As a young adult, church was awkward.
I didn’t have a wife, kids, or a career. Yet, the study we were working on was one that “challenges men to step forward, meet their responsibilities, and establish their manhood. This study focuses on the chief responsibilities men have as husbands, fathers, and breadwinners.” Was I then less of a man?
When I got married, I assumed I would finally be accepted at church. Instead, I did something to complicate that: I became a stay-at-home dad. People at church (in jest, I suspect; but it still stung), called me a “freak of nature” for being a man who was good with his kids.
Then came the questions whether I was ashamed to let my wife work. Or whether she had to train me to cook, clean, and buy groceries.
I suppose, I might have concluded that there’s some other gender identity that I better align with—or that the church is bad at determining what makes one masculine or feminine.
Gender and Genesis
Thus, when reading Austen Hartke’s “Non-Binary Gender and the Diverse Beauty of Creation”, I could resonate with the idea that categories are oversimplifications.
In Hartke’s case, the notion of a binary division of land and sea in the Genesis creation account seems like an appealing simplification at first, but then he states:
[L]ife sometimes falls outside black-and-white categories. Biologically, I learned that the world isn’t separated distinctly into land or sea; there are also marshes, estuaries, and coral reefs. Personally, I began to figure out more about my own sense of gender identity, and I wondered if all people were really divided into male and female, as Genesis 1 seemed to say they were.
For Hartke, because “land” and “sea” are an oversimplification, so too might gender and sexual categories be.
In many cases, these categories of “land” and “sea” are fine. Yet, nuance is useful for specific purposes, such as Jesus’ parable of building a house on rock or sand. Both are arguably “land,” but one is a more suitable foundation.
Is there a context in which our notion of gender requires nuance? For Hartke, the answer is yes, “because it is how we relate to the world.”
Hartke begins with the notion of “sex” (“male or female”) and refers to instances of intersex individuals referenced in ancient texts, such as a Sumerian creation myth.
Given these precedents, why not accept the notion that non-binary sexuality and gender is simply part of the created order, and that Genesis only comments on male and female for simplicity’s sake? As Hartke puts it: “If Genesis 1 was meant to describe the world as it is, the biblical authors would have needed a scroll hundreds of feet long.”
The Imago Dei
Instead, Hartke focuses on the concept of the Imago Dei: the image of God in every human.
The article concludes with the assertion that “it would be impossible to try to live into the image of God that we bear while also trying to deny our gender identity. We have to say yes to who God created us to be before we can begin imaging God in the world.”
In other words, accepting our gender identity is somehow a prerequisite (!) to bearing the image of God.
There are three major points I would like to address, here.
1) The Purpose of Genesis 1
I agree that it is not to simply present a laundry list of what’s in the world. Rather, I would side more with John H. Walton in his The Lost World of Genesis 1, where he draws on the Ancient Near East context (including some of the creation myths of Mesopotamia) to argue that Genesis is about God establishing a purpose for these binary elements, rather than creating them (“the sun to rule the day”). This is a parallel development to many gods in other creation myths defeating the forces of chaos before engaging in ordering the cosmos.
2) The Notion of identity and the Image of God
I fear that God sometimes gives us rather more than we bargain for. We are being “conformed to the image of His Son” (Romans 8:29), and in one rather stark portrayal “have been crucified with Christ and no longer live, but Christ lives” in us (Galatians 2:20). Our identity seems to matter less than the identity of Christ.
3) Whose Identity Matters?
If we examine the New Testament, we find striking trends in challenging societal constructions of identity.
Consider Paul: He argued against Peter privileging the Jewish converts to Christianity over the Gentile (non-Jewish), saying it rendered the gospel moot. In the same letter, Paul goes on to state (Galatians 3:28): “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”
It is not our identity that matters, but our identity in the context of Christ; it is not how I wish to interface with the Divine that ultimately matters, but that God has chosen to interact with me through Christ, to interact with me as with Christ. It is not my image of self that matters, but rather the image of God to which I should conform.
Perhaps it is to the desert that we must turn, in all its bleak monotony, to be tempted by our own self-importance, to be enticed by alluring misconceptions of God, and then to emerge ready to more authentically engage with God and others. Perhaps, then we can say with Job: “I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you. Therefore, I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes.” (Job 42:5).
For further discussions on the purpose of Genesis at The Art of Taleh, check out our creation series here.
