By Rollin Grams, Bible and Mission.
Texas Democrat candidate for the senate, James Talarico, has ventured into theological territory meant to challenge orthodox views about God and human sexuality.[1] Trying to challenge the Christian understanding of gender and sexuality, he alleged that God is ‘nonbinary’. Clarifying his comment, he averred that God is ‘beyond gender’. These are contradictory claims.
To suggest that God is nonbinary is to locate Him in the created order. When people claim to be ‘nonbinary’, they are making a claim about their sexuality. Sex, as we should know but also can see from Genesis 1.26ff, has to do with procreation and multiplying the species on the earth. Those claiming to be nonbinary are claiming sexuality, whatever ‘nonbinary’ means to them.
Talarico’s second statement is correct: God is beyond gender. This is because He is beyond the created order. God is not both male and female. He has no sexual identity. The fertility cult of Canaan understood their gods in terms of sexual identity, even pairing male and female gods. The God revealed to Israel was wholly other than the created order, including sexuality.
Talarico, however, confuses being beyond gender with being beyond a single gender. For him, God’s greatness is in being gender inclusive. His objective is to affirm transgender inclusion in female sports. However, God’s being is beyond the created order, not inclusive of whatever variety there is within it. Of course, we might add the obvious: God’s created order consists of only two genders, male and female. Talarico is wrong on both accounts.
The politician ventured a further comment from Genesis 3.28, that there is neither male nor female in Christ. His confusion seems to know no bounds. First, as even he is aware, this passage is about Christians, not everyone. Is he proposing that Christians should have transgender males participate in female sports, but not others outside of Christ? Of course not. Yet Paul has no such confused discussion in mind. His point is not, of course, that Christians recognise no genders but that gender does not exclude one from being a Christian. We might add that Paul’s statement recognises two genders, not the multiple genders of recent, Western, post-Christian culture.