UCC Official: God Transcends “Gender Binary”

United Church of Christ (UCC) official Rev. Chris Davies wrote a blog post last week entitled “God is Beyond Limits, Including Gender Binaries” in which she challenged the male/female distinctions, or “gender binary,” held by many Christians. The post appeared on UCC’s New Sacred blog on August 24.

Davies, who created the “Queer Clergy Trading Cards,” completed her academic work in “queer proclamation.” She serves the UCC as Coordinator for Congregational Assessment, Support and Advancement. This involves helping congregations “moving forward in bold ways,” she said in a separate article.

In her blog, Davies wrote: “God is beyond the gender binary—in God, Godself, and in working through people beyond the binary.” She broke her argument down into two main points: that “the divine Godself is portrayed as beyond gender” and that “the Divine is working through people who are beyond the gender binary…” She buttressed each of these claims with multiple biblical texts.

Davies backed up her first assertion by citing Genesis 1:27. She said God referring to humans as “them” demonstrated that God was “beyond a gender binary in the creation narrative.” She said the feminine personification of Wisdom in John 1 and Proverbs 8, as well as Isaiah 40-55, in which she said “all the images of God are feminine-oriented,” also illustrated how God defied the gender binary.

Davies fleshed out her second main point beginning with the Old Testament story of Joseph. She argued he was a “cross-dressing character” for wearing his coat of many colors. “Scholar Peterson Tuscano points out the Hebrew verb in this passage is only used one other place, and it refers to a dress given to a princess,” she said.

She added that the “massive role” eunuchs played throughout Scripture further busted the gender binary within creation, as did the “man who ‘isn’t behaving like a man’” in Mark 14:13-16.

Accepting this theology meant Christians needed to accept “that there are those among us who are embodying gender beyond male and/or female,” according to Davies.

“We must lift up the wisdom of people living in the margins in their experience with the sacred,” she explained. “We must listen when trans & genderqueer folk name their own journey.”

Of course, Davies’ thesis that Christians need to move past the male/female binary clashes with the traditional Christian understanding of gender. Indeed, prominent Christian author C. S. Lewis said it was “intolerable” to degenderize God and called it an “argument … against Christianity” itself in his book, God in the Docket.

“Christians think that God Himself has taught us how to speak of Him,” Lewis elaborated. “To say that it does not matter is to say either that all the masculine imagery is not inspired, is merely human in origin, or else that, though inspired, it is quite arbitrary and unessential.”

Traditional Christians also argue that God made no mistake when assigning genders to human beings beginning at creation. Southern Baptist Theological Seminary President Al Mohler made this point on his website in September 2014.

“Gender is not merely a sociological construct forced upon human beings who otherwise could negotiate any number of permutations,” Mohler said. “But Genesis teaches us that gender is created by God for our good and his glory. Gender is intended for human flourishing and is assigned by the Creator’s determination—just as he determined when, where, and that we should exist.”