here, only fresh meat in Chan, a popular author and preacher who is not shy about his views on sexuality.

These Evangelical leaders and the thousands of online signatories are professing their belief in a natural order of sexuality: Male bodies are designed to produce straight, masculine men and female bodies straight, feminine women.

Their purpose for the Statement is expressed in the preamble:

“We are persuaded that faithfulness in our generation means declaring once again the true story of the world and of our place in it — particularly as male and female. Christian Scripture teaches that there is but one God who alone is Creator and Lord of all. To him alone, every person owes glad-hearted thanksgiving, heart-felt praise, and total allegiance. This is the path not only of glorifying God, but of knowing ourselves. To forget our Creator is to forget who we are, for he made us for himself. And we cannot know ourselves truly without truly knowing him who made us. We did not make ourselves. We are not our own. Our true identity, as male and female persons, is given by God. It is not only foolish, but hopeless, to try to make ourselves what God did not create us to be.”
In faith, these Evangelicals believe that God ordained this nature when He created the original male and female as distinct representations of his own divine image. The Nashville Statement is doctrinal: it concerns a theological consensus around the subject of anthropology. What it means to be human, the image of God, is intimately-related to one’s body type: male or female. God designed men and women for either cisgendered heterosexual marriage, where sexual activity is permitted and the gender roles correspond to body types, or abstinence from sexual relations. Deviation from these accepted paths is permitted only insofar as sinful impulses do not become sinful actions. The only sexual relations and gender identities that are permitted by divine law are cisgendered heterosexual ones.

The easiest, and sometimes most often forgotten, response to this particular doctrine of anthropology is to bring up intersexuality. In more than one out of every hundred human births, a child is born with unique reproductive structures: ovaries internally and a penis outside, internal testes with a vaginal outside structure, partial organs, both organs, etc. Occasionally, the intersex genitals are inconspicuous and would, in prior generations, be “remedied” with surgery in infancy. Modern experts recognize that complex networks of hormones, chromosomes, and psychiatrics are interconnected with each person’s genital structure. A “corrective” surgery does not change the chromosomes that produced this body; it does not change the hormones generated to operate this person’s reproductive system; it does not change the mind of this person, except in the case of infants where bodies are changed by force.

But the Nashville Statement was aware of this protest, and they included two separate statements in response to the question of intersexuality.

In my words:

It’s part of God’s order of things that male-bodied people should think of themselves in male terms, and female-bodied people in female terms.
Variations on those bodies — physical variations like intersexuality or psychological like gender dysphoria — do not change the rules of God’s order. Male and female bodies should be male and female, respectively.

Intersex persons “should embrace their biological sex,” which means, considering the rest of the document, they should express themselves as either male or female. But the signatories provide a caveat:

“[Intersex persons] should embrace their biological sex insofar as it may be known.”
Imagine explaining this to an extraterrestrial alien. “I’m human, and my gender is 70% female, 25% male, and 5% anomalous. I have no idea how to embrace that 5% of my biological sex.”

Intersex persons are still gendered as either male or female, according to this theological model of sexuality. The decision is built into God’s order, and, as one article on the Center for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood’s website notes:

“The truth is that every child, even in a fallen world, is born male or female (Gen 5:2). When faced with the birth of an intersex child, parents should listen attentively to the counsel of physicians. If the child is far more male than female in anatomy, or vice versa, then there might be good grounds for intervening early to put the child’s sexual development on the right track. That said, chromosomal abnormalities must also be considered. If there is some physiological ambiguity and it is not altogether obvious what the gender of the child is, then the parents would be prudent to wait and allow the child’s gender to manifest itself naturally. As anyone with children can attest, a child’s gender often begins to manifest itself within mere months, so the wait need not be long.”
Now imagine the parents arguing over what is happening when their child begins “manifesting its gender.”

“My daughter loves her toy football.”
“No, my son loves his pink blanket.”
What gender-specific signifiers should we be on the lookout for? What clues do we collect to build evidence for our case that our child is, with religious certainty, male or female? How long do you wait before making a final conclusion that, yes, my child’s various fixations and noises demonstrate maleness beyond a doubt?

Obviously, the caveat in Article VI is intended to show grace to anyone who might be in this predicament. The signatories want to allow for the possibility that physical genital anomalies can correlate with long term challenges, including “psychological conditions.” Their conclusion, however, is that this logical glitch should be left unresolved for the sake of obedience to God’s order: there’s only two options, so intersex Christians will have to decide at some point which path God has appointed for them. We obey in faith, utilizing the best knowledge we have, they suggest: Listen to your doctors, pray, and celebrate your biological sex “insofar as it may be known.”

The problem is that everyone experiences their biological sex “insofar as it may be known.” Everyone doubts whether their personal demonstration of manhood or womanhood lives up to an edenic archetype. We have contests for Mother and Father of the Year because we recognize that there is a sliding scale to gender-specific identity markers.

“Somewhere, like in Proverbs 31 or in the Song of Solomon, there exists an ideal woman, but no one could ever achieve such holiness.”
“There are no men like David or Moses or Paul anymore.”
No one ever measures up to these heights, the same way no one measures up to any of these vertical, Pharisaical doctrinal absolutisms.

Because the Law of these Evangelical leaders demands a doctrinal Statement based in Nature and not in what Saint Paul calls Grace. They cast out these vain repetitions year after year, permanently obsessed with preserving a Nuclear Family that they themselves constantly violate with every divorce and affair and obsession and scandal. Their product is wholly defective, and yet they continue to sell it. Worse, they demand a global monopoly under penalty of (eternal?) condemnation.

They force a particular perspective on Scripture to meet their material conditions and defend their retreating territory, but they leave wide open this door of logic, this “insofar as it may be known” that reminds everyone of their inherently-limited perspective on their own sexual “self-conception.” They silently speak the inescapable transgenderism at the heart of their doctrine, the transfigured soul of Gender opened by the Grace of Christ.

They select their data for their theology from a careful reading of the Bible that purposefully ignores glaring challenges:

Like when Jesus says that in the Kingdom of God, people aren’t married anymore (Mark 12);

or when he says that his family are all those who do the will of God (Matthew 12).

Or when Paul says that, in Christ, the original created order of “male and female” is negated the same way every other normativity in “Nature” is negated.

“In Christ there is no Jew or Greek, slave or free, ‘male and female’” (Galatians 3). That last pairing, ‘male and female,’ is in quotation marks because Paul deliberately changes his word from “A or B” to “X and Y.” Paul is quoting the Genesis creation story from the Hebrew Bible, when the author writes “male and female He [God] created them” (Genesis 1).

In other words, it is specifically the created order that no longer applies — at least in the same way — to those who are “in Christ.”

They are not exiles from God’s family because they are “Gentiles,” because of their birth race.

They are not denied their spiritual inheritance because they are “slaves,” because of their birth class.

They are not cursed with a desire to dominate the other, even on the basis of Creation, because of their birth body-type.

Doesn’t Paul seem to be just expanding on what Christ has already stated? The Nashville Statement signatories mention in Article 6 the “eunuchs” who were born that way, a strange comment from Jesus who is making a point about marriage and divorce (Matthew 19). Jesus says that instead of getting married, Christians should devote themselves to the Kingdom of Heaven by becoming like those eunuchs who were either born or made that way.

When Paul says that it’s better for Christians to remain unmarried (1 Corinthians 7), isn’t he echoing Jesus who says whoever can accept it should embrace (figurative) castration for the Kingdom of Heaven?

Jesus first says that there have been eunuchs who were born that way (with some genital anomaly), and then he proceeds to exalt their condition by claiming that whoever has the power to accept it should become a spiritual eunuch! Neither Jesus nor Paul were encouraging people to get married; quite the opposite, they encouraged people to reject their biological sex, figuratively cut themselves off from sexuated relationships organized around marriage.

Husband, wife, son, daughter, man, woman, child. Replace it all with eunuch for the Kingdom, Jesus says.

Because Jesus brings a new commandment, one that transfigures the old commandment.

You have heard it said, “marry man to woman, be fruitful and multiply.” But I tell you, cut your genitals off, avoid marriage, and abandon the concept of the Nuclear Family.

When Jesus teaches that divorce is contrary to the will of God, he’s teaching God’s order the way God intended it to be practiced. When the crowd realizes that Jesus is making marriage a serious lifelong commitment, they freak out and decide they should avoid marriage altogether. Jesus agrees, with vivid, graphic force and mind-transforming perspective.

Become like the people who have anomalous genitals, says the Christ.

There is no original binary in the Kingdom of God, says Saint Paul.

The Nashville Statement is not representative of the Gospel, the Kingdom of Heaven, the Age to Come. The Good News is that there is no archetypical edenic “male and female” that we have to live up to. There is a whole new way to imagine the relationship between sexual anatomy and individual “self-conception.”

In Christ, gender and sexuality are trans-figured into the space between, the intersexual and transgendered eunuch-space where all body types are equal, all sexual requirements abolished, and all “self-conceptions” dissolved into the single body of Christ.

It’s a space where words like mother, father, brother, sister, husband, and wife get redefined, and where marriage, adultery, fornication, and immorality mean something totally new. There are rules in this new space, including being free of corruption while living in the old space. But the new rules transcend and transfigure the old, if only we can accept them.

Joshua Bean is a freelance and aspiring author, Master of Divinity (Cairn University 2011), and full-time parent.

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