You're probably asking the wrong questions

While I was quietly minding my own business, controversy about Christian gender roles and relationships began heating up and, if the social medias are any indication, has reached a rapid boil. I am old enough to remember when the term "complementarian" was created in order to put a warm and gentle face on what was widely considered an outdated and sexist (even if Biblical) understanding of the husband-wife relationship. Now it appears "complementarian" has become a synonym for "male chauvinist pig-dog" and is indistinguishable from the irredeemable "patriarch."

(By the way, this is why I never label myself with terms created by evangelicalism or the broader culture. Their meanings tend to drift without warning while the phrase "Westminster Standards" remains entirely stable, and "presbyterian" mostly so.)

As I've tried to get up to speed on why so many pairs of undies are bunching up, I've been surprised to see that discussions are centered around the same old Biblical texts such as Genesis 3:16, 1 Timothy 2 -3 and Ephesians 5. Some might think me cocky, but I honestly believe there's not much more to be discovered in these texts: they say what they say and have been pretty well exegeted; while some misogynist wingnuts may apply them improperly, the spiritually and mentally stable know how to answer those misapplications.

To be clear, I'm surprised not because a goodly number of Christian folk are generally dissatisfied with common understandings and applications of Biblical principles of gender and role relationships. With them, I feel very strongly that something is missing. What surprises me is that so many are asking the same old questions and expecting different answers.

To be even more clear, I don't have answers. But I do have questions, questions which I am shocked to find that very few are asking but which are manifestly apparent from even the most cursory reading of 1 Corinthians 11.

Has man been abolished?

Our congregation's reading group recently finished discussing C.S. Lewis's The Abolition of Man, a collection of three lectures he delivered in 1943. In the first ("Men without Chests"), he observes how a presupposition that all values are subjective was being propagated in the British schools of his day. (And now in the American public schools of our day, where children are taught to classify "the sky is blue" as "fact," and "God is good" as "opinion.") In the second ("The Way"), he refutes the theory that values are subjective, and labels as the "Tao" the objectively real virtues which have been discovered, recognized, and taught by all cultures across time and space. In his third lecture (the titular "Abolition of Man"), Lewis explores the consequences for humanity should his society's elites succeed in their project to condition all people to believe values truly are subjective. (Spoiler alert: said consequences are not good.) While the book is a warning against a possible abolition of man, this last lecture strikes a fairly pessimistic note (at least to my ears).

The Abolition of Man is widely praised as a rigorous piece of moral philosophy, and justly so. I've always thought of it as the theoretical background for That Hideous Strength, which is hands-down my favorite of C.S. Lewis's Space Trilogy novels. Still, I wondered whether, seventy-some years on, western anglophone culture continues to move in the direction projected by Lewis. If anything, culture seems to be much more atomized and individualistic as the control of elites (in politics, entertainment, education, etc.) has been eroded by the media explosion birthed by the webernet’s arrival. If elites no longer dictate the culture's direction, then they cannot condition our beliefs.

Hence, I am grateful to be reading together with other thoughtful Christians. One of our interlocutors asked whether the transhumanist movement, which seeks to transcend human limitations by genetic tinkering and such, represents a rejection of humanity itself. With that, a penny dropped in the vast and vacant recesses of my mind. 

Over the last few years, I've become accustomed to reading stories in Denver's journal of record which begin with something like "Dylan was assigned as a male at birth." Give heed to that verb, "assigned." One is assigned to a homeroom class at the beginning of high school, and to a cabin at the beginning of summer camp. No one in the history of the entire human race, or of any other mammalian species while we're at it, has ever been "assigned" a gender. Rather, the gender of every single human being has been DISCOVERED by a cursory visual inspection. While gender expression is a subject fraught with tension and subject to cultural variety, in human society gender is universally controlled by one's sex, full stop.

This editorial cartoon gets the matter exactly right. If a girl can be a Boy Scout, there is no meaningful relationship between the thing and the thing's descriptor. There is, then, no way to determine what a thing is; instead, the thing's essence is fluid, undetermined, and defined only by whim. Accordingly, there's no way to determine what a thing is because it has no essence. Instead of a square knot, we have only a tangled mess.

In logic, the argument from the lesser to greater holds that if a statement is true regarding the lesser thing, it is all the more true for the greater thing which encompasses the lesser. It seems to me that in the realm of objectively discovered fact, gender identity is far more obvious, and easily discoverable, than moral truth. If our culture is now at a point of rejecting the objective reality of gender identity, then that of moral truth was long ago abandoned.

As Westminster Shorter Catechism #10 helpfully reminds us, mankind images God precisely in his moral attributes of knowledge, righteousness, and holiness (Ephesians 4:24; Colossians 3:10). If morality has no fixed content, and our bodies have no fixed identities, then humanity is not in the image of the eternal and unchanging God.

In other words, there's no point in heeding Lewis's warning that the abolition of man is coming. Man has already been abolished.