Why Christians Must Get their Anthropology Right
Many Christian theologians have recognized in recent years that the worst heresies and errors facing the contemporary church are matters of anthropology. In the past, the central issues were different: the Trinity and natures of Christ in the early church, the nature of salvation at the time of the Reformation, and so on. Those issues obviously continue to be matters of concern from time to time, but today the church faces the most confusion regarding human sexuality, human purpose, and other matters that get at the fundamental nature of man.
One of those issues is transgenderism. It is easy to approach the issue with the basic Christian conviction, derived from Scripture, that God made only two sexes, male and female. This, of course, is true (Gen 1:27; Matt 19:4; etc.), vitally important, and must be affirmed. But the response of the “official line” among supporters of transgenderism is not completely to deny this fact. They normally argue that humans have a biological sex that is immutable and a gender that is assigned (by doctors and parents) at birth, but that can be altered. What would bring about such a change? The answer is one’s own feelings or thoughts. If a person believes himself or herself to be the opposite gender, that makes it true. At least for many advocates of transgenderism, the binary between male and female is not actually denied. It is just made fluid. As many have pointed out, in fact, transgender claims require the retention of the sex and gender binary of male and female. Most people don’t spend a lot of time thinking with precise analytical rigor about this, so it is often the case the defenders of transgenderism will simply say that they “are” the gender they choose, without qualifying it by saying they remain the sex they were born as. This is not surprising, because to affirm that you are one sex and the opposite gender simultaneously is extremely confusing (utterly incoherent, really). Nonetheless, maleness and femaleness are often not denied.
To respond to transgenderism, then, by simply affirming the fact of the created distinction of male and female, while true, will not be sufficient by itself to show the problems with transgenderism. The error is one of anthropology and goes much deeper than the surface issue of claiming that a person can change genders. That is just a symptom of the underlying disease. The error can be stated simply: it is the notion that there is no necessary connection between body and mind (or body and soul, body and spirit; there are a variety of terminological pairs that express this duality).
The body, for trans-advocates, is a biological fact. The mind, however, is free. It can choose to believe any number of things. But trans-advocates go further than simply affirming that we can think about whatever we want: they believe that the mind constitutes reality in the sphere in which it operates. Not to get too densely philosophical, but this is largely the legacy of thinking bequeathed to us by Immanuel Kant and his notion that the mind supplies the categories with which we process every fact that comes to us through our senses. This is superficially true, but not in the way that Kant or trans-advocates think it is, for this simple reason: there is an objective reality outside of ourselves that our God-given senses have access to. The mind, created by God to understand the data of the senses, is normally adequate to interpret that data properly (exceptions being instances of mental retardation, or severe brain injury, etc.).
For supporters of transgender ideology, then, the mind, since it determines reality in its own special realm (the realm, for example, of gender), is sovereign to alter that reality as it sees fit. And underlying this error, as I said above, is the anthropological heresy that one’s body and mind have no necessary connection.
How should a Christian respond? Most basically, by recognizing that mind and body, biblically speaking, cannot be radically separated. I say “radically” separated, because it is true that the body and mind (or soul, spirit, etc.) can be temporarily separated, as they will be in heaven as believers await the resurrection of the body. That, however, is a temporary separation. As glorious as the intermediate state before the resurrection is, it is not the most glorious state for man, which is only attained with the resurrection of the body (2 Cor 5:1–4) and restoration of the entire created order (Rom 8:18–25).
Apart from that temporary separation, the Bible treats man as an integrated whole. There are a variety of ways this is expressed in the Bible: body, soul, and spirit (1 Thess 5:23); body and soul (Matt 10:28); body and mind (Eph 2:3); and so on. There are nuances in the various words used, but the underlying thought is the same: man has a physical aspect and an interior aspect. He is not simply matter, though he is not less than matter. Man also has a created dimension of his being that transcends matter, which is the soul or mind, even as this realm is connected in a mysterious way with matter (the body). But the exterior and interior sides of man have a necessary and indispensable connection to each other. That is how God designed us at creation as his image bearers. To be in the image of God is to reflect God’s own being (volitional and moral), to place humanity in a realm higher than the animals.
In the end, while it may seem that the claim of gender fluidity is the central error of transgender ideology, the rot goes much deeper. To be equipped to resist transgender lies and deceptions, Christians must first get their anthropology right. We must understand that God made us as unified wholes, body and mind, body and soul, body and spirit. Although sin has radically distorted fallen man’s ability to use reason properly (Rom 1:21) we can nonetheless press this home in conversations with those who support trans-ideology by asking the simple question: “On what basis do you radically divide and separate the human person when you claim that biological sex and mental gender are wholly unconnected?” It is obviously not a scientific claim: sex is about undeniable biological markers. It is, ultimately, a metaphysical claim to say that a separate category of gender exists in the mind and can be changed at will. On what basis is such a claim substantiated? I know few will care to answer that question, but it might be the means of planting a seed of doubt in the minds of some.
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