REAL GENDER

The right to change sex on paper as well as in the flesh, a kind of decree of annulment on your old self, may be enshrined in law, the opponents of legislation may have stopped jumping up and down, but when gender change grows arms and legs and walks through our doors it is still the clash of the Titans, law and conscience (to put it charitably).

The notion of "acquired gender" has generated a remarkable amount of angst, and not only on the Religious Right. Concern has been expressed in the tabloid press that an athlete could change sex and win Olympic gold under an assumed gender – serious stuff, even though athletic officialdom have already abandoned trying to test scientifically  for gender! Church of England Traditionalists (often unhelpfully equated with Evangelicals) want to be allowed to "tell the truth about a person's REAL sex" in order to avoid being implicated in a same-sex marriage. But what is a person's REAL sex?    

STEREOTYPE OR REALITY

Even a cursory glance at the facts of sexuality tells us that defining a person's REAL sex can be a REAL problem. If someone senses that their body and mind are not the same gender, which is the REAL one, the body or the mind, and which of these would it be morally legitimate to "adjust" if the tension were to become intolerable?   It is tempting (if not particularly Christian) to think that physical attributes define a person's real sex, but even purely physical sexual characteristics can be ambiguous. Some children are born externally female, but internally male (Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome). Others are born externally male, but internally female (Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia). True Hermaphrodites are genetically 46 XXXY and have all the physical characteristics of both sexes and there is a whole range of other intersexual conditions.  

But it isn't just a few genetic variations that muddy the gender waters. The hormonal difference between male and female, for instance, is physical but quantitative rather than qualitative, i.e. both sexes have the same hormones, although generally in different quantities. Normal sexuality encompasses a range of hormonal mixes, which pass un-remarked, but there are also several medical conditions affecting an individual's hormonal balance more dramatically, causing radical variations in many of the characteristics normally used to distinguish gender. Hormone therapy is frequently used to "assign" gender in the distressing condition euphemistically referred to as an "open birth". This is linguistically reflected in words such as "effeminate", "feminine", "masculine",  "emasculate", "hysterical", "paternalism" or "macho" which point to the fact that gender distinctiveness exists more as a stereotype than a reality.    

THE GAY GENE

Which brings us to the question: could homosexuality also be genetic? The truth is that the jury is still out. Some researchers claim to have discovered the “gay gene”. Others rubbish the claim. One scientist claims to have discovered that manipulating the genes of the fruit fly can make it gay. Studies have been undertaken, comparing identical with non-identical twins and genetic siblings with adoptive siblings showing some possibly genetic correlations and others that implicate environment. The science is inconclusive.

Inconclusive science (or intelligence!) is no deterrent to fundamentalism, though. Some have argued that homosexuality can’t be genetic because it would confer no conceivable (literally) evolutionary advantage. Others say homosexuality can’t be genetic because it is a sin, which has a controversial and possibly unintended corollary, namely that if homosexuality IS genetic, it CAN’T be a sin, and nor can any other of the rapidly expanding list of traits that appear to be linked to some gene or other. There will soon be very few sins left, and then where will we be?

IS THE BIBLE HOMOPHOBIC?

People outwith the Christian community could be forgiven for assuming from the rhetoric emanating from that source that the Bible is quite clear in its opposition to homosexuality. They probably don’t even care. However, there is much more to Biblical teaching on gender than traditionalists would have us believe, and hopefully, open-minded people of any persuasion will give these insights at least some house-room, despite (or even because of) their provenance.

 Genesis 1 tells of man being created, male and female, but qualifies that by adding "in the image of God". Christians do not normally take that to mean that one of the Trinity is a goddess. Genesis 2 continues with the same relaxed approach. It tells the story of Adam being alone in creation, but God does not say, "How on earth is he going to procreate?" Instead, God says that it is "not good" for Adam to be alone. So it is not sexuality but the capacity for relationship which is fundamental to the created order, expressing the nature of God.    

Not that this should surprise us, because both Old and New Testaments place the highest value on non-sexual relationships. Jonathan's love for David is described as "more wonderful than that of women". Jesus is described as God's only BEGOTTEN son, referring to the unity of his substance with the father and the inter-personal relationship rather than any procreativity. The conception of Jesus at his incarnation was not by sexual union, he did not marry nor have children though he had many women friends. He declared that no love is greater than a man's giving his life for his friends and when asked about the world to come, he said that there would be neither marrying nor giving in marriage. Although using marriage to illustrate the relationship between Christ and the Church, Paul valued celibacy, and argued that, in the Kingdom of God, there is no difference between male and female.    

Significantly the Greek words "eros" and "storge", which particularly refer to sexual relationships, are hardly ever used in the New Testament. Instead, the word "agape" is applied to all kinds of personal relationships, including that between husband and wife. Many ancient faiths may be fixated on sex. Biblical Christianity is not. This will come as a great relief to singles of both (or all) sexes who can feel relegated to the third or fourth division in today’s family orientated churches.  

FUZZY TEACHING

Even Biblical teaching on that cause célèbre of Evangelicals - homosexuality is surprisingly fuzzy. At this point, everyone will be reaching for their Bibles and pointing to Lev 20 v. 13. How, they will be asking, can there be any fuzziness about the statement that to "lie with mankind as with womankind" is an abomination in the eyes of God? At most this is quite a narrow prohibition on male homosexual anal intercourse, and verse 1 of the chapter further restricts its applicability to "Israelites or any alien living in Israel". Whatever, it certainly does not prohibit any other kind of commitment that individuals of the same sex may make to, or provision that they may make for each other. When Ezekiel defines the sin of Sodom, that city whose name is synonymous with homosexual depravity in the Evangelical psyche, it is injustice and pride, not homosexuality that he highlights (Ezekiel 6 v. 49). Maybe once we have sorted out these two "beams” (4"x2"s) in the eyes of our churches and communities, we can justifiably turn our attention to the "motes” (specks of sawdust) of committed, faithful, loving gay relationships.

 STRANGE BEDFELLOWS

However, these are not the only Biblical passages that are relevant. To circumcise or not to circumcise was a fundamental issue for early Christians. Christianity was understood to be, not a new religion, but simply Judaism fulfilled by the coming of the Messiah, and circumcision was about as fundamental to that as you could get. The Apostle Paul's argument was simple: Don't start down the legal road, because if you do, you are obliged to go the whole way (Gal 5 v. 3). In other words, if we start condemning people for one abomination, we'll have to condemn everybody for them all, and will end up smiting unsuspecting people for a surprising range of misdemeanours, such as eating shellfish, snails or black pudding, remarrying their own divorcee, reading their horoscope or not cooking kosher - to mention only a few mentionable ones. Nor can we criticise someone for disobeying the first half of verse 13 of Leviticus 20, while excusing ourselves for disobeying the second half. We could, of course, remove this inconsistency by obeying the second half too, which would undoubtedly be applauded by former members of that guardian wing of the British National Party, Combat 18, who urged their members to execute homosexuals in the 1990s. Evangelical traditionalists would do well to ponder who their bedfellows are on the gay issue. 

 The early church leaders were remarkably pragmatic about the Jewish Law. They eventually accepted the point about circumcision, but to keep the peace requested that Gentile Christians abstain "from fornication, things strangled and from blood" (Acts 15 v. 20 - black pudding again!). In other words, it wasn't a big deal, and some concessions to their fellow Christians' sensitivities would be fine. A parallel stance for same-sex relations might be: "We can appreciate and celebrate your commitment to each other, but we recommend you refrain from penetrative sex. Why? Because an awful lot of people can't find enough wiggle room in their moral code to allow it, and it's probably bad for you anyway.  However, we won't be sending round the Bedroom Police, so it's a matter for your conscience."

 DARK MEDIAEVAL RECESSES

Human society in general, including our own, has a long and dishonourable history of prejudice against those who fall outside favourite norms - enslaving, excluding or even exhibiting them in cages as curiosities. Sadly, the church as an institution has been complicit in many of these abuses, offering spurious Biblical justification for anti-Semitism, racism, sexism, ethnic cleansing, witch hunting, homophobia and the like, some of them still lurking in its dark mediaeval recesses. Not so its founder, however. He taught that there is one absolute principle - love: that many-splendoured thing from which all diversity and individuality derive. That is the principle that stands in the way of reductionism, asserting the value of the individual. That is the spirit of the law, which no letter can be allowed to violate.  

 There may be a few who place themselves frivolously among the 15% around the periphery of the sexuality spectrum, but the testimony of many is that it is a place of anguish and certainly not a matter of easy choice. Does Jesus teach Christians to add to that anguish by subjecting them to loveless legalism? Or should they find that, whatever abuse they may suffer outside the church, inside there are no cages, no curiosities, no "Bearded Lady" exhibitions, no selective judgements, just unconditional love and the right to answer to God for their own conscience?   That would get one monster at least off their back.

PLEASE CAN WE HAVE OUR BIBLE BACK

Ever since Darwin, scientific fundamentalists have been hijacking some development of science, history or archaeology and flying it into the twin towers of Faith and Scripture.  Meantime, the opposite camp have responded with their own War on Error, occasionally backed up by “Shock and Awe” tactics like those of Ken Ham and his multi-million dollar Creation Museum.

The problem with this war is that does more damage at home than it does abroad. It keeps people locked in sterile argument instead of releasing them into the open country of faith in the meaningfulness of our universe and ourselves. They never get past the six days to the wonderful principles that the universe exists and consists (is not an illusion), that it is ultimately personal rather than mechanical, that relationship (Love, actually) is at its heart and that we are stewards, not Lords of creation with a licence to rape – to mention only a few. 

They never get to the deep intriguing questions, which secular as well as Christian thinkers ponder. For instance, if time was created with the universe, in what sense can we talk about “before” the beginning, and how could we understand relationship, either personal or mechanical, without time – e.g. what would happen to our idea of cause and effect if an effect did not necessarily follow its cause, or our understanding of love without the sequence of action and response? Or, when God “called” the light “day” and the water “sea” before there were people or languages, what does that imply about the relationship between thought and language? 

LOOPY TERRITORY

It is when you relegate Genesis to mere history or science that you get into the loopy territory that so many non-Christians associate with Christianity – e.g. How long was a day before the creation of the sun? If the serpent was condemned to crawl on his belly, did serpents originally have legs (and if so what distinguished them from lizards)? Did all animals originally talk or only  snakes, or only that snake and what language did it/they/he/she speak? Did Adam have a belly button? (Answers: 24 hours; yes; yes (don’t know); yes, don’t know, don’t know, Hebrew and; no – according to some!). 

These questions might be harmless enough, but some other assertions, aimed at harmonising the Bible and Science, have a much more dubious side - for example that God created the stars with the light already on its way to the earth and sedimentary rocks with the fossils already in them. How truthful is that? 

EVANGELICAL SLEIGHT OF HAND

Even more alarming is a bit of literary sleight of hand by the Evangelical translators of the NIV Bible. Readers of most other translations* may have noticed that in Genesis Chapter 1 the animals are created before man, whereas in Chapter 2, man is created before the animals, but not if they read the NIV. There, the tenses of Chapter. 2 have been tweaked so that in v. 7 man is “FORMED”, but when it comes to the creation of animals later in v. 19, the same Hebrew tense becomes “HAD FORMED”, implying that animals were something God had prepared earlier. A similar time shift happens to the planting of the garden. Not only was that also prepared earlier (“had planted” v. 8), we are lulled into the assumption that, since a garden without trees, shrubs or plants is hard to imagine (v. 5), these must have emerged earlier too. Presumably, judging from the absence of footnote or anything to indicate even a variant reading, the NIV translators regarded this as a harmless textual adjustment, but in Science, the same process would be called “smoothing” your results and be regarded as cooking the books.** 

Which brings us to the point that Science is a fine-principled enterprise with a checking process built into it.  Why should Christians of all people ask scientists to depart from the honest process of observation, hypothesis, controlled experiment, prediction, repetition, peer review etc. The belief in an ordered consistent universe is a fundamental Christian as well as a scientific one. It is what makes Science possible. Christians should be cheering Science on. There is no problem with asking if the universe as it is could have happened without an intelligent creator? Even if the answer is Yes, that doesn’t mean that it did. There is actually more of a problem with asking what a science that includes a sovereign, creator God might look like. What would its methodology be? Could you factor God into a scientific method, since he is by definition not experimentally predictable or controllable? Intelligent Design is an attempt to do just that, but it has a long way to go, and its core idea of “irreducible complexity” is alarmingly reminiscent of the “God of the Gaps” (RIP).

HOSTAGE TO FORTUNE

Of course we know that Christians are really afraid that if the Bible can be shown to be scientifically or historically untrue in any respect, it can’t be trusted about anything. 

What a hostage to fortune that is! Not only is Science continually being re-written, so is History. Why on earth shackle the credibility of the Bible to anything so changeable? Worse still, using Science or History to authenticate the Bible implies an acceptance of these as authorities over the Bible – a position that most Evangelicals would not accept.  If the Bible contained perfect science or history in God’s terms, i.e. predicated on the perfect and complete knowledge God has of everything, what sense could we make of it? 

But there are other reasons why this war of words should be recognised as a diversion – a decoy. 

Firstly, something may be historically or scientifically accurate, but untrue. Take for example the story of Abraham and Isaac. If the record of the events had stopped before the discovery of the ram, it would still have been historical, but untrue because the whole story has not been told, and the message that the story-teller intended to convey about God has been lost. Secondly, a story with a meaning can be expounded. Nothing is in there because it happens to have happened. The author is trying to tell us something. Thirdly, a story with a meaning (for example the story of the prodigal son) is not made more true by being historical, otherwise one of Jesus’ principal teaching media, the parable, would be an inferior means of conveying truth. 

So, the Bible is true because it is true, not because it is historical or scientific. It is there to tell us the truth behind History and Science, not the other way round, so please can we have our Bible back! 

NOTES

*           In a survey of 20 English versions only the one by the Plymouth Brethren Darby takes the same line as the NIV. Even the Roman Catholic Douai version can’t bring itself to change the tense to the pluperfect, instead employing the slightly ambiguous phrase, “having formed”. Strictly, it isn’t impossible to interpret “formed” as referring to a chronologically earlier event if the logic of the passage so indicates but in this case it is not the logic of the passage, but an imposed theological pre-supposition that dictates the interpretation. The NIV translators have done the necessary mental gymnastics, and then erased the evidence so that it seems natural. A similar “adjustment” removes the embarrassing description of mustard as the smallest of all seeds (Matthew 13 v. 31) All it takes is the insertion of the little word “your” into the NIV text. Problem solved and nobody will notice!

**            Famously, Gregor Mendel, the 19^th Century father of modern genetics was suspected of doing this with the results of his experiments on peas. Suspicion was aroused by the failure of a number of colleagues to replicate them, and the fact that his results appeared too tidy by half. The argument still goes on among geneticists.

Relax! Prayer doesn’t work. 

“The Lancet” (16/7/2005) carried the report from yet another medical trial of prayer – this time head to head with relaxation training. The finding? Prayer doesn’t work, but relaxation does. 

Of course, this is just the latest in a run of studies on whether or not prayer works, half of which say “Yes”, and other half  “No”. Actually, that’s not quite true. There’s quite a large grey area. One study found it kind of works, reducing some post-op complications but not the overall time in hospital. Another found that close personal prayer helps, but distant prayer has no effect. For some it depends who’s praying, for others it depends who’s sick, or what they’re sick of. 

But there’s no grey for the scientist interviewed about the Lancet study on Radio 4’s “Today” programme (15/7/2005), who came up with the memorably unscientific statement that for the power of prayer there is “absolutely no empirical evidence and never will be.” That ranks with the logic of the “father” of one of Archbishop Deya’s miracle babies who, when faced with the fact that there was no DNA connection between him or his wife and the child, responded, “That’s because it’s a MIRACLE, stupid!” Archbishop Deya is under investigation for child trafficking. 

It’s enough to make you ill! Actually, one study did conclude that prayer makes you worse. 

But, do Christians really want prayer to “work”? Don’t we want to be able to trust God not to be manipulated by our prayers? Don’t we believe that God is not limited by time or space and might do something beyond what we can ask or think? Don’t we believe that he pays attention to people nobody else notices? If God won’t give us a serpent when we ask for a fish, can’t we trust him not to give us a serpent when we ask for a serpent? Don’t we believe that ALL things, not only the nice ones, work together for our good? 

All this adds up to the fact that in any circumstance, we have no idea who is praying, or when, or for what, or what God thinks is “for our good”, and if we don’t know that, we can’t know that any particular event is an answer, nomatter how hard we pretend that it is. And, even if we were to get an “unmistakable” answer, we wouldn’t know whether or not, if we had known everything God knows, we might not have prayed our prayer in the first place, so the answer we got to the prayer we prayed would not be the answer we needed to the prayer we didn’t pray, although through no fault of our own. Which is among the things Paul was talking about when he described the Holy Spirit expressing the prayers we can’t articulate. 

In which case, what is the point in praying? 

In some ways, that last question is the greatest slur on God and Christians of them all. It proposes that the only reason for praying is to get what you pray for. Jesus said “You don’t receive because you don’t ask.” But was he encouraging us to behave like the demanding brats we sometimes see in the supermarket? Was he not saying that if we never ask, nothing is ever an answer, whereas we could be seeing everything as an answer, and living a life full of thankfulness? 

The heart of Jesus’ teaching on prayer is the father/child relationship. It is founded on the child’s trust in the father’s love and understanding, not on pester power. Does the fact that God knows what we want before we ask mean that we don’t tell God what we really really want? Of course not! Prayer, whether privately or corporately, is conversation. It is levelling with God. And then it is leaving it there. 

Then we can relax.