Disembodied Sexuality

Why Christians Need to Return to a Corporeal Concept of Sex

Note: This post was originally published at daughtersofsarahbook.net

I was a new mom the year that Target unveiled their infamous 2016 bathroom policy, which allowed transgender customers to use whatever restroom matched their chosen sexual identity. The previous year had seen me coming to grips with the realities of existing in a female body in a new way. I had become pregnant for the first time, and it didn’t exactly agree with me. Breastfeeding had turned out to be difficult, time-consuming as well as socially restricting. I loved my baby with every fiber of my being but everything in my life, at that moment, seemed determined by the kind of body that I lived in, and for me, it wasn’t a matter of feelings or preference. It was an objective, observable reality that impacted my life every day. While I was sympathetic to people experiencing gender dysphoria, I was in no mood to share the bathroom with biological males, with the anatomical features of biological maleness, who were experiencing a subjective feeling that they interpreted as “femininity.” Like a lot of Christians that year, I boycotted Target.

There was more at stake in the bathroom policy than my comfort or discomfort. What was really at stake was truth, and specifically the truth about the nature of sexuality. Is sexuality something that exists in the visible realm of bodies, or in the invisible realm of feelings and emotions? Is it something that can change based on what your hobbies or interests are, or is it a divinely-ordained condition outside the scope of human manipulation? In the summer of 2016, conservative Christians seemed unanimously in favor of the latter: no matter how you felt or what you did with your free time, sex could be conclusively determined by, well, checking between one’s legs.

Manhood: Shooting, Hiking and Fixing?

What many Christians - including myself - did not realize in the summer of 2016 was that our flippant simplification of the bathroom dilemma was true, but it was also out of step with the gender theory that Christian conservatism has embraced for years. By way of illustration, on Thursday, Owen Strachen, one-time president (‘14-’16) of the Counsel for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood (CBMW), tweeted an advertisement for a podcast episode entitled '“How to Be a Man: Practical Wisdom.” The tweet asked, “What is manhood?” but the answer had nothing to do with anatomy. Instead, Strachen answered his own question this way: “Manhood is doing hard things for God's glory and the good of others.” According to the podcast, the “hard things” that one must do to train oneself into manhood include “fixing things, hiking, gardening, shooting a gun.”

The tweet is a head-scratcher on a number of levels (Are women not supposed to do hard things for the glory of God and the good of others? Do recreational activities like hiking and shooting really count as “hard things”?). But for the purposes of this article, it demonstrates how the complementarian gender theory, while intending to clear up people’s confusion about sexuality, actually ends up setting the table and inviting gender dysphoria over for dinner. Many women teasingly responded that they must be men since they enjoy and excel at one, or all four, of the activities that Strachen associated with masculinity. Conversely, some men replied that they didn’t seem to meet the qualifications for being male, or concluded that maybe they were only 50% or 75% male because they didn’t garden, or shoot guns.

For most of the men and women responding to Strachen’s tweet, questioning one’s own sexuality on the basis of whether one hikes, gardens or shoots was a joke. But for some people, these kinds of questions aren’t funny, and they aren’t theoretical. Behind every biological male who thinks he is “a woman on the inside,” or vice versa, there is the acceptance of the idea that sexuality is an invisible, spiritual matter, rather than something that has to do with the visible and material. The moral of the story is, tying sexuality to a set of aptitudes, personality traits or hobbies - no matter how innocuous or positive those things are - can’t help but call one’s sexuality into a state of constant question.

Spiritualizing gender may sound like a good way to protect sexual differentiation, but it actually creates a stage where the players are freed to be any sex - or any combination of sexes - they want to be, regardless of their bodies. And the more rigid we make our gender “roles,” the more appealing - and maybe even necessary - it will seem to swap costumes. On the other hand, when maleness and femaleness are defined in terms of the body, there is no way to say that one “feels like a woman” or “feels like a man” in one’s invisible soul, because “feeling like a woman” would entail having a female physical attributes, and vice versa.

Sexuality Matters Because the Body Matters

To say that sexuality is something that exists on the physical, rather than spiritual, plane is not to say that it’s not important. Our sexuality is important to God because our bodies are important to God. God created matter, He created our bodies, and He created them sexually differentiated. He then declared His own work very good. The key to the idea of corporeal (bodily) sexuality is this idea of it being God’s work, not ours. Our sexuality is an act of God that He performed alone, while He was knitting us together in the womb. It is not a moral or spiritual ideal that we must aspire to; it was already completed before we had had an opportunity to “perform” it. While there are a few exceptions (such as individuals who are born intersex), God providentially places His image-bearers in bodies that can be immediately categorized as either male or female.

Because sexuality is a physical phenomenon, it also has to do with the historical. Sexuality isn’t a pre-existent principle; it’s a phenomenon that began in a moment in time. God created Adam first, and then made Eve - the first woman - from the substance of his body, and presented her as a sexual counterpart. The whole idea of femaleness has to do with being taken out of the male, who came first. Human sexuality is a historical fact that was established before any of us were born, which is why Paul appeals to the creation account, rather than personality quirks, in his explanation of sexual difference in 1 Corinthians 11. Sexual differentiation does not have to be maintained or protected by us, because whatever interests men or women pursue, we will never be able to go back in time and change the fact that woman was drawn out of the man’s body in the garden of Eden. That real, historical event secured and defined human sexuality forever.

If sexuality is a merely physical condition, then why do men and women seem to develop distinctive personalities? A corporeal theory of sex does not preclude differentiation in personality, because our bodies are more than what’s “in between our legs.” At the risk of casting the male body as the norm and women’s bodies as the aberration, this is best understood as thinking about how women’s bodies differ from men’s. Any doctor will tell you that the female body is vastly more complex than the male body, chiefly owing to women’s role in the reproductive process.

The way women’s bodies differ from men’s affects both “nature” and “nurture.” We may never fully understand the extent to which women’s personalities are shaped by the different hormones that facilitate menstruation, pregnancy, birth, and breastfeeding. Additionally, the experience of moving through life in a female rather than a male body is certainly formative. Factors like the desire to be attractive to men, the differing biological experiences that go with reproduction, and simply existing in a relatively more vulnerable body than men, all affect the way women interact with their world. In short, there are social and temperamental differences between men and women, but they can be attributed to ordinary, rather than mystical, causes. We don’t need to deny or be confounded by these differences, but we also don’t particularly need to reinforce them.

So far, a corporeal concept of sex seems to fit our current experiences, and biblical protology (the study of history’s beginning), but what about our eschatology? Does a corporeal theory of sex mean that we won’t be male or female in heaven? Again, no. God is Spirit, but His creation is, and always will remain, material. The Bible does not speak of eternity as a place where we will float around as disembodied souls. Our bodies - like Christ’s - will be resurrected and we will live in an atmosphere where there is space and time: the new heavens and a new earth. Christ’s resurrected body is the pattern for the incorruptible bodies that we will have in heaven, and Christ’s body was resurrected male. There is every reason to think that, even though human marriage will cease to exist, we will continue to have male or female bodies in heaven.

Male and Female Bodies and Redemption

Just because sexuality is not a spiritual phenomenon does not mean that it is not spiritually significant. In fact, the more we see sexuality as a part of the ordinary, the better we can understand the Bible’s typological purpose for creating sexuality as part of the material world.

In Ephesians 5, we learn that sexuality is a physical shadow of the spiritual reality of Christ and the church. The very nature of a shadow implies that it is not the thing that is casting it. The ordinary things of sexuality make the invisible things of our union with Christ, visible. For instance, in the picture of Eve being taken out of Adam, we see a shadow of the church being created from Christ’s wounded side. In woman’s sexual attractiveness to man we see a shadow of how Christ is enraptured with the church, who is formed after His image: “Here at last is bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh.” In reproduction, we see a physical shadow of the fact that the church cannot bear spiritual fruit except by being united with Christ. As an ordinary shadow of a supernatural thing, sexuality serves us very well. But when we try to elevate sexuality to the invisible, spiritual plane, we actually end up obscuring its meaning.

“The Truth Will Set You Free”

Sexually-differentiated bodies are a part of God’s good creation, and therefore they should be received with thankfulness. But we humans have a very bad habit of trying to earn things that God has given as gifts, and gender is no exception. We should certainly condemn practices that exhibit ungratefulness for the bodies that God has given us (this would include outright rejection of our sexuality by cross-dressing or engaging in romantic relationships with members of our own sex). But we sin in another way when we try to self-actualize through stereotypically masculine or feminine behaviors, and when we pressure others to do the same. This road does not lead to a sturdy, working anthropology of gender; it only leads to chaos and confusion.