lutherans elect first transgender bishop

pretty crazy news.. Can't say I didn't see it coming with the liberals, once you're in for an inch, you're in for a mile...


Lutherans elect Megan Rohrer first transgender bishop

https://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/nation-world/national/article251293899.html



Heretics gonna heretic

 

Sierra Pacific synod? This is pretty much a dog bites man story.

 

Not sure if this was your intention with the post, but I figured I'd take the opportunity to ask about something I don't really understand. Assuming a world where WO is okay, what's the tension with transgender priests? Is it just another vehicle for the WO debate, or is there something specifically repugnant about the female priest being born a man?

 

Transgender people are confused about who and what they are. Therefore they are not good role models and should not be placed in positions of leadership. Consider the guidelines for leadership which Paul told to Timothy:
1Ti 3:2 A bishop then must be blameless, the husband of one wife, vigilant, sober, of good behaviour, given to hospitality, apt to teach;
1Ti 3:3 Not given to wine, no striker, not greedy of filthy lucre; but patient, not a brawler, not covetous;
1Ti 3:4 One that ruleth well his own house, having his children in subjection with all gravity;
1Ti 3:5 (For if a man know not how to rule his own house, how shall he take care of the church of God?)
1Ti 3:6 Not a novice, lest being lifted up with pride he fall into the condemnation of the devil.
1Ti 3:7 Moreover he must have a good report of them which are without; lest he fall into reproach and the snare of the devil.
1Ti 3:8 Likewise must the deacons be grave, not doubletongued, not given to much wine, not greedy of filthy lucre;
1Ti 3:9 Holding the mystery of the faith in a pure conscience.
1Ti 3:10 And let these also first be proved; then let them use the office of a deacon, being found blameless.
1Ti 3:11 Even so must their wives be grave, not slanderers, sober, faithful in all things.
1Ti 3:12 Let the deacons be the husbands of one wife, ruling their children and their own houses well.

Is Megan the "husband of one wife"? No, Megan would prefer to be a wife 'themself'. (Referring to himself in the plural makes me ask if he is "not doubletongued," meaning equivocating or telling a different story!) Is Megan "of good behavior," and "have a good report"? Is Megan "proved" and "found blameless"? Is Megan "faithful in all things" including faithful to the gender God gave him? This person should not be a leader representing the Gospel of Jesus Christ. This person helps make the ELCA look like fools. They have chosen a laughingstock. They've given themselves another black eye.

 

Thanks, I think this helps. I've emphasised the parts of your reply that I found persuasive.

This isn't something I've studied in any depth, because transgender issues haven't become relevant to my parish yet. As far as I know there's only one transgender priest from a major church in the whole of Australia and she's a Uniting Methodist (the Australian unity of Presbytarians and Methodists in ecumenical cooperation with the Anglican Church), but they are being displayed in my local cathedral's exhibition about the historic contributions of Christian women to the city this month so I figured its about time I started to work out what I think about transgender priests, and this thread seems as good a catalyst as any.

I'll expose four of my thoughts in case anyone else wants the opportunity to offer competing thoughts that might help steer me.

1. The argument based on 'the husband of one wife' seems to be a WO argument, and irrelevant to the issue of transgender priests. If you take a WO perspective, then this only means they must be monogomous, not that they must be a man. If they are a female-to-male priest then they would prefer to be a husband.
   
   
2. I'm not sure what being transgender has to do with being "found blameless". This clause means deacons should have been 'tested' in some other form of leadership role before being given the role of deacon. I've no idea if Megan was promoted without being 'tested', but if she was it's unclear to me what that has to do with transgender priests.
   
   
3. I find your thrust on "Is Megan faithful to the gender God gave them" persuasive, but I feel like it leaves me in an ideologically vulnerable position. I agree with you that their gender was God given at birth, but is there any piece of scripture backing up this claim (I cannot think of any)? What if you and I are wrong and it's 'man given' or 'doctor given' on the basis of the sexual characteristics we observe, and that their actual god given gender is distinct from their sexual characteristics - which is what provokes their gender dysphoria. I'm not saying that's the case, I'm just saying it could be the case, and so it would be nice to have a scriptural argument to defend my intuition. Locking someone out of the priesthood on a "I reckon" doesn't seem safe.
   
   
4. It seems to me that scripture is silent on people who are gender-dysphoric. My default position then would be that there's nothing intrinsically sinful or wrong from a Christian perspective with being transgender (that's not to say it doesn't have common outcomes that are immoral, but that's a product of flawed human society and not something inherent to the phenomenon). With that in mind all my secular views on transgender rights ought to be couched in a general sphere of Christian love and charity first, and then my opinions on the secular impacts of those rights second.

As an aside, given you seem to be using 1 Timothy 3 as a guide for all leadership roles and not just Bishops/Deacons (which I do too), would you also exclude fellow transgender parishioners from Church councils and other leadership roles?

 

Not wishing to butt in on this debate to any great extent, but do we know why s/he prefers to use or have plural terms of address used? Has s/he offered an explanation of his/her preference for the plural when referring to her/him self? Has He/she considered the implication that might spring to the minds of parishioners who are used to reading Mark 5:1-13. Not maybe the wisest way to begin one's ministry among the sometimes perhaps ignorant, though referring to onself using the 'Royal' WE, does not necessarily denote demonic possession admittedly.
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Would that be at least one wife or a maximum of only one wife, or leaving an alternative option of no wives at all? (Perhaps even being one themselves)

Almost needs to go unsaid. Whether male or female, who wants a violent, wickedly rich, impatient, covetous, drunk as their bishop, but I think the RC church and a few C of E male only ones in bygone days, came close to fitting that profile in more than just one of the criteria mentioned.

Seems then that a Bishop must have children which would put many an RC bish in a quandry, even if they have some secretly tucked away out of sight.

Maybe we can safely assume that at the time this was written a female bishop would have been such an unusual novelty that the author saw no reason to include the possibility that male domination of power roles in society would ever cease.

I doubt that the author would have preferred to use 'they' here instead of 'he', like the Rt Revd Megan Rohrer but I'm quite sure he would still stick with a bishop not being wet behind the ears and naive

No scandalous behaviour or skeletons in 'their' cupboard. Makes sense unless one thinks that would only apply to men.

Nothing here which might not aptly apply equally to men or women bishops.

Of course, obviously.

Good sense advice that.

Assuming, as we may, that all bishops, to the knowledge of the author, were men, it would be perfectly natural for him to assume that they must also have wives who should also have certain necessary moral characteristics.

So the final requirement seems to be that Bishops must be house owners. Odd, since Jesus had nowhere even to lay his head. Matt.8:18-20. Yet he is the auther of our salvation. Heb.5:9.
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I have looked at it like this, that transgenderism is a *second* violation of nature, on top of WO-ism

So even if Women’s ordination became okay, transgenderism would be a whole new rejection of God’s order, and therefore greatly blasphemous

 

There is no such thing as "transgender", simply a mental illness called gender dysphoria that makes a man feel like a woman or vice versa. It is a sickness that should be treated by mental-health experts, not something to be tolerated much less encouraged. This is one of the many deviant practices of our age that will horrify and mystify our ancestors (presuming that we leave any, demographically as well as culturally barren as we are as a culture).

Trangenderism, like homosexuality, is what the the Apostle Paul calls para physin, or "contrary to nature". God creates human beings male or female, and to reject that assignment is to blaspheme against the God who formed us. It is also a kind of inversion abhorrent to Christian doctrine, where the Divine Order (established by God at the creation) is upset by the fallen and deviant will of human beings (or Satan). Two people of the same gender cannot be married for the same reason: this is also para physin. ("Gay marriage" is an oxymoron, in fact. It is an impossibility.) A person born a woman cannot become a man nor a man become a woman.

Note that when Paul uses physin ("nature") he's not just referring to the physical world. He's referring primarily to the Divine Order, the kosmos, God's entire realm of creation.

As a side note, my objection to WO is also founded up on the fact that the Bible declares it para physin. A woman cannot act in persona Christi because Christ was a man; and a woman cannot have authority over a grown man, which leaves out the pastoral role.

 

Here's something to ponder: among a significant subset of the American population, transgender=gay. I am drawing specifically from my mother's thoughts here and I believe she is fairly typical of her peers. She's never made any real effort to understand transgender people because in her mind they are sissies who want to cross dress and be the submissive party in a gay encounter.

But transgender issues do not have to be tied to any sexuality.

 

Tiffy, your idiosyncratic readings of Scripture are going to give me a stroke.

"House" (Greek oikos), in this context, is obviously (obviously) referring to "household". In fact the ESV renders the word as "household" rather than "house", as does the NIV.

 

Much as I regret exposing you to the possibility of a stroke Ananias, in spite of it not actually being 'Stir up Sunday', I do enjoy stirring you up.

Household, if we are taking these texts quite literally would still imply a Bishop would need to be the owner of a house, and most house owners were admittedly male back when this was written. Effectively no household = no bishop, if taken that literally.

Interestingly, until only the 2nd decade or thereabouts of last century in the UK only house owners were allowed to vote. If you didn't own property you had no vote. Thank goodness things have moved on since then, (except sometimes in the Church of England and definitely not in the RC church ).

If you have never learned to have fun with scripture you will never get any of Jesus' jokes.
.

 

It's a subject around which much ignorance has gathered to loudly voice its opinions.

 

I deal with the scriptural basis on which we can we make the claim that "transgenderism is a violation of nature" in response to Ananais, but this line of thinking opens up a tough problem of at what point transgenderism becomes a violation. Which component of transgenderism is a violation? Is experiencing gender-dysphoria tolerable so long as you don't transition, or is the very act of believing you're in the wrong body the violation?

Hotly contested translation of 'para physin' aside, this is a convenient argument, and one I'm willing to be persuaded by, but on what grounds can we conclude gender dysphoria is "contrary to nature" in a way that is blasphemous? I'm assuming you're quoting para phusin exclusively in the context of Romans 1.26 here (as in, its an affront to nature that is uniquely hateful to God). Because don't forget that Paul also says that converting Gentiles is para phusin (Rom 11.26), and so acting contrary to nature cannot be sinful in of itself. To prohibit a transgender person from joining the priesthood, we must understand transgenderism to be contrary to nature in a way that is alike to "women exchanging natural intercourse for unnatural" and not contrary to nature alike to Paul converting a Gentile to a Jewish faith.

If it's true that God creates all human beings male or female in one singlularly consistent body and spirit (I'm using spirit here in my own, invented, term of the word to represent gender abstracted from sex, not in a biblical sense) then it seems clear that to reject your assigned gender is wrong. But I'm not aware of any passage in the bible that talks about gender as a concept, or transgenderism in any form. A logical conclusion is that no biblical writer had an idea that gender dysphoria is a thing, and so never considered it necessary to detail such a thing - but then we can't draw a clear scriptural argument on that basis to determine how God actually assigns our gender (that is the male-ness/female-ness of our spirit), and we can't know that it's never the case God gives us a male body and a female spirit. An obvious intuition pump is that it doesn't feel right that He would, but I'm not going to start assuming what God does or doesn't do without evidence.

I'm get that I'm playing the Devil's Advocate here about things that might seem intuitive, but I'm hoping it prompts some novel response that can clear up a little of the doubts I have.

The word household has multiple definitions - but more importantly it's a translation of a greek word that has no associations with property. This requirement is not just for bishops, but also deacons, and many put it on any leadership position in the church. I'm not aware of any mainstream theologian that interprets 1 Timothy 3 as mandating property requirements, and to do so would exclude most rectors whose home is owned by their parish, and any holy order that holds to a vow of poverty. Poor St. Francis of Assisi would need to be posthumously defrocked. I think we can all conclude that such a reading is absurd, and so the traditional reading must hold.

 

I analogize transgenderism to having six fingers... Having six fingers is not a sin, but also obviously against nature... Celebrating people who have six fingers is *celebrating a defect of nature*, and that's a problem

"believing that you're in the wrong body" seems to be just like having six fingers, so you cannot be blamed for having this mental illness... But we have to acknowledge that it *is* a mental illness, and you cannot be celebrated for it, but rather pitied, medicated, etc..


So the first problem is that we have to acknowledge the defect in the people, and that to celebrate some defect in them (especially a mental defect), is a grave blasphemy against God

Next, can a defective person be allowed into the Holy Orders of The Church? Having six fingers is probably not a disqualifier, because it it is a defect of the body; whereas having gender dysphoria is a defect of the mind

People with any substantial defects of the mind: not only gender dysphoria, but also schizophrenia, etc, cannot minister the Sacred things (or even be out in public)

The blasphemy, as I see it, is:
1. celebrating the person for them having a mental unnatural defect
2. allowing a mentally ill person to serve in the sacred things

 

The people of the near and middle east certainly had experience with male temple prostitutes (who often dressed as women) (what Paul called arsenokoitai) and of eunuchs, so though they didn't call the condition "gender dysphoria", they were certainly aware of it and treated it like the defect that it is. In Romans 1:27, Paul refers to men who give up the "natural" (phusikos) relations with women -- and this does not just mean the natural sexual act, but also normal relations between the male and female (societal and cultural roles as well as sexual ones).

Gen 1:27 is one of many, many such instances. Male and female he created them.
Gen 2:18 It is not good that the man should be alone. I will make him a helper fit for him. (Note the word "fit" here: it is from the Hebrew neged meaning "complementary" or "opposite to".)
Gen 2:20-22. And the rib that the LORD God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man.

I could keep going, but the male and female human were created by God as male and female, both in form and in essence, right from the beginning. The Bible makes it clear that humans are not just spirit beings, as God and the angels are, but embodied beings as well -- we will retain our physical forms (though perfected) after Judgement in the end times. In human beings, you cannot separate soma and pneuma because they are inextricably tied together.

 

One question I never hear theologically liberal Christians ask is: why did God create woman as a "fit" helper for the Adam? Why not another man? Why not five or fifteen more men? Male companionship is certainly a good thing, and the extra musclepower would certainly have been a help to the Adam. Why woman, if not for the purposes of complementary union and childbirth? It comes back to the Divine Order again. Male and Female human beings were created so deliberately, by God, as part of His plan for creation. Any violation of that order is inversion, and is thus to be rejected.

It is clear that God wants men and women to come together and unify (sexually and otherwise) to become essentially one whole Person (and to procreate other human beings to carry on). Any other combination goes contrary to nature (is para physin).

 

And I think the traditional apologetic works even without scripture purely on the natural and secular level...

For example we know that there are asexual organisms out there, and if you are an asexual mollusk then that's fine, good for you.... But not only man but all primates are sexual organisms and therefore to violate *that* order is what would make it unnatural

It's not very different from walking on one's hands....Some organisms walk on their hands and that is fine, but the function of our organism is to walk on feet, and those who walk on their hands would therefore be unnatural



Right, so there is the natural critique of transgenderism, and there is a supernatural Revealed critique of transgenderism; it goes against them both

 

Actually, (my tongue was in my cheek as I made the statement), I was not asserting that my interpretation should be taken as theologically valid. Rather that literalist interpretations are capable of going much too far and seeming to prove much too much. In fact the scriptural statement merely, (in my opinion) is intended to imply that a deacon or bishop needs the skills of the wise head of a household, rather than to actually BE the head of a household.

This, as you so amusingly pointed out, would then let St Francis, and many other celebates off the hook, so to speak, from a prompt defrocking for not actually being the actual head of a household.

Nevertheless there will still be those who will appeal to all these apparent criteria as being essential in every respect in the choosing of the deaconate, (especially the bits that appear to insist on them being male).
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Ah I follow, it popped up as I was writing another reply and I didn't digest it appropriately.