The first century Jewish Historian, Josephus, once said: “If you’ve not seen the temple in Jerusalem, you’ve not seen beauty.”
I’m sure it was something else. Had it not been a Jewish temple, it most likely would have been considered one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient world.
Model of Herod’s Temple Herod’s Temple at Israel Museum, Jerusalem” by Templar1307 is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
Where does God dwell? Where will God dwell?
“But will God indeed reside with mortals on the earth? Even heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain you, much less this house that I have built!
King Solomon – 2 Chronicles 6:18
Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth….And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them as their God; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them.
John the Seer – Revelation 21:1-3
A Temple Not Made With Human Hands Arches, National Park
There exists an elegant creational dance witnessed daily. The sun rises and sunsets. And underneath the surface of things, below the dance floor, the part we don’t see, green pigment chlorophyll gathers energy from the sun to empower the greening of the planet. All around us we see a living, breathing, beautiful embrace, and the fruitful coming together of difference, a union seen and unseen, dancing above ground and beneath. We witness daily the mystery of life. In God’s more complex life forms, we observe the give and take between male and female. At the pinnacle of creational complexity, we humans dance to melodies and harmonies which produce ever deepening companionship, complementarity and, of course, children.
Where would we be without that dance?
I believe God created both Heaven and Earth, Spirit and Matter, Soul and Body, invisible and visible things. I believe God designed us humans for body-soul integration. If you are a person who values God’s good creation and also believes God intends the bi-natured world to exist in loving harmony, as a integrated creation, with an overlapping and interlocking existence, mirroring the life of our Triune God, then you may be assigned the label “bigot” in this fluid world full of endless imaginings.
Why? Because you don’t believe that inner desire trumps biology. Or that the mind can be fruitfully separated from the body. Rather you believe in an inherent creational structure ordained and blessed by God. At the human level, you believe God created us male and female. And those are the only options. You also believe it is illicit to do irreparable harm to the body in service to one’s gender identity.
(It must be admitted that some Christians have reimagined the Faith and have expanded this project into reimagining our anthropology as well.)
We each, male or female, possess half of a reproductive system. So the long term purpose and intention, if humans want to remain a “going concern,” is the uniting of two into one flesh so that they might become three. This Trinitarian pattern of two becoming one that then becomes three, father, mother, child, echoes the existence of Classic Christianity’s Triune God.1I realize twins and triplets, etc…break the analogous pattern, but the coming together of difference to create life remains valid. Of course I won’t deny the mystery of the Trinity transcends this basic pattern of earthly existence, but I believe this particular “trace of the Trinity” in our created order speaks wisely & soberly to us.
At least it should.
To frame today’s most important debate as purely a question about loving people is insufficient. It is necessary but not sufficient if your main desire is to lead broken humans to wholeness. Jesus, as John tells us, was full of Grace & Truth2John 1:14 “And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.”.
You are not loving a person if you affirm their delusions. No matter how sincerely held those delusions might be.
“Love” separated from Truth is infertile, it cannot create life. It can’t make us whole. And that is what God desires for us. Fruitful, flourishing, wholesome life.
Individuals with a Gender Identity Disorder (Gender-Dysphoria) need Truth-filled Love. Please read this post for more details.
For anyone interested in an extended review of the Gender-Critical Pro-Creation argument presented on this blog, but without having to scroll through every post, please visit the Menu at the top of each page and click on the Top Posts link.
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I’m a Classic Christian and think Gender Ideology is anti-creational to the core. This blog is about “God’s Good Creation.” That’s why I’m writing about Gender Ideology. And “speaking up” as I’m confident Jesus would.
"Have you not read that the one who made them at the beginning 'made them male and female.'" [Matt 19:4]
If you would like more detail on how my Christian worldview informs my understanding of Sex and today’s Gender Ideology please read the following posts.
Ben Appel is gay. He’s also fearful of what he calls:
a frightening new version of homophobia pervading the U.S., disguised as, of all things, “LGBTQ” activism.
He just wrote an important opinion piece in Newsweek.
Appel enrolled in Columbia University and started an internship with two advocacy campaigns in Maryland promoting marriage equality & transgender rights legislation. He aspired to become a social justice writer and activist. But this didn’t quite work out:
My excitement about the internship quickly gave way to a nauseating mixture of fear and shame. I was, I quickly learned, not the right kind of "queer." I was just another "cis" (short for "cisgender," a word I had never even heard until it was assigned to me, typically as a slur) gay male—in other words, a privileged and unevolved relic of the past. After all, I had my rights—the right to marry, the right to serve openly in the military, the right to assimilate into this oppressive, "cisheteronormative," patriarchal society. It was time to make way for a new generation of "queer," one that had very little to do with sex-based rights and more to do with abolishing the concepts of sex and sexuality altogether.
Continuing his studies at Columbia he was introduced to Queer Theory.
... I learned about queer theory, an obscure academic discipline based largely on the writing of the late French intellectual Michel Foucault, who believed that society categorizes people—male or female, heterosexual or homosexual—in order to oppress them. The solution is to intentionally blur—or "queer"—the boundaries of these categories. Soon this "queering" became the predominant method of discussing and analyzing gender and sexuality in universities.
Queer theorists insist that subverting the categorizations which have been imposed upon young people—for example, the sex they were "assigned" at birth—is the ultimate expression of autonomy, and further, the key to liberating society from a system devised largely, so they claim, by cisgender white men. (Never mind the scientific and cultural achievements of women and racial minorities.)
Are you seeing any connection to the things I’ve been writing on this blog? I hope so. I’m occasionally asked, why are you so concerned about this issue? Because there are deep cultural currents at work here, about which most are completely unaware. Anti-creational currents. (Writing as a Christian, of course.)
Here’s the article in Newsweek. [Standard link disclaimer1Links from this blog to online resources don’t necessarily mean I support everything found there. But as adults we should embrace viewpoint diversity. And make alliances where we can.].
It is not enough to want to help “marginalized” folk. As he did. We must also tell them the truth. And point out radical untruths. As he did.
From a Christian worldview, the radical autonomy promoted by Gender Ideologues and Queer Theorists is, to use a very old word, idolatry, pure and simple.
It is the worship of the Autonomous Self.
But the Truth is we had nothing to do with being created male or female. A loving community brought us into being. And it cannot be undone.
We must help confused people accept who they were created to be. And tell them a great story about who they could become.
Individuals with a Gender Identity Disorder (Gender-Dysphoria) need Truth-filled Love. Please read this post for more details.
For anyone interested in an extended review of the Gender-Critical Pro-Creation argument presented on this blog, but without having to scroll through every post, please visit the Menu at the top of each page and click on the Top Posts link.
