By Faith On Sex & Gender

 

Continuing from our last article.. 

4. Human sin has corrupted everything, including sex and gender.

Because of humankind’s rebellion against God and fall into sin, everything and everyone is broken. The disobedience of our first parents in the Garden of Eden has corrupted human nature; hence, our default setting is to rebel against God in our thoughts, words, and actions (Romans 3:10, 23; Romans 5:12, 18-19). Just as he did with our first parents in the Garden of Eden, the wrecker of this world (Satan) comes to us, hoping to deceive us, lead us away from God’s good intention, and enlist us in his efforts to destroy God’s good design. On gender, sex and everything else, Satan continues to pose this doubt-inducing question: “Did God really say . . . ?”

On the face of it, this is true. At issue is how we are to think God’s thoughts after him. Do we look to God’s moral will, or will we look to God’s decretal will & reason from there, as if God’s decretal will is both necessary & sufficient to draw theological & moral, ethical conclusions about sex & gender?

It’s worth noting that the PCA’a position on these issues fosters an environment in which they & others within the Evangelical Reformed community teach students, like those at RTS, Westminster, Reformation Bible College, Stand to Reason, & Ligonier Ministries to strive for theological precision & accuracy & follow the rules of sound reasoning & biblical hermeneutics on the one hand, then telling homosexuals who appeal to their biology or genetics to underwrite their sexual ethics that they are committing the Is-Ought Fallacy while they themselves turn right around & engage in Special Pleading and act like God Almighty, in whom the principles of sound reasoning inhere, as if He has baptized particular uses of Is-Ought reasoning, leading men like Andrew Rodriguez to state that the human body serves as a proper epistemic template for moral theology relative to sex. gender, & human sexuality.

5. God’s will for gender is clear

God has revealed His glorious plan for humanity in the Creation account found in Genesis 1 and 2. If we want to know what it means to be human — fully human — we find the answer, “In the beginning . . .”. There we see that everything God created He stamped as “good!” But when He finished creating human beings He said “very good!” They were male and female, the binary genders He designed and assigned, both equal in value and dignity. They were given complementary biological forms and purposes so that they might work together to care for God’s creation, and to be fruitful and multiply. God gave each of us sex organs (and even genes in our DNA) that tell us what sex we are, either man or woman. Jesus affirms this in Matthew 19:4: “Have you not read that He who created them from the beginning made them male and female?” Because of this, rejecting God’s design and attempting to alter one’s biological sex is to reject the image of God within us and rebel against Him. To do so undermines one’s humanity and diminishes one’s flourishing.

Once again, this is an exercise in Is-Ought thinking.  Yeshua was not answering a question about whether or not it is immoral to contend with God, yourself, & other people about your sex/gender; nor was He answering a question about whether or not marriage is a heteronormative activity.  He was answering a question about divorce & referred to Genesis and to Deuteronomy & probably Malachi.  In so doing He coupled God’s decretal & moral wills, thereby demonstrating how to reason properly as well as answering the question put to him.   In order to properly argue for his position, the article’s author must do the same.