Editors’ note: The following article is an adapted excerpt from Andrew T. Walker’s 2022 book, God and the Transgender Debate: What Does the Bible Actually Say about Gender Identity? (Good Book Company).
Imagine yourself on a tour of an airplane-manufacturing plant. You are there to see a new, cutting-edge model. As you begin your tour, you talk with engineers about the overall design. They talk about the plane’s speed, its power, and its seating capacity.
Next, you head out onto the floor of the plant, where hundreds of workers each have a unique task. You stroll past each station. Workers are assembling the engine. There’s a station for wiring all the cockpit instrumentation. Further down the factory floor, you see workers putting upholstery on seats that will go inside the plane. Each is working from a plan — the blueprint for the plane.
Then, at the very end of this enormous facility, you see it: the plane itself. It is still in an almost skeletal form. But a design is taking shape that will make an insanely heavy object fly at amazing speeds — and if any of these workers fail to meet expectations, something could go wrong with the plane. A mistake in constructing the engine, or a failure to tighten the propeller components properly, will lead to catastrophe.
Every part of the plane’s design is intentional. Nothing here happens by accident or guesswork. Each part of the plane is relying on other parts of the plane to do their job so it can do its job. The purpose of a plane is to fly. A car is not a plane, even though both are modes of transportation. The reason a plane might take flight could change on occasion, but no one should dispute that the purpose of the plane is to fly an object at a fast speed to a particular destination. The parts are interlinked and dependent, but all the parts come into focus when a goal or objective is in mind. The goal or objective explains the construction of the plane.
God’s Blueprint
When we look at the Bible, we see a similar story take shape as we read how God created the world. There was a Designer, and He had a plan for how He was going to make the world. There was a blueprint that God had in mind. And, once He had built His creation, He stood back (as it were) and nodded: “And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day” (Gen. 1:31).
God’s creation was “very good.” It was not average, and it was not purposeless. God’s act of creating was successful in every part, and it was intentional in every part. The God of the Bible is not a God of chaos or randomness, but order and purpose. And His purpose is brilliant — whether it is trees, or mountains, or stars, or atoms, or babies’ fingers, creation is full of awe-inspiring sights, sounds and smells.
And God’s creative brilliance climaxes with humanity: “Then God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.’ So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them. And God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.’ And God said, ‘Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit. You shall have them for food’” (Gen. 1:26–29).
The high point of the story of creation is God’s act of making mankind. Genesis paints a picture of a God who, like an artist, finishes a masterpiece with extra care, attention, and precision.
Humanity is the high point because there is something unique about mankind: Only humans bear God’s image.
“The image of God” is a somewhat mysterious category that theologians have debated for centuries. All agree, though, that to bear God’s image means that there’s a special relationship that only humans have with God. According to one, Wayne Grudem: “The fact that man is in the image of God means that man is like and represents God” (Systematic Theology: An Introduction to Christian Doctrine, p. 442).
Humans are not identical to God, but they are made to be like God in features such as their moral aspects, spiritual aspects, mental aspects, and relational aspects. Humans can know God in ways that the rest of creation cannot. Rabbits do not debate among themselves the existence and nature of the divine while nibbling grass, and fish do not consider the moral complexities of their lives while swimming around. Humans do consider these things and debate these questions. Further, humans were assigned the task to “subdue” creation — to rule over it on God’s behalf.
We are made to represent God, to relate to God, and to rule on behalf of God. It is from being made in God’s image that humans possess inherent dignity. Quoting Grudem again: “We are the culmination of God’s infinitely wise and skillful work of creation.”
No one — not the state, not any philosophy, not any social movement — can give humanity more dignity and worth than God can. Our value and worth does not come from ourselves; it is God-given.
More Than the Sum of Your Parts
Come back to the aircraft for a moment. How much is the engine worth? If you add up the value of all its parts, you will get one answer. But if you consider that all the parts together have made an engine, you will get a bigger number. The engine has greater value than the sum of its constituent parts, because it has been made intentionally, as an engine, and as a crucial part of a greater plan. So, you and I are of more worth than our parts add up to, or than your contribution to your nation’s economy (otherwise the unemployed would be worthless), or to our species’ future (otherwise those without children would be of less value). You have been made intentionally, as an image-bearing human, as a crucial part of God’s greater creative plan.
And every aspect of who we are carries and reflects that dignity — our minds, our hearts, and our bodies. All are created, and all therefore carry value and are designed to have dignity.
This means that matter matters. Our bodies matter. Your body is not arbitrary; it is intentional. While you are more than your body, you are not less. We are not just a collection of atoms and synapses that happen to be conscious. Nor are we God-aware souls trapped in the materials of this universe. We are living, feeling, emotional, embodied beings, designed to relate to and reflect the Creator with each part of ourselves.
God’s Right to Speak
“The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof, the world and those who dwell therein, for he has founded it upon the seas and established it upon the rivers” (Psalm 24:1–2).
In other words, because God made this world, this world belongs to God. Its patterns and rhythms are fixed according to God’s will, not ours. We are a part of God’s creation; we are creatures with a Creator. The best way to live is according to the blueprint that God designed — and by playing the part that God designed humanity to perform. As creatures, we can’t rewrite the blueprint of our design out of our own will. A plane’s engine cannot decide to be a wheel, because the wheel is defined with a different purpose in mind. We have neither the authority nor the ability to rewrite or reconfigure how God made His world.
It’s His creation; we’re just living in it. And, since our bodies are part of His world, made by Him, His authority extends to us. This is His creation, and we are His creation.
So this is why, ultimately, God has authority in the transgender debate. His voice deserves to be heard, and His opinion needs to carry ultimate weight. This isn’t a debate between “cisgender” and “transgender” individuals, or between those who are religious and those who are secular, or between left and right. This isn’t a question of whether Andrew Walker has any right to speak into this debate. This is a question of whether a Creator has the right to speak about His creation. And it is a question of whether a Creator has more knowledge of His creation than a small part of that creation.
This is a debate on competing authorities: ourselves or God, creatures or Creator. That’s what each of us has to decide — and it is a safer bet to cast your lot with the story of the Creator, who speaks authoritatively about how He made creation and why He made creation.
God’s Creation Has Purpose
Remember that when God finished His act of creating, He called all that He had created “very good.” This is important when we think about sex and gender, because when God declared His creation good, He was declaring that what He has made has purpose behind it. The beginning of God’s Word makes two ideas very clear. First, God is the Creator. Second, we are creatures. These two short sentences may be the most significant of this book. Being creatures means that we aren’t sovereign. Only God is sovereign.
The God who creates is the God who assigns to humans what humans are, what humans are supposed to do, and how humans are to do it.
Being creatures means that our highest calling and greatest pleasure is found in living in line with how God designed us. That is not to say that how God designed us is the easiest or most popular way to live. Being creatures means that we cannot re-create ourselves in any fashion or form that we desire by a simple act of the will or the complex work of a surgeon. When we as creatures reject the Creator’s blueprint, we are both rebelling against the natural order of how things objectively are, and (though it may not seem like it) we are rejecting the life that is going to be the highest good for us.
More Than “Mankind”
This may sound obvious, but God’s blueprint included making humanity in two distinct forms — male and female:
“The Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. Then the man said, ‘This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.’ Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh” (Gen. 2:21–24).
Maleness and femaleness, according to the Bible, aren’t artificial categories. The differences between men and women reflect the creative intention of being made in God’s image. To quote the pastor Kevin DeYoung: “Far from being a mere cultural construct, God depicts the existence of a man and a woman as essential to His creational plan. The two are neither identical nor interchangeable. But when the woman, who was taken out of man, joins again with the man in sexual union, the two become one flesh (Gen. 2:23–24). Dividing the human race into two genders, male and female — one or the other, not both, and not one then the other — is not the invention of Victorian prudes or patriarchal oafs. It was God’s idea.” (“What Does the Bible Say about Transgenderism?” The Gospel Coalition; https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/kevin-deyoung/what-does-the-bible-say-about-transgenderism/.)
God designed humanity in male and female forms. He chose to create two complementary beings — not thirds, eighths, or in one single type. What is a man? Genesis tells us that a man is a human whose physical design is organized for reproduction with his sexual counterpart, a woman, or wife, with whom he can physically become “one flesh” (2:24). Similarly, Genesis reveals that a woman is a human whose physical design is organized for reproduction with her sexual counterpart, a man, or husband. How do we know this to be true? The command to exercise dominion occurs through acts of multiplication that result exclusively from sexual intimacy.
According to Scripture, one of the ways we understand the distinction between male and female is how their bodies unite with one another, with respect to procreation. To be abundantly clear: This definition does not mean that individuals who are unmarried, or who suffer from a physical condition which means they cannot have children, are inferior males or females. Rather, all males and females, regardless of marital status or impairment, are oriented to acts of reproduction at the level of their genetic makeup regardless of whether procreation is fulfilled.
A person with male anatomy is reflecting physically the fact that he is created a man. A person with female anatomy is reflecting that she is a woman. Maleness isn’t only anatomy, but anatomy shows that there is maleness. And femaleness isn’t only anatomy, but anatomy shows that there is femaleness. Men and women are more than just their anatomy, but they are not less. Our anatomy tells us what gender we are. Our bodies do not lie to us.
I call this the “Genesis Blueprint,” and it goes like this:
- God created humanity in His image.
- God created humanity male and female.
- God created male and female for one another.
These three truths are the essential building blocks of God’s design for gender and sexuality. These truths reflect (1) God’s good pleasure and authority in creating human beings; (2) the reality that male and female are real, embodied categories; and (3) the truth that God orders the sexual relationship of male and female in the context of a heterosexual, monogamous, and permanent union.
These fixed and unchangeable absolute differences in men and women (chromosomes, anatomy) are accompanied by general differences in the relative strengths of being a man or woman. The broad shoulders of men aren’t accidental features, but evidence of the natural strength that males were created to innately possess. The wider hips that women possess for childbearing speak to the creational design that God wove into femaleness.
The protective instinct that men are often able to harness at a moment’s notice isn’t an evolutionary characteristic passed down from marauding cavemen — it issues from the way that God made men. Much in the same way, women tend to enjoy what we sometimes call “motherly” instincts, such as nurturing. A woman can be protective, and a man can nurture, but we should consider whether there are natural aptitudes that men possess that make them better protectors and natural aptitudes that women possess that make them better nurturers. This does not mean to suggest that maleness or femaleness can be reduced down to aptitudes and inclinations, but that these realities are tied to the larger embodied differences of men and women. If we insist that there are no differences in aptitudes or inclinations, we are insisting upon the interchangeability of the sexes, which history and experience tells us is false.
To misunderstand, blur, or reject the Creator’s categories for humanity doesn’t just put us in rebellion against the Creator and creation — it puts us at odds with how each of us was made. Since God made a “very good” world, with no flaws, and since that world included humans created as men and humans created as women, to strive to become different than or even the opposite of how God made us can never result in happiness, flourishing, and joy, whatever it promises.
— Andrew T. Walker is associate professor of ethics at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky. He is also a fellow with the Ethics and Public Policy Center.