Administration Of Genesis 1:27 today

Outreach, an LGBTQ Catholic resource that offers news, essays, resources and community for LGBTQ Catholics, their families and friends, and those who minister to them in the Catholic church worldwide, has recently published some articles that may help us see that God’s plan for human sexuality is more than we may have previously considered.

Listening and care

Father Charles Bouchard, O.P., Dominican friar and the senior director of theology and sponsorship at the Catholic Health Association of the United States, suggests that the U.S.C.C.B.’s Administrative Committee may have wanted to say as little as possible. They urge that we employ “all appropriate resources to mitigate the suffering of those who struggle with gender incongruence.” This tells us to focus on what we can do for trans patients. 

We can listen, we can promote scientific research, we can provide pastoral and spiritual care and we can care for families. (It is noteworthy that the document uses the term “gender incongruence” while other parts of the Note seem to suggest that it is not a real medical condition that requires intervention.) 

Trans people are teaching us that human sexuality is more varied and complex than we might feel comfortable admitting. The bishops’ Note may open the door for serious discussions of the questions transgender experience raises. It may help us see that God’s plan for human sexuality is not entirely binary after all. Maybe we will discover that God is glorified by creation in more ways than we thought possible. (Bouchard, 2023)

Father Richard J. Clifford, S.J. , a leading Old Testament scholar, founding dean of the Boston College School of Theology and Ministry and the former dean of the Weston Jesuit School of Theology from 1983 to 1987, concludes that the expectation that this single verse (Genesis 1:27) can adjudicate modern controversies about gender is thoroughly misguided. There is no hint that the ancient author knew anything about the modern issue of gender identity. And the text gives no hint either. To use “male and female he created them” against (or for) contemporary discussions of gender is to read into the biblical text rather than read the biblical text.

Genesis 1 responds to the community’s doubts about their future by showing how God arranged that all animate beings would continue through their offspring. The text does this, in a strikingly original way, by affirming that God implanted in every living creature a seed (in Hebrew, zera‘) from which future generations will come. The word “seed” appears six times in the text, all occurrences referring to plant and animal life in Genesis 1.

God’s generous commitment to support human life is the proper context for interpreting “male and female he created them.”

For humans, however, the text uses an alternate expression to make the same point, “male and female he created them.” “Male and female” thus means that humans, by divine will, share the life-potency of other life forms on earth. God’s generous commitment to support human life is the proper context for interpreting “male and female he created them.”

In its context, it means that human beings have the same “seed mechanism” that assures them they will continue by begetting descendants to replace the generations that have gone before. Genesis 1:27 assures every human being, not only Israel, that God has implanted in them the means for continuing the future existence of the human race. (Clifford, 2023)

Pope Francis, in the encyclical “Laudato Si”, urges us to adopt a kinship relationship with nature.

Preference for Kinship

Our scientific study helps us to better understand the complex and wonderful role we have in the understanding and supporting all of Creation.

References

Bouchard, C. (2023, April 24). Catholic ethicist on U.S. bishops' directive: Transgender people teach us that human sexuality is "varied and complex". Outreach.faith. Retrieved June 25, 2023, from https://outreach.faith/2023/04/catholic-ethicist-on-bishops-directive-transgender-people-teach-us-that-human-sexuality-is-varied-and-complex/ 

Clifford, R. J. (2023, June 25). Richard J. Clifford, S.J.: Using "Male and female he created them" to adjudicate gender controversies is "thoroughly misguided". Outreach.faith. Retrieved June 25, 2023, from https://outreach.faith/2023/06/richard-j-clifford-s-j-using-male-and-female-he-created-them-to-adjudicate-gender-identity-controversies-is-thoroughly-misguided/ 

Philosophy Theology and Gender

Forms of theological thinking and religious practice that have featured the unimaginability and incomprehensibility of God are key to prayer and the mystical life.

Inclusive approach

 

Daniel Walden urges authentic engagement of Christians with the stories of transgender people as a path to greater inclusion to Church life.

I do not posit here a duty to receive the life stories that people tell us, including about their gender, without any critical engagement. But the reflexive denial with which transgender people’s stories are met is only “critical engagement” with an intellectual culture that routinely mistakes contrarian punditry for discussion, paid advertisements for book reviews, and publicity-seeking pronouncements for moral theology. Authentic engagement—the sort of radical encounter with other persons that Pope Francis regularly lays out as an obligation for all baptized Christians—demands that we suspend such instincts for immediate reaction. To be properly critical, we must first understand what we criticize. We must understand what a person is saying: what their terms are, how they map onto experience, and how the arrangement of those terms draws sense and meaning out of the sequential events of experience. Such understanding comes not from a momentary reaction to a single statement, but from sustained engagement with a person’s full understanding of their own life.1 

Father Herbert McCabe is frequently cited in the article by Daniel Walden in Commonweal Magazine. The Irish Times describes the approach of Father Herbert that respected Catholic Orthodoxy and presented God as weakness rather than power.

At the centre of his faith was the image of a failed, reviled, first-century political criminal whose execution was a grim sign of how far the powers of this world will go when their interests are threatened. For him, God was a matter of weakness rather than power. When we spoke of him (or "she", as he sometimes casually referred to the Almighty in his sermons), we literally could not know what we were talking about. His thought thus joined a long Irish tradition of negative theology whose source was the great medieval philosopher John Scottus Eriugena.2 

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy outlines the Christian Neoplatonism of John Scottus Eriugena, the medieval philosopher who influenced Father Herbert McCabe.

Eriugena’s thought is best understood as a sustained attempt to create a consistent, systematic, Christian Neoplatonism from diverse but primarily Christian sources. Eriugena had a unique gift for identifying the underlying intellectual framework, broadly Neoplatonic but also deeply Christian, assumed by the writers of the Christian East. Drawing especially on Basil, Gregory of Nyssa, Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, Maximus Confessor, as well as on the more familiar authorities (auctores) of the Latin West (e.g., Cicero, Augustine, Macrobius, Martianus Capella, Boethius), he developed a highly original cosmology, where the highest principle, “the immovable self-identical one” (unum et idipsum immobile, Periphyseon, Patrologia Latina 122: 476b), engenders all things and retrieves them back into itself. Contrary to what some earlier commentators supposed, it is most unlikely that Eriugena had direct knowledge of the original texts of Plotinus, Porphyry, Proclus, or other pagan Neoplatonists, but he did have some direct knowledge of Plato (a portion of Timaeus in the translation of Calcidius) as well as familiarity with the pseudo-Augustinian Categoriae decem.3 

Philosophy and theology that dates to medieval times may provide a foundation for sincerely listening to the voices and spiritual journey of transgender children of God.

 

References

1	(n.d.). Gender, Sex, and Other Nonsense | Commonweal Magazine. Retrieved December 30, 2021, from https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/gender-sex-and-other-nonsense
2	(n.d.). Father Herbert McCabe - The Irish Times. Retrieved December 30, 2021, from https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/father-herbert-mccabe-1.325533
3	(2003, August 28). John Scottus Eriugena. Retrieved December 30, 2021, from https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scottus-eriugena/