Proposed Constitutional Amendment – I
'As the Holy Scripture reveals, both men and women are made in the image of God and, therefore, men
The World Health Organization defines sex as a matter of biological science. Male or female sex in their definition is not social construct but instead can be determined through empirical science. To put it simply, science can determine sex based on the absence and/or presence of scientifically observable facts. The same WHO defines gender as a matter of identity. So, in that respect, gender can be said to be a matter of social construct. However, even within that context gender is not so fluid as with each definition of gender there are necessarily rules for inclusion and exclusion that provide for some sense of knowing. We will come back to the topic of gender later.
Given this background there is at least one problem with the proposed amendment identified in the highlighted text above. What is unclear in this statement is whether we are talking about God having a scientific expression of sex or having a gender identity.
C.S Lewis once addressed those who can’t tell the difference between biology and gender.
“Everyone must sometimes have wondered why in nearly all tongues certain inanimate objects are masculine and others feminine. What is masculine about a mountain or feminine about certain trees? Ransom has cured me of believing that this is a purely morphological phenomenon, depending on the form of the world. Still less is gender an imaginative extension of sex. Our ancestors did not make mountains masculine because they projected male characteristics into them. The real process is the reverse. Gender is a reality, and a more fundamental reality than sex. Sex is, in fact, merely the adaptation to organic life of a fundamental polarity which divides all created beings. Female sex is simply one of the things that have feminine gender; there are many others, and Masculine and Feminine meet us on planes of reality where male and female would simply be meaningless.” (Perilandra p.200)
There are those who will struggle with the above. If you hold that truth can only be determined through scientific inspection, then you will be left a determination that there cannot be a distinction between gender and sex since gender in these expressions can't be scientifically assessed. I think that there is a weakness in that view, commonly referred to as scientism -- chief being that the belief/statement itself cannot be scientifically evaluated.
So let us focus for a brief moment on the topics of sex and gender. I believe that discussions of sex in regards to God are category errors. In this, I would agree with the highlighted portion of the amendment. However, it is unclear in the amendment whether it properly confines itself to sex alone. If gender is in focus with this amendment, then it creates grave problems within our use of scripture.
Some may raise the argument that the issue of gender is muted within scripture due to the Hebrew language not having an expression of non-gender. This argument seems to be injurious to the revelation of scripture. The question on this argument seems to be, does language proscribe (or confine) our definition/understanding of God or whether the definition/understanding is simply described through language. If there was a desire of God to express non-gender, then is it more likely that there would have been a work or phrase to capture that instituted within the language?
Another argument is that using simple masculine pronouns to describe God is demeaning to women. How so? God created man and woman and in Genesis we are told that after creating both man and woman God looked at all he had created and said it was "very good". One need only to look to scripture to understand that contrary to the assertion that women are demeaned in the Bible, women are referred to with high regard. Time and again, scripture provides references of feminine qualities within the Godhead. Examples such as Jesus saying how he longed to gather Jerusalem like a hen gathers its young demonstrate a high sensitivity to the feminine.
So why worry at all about gender? Some will argue that we could just remove all personal pronouns from Scripture in reference to God. This is an idea that has extremely detrimental effects. Unlike the deities of so many other religions, the God of the Bible is not an abstract idea or some other form but instead a personal God. While he is transcendent, he is still deeply personal and this fact is best represented in the Incarnation of Jesus. God does not remain wholly separate from His creation (an attribute of Allah in Islam) but instead stepped into creation to demonstrate His nearness and personal attributes. We must not abandon the idea of a personal God to salve some modern conscience. We don't abandon good theology for cultural peculiarity.
So, back to the WHO definition of gender. If in fact the definition is acceptable, then it seems the church would have but one option and that is to determine how God self identifies. Lewis offered this observation:
"Christians think that God Himself has taught us how to speak of Him. 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. And this is surely intolerable: or, if tolerable, it is an argument not in favour of Christian priestesses [or changes in biblical gender language] but against Christianity. It is also surely based on a shallow view of imagery.'
While I can admire much of the attempt to amend the constitution, there are still troubling aspects as I have tried to indicate in this article. Given the theological problems that are introduced through this amendment, it seems that voting for this amendment would have potentially more negative effects than positive. One can only hope that the language about sex/gender of God was an exuberant overreach in trying to achieve goodness. However, upon careful examination this amendment has serious deficiencies that need to be addressed prior to acceptance. We must demand more care and consideration for scripture in considering amendments to our foundational documents.
I close with this quote from a Touchstone article by Wayne Martindale and his quotation of Lewis:
"With merely human constructs, we may change terms and cultural ideas as often as we like. Where revelation and divinity is concerned, however, “We cannot shuffle or tamper so much. With the Church, we are farther in: for there we are dealing with male and female not merely as facts of nature but as the live and awful shadows of realities utterly beyond our control and largely beyond our direct knowledge. Or rather, we are not dealing with them but (as we shall soon learn if we meddle) they are dealing with us.”"
Read more: http://www.touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=04-01-005-f#ixzz4j9AUYCi5
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