Male and Female He Made Them: A Response to Dr. David J. Dunn

on January 31, 2013


By Nathaniel Torrey
@nathanieltorrey

How essential is being a man or a woman to the experience of being human? For some, whether we are male or female is merely a biological fact; it offers no imperatives or necessary conditions for how we experience the world. For others, sex is understood as informing our experience of the world, who we are, and how we ought to behave.  This understanding is certainly in alignment with traditional Christianity. We are told in Genesis 1:27 that, “God made man; in the image of God He made them; male and female he made them.” To be something that could be called an image of God, humanity was made male and female. Right from the beginning our sex is revealing to who we essentially are: creatures made in the image of God.

Dr. David J. Dunn, while admitting he is not of the first camp that relegates sex to mere biology, he does not agree that our sex is essential to our humanity. In his blogpost over at the Huffington Post, he claims that the belief that a person’s biological sex is essential culminates in Christological heresy, an error in our understanding of who Christ was and ultimately how his life, death, and resurrection made salvation possible. The supposed problem with saying our sex is essential, “is that it means that only half of humanity can be saved because only half of humanity was assumed by Jesus. Jesus Christ is a man. Thus he assumed male nature. Women, I’m afraid, have yet to be redeemed. They must still await the coming of their Christa.”

Because salvation is available to men and women, Dr. Dunn argues, sex cannot be understood as being essential to our humanity. Since Christ is both God and human in every essential meaningful way, and must necessarily be so in order to save mankind, if all of humanity is saved then sex must be something that can be cast aside as accidental or unessential to humanity.

But there were many things Christ was not, yet those things he wasn’t aren’t somehow less essential to being human.  For example, He was not married. Yet, marriage is a sacrament, at least in the Orthodox and Catholic Churches. While monks and nuns are called to be celibate like Christ, many are called to leave their parents and to join their spouse to be one flesh (Genesis 2: 24). Neither of these is less human that the other; they are both ways in which human beings glorify God. Just because Christ was celibate does not mean married couples are somehow not essentially human, and therefore condemned to damnation.

The fact that Jesus came sexed at all shows that being male or female is part of what it means to be human.  If sex were not essential to being human, Christ would have been incarnate as a neuter. Going a bit a further, I would argue it is theologically significant that Jesus came as a man and not a woman. While neither is less human than the other, being a woman and a man are simply different things.  If men and women are indistinguishable,  Christian marriage as an image of Christ and his Church doesn’t make sense.  Christ is described as the bridegroom and the Church the bride. If the two were interchangeable, why describe them that way? It only makes sense if we understand that the love of a husband for his wife and the wife for her husband are not simply interchangeable (though given Dr. Dunn’s defense of gay civil marriage, he might be comfortable admitting that the love between two consenting adults is the same whether it’s a man and a woman, a man and a man, or a woman and a woman). To put it in the language of another image of Christ and the Church, it would be saying that the head is literally the same as the body.

Another example of how our understanding of sex affects our theology is the Trinity. It matters that we call two persons of the Trinity Father and Son, not mother and daughter, or even mother and son. This is not to say that the persons of the Trinity have particular genitalia. What it does say is that what we know about a relationship between a father and his son, which is different than between a mother and a son, or a father and a daughter, reveals something to us about how those persons in the Trinity relate to each other (which is why the Filioque, the Latin addition to the Nicene Creed that says the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, is problematic because it turns the father-son relationship into two indistinguishable persons with the same abilities. But that’s a topic for another day). Understanding the relationship between God the Father and God the Son as a relationship between a father and a son is different than if it were described in the terms of other relationships of parents and children. The difference in other relationships between parents and their children consists in their sex. If that is true, then we must conclude that sex is somehow defining and essential to human beings and how they relate to each other.

However, just because being a man or a woman is essential to being human doesn’t mean all boys must wear blue and all girls pink. How maleness and femaleness manifest themselves in different eras does change. A man wearing tights 300 years ago would have been manly, while if he wore them today many would question his manliness (though they are in danger of making a comeback).  Recently, women have been deemed essentially the same as men in their ability to perform in combat roles in the U.S. military. It is times like these that we need to examine what manliness and womanliness are at their essence and understand what it means that human beings, as male and female, reflect the image of God.

  1. Comment by J S Lang on January 31, 2013 at 5:39 pm

    The church-related (not the same as “Christian”) college I attended had a sculpture in the library called “Christa,” a crucified Jesus but one that was a bit lumpy around the pectoral area. The sculptor (a lesbian – imagine that) said that her attachment to Christianity was possible only because she ceased to think of Jesus as Son of God and thought of him/her/whatever as Child of God. Interesting religion, but it’s not Christianity. If that sculptor is still alive, she must’ve been pleased at The Inclusive Bible, which calls Jesus “God’s Own” instead of “Son of God.”

  2. Comment by David J. Dunn on February 2, 2013 at 1:45 pm

    Thank you for the accurate summary. I appreciate you pushing my thinking. I do think you are conflating sex and gender (bride and bridegroom belong to the latter), and thus the exten to which you think gender is constructed remains ambiguous. I think there is a difference between saying that sex is a part of our nature and saying that sex is essential to our nature. Thus St Gregory of Nyssa posited that we would be neuter in heaven. Sex was added to us because God saw that we would need to reproduce because of our sin. I disagree with Gregory, by the way.

    Good catch on the relationship between gay marriage and this issue. The post came out of my attempts to work through an Orthodox way of thinking about same-sex orientation, which my tradition does not do very well. Though I think it would be premature to read an ulterior motive behind my post, only wresting. (-:

  3. Comment by Sandy N on February 2, 2013 at 2:13 pm

    I have Greek friends who attended Orthodox schools where all the teachers were priests. They tell me that the Orthodox church is quite familiar with same-sex orientation and how to deal with it.

  4. Comment by David J Dunn on February 3, 2013 at 5:17 pm

    Like many things, Sandy, it depends on whom you ask. I have had some rather public debates with a few priests who would concur. They respond that SSO is a a perversion of nature and a clear violation of Scripture. My opinion, which I state somewhere on my blog, is that Orthodox theological anthropology cannot think of being gay as a kind of orientation or anything like what we know today. We can only think of it in terms of the act of gay sex. It is basically a fornication issue. The arguments of my respected interlocutors have more in common with Catholic natural law theory and Protestant biblicism, both of which are rather foreign to the Orthodox tradition. You will find priests who agree with me on that point, regardless of where they stand on the issue of SSO in general.

  5. Comment by Sandy N on February 4, 2013 at 12:16 pm

    I wasn’t referring to the Orthodox churches’ officlal teachings, I was referring to the practice of clergy engaging in sexual relations with boys under their tutelage, also with other priests. I don’t know if this is true of Orthodox in the US, but my 3 Greek friends, all men, were educated in Greece under Orthodox priests, and they’ve said it was very much an “open secret” back in the 1970s and 80s.

  6. Comment by Nathaniel Torrey on February 5, 2013 at 3:09 pm

    Thanks for your response to my post. The reason you might think I’m conflating sex and gender is because I think they are intrinsically linked to each other. I tried to deliberately use “sex” instead of “gender” in the article to get at this. The bifurcation I think is a mistake.

    I think you hit the nail on the head about orientation language. To talk about homosexuality as an orientation already cedes the argument for making homosexual normative. This raises the question: “How much do our sins, even if we are naturally inclined towards them, define who we are essentially?” I think it is safe to identify as A sinner (as in the Jesus Prayer, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner”), but to say that you are a particular kind of sinner seems not quite right to me.

    Have you read the Antiochian archdiocese’s page on homosexuality? I think it is pretty illuminating on this score.

    http://www.antiochian.org/node/17905

    I’m curious about your stance on natural theology and how it relates to Orthodox theology. Natural theology’s claim is that God can be known unaided, without the help of revelation, albeit in a limited sense. This seems to square with St. Paul (Romans 1:20) and St. Athanasius in On the Incarnation. Is natural theology, in that case, really incompatible with the Orthodox tradition? I’m inclined to think that the knowledge of God gained through unaided contemplation is true, but since it it can not be salvific in and of itself, one’s time is simply better spent worshiping, fasting, and praying(the knowledge gained through contemplation could lead one to worship more regularly, pray more, etc. but it on it’s own offers no grace).

  7. Comment by David J. Dunn on February 9, 2013 at 11:53 pm

    I think we are all only particular kinds of sinners. I think we really need to listen to the experiences of gay people in the church, and we need to recognize that there is something unique about them. I mean, I try to imagine if heterosexuality were considered a sin. In this alternate reality, where kids say things like, “That’s so straight!” how would I feel if I spent my entire childhood liking girls and being told that my feelings were sinful and that acting on them was even worse. I had to pray really hard and ask God to change the way I felt, or I could spend my entire life celibate. Thinking about sin in the abstract can belie the fact that there are real people who are hurting and confused and lonely. Whether you are a Christian who believes homosexuality is sinful, or if you think it is all part of God’s diverse creation, the fact of the matter is that the church does a terrible job attending to the needs and experiences of gay people.

    On creation, that is a big question. My very short and inadequate answer is that natural theology requires a nature-grace distinction that is not really a part of the Orthodox tradition. Nature is being deified. Thus we think of it eschatologically, which makes it a poor basis for any kind of theology because, in a manner of speaking, nature has not happened yet.

  8. Comment by freweini on December 16, 2018 at 2:50 pm

    Nathaniel, Thank you! This might be the first blog I read where it clearly stated ‘ there is no bifurcation between sex and gender’. The undergrad sociology course I took had a chapter on “Gender”, and our instructor gave us bible verses in order to ridicule how the bible is wrong in “male and female”, but how gender is constructed by society. My mind keeps thinking about Ravi Zacharias famous argument –“You do not violate a person’s ethnicity and race. It is a sacred gift. And the reason Christians believe in an absoluteness to sexuality is because we believe sexuality is sacred as well, and that’s why we make our choice that same way. You will help me if you will tell me why you treat race as sacred and desacralize sexuality”.

  9. Comment by Jeff Johnston on February 8, 2013 at 4:12 pm

    Dr. Dunn –
    1. Why do you think that the terms “bride and bridegroom” are unrelated to sex? Marriage has always been related to the sex of the couple – male and female – because their conjugal union is capable of producing children and usually does so.
    The specifics of how a culture thinks about men and women may differ, and the roles and actions in a culture may differ, but those (what you label constructs) are not arbitrary and arise from distinct male-female differences.
    2. I’m curious as to whether you think a “same-sex orientation” (whatever that is) is “essential” to the nature of a “homosexual” or if you think it is a social construct.

  10. Comment by David J. Dunn on February 9, 2013 at 11:43 pm

    1. I do not believe I said that bride and bridegroom are unrelated to sex. I said that the terms belong to gender, not to sex. Bride is a social construct applied to women in our culture. It is related to sex, but it is not essential to what it means to be a woman.

    (Of course, to say that there is something essential to being a woman is to beg the question a little bit. Sexual binaries are also difficult to construe at a purely biological level.)

    2. There is the gay bogeyman again, eh? I think you are asking if I think gay people are born that way (not if I think gay people do not belong to the human species, to wit, they have a different nature). I do not know. I think the answer is somewhat irrelevant. I do not think there is any way to be able to determine what the origins of same-sex attraction are. I do think that we need to take seriosuly the testimony of gay individuals, and those who know them well, that they have been this way their entire lives.

  11. Comment by Jeff Johnston on February 11, 2013 at 7:31 pm

    Hi David – I’m responding to your response, hoping this post comes out in the right order.
    1. I would argue that the term “bride” is very related to sex – the femaleness of the bride is integral to God’s image in humanity and to marriage, procreation and parenting. I don’t think you can split it off and say it “belongs to gender” as if it were purely a social construct. Actually, the term “gender” was borrowed from linguistics and applied to “identity” by folks like John Money, a Kinsey cohort. The idea that “gender is a social construct” has some truth – but is not the total truth. The more biblical idea is of sex – which has to do with separation – humanity’s separation into male and female. It is that separation that Paul, Moses and Christ point to as the basis for marriage – what was once one (somehow) has been separated and is now two (male and female). The longing to reunite comes from that longing.

    2. The capacity to be a bride is essential to being a woman – essential to the female sex and to femininity.

    3. I should have been more clear in my second question. Forgive me. Here’s what I’m wondering: What do you mean by this statement,”My opinion, which I state somewhere on my blog, is that Orthodox theological anthropology cannot think of being gay as a kind of orientation or anything like what we know today”? What do we know about “being gay” that biblical authors and church teachers did not know? What do we know about “a kind of orientation” that they did not know?

    4. Yes, we can take someone seriously when they say, “I’ve always been that way.” So we ask serious questions, such as, “What do you mean you’ve always been that way?” Do you mean when you were five you wanted sexual intimacy with a man? Or do you mean you felt different from other boys and men? Did you feel envy? Did you think you were better than? Less than? In what ways did you feel different or think you were different? Where did those thoughts come from? What does it mean to a child to “be gay”? To an adolescent? To a teen?
    In addition, we would also take seriously those who say their orientation has shifted.

    Thanks,

    Jeff Johnston

  12. Comment by Salvatore on February 11, 2013 at 7:50 pm

    Regarding the idea that sex is essential to being human “means that only half of humanity can be saved because only half of humanity was assumed by Jesus.”:

    I think of the following passages of the Scriptures:

    Genesis 2:21-24: In which we read that Eve was created out of Adam. Thus in a sense, before Eve was created, Adam comprehended Eve. (Earlier in this chapter, we read that God created Adam out of “the dust of the ground”, and that God “breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul”.)

    I Corinthians 11:8: In which we read: “For the man is not of the woman; but the woman of the man.”

    Hebrews 7:9-10: In which we read that because Abraham gave a tithe to Melchizedek, the Levitical priests, who descended from Abraham, also gave a tithe to Melchizedek.

    Romans 5:12-21 and I Corinthians 15:21-49: In which we read that Adam and Christ are compared, and Christ is called the “last Adam”. Notice that Paul says that “by one man sin entered into the world”–he does not say by one man and one woman. In I Corinthians 15:21 we read: “For since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead.”

    Taking these passages together, I think one can come to an understanding as to how Christ, as a man, could redeem women, even though He assumed male nature and not female nature.

  13. Comment by Steven on February 5, 2018 at 11:11 pm

    Nathaniel, thank you for your work. I found several things you said very helpful for framing my thinking. I have read in another blog that the use of “male and female he created them” is not helpful in discussions of LGBT issues. The argument is that God is giving general categories, not a full list of all types of creatures. For example, we are told of land animals and of water animals being created, but amphibians who dwell both on land and in water are not mentioned, yet God created them and they are good. I would be interested to hear your thoughts on this.

  14. Comment by Karlos Lyons on January 26, 2019 at 8:11 pm

    Mr. Nathaniel-

    I see validity in your response to Dr. Dunn’s article, but I also see validity in Dr. Dunn’s article, as well. I am still coming to understand more about essentialism, but I can already tell that I do not fully agree with it or embrace it. Unless I’m reading Dr. Dunn’s article incorrectly, I think you are misunderstanding what he is trying to say. He is saying that biological sex alone is not the sole basis for understanding our humanity, and that gender roles that we have assigned to maleness and femaleness may be more descriptive rather than prescriptive, which is how they tend to be treated in conservative Christian circles. Also, as it relates to Genesis 1:27, yes male and female do bear the image of God and their sex is a part of their humanity But so does a homosexual, transgender, lesbian, bear God’s image and their own humanity.

  15. Comment by Drey on January 29, 2019 at 8:46 pm

    Thank you, Nathaniel Torrey and Dr. Dunn for your thoughts and work in this area of human sexuality. As a Christian, I feel that the conversation around sexuality and gender is often too shallow and impersonal, yet I agree that there is theological work to be done. I appreciate both of your contributions as well as your cordial discussions as well! I would like to add to the conversation concerning the issue of the bifurcation between sex and gender that runs deep in this conversation. In my understanding sex is biological division of the species, especially as differentiated with reference to reproductive function. In contrast gender deals with the division of the species by social and cultural behavior and roles. The issue then is what is masculinity and femininity? Furthermore, Gen. 1:27 I believe speaks to both of these spheres. For example the institute of marriage is shown in the Genesis account as not only physical but relational. Furthermore, this relational element seems to be rooted in gender issues, that is the social behaviors. In verse 24, we have this statement, “Therefore, a man leaves his father and mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh.” While I do not think this is prescriptive, I do think it comments that sexuality and gender matters are both fashioned in the creation narrative. In my view, it is unfair to say that gender is purely socially constructed. I do however think that much work should be done in understanding what maleness and femaleness actually looks like biblically versus the labels given by the broader conservative Christian circles. Thoughts?

  16. Comment by James Beasley on January 29, 2019 at 10:34 pm

    Nathaniel, I’m seeing that it’s been a number of years since your initial post, but judging from the comment section this seems to be a conversation that is still very culturally relevant.

    I’ve read the 2013 article by Dr. Dunn, as well as the exchange both you and he had in the comments. It encouraged me to see some civility in the exchange between you two, particularly because the comment sections of similar blog topics I’ve been diving into lately have lacked attempts to understand. Not only did your response to Dr. Dunn contain gratitude, but the instance where you disagreed with his apparent bifurcation between sex and gender was done with gentleness instead of combativeness. I’m taking into account that your comments took place in 2013 (nearly 6 years ago), and that civility in online communications have now deteriorated in the year 2019, but it seemed worth noting that I found your discussion refreshing.

    I should also note that I’ve been looking into essentialism and constructivism, and find myself leaning away from what I understand essentialism to be- the idea that biological sex is a prescription for corresponding gender characteristics. It’s been 6 years since your post, so I don’t want to assume that your present views have remained exactly the same– but according to your 2013 views it seemed like you shared the idea that the sex of an individual doesn’t always prescribe specific characteristics… an idea that I saw in your last paragraph when you mentioned the manifestation of maleness and femaleness does change throughout the eras. Specific colors and styles of clothing that are assigned as feminine today were masculine in another time and culture. In the example you gave, culture seems to inform these manifestations, and when culture changes so does maleness and femaleness. Because of this, the essence of being a man or a women cannot be defined by these ever fluctuating qualities. This is why you and I would probably agree that we’d have to look towards biblical examples of godly maleness and femaleness to find stable expressions of what it means to be men and women.

    Over the years, have you had a chance to resolve the tension between which characteristics are culturally informed manifestations and which are informed by biblical example of godly people?

  17. Comment by Allie Allie on January 19, 2020 at 3:52 pm

    “The fact that Jesus came sexed at all shows that being male or female is part of what it means to be human. If sex were not essential to being human, Christ would have been incarnate as a neuter.” I think this show’s Christ’s humility on this earth. Great point.

  18. Comment by Ebony on January 28, 2020 at 10:48 pm

    Nathaniel,

    I think that both you and Dr. Dunn make some interesting points. After reading article that Dr. Dunn writes, I think that Dr. Dunn has a misconception of the Imago Dei and how it relates to humans. The image of God is not just something that males and females have, but rather it is the condition that we are born in, the very essence of our nature. Therefore, Jesus, coming to earth of the same essence redeems all. This then does away with Christological hersey that Dr. Dunn claims essentialism to display.

    I do not agree with everything that essentialism says. However, I think that our sex does inform the way that we interact with society. That is how it has been from the very beginning of time biblically. We see in Genesis three how the curse of sin shapes the gender roles that will shape the way the world will function from there on and out.

  19. Comment by Henry Braun on January 26, 2021 at 12:37 pm

    I believe this post by Nathaniel makes a very strong case as to why gender is actually very crucial to the human experience. This is why the dilemma of being born intersex can become so incredibly complicated. The bible makes it very clear on using gender terminology and assigning gender to Christ, and God. This is not to say that the masculine gender is superior; rather, there is a need for this area of humanity to be identified for someone to experience life to the fullest.

  20. Comment by Lauren C on January 26, 2021 at 4:38 pm

    Nathaniel, I appreciate your address of the implications that the removal of sex from identity would have on various theological matters. I agree that Jesus’ coming as male affirms sex’s role in being human, without limiting his salvific representation, so to speak, to one particular sex.

    Near the end of your article, you briefly mention that how maleness and femaleness present themselves throughout history has changed over time. I’m curious to hear your thoughts on how this can be true if sex and gender are intrinsically linked. I don’t know that I disagree, but I would appreciate your perspective.

    And I’d also like to thank both Nathaniel and Dr. Dunn for the gracious way they interacted with one another, even while disagreeing on fundamental points. As another commenter mentioned, online discourse has greatly changed over the past 8 years now, and it is rare to see people accurately represent and respond to another’s position. It’s refreshing to see!

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