Until today, I have usually used this website, and my videos, to educate people on Anglicanism. However, today I am using this, and other platforms to call on the Church’s theologians (not just Anglicans) to come up with a new theological framework with regard to sex and gender. And the reason why is two-fold:
- The framework(s) held and used by so-called “Conservatives” are hopelessly broken and unable to cope with the situations we find in post-modernity, while
- The framework(s) developed so far by so-called “Liberals” are either unsatisfactory or rely too much upon Athestic philosophical frameworks and are inherently risky.
I will make my point using one of my favourite topics: Physics. In his famous work, Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, Sir Isaac Newton established classical mechanics, which includes his famous three laws of motion:
- A body remains at rest, or in motion at a constant speed in a straight line, unless acted upon by a force.
- When a body is acted upon by a force, the time rate of change of its momentum equals the force. And,
- If two bodies exert forces on each other, these forces have the same magnitude but opposite directions.
Newton’s Law of Motion, as well as everything else he established in Principia, worked really, really, well for centuries in Physics. That is until we found they don’t always work in cases of things traveling at high speeds, things that are really massive, or for things that are really small. Generally speaking, there was (and arguably still is) some pushback in the scientific community to revising the Laws of Motion to deal with these situations, however, Physicists have generally gone where the evidence has pointed them.
The Church is now facing a challenge with regard to its positions on sex and gender. And, let’s be honest here, the greater Church has done a piss-poor job of dealing with this challenge.
Perhaps the most obvious and well-established item the Church has failed on is dealing with so-called Intersex persons, that is, people who have sex characteristics, such as gonads or genitals, which do not allow them to fit into the traditional binary notions of male and female. There are those who can claim that transgenderism and non-heterosexuality are simply mental disorders that need to be treated, however, they cannot deny the existence of the Intersex, something that is well proven, such as those who may suffer from having an extra X or Y-chromosome.
Simply put, “Traditional” theology breaks down in the face of Intersex persons.
Now, you could argue “Maple, you are only talking about a very small percentage of the population. Surely we don’t have to worry about them?”
Wrong.
If “Traditional” theology can’t encompass or dismisses the Intersex then a new theological framework is needed.
And if “Traditional” theology can’t rise to the challenge of dealing with the Intersex who is to say it is truly up to the challenge of dealing with the other issues before us such as sexual orientation and gender identity?
That being said, whatever theological framework replaces it must be firmly established within the Christian tradition and not rely on Athiestic philosophies such as Utilitarianism.
Some may ask why am I writing this? Why am I, someone easily label as a cis-gender, heterosexual male, feel compelled to write this, and other coming posts on this matter? While I have long believed the Church needed a fresh theological framework on sex and gender, this matter became much more personal for me in 2016 when the “woman” I married came out to me as being Transgender. This disclosure by my spouse would eventually lead to our separation and legal divorce.
The Church’s traditional view on sex and gender would hold that my former spouse is not a man, but a woman based purely on his sex organs he had at birth, and that he is suffering from some type of mental disorder for identifying as a homosexual man. The marriage we entered into would be viewed as a valid opposite-sex marriage. Possibly worse is that I could be accused of abandoning my sick “wife” and not saying with “her” despite “her” “mental illnesses”.
None of that sits right with me.
I want to stipulate in this, and any subsequent posts, I am not trying push or publish a particular theological narrative; I am calling for a new one.