Male and female?
Canon Professor Michael Hull writes:
Crucial to any debate is the definition of terms, and the gender debates are no exception. As a perfunctory Google search will confirm, there is vast diversity in defining ‘gender’, never mind ‘male’ and ‘female’, as well as in identifying the bases upon which those terms are best defined. The Supreme Court’s ruling in For Women Scotland v The Scottish Ministers, for example, is not an adjudication about law per se, but about terms, like ‘woman’ and ‘sex’, in existing law (the Equality Act 2010) based on biology, on the natural order.
As God is the author both of natural and divine revelation, there is no better place to look than Holy Scripture for wisdom about sex and gender, and to begin at the beginning, that is, with Genesis 1–2, wherein we read of God’s creation of humans in his own image and likeness. These two chapters partly unveil the mystery of humankind as a unified whole whilst at the same time differentiating them as male and female in terms of their end or goal (yet another kind of unity) to bear fruit and multiply, as do other creatures, albeit on a higher plane (Gen. 1.22, 28). Indeed, Jesus invokes Gen. 1.27 when speaking about marriage and divorce: ‘But from the beginning of creation, “God made them male and female”’ (Mk. 10.6; cf. Matt. 19.4). There is plainly an immutable difference between them that is cast into relief against the constant of their humanity (e.g. species) and the disparity of their sexes (e.g. gametes). Genesis’s use of the merism ‘male and female’ underscores humanity’s integrity whilst at the same time accentuating its twofoldedness.
Humankind is unique among God’s creatures wherein maleness and femaleness are elemental. The Psalmist speaks of humans as little less than God (see Ps. 8.6; 82.6; cf. Heb. 2.5–18). Nothing of the sort is said of lesser creatures whom humans steward (Gen. 1.28); nor of angels, spiritual creatures without bodies, who are neither differentiated by sex nor procreative. Because our sex is part of our embodied humanity, it is essential to each of us as human beings, not only in terms of things biological, but also things spiritual, personal and communal. From the moment of fertilisation, the zygote is diploid, the sex is determined and yet another human bears the image of God as you and I do just now. In our bearing the image of God as creatures, our status in the divine order vis-à-vis the Christ, who is the uncreated image of God (Col. 1.15), is evidenced.
When the Second Person of the Holy Trinity becomes incarnate of the Virgin Mary, the mystery of humankind is further unveiled insofar as Jesus’ humanity follows in the natural order as truly human: he is born a boy and dies a man. Moreover, he rises from the dead corporally, decidedly not as a disembodied spirit or a ghost (Lk. 24.39). The qualities of Jesus’ resurrected body and the resurrected bodies we hope to bear one day are not easily described even by St Paul, who had seen the Risen Lord, and who writes about our resurrected bodies in 1 Cor. 15.35–57. Yet Jesus appears bodily to our forebears in the faith and ascends to heaven physically. The Second Person of the Holy Trinity is forever enfleshed, bearing for all ages the marks of his Passion in his glorified body. Thus, naturally and supernaturally, our human bodies are of the utmost significance because we do not exist without them, and in a rarified way they are ours forever.
We Christians need to be clear in defining our terms, particularly ‘male’ and ‘female’ according to the natural and supernatural orders, because our role in the gender debates is to proclaim the Gospel. The Good News of Jesus Christ affirms God’s carefully ordered salvation history, from creation to redemption to restoration, the key to which is the now eternally embodied God–human, who retains his sex. The reality and retention of sex as a sine qua non of humanity is as enigmatic as the Incarnation itself. Therefore, Christians do not take the male and female sexes for granted at all. We take them as God given, as gifts to be treasured in this life and the life to come. The gender wars provide us an optimum opportunity to discover anew and to articulate clearly what God has revealed biologically and theologically, namely, that we are male and female humans. To perceive or to recast humanity otherwise is to misread nature and revelation. The ways we live and move and have our being as women and men may run the gamut, for we are fearfully and wonderfully made and that we know full well (Ps. 139.1), but male and female we truly are by God’s design.
The Reverend Canon Professor Michael Hull has been an Assistant Priest at St Vincent’s since 2015. He is also the Principal and Pantonian Professor of Divinity of the Scottish Episcopal Institute.
