Mark Carr - Adventism, Wholeness and Evolving Human Gender and Sexuality

Adventism, Wholeness, and Evolving Human Gender and Sexuality Mark F. Carr, PhD

Paper submission, ASRS 2022 Denver, CO.

Unfortunately this version of the paper has excluded footnotes due to formatting. For the entire paper write webmaster@sabbathseminars.org with a request

Introduction

Late on the final day of our 2022 ASRS conference, only a few miles away from us, just as the Transgender Day of Remembrance began, a deranged person murdered five people at a nightclub in Colorado Springs, CO. The club, “Club Q,” is well known for their friendliness to the LGBTQIA+ community. Mediating wholeness in a broken world, our theme for this year, calls upon Adventism to ease up on our tribal concerns for who is in and who is out. What the world now needs from our Seventh-day Adventist church is not more fine-tuned statements about who is acceptable for membership based upon their gender and sexuality. Rather, our more difficult task today is to find ways to open our hearts and churches to marginalized others. This paper attempts to challenge the Church’s existing posture toward the LGBQTIA+ community as reflected in our “official statements” on human nature, gender, and sexuality.

Considering the expanding knowledge of the biology of human nature, how can we deepen compassion for fuller understanding of human gender and sexuality. In this paper, I assert that intimacy, including sexual intimacy, is essential to our human nature. In the process, I offer some attention to the Genesis story and to Jesus’ attempts to offer us a more abundant, relational life. I highlight our Fundamental Belief #7 as well as some of the Church’s “official statements” on gender, sexuality, and marital relations.

Secondly, I look briefly the relationship of the Adventist Church and its healthcare corporations in the U.S. Our “Church’s” healthcare ministry fails to live out Christ’s altruism to our communities in favor of protecting our relationship with the Church. This self-protection ironically falls under the shelter of U.S. laws on religious liberty. Laws that look like establishment (of an official state religion) to some legal scholars. This imbalance should come to an end.

Part I:

On Human Nature:

Saying anything definitive on the topic of human nature as an ethicist is perhaps a fool’s errand. Nonetheless, in my understanding of the topic, I take a both/and orientation to establish descriptive and normative accounts of what it means to be human. Some argue for a strictly materialistic orientation, presently dominated by biological or genetic determinism that occasionally excludes theology, philosophy, psychology, and religion altogether. Others, of course, thoroughly reject those materialist accounts in favor of a rationalist or other form of non-materialism. Some of us want both, recognizing that our philosophical and theological understanding of human nature must also allow present-day scientific knowledge to inform our life and faith. As an ethicist, engaged in application toward persons-cum-patients and/or congregation members, I find our presumptive understanding of human nature is very influential to the ethics of human interaction, although not always very helpful.

By taking this both/and approach I mean to say that for functional and heuristic reasons life today demands we recognize (indeed, prioritize) the reality of our material lives. Thus, I argue that genetic science is revealing things about human nature that we must attend to even if it ruptures our cherished, supposedly, biblical convictions, particularly as it relates to human sexuality and gender identity. Additionally, a both/and approach should not allow a biological/genetic determinism to serve as the final word on what it means to be human. Christian and Adventist interpretation of the Bible has always been deeply influenced by the truths revealed through both culture and science as it has evolved through the centuries of Christian thought and theology. In the words of Alison Jaggar and Karsten Struhl,

“As far as human beings are concerned, the relation between nature and culture is mutually constitutive: To oppose one to the other is incomprehensible. Everything that we are and do is revealed as simultaneously cultural and natural.”

Another way of looking at this complexity is referred to by philosopher Neil Roughley as “developmental plasticity.” Human development, says Roughley, is only partially established at birth. The “prolonged infant helplessness” of human children requires a “social uterus” and a “secondary altriciality.” As anthropologist Ashley Montagu once put it, there is an “exterogestation” involved in human development since the human brain at birth is only 30% of its ultimate size and function. This level of complexity layered on top of human genetic complexity regarding gender and sexuality should prompt humility in our Church’s official statements.

I take a neo-Aristotelean view of life well lived, particularly as expressed through his notion of eudaemonia (a state of wellbeing or human flourishing). A virtue ethic of this sort best matches the finest stream of Seventh-day Adventist thought regarding our material lives. We do have a theology of holistic life that closely aligns with eudaemonism. In biblical context, Jesus’ statement that he came to offer a more abundant form of life (John 10.10) can provide some general framing for avoiding picayune matters of a sexual identity or gender preference. The Church can and should help us all attend to fidelity in our human relationships, rather than focus on what genitalia we have or how we use them.

On the Materialist/Biological/Genetic part of both/and:

What is to be learned from science regarding human nature in the areas of gender and sexuality? In this section, I narrowly focus on persons identified as intersex at birth, doing so through the science of human genetics. Throughout the paper, however, I will generally and simply refer to human gender and sexuality without taking time to survey the important and relevant conceptual and verbal categories at play. There is much to be learned along these lines and the responsibility falls upon us to speak with some semblance of knowledge relevant to the topic.

Historically, Christianity treated such persons, known as “hermaphrodites” or “androgynes,” in horrific manner. Author Leah DeVun’s recent book, The Shape of Sex: Nonbinary Gender from Genesis to the Renaissance, offers an historical overview of how Christians and supposedly Christian societies treated such persons. The historical record refers to them at times as “monsters,” as DeVun demonstrates. Among other things, surgeons (emerging slowly from their reputations as barbers) came alongside parents and Churchmen offering to fix these intersex persons so they properly fit our established male/female frames. Reviewing this history, our history, should be required reading for anyone who speaks from a supposed biblical or theological perspective on behalf of Adventism or any other Christian group. Adventism’s many statements on human gender, sexuality, and relationships continues Christianity’s historical marginalization of LGBTQIA+ persons.

What does a materialist account of human nature presently teach us about the human person. I wish it was easy to show you, in chart form, the genetic variation between male and female. The journal, Scientific American published a special edition in September of 2017 that taught me a great deal about genotype and phenotype in human nature. A verbal description here will have to suffice. On opposite sides of the chart are male (46XY) and female (46XX). These persons are conceived, grow up and present to the world in stereotypical male and female patterns. Those in between are well known, typical patterns that we used to refer to as mutations. These are persons whose genetic makeup naturally results in non-stereotypical, phenotype presentation. Their genotypes are as follows:

-45X otherwise known as Turner syndrome

-45X/46XY otherwise known as mosaicism

-47XXY otherwise known as Klinefelter syndrome

Each of these have variations on the theme as well. The chart goes on to indicate the phenotypic expression of these genetic patterns and they are not simply male and female. The chart shows almost thirty abnormalities between the male and female sides. These abnormalities may be adjusted by hormonal and surgical procedures so that for the most part persons can, if they or their parents wish, present as stereotypical male or female. The chart is available to the public here: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/beyond-xx-and-xy-the-extraordinary-complexity-of-sex-determination/

Loma Linda University researcher, Kerby Oberg, MD, PhD, is a specialist in the early cellular stages of human development. He studies the first cellular divisions of the conceptus as it develops into a blastocyst and then embryo. In conversation with him about this chart he has confirmed its legitimacy and noted that development of gender is necessarily tied to our genotype but cannot be thought of as simple. It is a complex process that is vulnerable to several events that result in variation. While I would assert, in light of this knowledge, that human sexuality and gender is fluid, not fixed, Dr. Oberg would say I’m engaging in an “overemphasis of the data.” Rather, he would say that we humans “can be” fluid, “because 90-95% of us are relatively binary in our biologic sex – maybe a bit more fluid on our gender identity.” With his understanding of early human development, he asserts that there are “hormonal thresholds” to cross as embryos develop that “toggle between male and female.” “At the intersection there is room for some 5-10% that are ambiguous or fluid.”

Theologian Megan K. DeFranza writes in her essay, Good News for Gender Minorities, “Human sex is dimorphic…but not strictly so; it also falls on a continuum. There are exceptions to the typical patterns….” She goes on to ask, “Are those who are not strictly male or female in body or gender…problematic? Are they beautiful variations or troublesome aberrations?”

Adding to this complexity is the reality of societal pressures regarding gender identity and sexuality. If the complexity demonstrated in the spectrum of human genotype/phenotype is also true of the expression of our sexuality then our Church statements of how we think God would have us live ought to reflect nuance appropriate to the task.

On the theological/philosophical accounts of human nature:

I am not interested in taking this paper in the direction of addressing the social phenomenon of gender in American and international culture. I see no compelling reason for our Church to officially say anything about sexuality and gender that attempts to position ourselves in the present state of the American culture wars.

I am interested in trying to establish a grace-oriented manner with which we Adventists can approach intersex (and nonbinary) persons as beautiful creations of our loving God. Persons whose genotype and phenotype (with resultant expression in intimate relationships) have nothing to do with Church membership or God’s gift of salvation.

I agree with Linn Marie Tonstad when she pushes Christians to take our claims of God’s love more seriously. She writes, “The whole social order that separates people into the decent and the indecent, that regulates accepted orders of bodily and economic exchange, is ruptured by a Christ who gave his life for all, but most particularly the despised….” I am interested in our Church embracing, as Tonstad notes, a model of “loving exchange, free gift-giving, and indiscriminate distribution, reflecting the economy of a god who distributes Godself among all people without reservation.”

It is true that Adventism has tried to take a both/and path to understanding human nature. We do reject a foundational dualism and assert instead a holistic view of human life. The “Transgenderism” statement itself asserts: “From a biblical perspective, the human being is a psychosomatic unity.…[T]he Bible does not endorse dualism in the sense of a separation between one’s body and one’s sense of sexuality.”

It is also true that we believe God is revealed in nature. A corollary to this belief is a necessary commitment to science and what it reveals to us about nature, even human nature. I understand that present day fringe groups within the Church who have been pre-empted by the American culture wars continually seek to discount science as a source of truth. Nuance with regard to the embrace of science is as important as our nuanced hermeneutical efforts to understand scripture.

Additionally, the Seventh-day Adventist Fundamental Belief #7, “The Nature of Humanity,” reads in part:

“Man and woman were made in the image of God with individuality, the power and freedom to think and to do. Though created free beings, each is an indivisible unity of body, mind, and spirit, dependent upon God for life and breath and all else.”

Much more can and should be said about what it means for us to be created in the image of God with “individuality, the power and freedom to think and to do.” Presently, the “individuality” referred to here comes with caveats. The caveats focused on gender and sexuality appear to come from our literal reading of the Genesis creation account. Humans, we say, are created as “male” and “female.” Oddly, our preoccupation with strict literal interpretation of Gen. 1.27 doesn’t extend to the next verse, to God’s command to “be fruitful and multiply.” If a literal reading of 1.27 demands that all sexual intimacy be bound by the male/female binary, why wouldn’t we all similarly be bound to reproduce as is commanded in 1.28? Complementarity in this verse is easily interpreted away and there are no statements by the Church demanding that we “multiply.”

Additionally, it seems the Church would have us set aside the part of the Genesis account that says God created “Adam” in “their image” such that human characteristics across the male-female spectrum were fully reflected in Adam. According to the Church, we humans (males and females) are “complementary” beings. While “singleness and the friendship of singles” is part of “the divine design” sexuality is only to be expressed within male to female marriage. The “Transgenderism” statement reads: “The Genesis account is foundational to all questions of human sexuality.” All sexual intimacy must take place within the bounds of male and female marriage. This “complementarity” and its associated intimacy must, apparently, somehow be monitored by the Church since membership depends upon it. One wonders how the Church would know that its members were “cross-dressing” or living in intimate relationships as surgically transitioned transgender persons. Will our pastors become watchdogs for members engaging in such “alternative” lifestyles?

The Adventist Biblical Research Institute’s (BRI) special “Ethics Committee” has also issued a statement on transgender persons. And to their credit they strike a humble tone at the outset in the section entitled “Believers and Sex-Change Surgery:”

“(1) While the struggles and challenges of those identifying as transgender have some elements in common with the struggles of all human beings, we recognize the uniqueness of their existential situation and the limitation of our knowledge in such issues.”

Nonetheless, according to the BRI, it turns out that “cross-dressing,” is a grave disorder in human nature. The statement also notes apprehension that nonbinary persons may be engaging in strategic efforts to express their same sex attraction. The statement reads in part: “In some cases, sex-change surgery may be motivated by a sophisticated desire for homosexual activity.”

While I am generally a keen advocate of the Church’s “official statements,” those focused on gender and sexuality are overly focused on tribal concerns and social phenomena. Rather than reflecting on relational holism, Christ’s offering of abundant living, and mediating a healing perspective in a broken world, the statements attend primarily to who is in and who is out. Concern for who may be members in the Church is paramount in these statements. Would that there might be substantive theological assertion here about how God’s grace and love can be expressed through our Church to those hurt and harmed by our cultures. Even as our U.S. society fails to provide safety for the LGBTQIA+ community, we Adventists seem intent on defining “biblically appropriate lifestyles” over creating literal and theological space for ministry and healing.

The “transgenderism” statement refers to “contemporary trends to reject the biblical gender binary (male and female) and replace it with a growing spectrum of gender types….” Readers get the sense that the Church feels the need to defend itself, its view of scripture, and even God from the apparent horrors of a “contemporary trend.” These trends “may result in biblically inappropriate lifestyle choices.” The “inappropriate” choices they have in view include,

-cross-dressing,

-sex reassignment surgery,

-desire to have a marital relationship with a person of the same biological sex.

Such grave, “inappropriate lifestyle choices,” “triggered” by the “transgender phenomenon must be evaluated by Scripture” according to the statement. The document goes on to identify ten “biblical principles” that guide this scriptural evaluation. Persons whose lifestyle is in accord with these principles is deemed worthy of membership in the Church. What distinguishes these persons over and against those who make sufficiently “appropriate lifestyle choices?” The distinguishing factor is “intimate relations.” The Church clearly positions itself; all nonbinary intimate relationships are biblically inappropriate. Nothing substantive is said about fidelity to committed, intimate relationships.

As I read this statement, I can’t help but think that Jesus would be on the receiving end of it; among those listening in for the hope of inclusion and salvation.

The Adventist doctrine of sin, asserts that humans living as transgender persons are doing so because of sin. It is only because of the tragic results of sin that there would be persons facing material life this way. The fact that Adventist theology proclaims all persons to be in a state of sin only makes this assertion about transgender persons more painful. Intersex and gender fluid humans, according to the Church, have some sort of special level of sinfulness above and beyond those of us found within the supposedly morally appropriate categories. In the 2012 statement, “Same-Sex Unions,” the Church proclaims:

“Homosexuality is a manifestation of the disturbance and brokenness in human inclinations and relations caused by the entrance of sin into the world. While everyone is subject to fallen human nature, ‘we also believe that by God’s grace and through the encouragement of the community of faith, an individual may live in harmony with the principles of God’s Word.’”

Like all sinful humans, according to the Church, those who fall outside our accepted categories of gender and sexuality, may joyfully attend our churches. Indeed, they may become recipients of God’s grace if they present and/or perform as persons of one gender or the other. Put differently, if they perform appropriately for the Church’s expectations, they may “fully participate” as members. Doing so, however, demands that they not have any intimate sexual relations. The “Transgenderism” statement is clear on this point: “5. The Bible clearly and consistently identifies any sexual activity outside of heterosexual marriage as sin. Alternative sexual lifestyles are sinful distortions of God’s good gift of sexuality.”

Of interest, the BRI’s statement adds further nuance. For persons who have transitioned from their gender at birth the Church should “not deny church membership.” They go on: “The only thing that we can biblically require is what the Bible requires from all of us: to allow the Spirit of the Lord to bring inner healing to us and to live a life of moral and sexual purity….” Even so, “a marriage between a non-transgender male and a transgender male or between a non-transgender female and a transgender female would be understood as a homosexual relationship, prohibited by Scripture” and thus rendering the couple exempt from Church membership.

The long and the short of it is, Adventism denies trans or gender fluid persons the essential human necessity of intimacy; intimacy of the sort that may include sexual contact. Thus, the Church has no theological or material space with which to welcome, as members, such persons living in intimate relationships with others.

Asserting the obvious:

First, theologically, if we can say that God reflects the full female/male gender spectrum and say, at the same time, that God created humankind in God’s image then it strikes me as odd that we persist in limiting our view of appropriate, intimate human relationships solely through the gendered categories of male and female. DeVun notes in her historical survey of Christian commentary on Adam, that “for some readers… Adam’s maleness was inherently joined with femaleness. Some went so far as to claim Adam himself as an ‘androgyne,’ or ‘man-woman.’” Through this creation story, the “concept of ‘primal androgyny’ entered Christian theology during the first decades of the third century.” According to DeVun, “Certain Christian theologians” at that time “described Adam as a sexually undifferentiated,” human, the “lost prototype of human nature that reflected divine innocence and simplicity.”

Similarly, DeVun offers historical material in support of a view of Jesus as androgynous. In a chapter on the alchemical tradition of the “late Middle Ages and early renaissance,” she details the rich artistic portrayal of Jesus as a person incorporating the whole of the male-female spectrum. “According to this view, Christ is the ultimate nonbinary figure, a unity of contrary parts—the human and the divine, the male and the female….” Christ in his life is “both nature and supernature, male and female, human and divine—the poles of the spectrum tethered together….an eminently desirable union of opposites that transcends the normal operations of nature….” As Linn Marie Tonstad puts it “Christians believe in a God whose love undoes every binary.”

Secondly, I assert that intimacy is essential to our human wellbeing. If the Genesis account of creation is so important to Adventism, why wouldn’t we focus on the relational theological teachings of the story? According to the story, Adam must have given God the impression of being incomplete and lonely. It wasn’t good that Adam was alone according to the Genesis story. Thus, perhaps we might say, Eve was created to join Adam in intimate relationship. Might it not be said that the primary purpose of this stage of human creation was to counter loneliness? Justin Sabia-Tanis writes, “The most critical thing to note about the division of the sexes is in Genesis 2:18, in which God describes the rationale for this division—not to create a separation of genders but rather to solve the problem of human loneliness.”

Might it not be asserted that the divine purpose of human coupling was for relational enhancement through intimacy? Reproduction and the supposed “complementarity” of our biological structures then might be considered of secondary consequence. But, instead, our Church seems unable to avoid being dragged into the American culture wars on gender and sexuality.

Given the elements I’ve noted here, namely,

-the importance of intimacy,

-the genetic science of human nature,

-the alternative possibilities of interpreting the essence of the Genesis account, it seems to me that Adventism fails itself and our God by limiting God’s grace and salvation to those who perform properly in accord with culturally conditioned ideas of gender and sexuality.

Through the statements on transgender alone, Adventism marginalizes roughly 136 million people alive today. Additionally, our statements on same-sex relations sideline literally hundreds of millions more. This seems like it ought to cause us a lot more anxiety than it does. To highlight the complexity and hopefully escalate our anxiety, let me ask some questions focused on a very narrow portion of the gender spectrum:

-Upon whom does the moral burden fall that a baby with “atypical sexual development,” matures toward either male or female phenotype?

-Should the parents insist, soon after birth, that the child go through surgery?

-Should a surgeon step forward and offer services that would “fix” the child?

-Should the person with atypical sexual development simply grow up like everyone else?

-Should the child be baptized into the Church prior to settling into an either male or

female phenotype? And if the answer is yes, then how would we go about pushing such

a person out of membership when they make “inappropriate, alternative, lifestyle

choices?”

To be clear, my assertion is that intersex and nonbinary persons of whatever gender orientation should be celebrated for who they are, from anywhere they fall on or move along the spectrum of human phenotype. Adventism would do well to open its arms to LGBTQIA+ persons as a faith community of sanctuary from a society hellbent on marginalizing them.

Part II: A Second Assertion:

Adventism in the United States is presently in a posture of self-absorption and self-protection in relation to sociocultural and political issues in our society. I hope to illustrate what I mean through a brief assessment of our healthcare ministry in the U.S. particularly in the relationship Adventist healthcare corporations have with the Church administrative branch and the public it serves.

First, it must be recognized that the Church does not own our healthcare ministries. Adventist healthcare corporations are not owned by the General Conference, the administrative branch of the Church. Adventist healthcare corporations are identified by American, corporate, legal structures that govern, license, and monitor the offering of healthcare in our country. The General Conference gave up ownership of these corporations back in the late 1980’s for fear of litigation that would gut the Church coffers. Thus, the various Adventist healthcare corporations are stand-alone, corporate entities that partner with the Church; find their existential identity within our faith tradition and community.

Adventist healthcare corporations partner with our administrative branch for obvious and deeply integral reasons; we are all committed our Church and our God. But we see life differently. There is a necessary tension that exists between the medical and administrative branches of the Church. I see the same tension in the Catholic system within which I work. Those in the medical/healthcare sub-culture have an outward-facing ministry to the public while those in Church administration have an inward-facing view protective of our Church identity and structural boundaries. This amounts to an insuperable tension that will eventually rupture the bonds. Adventist (or any faith-based) healthcare corporations have an identity bond with our Church, but they have a fiduciary duty to the public. One of these two must be prioritized over the other in our present society as it relates to transgender (and some other) healthcare services.

Faith-based, Adventist, healthcare corporations present themselves to the public as committed to extending the healing ministry of Jesus. I think I am on safe ground to assert that Jesus was self-effacing; he was altruistic toward those he came to serve (Philippians 2.3-7). Thus, it seems to me that a Christian healthcare corporation that seeks to extend the healing work of Jesus ought to be similarly self-effacing. Of course, a balance of self-protection and self-effacement is necessary in any disposition focused on caring for others. In corporate Adventist healthcare, telling the public that they are the focus of our service is ostensibly altruistic. However, when hospitals limit their treatment offerings to the public based solely upon faith conviction and connection to their administrative branch they reflect an ego-centric, self-protective approach.

To be clear, I am asserting that altruism should be the primary virtue of a Christian healthcare corporation, whether Catholic, Baptist, Mormon, Lutheran, or Adventist. All are licensed by the state and federal government, and we serve our communities with the presumption that when persons enter our facilities, they can avail themselves of the medically appropriate, legal services that hospitals normally provide. Of course, not all hospitals are able to offer everything legally available. But when upholding the Church’s faith convictions and offering the public what they have deemed appropriate comes into conflict, our inclination should be altruistic; we should offer the medical care the public seeks. In my view, such altruism would be a healing force in our society, helping mediate wholeness in ways consistent with our Adventist theological convictions.

Unfortunately, altruism of this sort causes tension in the relationship with the administrative branch of the Church. And it ought to. One need only read the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ ministry to see how his altruism stressed his own relationship with his faith community. When our healthcare corporations override altruism to the public out of fear for the potential repercussions with the Church, we place restrictions on the services we offer in at least three areas:

-Assisted death/suicide

-Most people in the U. S. die in a hospital and most of them know it is coming, often with excruciating physical and psychological pain and suffering. In states where assisted death/suicide is legal, Adventist hospitals refuse to help patients secure these services. Sometimes, patients are too ill to transfer to another hospital and their request for a legally available therapy is denied. If there are physicians working for us in our hospitals who are willing to help patients end their lives, should we forbid them because our clerics in Washington, D.C. deem it morally inappropriate?

-Abortion services

-In most cases when a woman is in medical need of an abortion to save her life or to protect against a rapidly onset critical condition and in our hospital, she must first prove her pathological vulnerability, often to a cast of male physicians and sometimes chaplains (read clergy persons). If there is any indication that her pathology is not a grave danger to her and she is seeking an abortion for non-critical reasons, she is discharged to find medical help elsewhere, given of course, that she is medically stable.

-Intersex and gender transition services

-What rules should be established for our healthcare facilities with specialties in gender identity and sexuality? If a patient seeks one or more of the dozen or so therapies associated with transitioning gender, what would our church administrators ask our healthcare corporations to do in order to vet these persons in accord with the Church’s statement on “Transgenderism?” Should our healthcare corporations be bound by the official statements of the General Conference?

Illustrative to this question on caring for persons transitioning genders there is a statement issued by the Adventist Health Policy Association, a representative body for Adventist healthcare corporations. It is a welcome and bold statement in light of the relationship between our administrative, medical, and business sub-cultures. Calling upon “the biblical principle of justice” the document calls for “extra care and concern” for “those at increased risk of unfair treatment.” It goes on, “Adventist health care ministries contribute to the restoration of human dignity, equality, and unity through the grace of God by which human beings understand themselves to be interconnected members of God’s family.” Furthermore, unlike our administrative branch there is an explicit appeal to the authority of science: “Scientific knowledge regarding gender identity continues to be developed, and emerging evidence requires clinicians and health systems to evaluate, incorporate, and possibly alter the delivery of healthcare based on the best currently available evidence.”

As our healthcare corporations operate an outward-facing ministry to the public, should they engage in hormonal and surgical therapies designed to establish, maintain, and enhance the gender and sexuality of transgender persons? What happens to their connection to the Church if they offer legal, medically appropriate therapies to persons making choices that the Church deems “inappropriate lifestyles?”

Conclusion:

In light of the complexity of human nature it is my hope that Adventism finds a path forward on human gender and sexuality that accounts for science while upholding the necessity of intimacy for our health and wellbeing. Throughout our history, we Christians, and Adventists, have often been very wrong in the positions taken when responding to evolving scientific understanding of our world as well as socio-political phenomena associated with our basic human nature. In Roman Catholicism it took 359 years to apologize for the grievous treatment of Galileo. In that case, science and faith collided and Galileo at 69 years old spent the last nine years of his life under house arrest. The Washington Post article on the event of the apology in 1992 quotes Pope John Paul II:

"The underlying problems of this case concern both the nature of science and the message of faith…. One day we may find ourselves in a similar situation, which will require both sides to have an informed awareness of the field and of the limits of their own competencies."

In Seventh-day Adventism it took one hundred years to apologize to our German Church members pushed out at the onset of World War I in 1914 for taking a non-violent approach to the war. The Adventist Review, in 2014 quoted Daniela Gelbrich, lecturer of Old Testament at Friedensau University. “Life is complex and we cannot predict how we would decide in a similar context. This is where humility and grace are needed….”

How can we avoid the need to offer apologies to nonbinary persons in the years ahead? I appreciate the suggestions offered by Christine Gudorf in her 2010 chapter (“The Erosion of Sexual Dimorphism”) in the book Sexuality and the Sacred: Sources for Theological Reflection, 2^nd edition. They include:

-Religious communities should resist defining sexuality. As noted only briefly in this paper, sexuality (and associated matters of gender) is ever and always changing in the socio-cultural-political milieu that generates commonly understood views. Churches should not attempt to offer definitive statements about gender and sexuality on supposedly fixed, divine propositions of eternal truth without remaining open to evolving scientific understanding of human nature.

-Religious communities should decenter sexuality. Rather than fixate about how persons experience physical intimacy perhaps we should attend to a theology of intimacy. One that focuses on holistic life, well-being (Eudaemonia), and what it means to mediate wholeness in a broken world. How can we protect our young people from social and Church obsessions of human sexuality and teach them to find, develop, and protect faithful, intimate relationships among us?

-Religious communities should historicize sexuality. We should not pretend that standards of human intimacy have been fixed since creation. Historians, if we listen to them, will save us from the overreach of the sacerdotal branch of all of our Churches. As Tonstad puts it, “gender and sexuality have a history—both as a history that varies over time and culture, and as a history that varies in the importance gender and sexuality are given in understanding the self.”

-Protect the weak without disempowering them. While I would not identify intersex/transgender/nonbinary persons as weak, they are frequently marginalized for no substantive reason. This is particularly true in religious communities, including Seventh-day Adventism.

Rather than further delineate who gets to be counted among us as members, Seventh-day Adventism ought to turn its attention to how we can show God’s unconditional love for marginalized persons in our society. Opening our hearts, minds, and churches to the LGBTQIA+ community is the mediating work of wholeness for our broken time.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

consulted and/or referenced

Articles:

Fehige, Yiftach. “Sexual Diversity and Divine Creation: A Tightrope Walk Between Christianity and Science.” Zygon, vol. 48, no.1 (March 2013), pp. 35-59.

Gudorf, Christine. “The Erosion of Sexual Dimorphism,” in, Sexuality and the Sacred: Sources for Theological Reflection. Ellison, Marvin M. and Kelly Brown Douglas, editors (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010), pp. 141-164.

Houk, Christopher P., MD., Laurence S. Baskin, MD, FAAP, and Lynne L. Levitsky, MD. “Management of the infant with atypical genital appearance (difference of sex development).” In UpToDate, Wolters Kluwer online resource at www.uptodate.com , 2022.

Jaggar, Alison M. and Karsten J. Struhl. “Human Nature,” pp. 1209-1220. The Encyclopedia of Bioethics, 3^rd edition, Stephen G. Post, general editor. San Francisco: Macmillan Reference, USA, 2004.

Kaiser, Denis. “Adventist Leaders in Germany Apologize for World War I Stance,” in Adventist Review, May 30, 2014. Available at: https://adventistreview.org/news/adventist-leaders-in-germany-apologize-for-stance-in-world-war-i/

Montalbano, William B. “VATICAN FINDS GALILEO 'NOT GUILTY',” The Washington Post, November 1, 1992. Available here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1992/11/01/vatican-finds-galileo-not-guilty/1092b119-440e-4fb6-b990-cc7f8a662f0d/

Montanez, Amanda. “Beyond XX and XY.” In “The New Science of Sex and Gender: Why the new science of sex & gender matters for everyone.” Scientific American, September 1, 2017.

Roughley, Neil. “Human Nature,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Spring. 2021 edition. Available at: https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2021/entries/human-nature/ pdf version, pp. 1-63.

Sepper, Elizabeth and James D. Nelson. “Disestablishing Hospitals,” Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics, 49(2021), pp. 542-551.

Books:

Beilby, James K. and Paul Rhodes Eddy, eds. Understanding Transgender Identities: Four Views (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2019).

DeVun, Leah. The Shape of Sex: Nonbinary Gender from Genesis to the Renaissance (New York: Columbia University Press, 2021).

Robinson-Brown, Jarel. Black Gay British Christian Queer: The Church and the Famine of Grace (London, UK: SCM Press, 2021).

Schwarz, Hans. The Human Being: A Theological Anthropology (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2013).

Tonstad, Linn Marie. Queer Theology: Beyond Apologetics (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2018).

Seventh-day Adventist Church Statements, General Conference:

“Guidelines for the Seventh-day Adventist Church in Responding to Changing Cultural Attitudes Regarding Homosexual and Other Alternative Sexual Practices,” 2014

https://www.adventist.org/guidelines/responding-to-changing-cultural-attitudes-regarding-homosexual-and-other-alternative-sexual-practices/

“Homosexuality,” 2012

https://www.adventist.org/official-statements/homosexuality/

“Marriage,” 1996

https://www.adventist.org/official-statements/marriage/

“Pornography,” 1990

https://www.adventist.org/official-statements/pornography/

“Same-Sex Unions,” 2012

https://www.adventist.org/documents/same-sex-unions/

“Sexual Behavior,” 1987

https://www.adventist.org/official-statements/sexual-behavior/

“Transgenderism,” 2017