Methodological Preface
A sermon recently came across my desk that I think deserves a serious theological reply. Not because it is unusual, but because it is not. The preacher is visibly anguished by the question he has set himself: how should the church speak about gender and the relation between embodiment and identity? His answer is delivered with audible kindness. It is also, by my reading, dogmatically incoherent in ways that the kindness conceals. I will not name the preacher or the church; the argument is with the position, not the person.
What makes the sermon worth engaging is that its pattern is now standard, especially in conservative Protestant and evangelical settings. The rhetorical register is what is sometimes called “Side B”: traditional sexual ethics paired with a refusal of “ex-gay” or change-oriented therapy and a posture of pastoral accompaniment toward those who choose celibacy or chaste heterosexual marriage. Side B has its serious critics on both sides of the contemporary Christian sexual-ethics debate, but on its own terms it is a real intellectual project, and I have written about it elsewhere in informal and in academic contexts.
The theological substance fused to that register in this sermon, however, comes from quite different territory, arguably from the Roman Catholic Theology of the Body tradition, named for the Wednesday audiences John Paul II delivered between 1979 and 1984 and now widely mediated through popularizers, including authors the sermon cites by name. That tradition’s central anthropological claim, which the sermon adopts as its own thesis, is that “the body reveals the person.” Within Catholic moral theology the claim is internally coherent: it is held in place by magisterial authority, sacramental ontology, and Thomist natural law. Lifted into a Protestant pulpit, it is something else entirely. The register provides the irenic surface; the apparatus provides the architecture; and the architecture, in its new ecology, has nothing left to anchor it. Disentangling the two is the work of this essay.
I write from within three theological traditions, named here briefly and developed only where they bite in what follows: the actualist reading of Karl Barth associated above all with Bruce L. McCormack; the recovery of Rudolf Bultmann’s hermeneutical project in David W. Congdon’s The Mission of Demythologizing (2015); and the confessional witness of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), of which I am a deacon and an inquirer for ordination. Each, in its own idiom, refuses to allow any creaturely datum (e.g., chromosomes, embodiment, the order of creation read off the body, etc.) to function as a parallel disclosure of God’s intention alongside the Word spoken in Christ. The argument that follows is that the sermon under analysis, in spite of its own intentions, depends on exactly such a parallel disclosure, and that nothing about the gentleness of the surface tone changes what the substructure is doing underneath.
The Phantom Rival
The sermon opens with an architectural claim: there are “two worlds,” the kingdom of God where we submit to “God’s good design” and the kingdom of the self that traffics in “self-autonomy and self-actualization.” This rival kingdom, the preacher insists, “got really ramped up in the Enlightenment” and has accelerated over the past sixty years. The rest of the sermon depends on this load-bearing antithesis.
It is a phantom. McCormack’s reconstruction of Barth’s mature actualism does not work with the assumption that divine sovereignty and human autonomy stand in inverse proportion. The whole point of Barth’s revised doctrine of election after 1936, what McCormack identifies as the “final adjustment” through which Barth’s account of God became “more consistently ‘postmetaphysical’” (McCormack, “Actuality,” 211), is that God’s primal decision is to be God-for-us in Jesus Christ “and to be God in no other way” (210). The eternal event in which God determines Godself to be God-for-us is, McCormack argues, identical with the event in which God gives Godself God’s own being (210). Once that identity is grasped, the zero-sum economy on which the “kingdom of self” frame depends collapses. There is in reality no covert, ungracious God-in-Godself standing behind the God who is for us, and so no antecedent divine sovereignty whose maintenance requires the suppression of human autonomy. The actual rival to the kingdom of God in Reformed dogmatics is idolatry, and idolatry is not solved by a heteronomous imposition of “design.” It is solved by God’s self-disclosure in Christ which re-orders the creature from within in the freedom of the Spirit.
The sermon’s narrative of the Enlightenment as the source of modern disorder bears the same superficial relation to actual Reformed historiography. McCormack’s CRDT is among other things a sustained reconstruction of Barth’s complex, often appreciative engagement with modernity. There is no path from Barth to the kind of declension narrative the sermon assumes; on the contrary, Barth’s refusal of Kulturprotestantismus in 1934 was a refusal precisely of the kind of natural-theological move the sermon repeats in a different register. Barth’s “World remains world. But God is God”—the formula McCormack identifies as the public marker of Barth’s break with liberalism (CRDT, 129)—was never an authorization to read the orderings of “the world” as transparent to divine intention. It was the opposite.
From Received Identity to Read-Off Identity
The most theologically promising sentence in the sermon is the contrast it draws between identity that is “achieved” and identity that is “received.” “It’s about whose I am,” the preacher says, “which then informs who I am.” Read on its own, this is a perfectly Reformed sentence. It is the grammar of justification, in fact.
But within the next breath, “received identity” has been translated into something quite different. We learn that biological sex (“the presence or absence of a y chromosome”) is the constitutive disclosure of who we are, and that “your embodied state as a male or a female is what reveals and proclaims your gender identity.” Identity, in other words, has been received from God in two registers that the sermon now treats as one: in Christ through the kerygma, and in our chromosomes through the order of creation. These are not the same operation.
The first is dogmatically Reformed; the second is not. McCormack’s argument in “The Actuality of God” makes this distinction with unusual sharpness: Barth’s mature postmetaphysical position turns on an identity, the event in which God gives Godself being is the same event that grounds responsible human language about God; if the two are conceived as distinct, divine reality and human language fall apart and the latter never reaches the former (“Actuality,” 211). Theology cannot therefore begin with a separately disclosed reality, whether cosmological or anthropological, and then arrive at God by negation and analogy. As McCormack frames the conclusion, to call Barth’s doctrine of God postmetaphysical and to call it christologically based is to say one and the same thing (212). To assert, on the contrary, that the chromosomes have already disclosed the person before Christ pronounces over them is to grant to creation a revelatory function that the postmetaphysical position reserves for the Word.
This is the difference between two different theologies of revelation. McCormack’s reconstruction of Barth places the body, the cosmos, and the historical situation in the role of creaturely media through which the Word addresses the creature. They are the theater and instrumentality of revelation and not its disclosing essence. Once they are made to disclose in their own right, once we say “the body reveals the person,” the christocentric grammar has been quietly replaced by a metaphysical one.
Theology of the Body in Borrowed Clothes
This is the place to address the source-base of the sermon directly. The two principal authorities cited are Abigail Favale’s The Genesis of Gender (2022) and Sam Allberry, supplemented by Mark Yarhouse’s clinical psychology. Favale is a Catholic convert working firmly within a Theology of the Body tradition that traces through John Paul II’s Wednesday catecheses to a broader Catholic personalist anthropology with deep roots in Thomist natural law. Allberry occupies a Side B Anglican-evangelical position that pairs traditional sexual ethics with affective compassion. Yarhouse provides a diagnostic vocabulary.
Favale’s claim that “the body reveals the person” is doing the work that, in Catholic moral theology, is grounded in a robust natural law mediated through ecclesial magisterial authority. The Catholic system has, one could argue, integrity. Lifted out of that ecology and pasted into a non-denominational evangelical pulpit, the same claim becomes a freelance natural theology with no governing authority but the preacher’s own reading of Genesis. The result is the strange spectacle of a Protestant sermon whose central anthropological claim depends on a Catholic metaphysical apparatus the preacher has not adopted, would not adopt, and probably could not adopt without vacating his ecclesial location.
The sermon’s most striking deployment of Allberry crystallizes the difficulty. Citing him approvingly, the preacher contrasts a culture that allegedly takes psychology as the sexual identity to which the body must be conformed, with a Bible that allegedly takes the body as the sexual identity to which the mind must be conformed. This is rhetorically tidy and dogmatically backward. The Bible, on a Reformed reading, says neither of these things. The Bible says that Christ is your identity and that mind, body, and history are all conformed to him in the pneumatological event of being-addressed-by-the-Word. To swap “psychology” for “body” as the source of identity is to remain inside the very anthropology the gospel disrupts. Both poles of Allberry’s antithesis are forms of the same anthropological essentialism; the gospel refuses both.
The Body Reveals the Person? Myth as Objectification
It is worth lingering on the central thesis the sermon takes from Favale, because Congdon’s reconstruction of Bultmann gives us the technical vocabulary to name what is happening. In Bultmann’s usage, as Congdon reconstructs it, “myth” is a formal-philosophical category: a “metaphysical or objectifying mode of speaking and thinking” (Congdon, Mission, 11). To speak mythologically is to render a relation in “static ontological terms,” to take what is in fact historically contingent and dynamic and to fix it as essence (11). Demythologizing, in turn, is “criticism of the world-picture of myth insofar as it conceals the real intention of myth,” paired with “existentialist interpretation” that recovers the kerygmatic content the mythological form had buried (xxix).
This is precisely what is happening when the preacher claims, with Favale, that “the body reveals the person.” The proposition takes a relation between embodied historical persons and the address of God in Christ and renders it as a static essence: the body as disclosing substance, the person as legible inner content, the relation as immediate ontological correspondence. It is, by Bultmann’s technical definition, mythological speech. And by Congdon’s extension of the analysis, it is mythological speech of a particular kind: an objectification that conceals the kerygmatic content (the address of God to the actual creature) under a metaphysical claim (the chromosomes already say what God will say). Congdon’s diagnostic of “objectifying thinking” names a precisely identifiable formal operation, and that operation is what the sermon performs.
The performance is doubled by the sermon’s later argument that “God’s language creates” while “human language names.” The preacher means this as a critique of pronoun usage and gender-affirming naming; what it actually does is concede that human linguistic acts construct nothing while quietly performing the construction it disavows. The claim that one’s own naming practices simply “recognize” what God has already said requires a prior interpretive judgment about what God has said, a judgment made in modern English, with categories (“biological sex,” “gender identity”) that did not exist in the Hebrew of Genesis, mediated through reading practices the preacher has not made available to scrutiny. This is what Bultmann would call objectifying thinking par excellence: the practitioner of myth invariably treats his own interpretive location as transparent to the reality it interprets, while diagnosing the equivalent operation in others as ideology.
The Natural Theology of Gender
Congdon goes further than the formal diagnosis, and here we arrive at the polemical center of this essay. In a footnote that targets John Piper and the Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood tradition but that explicitly broadens to “new natural law” thinking, he names the operation a “natural theology of gender”—or, in Bultmann’s terminology, a “gender mythology” (Mission, 685, n. 271). Piper’s claim that men and women fulfill different roles based on permanent facts of creation rather than temporary cultural norms, Congdon argues, is in fact the constantinian essentialization of cultural norms dressed up as a doctrine of creation. The diagnosis is sharp: this is self-justification according to the law rather than the gospel (685).
The body text under which this footnote sits generalizes the analysis. Those who advocate the divinization of cultural norms—Congdon names race and gender as the central instances—are, by his argument, advocating a nonmissionary conception of the kerygma, one that closes the gospel, ironically, against intercultural movement and translation (Mission, 685). See, however, this other article I have written. Congdon then closes the section with a thought that ought to be read aloud at every PC(USA) polity exam:
[It] seems that some of the most ostensibly conservative theologies are ironically the most liberal, since they operate as if theology’s task is to justify and perpetuate a culturally-conditioned understanding of human beings (Mission, 685).
Now consider what the sermon is actually doing when it claims that male and female are “intentional,” “right at the heart of creation,” that the body “reveals the person,” and that male-female complementarity is the deep teaching of Genesis 1–2 binding contemporary discernment. By Congdon’s analysis, this is exactly the move he names: cultural norms divinized through a fabricated doctrine of creation, mythological objectification, law masquerading as gospel. The sermon is a textbook instance of the species Congdon diagnoses, and his term “gender mythology” is the right technical name for it.
The deeper structural point is that Congdon’s diagnosis is about the formal logic of converting cultural inheritance into theological essence. Once that operation is identified, the question shifts from which gender norms get divinized to whether gender norms ought to be divinized at all. The Reformed answer, on Congdon’s reading and on McCormack’s, is that they ought not. The kerygma is irreducible to any culturally-conditioned anthropology, including the one currently under threat from the cultural change the sermon laments.
Genesis: A Note of Caution
The sermon’s reading of Genesis 1–2, as a “zoomed out” and then “zoomed in” anthropology that yields a stable ontological grid for measuring contemporary gender variance, operates in exactly the metaphysical-objectifying register Congdon diagnoses as mythological. The Hebrew word kĕnegdô is etymologized; the ṣela’ of Genesis 2:21 is connected to tabernacle architecture; the koala-bear taxonomy is offered as exegesis. Whatever else this is, it is not a historicized, kerygmatically-disciplined reading. It is the construction of a timeless anthropology out of a saga whose actual genre and rhetorical function the sermon does not pause to consider. A Reformed reading need not adjudicate the rib’s anatomy; it needs only to ask whether the chapters function in Reformed dogmatics as the disclosing locus of Christian anthropology, or as creaturely media for the address of the Word who comes after them and before them. The sermon answers the question one way; the postmetaphysical-actualist position answers it differently.
Sanctification’s “Surgery” and the Law of Conformity
Here we arrive at the most significant theological difficulty in the sermon, and the one McCormack’s Justitia aliena essay allows us to name with precision. The preacher’s answer to the trans person, the gay or lesbian person, the dysphoric person, is not (the preacher insists) for one to become the other; the answer is Christ, with everything else flowing from that reality. Then in immediate apposition the preacher demands that “the Holy Spirit to do surgery on us to change us”—the surgery being, contextually, the conformity of the dysphoric mind to the natal body.
McCormack’s reconstruction of Barth’s account of justification and sanctification shows exactly why this move is theologically catastrophic. For Barth, justification and sanctification are “two different aspects of the one saving event,” and they take place in Jesus Christ in the first instance, not in the historical existence of the believer (“Justitia aliena,” 179; CD IV/2:503). The decisive movement, i.e., the one that distinguishes Barth from much of the evangelical tradition, is his refusal of any dualism between objective procuring and subjective appropriation (179). What Christ accomplishes is, on Barth’s account as McCormack reads it, not merely the possibility of reconciliation but its reality (179). The Spirit awakens faith so that we might live from a justification already effective for us prior to our knowing of it (179).
The sermon’s “surgery” demand inverts this entire structure. By making the Spirit’s work the production of cisgender embodiment, the sermon reintroduces exactly the dualism Barth labors to refuse: a Christ who makes possible, and a Spirit who makes actual—actual, here, in the form of conformed gender presentation. Salvation accomplished there and then, appropriated here and now, with the appropriation being the substantive form of the gospel demand. Where this dualism is in place, the work of Christ collapses into the merely possible, and the burden of actualization gets shifted to a Spirit whose work is now to complete what Christ left unfinished. The sermon’s pneumatology is the pneumatology of a gospel half-accomplished, and the half left over is precisely the half that has to be paid out in conformity to a particular embodiment.
Congdon converges on the same diagnosis from the other direction. Once the kerygma is conflated with cultural norms, the proclamation ceases to function as proclamation and begins to function as demand. The Christian message, instead of announcing what God has done, announces what the believer must do. This, Congdon argues, is the structure of constantinianism (Mission, chs. 6–7). It is also, in classical Reformation terms, the structure of Law. The good news of God’s Yes in Christ has been translated into a “yes, but only if”: yes, you are loved, if you conform; yes, the Spirit is at work, if you submit to having your gender presentation reordered. This is not the Reformed proclamation. It is the inversion of the Reformed proclamation, and it is the inversion against which Barth wrote CD IV/1.
The pastoral consequences are alarming. If the Spirit’s work is the production of cisgender embodiment, then trans persons in whom such “surgery” has not occurred become, by the sermon’s own logic, persons in whom the Spirit has not done its work. What follows is not, in the sermon, an affirmation of God’s Yes to those persons in their actually existing embodiment but a deferral: “let God take care of...that.” The eschatological reservation here is doing work the gospel forbids it to do. It defers the present Yes to the resurrection on precisely the population whose mortality and well-being are most acutely affected by communal nonrecognition.
There is a darker irony in the sermon’s own framing. The preacher condemns surgical transition as a presumptuous remaking of God-given embodiment and then asks the congregation to pray that the Spirit will perform “surgery” to remake the dysphoric person from within. The image is the same. Only the location of the scalpel has moved.
Confessional Witness
The sermon’s approach is doubly out of joint with the confessional tradition I serve. The PC(USA)’s Book of Confessions—the Nicene and Apostles’ Creeds, the Scots Confession, the Heidelberg Catechism, the Second Helvetic Confession, the Westminster Standards, the Theological Declaration of Barmen, the Confession of 1967, the Brief Statement of Faith, and the Belhar Confession—does not contain a confessional doctrine of cisgender embodiment. There is no place where the Reformed standards articulate “the historic teaching on male and female” as a confessional commitment.
What the standards positively articulate, with increasing explicitness from Barmen forward, is the centrality of reconciliation and the church’s call to read the gospel into the concrete situation of suffering. The Brief Statement of Faith asks the Spirit to give the church courage “to unmask idolatries in Church and culture” and to work with others for justice, freedom, and peace (BOC, BSF 11.4). The Confession of Belhar declares that the church is called to stand by people in suffering and need and to witness and strive against any form of injustice (BOC, Belhar 10.7). The denomination’s polity has moved in step. The 2010–11 ratification of Amendment 10-A removed barriers to the ordination of LGBTQ+ persons. The 221st General Assembly’s 2014 action authorized teaching elders and sessions to celebrate same-sex marriages, and the corresponding Book of Order amendment took effect in June 2015. The 223rd General Assembly’s 2018 action—through Overtures 11-12 and 11-13—affirmed the church’s commitment to “the full welcome, acceptance, and inclusion of transgender people, people who identify as gender non-binary, and people of all gender identities within the full life of the church and the world.” Most decisively, Amendment 24-A, passed by the 226th General Assembly in 2024 by a vote of 389 to 24, ratified by a majority of presbyteries in March 2025, and effective July 4, 2025, added “gender identity” and “sexual orientation” to the constitutionally protected categories at Book of Order F-1.0403, alongside race, ethnicity, age, sex, disability, geography, and theological conviction. This is a constitutional provision. A sermon that treats gender identity as a theological pathology requiring the Spirit’s surgical correction is preaching a position the denomination’s Constitution identifies, in a paragraph governing membership and full participation, as a basis on which discrimination is now forbidden in the life of the church.
The sermon preaches a confession that the Reformed tradition does not contain, and treats as obvious a commitment that the standards never articulate. The PC(USA) has not “drifted” from a Reformed sexual orthodoxy that the sermon represents; the sermon represents an evangelical-Catholic synthesis that the Reformed tradition never had—at least not in this guise.
The Neighbor in Their Actually Existing Personhood
Let me close with the pastoral coda the sermon clearly meant most sincerely. The preacher reaches for the registers of compassion and finds language that is, in places, genuinely tender—the affirmation that God has made people male and female, paired with a profession of grief and accompaniment, paired with the sermon’s most quietly devastating phrase: “let God take care of of of that.” This is the most carefully written sentence in the sermon, and it is the theologically cruelest one.
The reason it is cruel can be stated in the vocabulary I have been using. The sermon’s compassion addresses the trans person, not in their actually existing embodiment, but in their imagined corrected future. The body the trans person actually has is not the body God has given them; it is a body God will eventually take care of. The neighbor in front of the preacher is therefore not the neighbor God addresses; the neighbor God addresses is the cisgender double the trans person will, eschatologically, become. This is what it looks like when a “natural theology of gender,” to use Congdon’s term, eats the doctrine of the neighbor. It kills the neighbor.
The Reformed answer is not to soften this with more compassion. The Reformed answer is to refuse the framework that makes this kind of compassion the only available kindness. The Word that is spoken in Christ is spoken to the actual human being, in the actual body, in the actual moment of address. The Spirit’s work is the work of communion, not the work of correction. The body is not the disclosing essence of the person; the Word is. And the Word, in Christ, has already said Yes.
If there is a counter-sermon in this somewhere, it would have to refuse the kingdom-of-self frame and replace it with the divine Yes that liberates rather than constrains. It would locate identity in Christ’s electing act rather than in chromosomal disclosure. It would distinguish justification from any ethical demand whatever, refusing the dualism Barth refused. It would name the move from “permanent facts of creation” to gender essence as what Congdon teaches us to name it: a constantinian operation in which cultural inheritance is converted into theological essence and the law is mistaken for the gospel. It would let the Spirit’s work be the work of communion rather than the work of correction. That is the sermon I would like to hear from a Reformed pulpit. The one analyzed here—careful, pastorally well-intended, sourced from serious authors—is finally an instance of what Congdon teaches us to call gender mythology, and gender mythology has no home in a tradition whose first instinct is the Word and whose final instinct is the neighbor.
Notes
Barth, Karl. Church Dogmatics. Edited by G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance. Translated by G. W. Bromiley et al. 14 vols. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1956–75. Cited as CD; volume references throughout follow McCormack’s citations of Kirchliche Dogmatik with English translation.
Congdon, David W. The Mission of Demythologizing: Rudolf Bultmann’s Dialectical Theology. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015. The footnote cited as central to this essay (685, n. 271) targets John Piper and Wayne A. Grudem, eds., Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood (Wheaton: Crossway, 1991; rpt. 2006), and explicitly extends the analysis to “new natural law” theorists.
Favale, Abigail. The Genesis of Gender: A Christian Theory. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2022. The principal source of the sermon’s “the body reveals the person” thesis; cited here for context only, as the sermon’s deployment of Favale is the object of critique rather than a source for this essay’s constructive position.
McCormack, Bruce L. “The Actuality of God: Karl Barth in Conversation with Open Theism.” In Engaging the Doctrine of God: Contemporary Protestant Perspectives, edited by Bruce L. McCormack, 185–242. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008.
———. “Justitia aliena: Karl Barth in Conversation with the Evangelical Doctrine of Imputed Righteousness.” In Justification in Perspective: Historical Developments and Contemporary Challenges, edited by Bruce L. McCormack, 167–96. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2006. Where double pagination is given (e.g., KD IV/2:569 / CD IV/2:503), the first reference is to Karl Barth, Kirchliche Dogmatik (the German edition), and the second is to Church Dogmatics (the English translation).
———. Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology: Its Genesis and Development, 1909–1936. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995. Cited as CRDT.
Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). The Constitution of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), Part I: Book of Confessions. Louisville: Office of the General Assembly, 2016. Citations to The Theological Declaration of Barmen (8.11–8.12), The Confession of 1967, A Brief Statement of Faith (11.4), and The Confession of Belhar (10.7) follow the standard paragraph numbering used in the Book of Confessions.
———. Polity actions cited: Amendment 10-A (ratified 2011), removing barriers to LGBTQ+ ordination; the 221st General Assembly’s 2014 authoritative interpretation on same-sex marriage and the corresponding Book of Order amendment effective June 2015; the 223rd General Assembly’s 2018 action through Overtures 11-12 and 11-13 affirming the welcome and inclusion of transgender and gender-non-binary persons; Amendment 24-A (passed by the 226th General Assembly 389–24 in 2024; ratified by majority of presbyteries March 2025; effective July 4, 2025), which adds “gender identity” and “sexual orientation” to the constitutionally protected categories at Book of Order F-1.0403; and Amendment 24-C (also ratified May 2025), which adds examination of these principles to the ordination process at G-2.0104b.