Evangelical obsession over gender is ascending to heaven now.
In March, Christianity Today published a piece titled “Our Gender on Earth as In Heaven: Will Our Gender Be Removed or Renewed in the Resurrection?”
The author, Fellipe do Vale, is the kind of Christian theologian the church needs today. He has entered the combat zone of the most vitriolic, violent debate in our culture — transgender people — while appearing not to discuss transgender people.
A theology professor at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, do Vale previously published Gender As Love: A Theological Account of Human Identity, Embodied Desire, and Our Social Worlds. His most recent article puts him right in the midst of the fight.
Fellipe do Vale
The difference between do Vale and other evangelicals is this: His starting point is the pain and suffering endemic to gender issues. He is remarkable for his empathy, his humility and his intellectual openness to diverse opinions as the nation struggles with how to wrap its mind around transgender identity. There’s none of the “all guns blazing” violent rhetoric of Bible-waving, pulpit-pounding, publicity-seeking preachers. The tone of the article is refreshing.
Do Vale’s starting point also is instructive: “Today, gender is a source of suffering and confusion for many — both our experience and our notions of gender are sick with sin. All around us, we see the ways sexism, abuse and other forms of harm have hurt God’s creatures, especially women. The virtues that are needed to be a Christlike presence — such as listening well, showing tenderhearted compassion and not jumping to simplistic conclusions when people share stories about their experiences of gender — are sorely lacking in Christians of all ideological persuasions.”
He insists, with genuine generosity, “If we Christians affirm that our bodies, with all their particulars, have been given to us by God, then we might reasonably ask which aspects of personhood will persist beyond death and into the new creation. Will our resurrected bodies possess the same traits they do in life — such as our race, gender, sexual orientation or disabilities?”
He continues: “Therefore, a theology of resurrection that removes all gendered aspects of creation is a theology of erasure that leaves our laments for gendered suffering and injustice — such as dysphoria and discrimination — unaddressed. The resurrection is not a cosmic Etch A Sketch, where God shakes everything to start over; it is a divine commitment to what has already been made and declared very good (Genesis 1:31), which includes our genders.”
Raising questions
There are, however, disturbing vibes in do Vale’s article. The theological language sprinkled throughout suggests a dark tale.
For example, what does he mean by “curing us of our sin,” the gendered pain we experience in this “present evil age,” the “open wounds of God’s people,” “our paradigms for gender have been broken and distorted by sin?” Perhaps he is only speaking of the “pain” endured by women in a patriarchal world, but the idea of “gender pain” sticks to gays, lesbians and transgender people with even more force.
Do Vale uses a disorienting analogy comparing being bitten by a venomous snake to gender issues. He suggests if someone’s arm is bitten by a venomous snake, there seem to be two options: Amputate the poisoned limb or extract the venom. While both yield the same result — saving the person from a life-threatening toxin — they achieve it in starkly different ways: one by removal, the other by renewal. Likewise, how believers envision the resolution of our gendered pain often boils down to whether our genders are removed or renewed in the resurrection, he proposes.
“Removal or renewal suggests something wrong with a particular gender.”
Removal or renewal suggests something wrong with a particular gender. Again, I ask, what is wrong with gender that would require its removal? Gender is not sinful.
While there is much to applaud in do Vale’s starting point of pain and suffering, there’s the possibility the most pain is caused by how heteronormative Christians treat others.
Do Vale concludes: “Ultimately, I believe we will remain gendered in the eschaton because of the Christian hope for abundant life and justice. This hope persists because of a conviction that Jesus loves those who are most vulnerable, including those for whom gender is a point of pain.”
He doesn’t judge his intersex friend or condemn transgender people. In fact, he says, “While I cannot say with certainty what sex or gender my intersex friend will be raised as, I know her body will be the body God has been helping her cultivate friendship with now. A surprising switch at the end of all things would seem quite out of character with God’s redemptive action.”
What if the real issue with gender is transgender?
Our gender in heaven is a bit of speculative theology.
I suppose for some, keeping transgender Christians out of heaven equates with keeping them out of public bathrooms. And without that kind of evangelical obsession with declaring two strict genders assigned by God at birth, there might not be as much need for an article like do Vale has written.
What if opening a front about gender in heaven becomes one more strategy for securing victory against transgender people on earth?
Politically, evangelicals have identified transgender people as the enemy they believe will enable them to galvanize public support in defeating liberalism and raising suspicion about the rest of the rainbow coalition.
“What if opening a front about gender in heaven becomes one more strategy for securing victory against transgender people on earth?”
The transgender community appears the most vulnerable and misunderstood. With the intuitive instincts of a herd of lions hunting prey, evangelicals sense how to pick on the weak and the vulnerable members of our society. They are attacking the transgender community with a fierceness matched only by their campaign against anyone involved in having or providing or aiding an abortion.
In 24 states, Republicans have passed laws banning gender-affirming therapies, sometimes threatening doctors with prison time if they prescribe the treatment they think is best for their patients.
Good questions to ask
Now that evangelicals have staked a claim on earth — there can be only two assigned genders — they are turning their sights heavenward.
That could open a good line of discussion for us on earth, however.
How are we to consider such questions? And what does the Bible actually say about any of this? Are there answers to be known this side of eternity?
For most evangelicals, the conversation centers on the Apostle Paul and his warnings against “the flesh.” This Gnostic denial of the body is an evangelical mantra.
We are told not to live according to the flesh, “for if you live according to the flesh, you will die; but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live.”
Seventeen times, Paul uses “flesh” or “fleshly” in Romans. He seems to equate the fleshly with “our sinful passions,” a people “sold into slavery under sin,” and “with my flesh I am enslaved to the law of sin. In Romans 8, Paul says, ‘To set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace.”
The modern church has created a Gnostic frame of the fleshly as inherently sinful. Yet such a frame reinforces a false dichotomy between the flesh and the spirit. We assume Christianity is about the “spiritual.” To be “fleshly” is to be sinful, bad. To be spiritual is to be good — to be anti-body, anti-sex, anti-pleasure.
Perhaps this is why the idea of gender as a “sin” has a large place in do Vole’s argument. He can’t escape his conviction that gender is fleshly, material, human and therefore sinful. This is Gnosticism 101.
When evangelical talk turns to heaven and gender, be aware they are really talking about life on earth where evangelicals are haunted by gays, lesbians, transgender people and queers.
And it’s possible they are seeking to bring God’s kingdom to come in heaven as it is on earth.
Rodney W. Kennedy is a pastor and writer in New York state. He is the author of 10 books, including his latest, Good and Evil in the Garden of Democracy.