The individual and his or her expression of his or her subjectively experienced and asserted identity has been elevated to ultimacy in the culture, the norm by which all other norms are to be regulated.
At the societal level gender identity is presented as a social construct. At the individual level it is asserted that it is either subjectively determined or performative in the sense that gender is what you do. It is not within the purview of this article to unpack the contradictions inherent in these different definitions.
It is sufficient to assert that Scotland today is is what a person feels or does that determines what they become. The emphasis is much more on the former than the latter: I feel therefore I am.
An identity rooted in the consciousness or behavior of an individual can have no inherent stability. To have an inherent stability an identity must be rooted in an objective ontology.
Now it so happens that there is a final ontological reality in which all being is grounded. It is the being of God Himself. When God identifies Himself to Moses in the bush that burned and yet was no consumed he called Himself “I AM WHO I AM.” (Exodus 3:14)
This tell us some important truths about God. He is eternal, existing in a state of continuous presentness. There is no past, there is no future with Him. All of space-time history is known to God and present before Him at the same time all of the time, so to speak. What we experience in analogue continuity God sees comprehensively in that same, single, eternal, moment.
Further, God cannot not be: His being is ontologically necessary. God just is. Because God is necessary being all contingent being can be grounded in Him. Jean Paul Sartre posited that the fundamental philosophical question is that something exists. That has to be explained. The Christian has no difficult with this question.
If something exists, then something must necessarily always have existed: nothing comes from nothing. The Cosmos could not have created itself because it would have had to exist before it existed – a logical absurdity. If matter-energy has always existed, it would need to be both infinite and eternal for only that which is infinite and eternal can possess self-existence as pure being. Energy-matter is not infinite and eternal, it is finite and temporal.
As necessary, omnipotent Being God can create ex nihilo – out of nothing.
It is this ontologically necessary God that created Mankind.
“And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being.” (Genesis. 2:7)
We have being because God has willed that we be. It was God’s purpose to make man. “Then God said, "Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness.” (Genesis. 1:26) The Trinity acting in concert through their single will brought Adam into being. The Apostle Paul restates this truth in the New Testament: “in Him we live and move and have our being, as also some of your poets have said. ‘For we are also His offspring.” (Acts 17:18). Both our createdness and our being-in-in-God-ness are affirmed by this verse.
Genesis 2:7 also tells us something else significant regarding our ontology – that man is a body-spirit unity.
God took the dust of the ground and fashioned a male body. The body was created first. Then God breathed into the nostrils of this body and gave it life. In this way body-soul unity that is Man was established.
The body does not have precedence or priority over the soul. Nevertheless, we must affirm that in chronological terms the soul – the seat of the personality of Adam – was fitted to the body. This psychosomatic unity was body first then body-soul. The body is foundational to the ontological unity of each personal instance of humanity. This is of tremendous significance. The unity - the integration - of the body-soul unit is violated when sex or ‘gender identity’ is separated from the biological sex of the individual. Such a separation is necessarily a cause of emotional and psychological pain. It is inevitable.
In the current cultural moment it is important to enquire as to how Adam identified himself. Simply put, Adam identified himself according to the ontological reality of God’s creation. When God created the first woman -Eve – out of Adam’s own DNA he said:
"This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; She shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man." (Genesis 2:23)
Adam identifies himself as a man. There was perfect congruence between his ontology and his identity. There was no conflict and no confusion between his biological sex and his identity as a man Adam naturally asserted his maleness. In so doing he walked within the circumscribed reality of his createdness.
In this verse we also recognise that the male-female sex binary – first introduced in Genesis 1:26 - was established by God from the beginning. Adam refers to himself as ‘Man’ and to Eve as ‘Woman.’ The ontological body-soul male/female binary that together constitute humanity is a creation ordinance. It is hard-wired into the very fabric of reality. It can be affirmed, it can be denied, but it cannot be altered. This sex binary was reaffirmed by the Lord Jesus Christ in Matthew 19:4 and Mark 10:6. It is not an Old Testament ordinance, rather one that is universally normative.
This is a true biblical ontology of personhood.
The male/female sex binary has been universally recognised throughout human history, across peoples and cultures. Marriages, families, communities and societies have been built upon it.
There is today ferocious assault on this male/female sex binary. It is mediated through government, education, media – but is Satanic in its character. Marxism is an assault on every Creation norm.
The union of the body-soul unit is denied and the identity is abstracted way from the physical body. The essential embodiedness of human existence is repudiated. A Gnostic division between the body and the spirit is being asserted. Identity is free-floating, something fluid and malleable. Our physical bodies have no normative ontological significance with regard to our fundamental identity. I become what I feel and will myself to be. The body as prison must then be brought into subjection to the free-floating identity. Where there ought to be a harmony of being between body and soul there is dissonance.
Thus it is no longer the will of God that determines human being. The createdness and givenness of our humanity has been repudiated. Man has become his own maker.
There are consequences in living as what we are not. A Dutch study published surveying forty-five years of date comprehending 8263 referrals to a clinic for gender dysphoria found that “the suicide risk in transgender people is higher than in the general population and seems to occur during every stage of transitioning.” The suicide rate was three to four times higher amongst transgender identifying individuals that in the general population.
It is not possible for any person to live with congruence and stability when they assert an identity that is in conflict with their biological sex for this identity is a denial of the ontological reality of what they are.
It is important to note that none of us has a perfectly integrated personality due to the consequences of the Fall and the entrance of sin into this world. The Fall has affected us each uniquely and personally. We must have sympathy with its consequences for for those who struggle with gender dysphoria.
Only Adam, Eve before the Fall and the Lord Jesus Christ have experience of a perfectly integrated ontological human personhood.
The Lord Jesus Christ came into this world to restore a true ontological personhood. To everyone who looks to Him in faith the body and soul are restored. The soul is restored when the person is ‘born again’ (Jon 3: ) The spiritual nature of man is united to Christ: “he is a new creation; old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new.” (2 Corinthians. 5:17)
This also is a true ontology rooted in objective spiritual reality. This new man is as new as he will ever be and is already participating in the new creation inaugurated by the resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ. This new birth is the first resurrection. (Revelation 20:6) We are already raised with Christ and walking in newness of life. (Romans 6:4)
The second resurrection will occur at the Second Coming of the Lord Jesus Christ. When He returns every grave will open and the seas will give up the bodies of the dead. The dead in Christ will rise first. (1 Thessalonians 4:16) The bodies of the children of God will be raised as spiritual bodies (1 Corinthians 15:44) without weakness or defect or corruption.
This perfected body will be united again to the soul in a perfect harmony of psychosomatic unity. The ontological personhood of every one of God’s children will be fully realised on that day and will remain inviolably so into the endless ages of eternity.
There is a practical implication in all this for those of us who profess Christ. We cannot affirm any ‘gender identity’ which is not congruent with the biological sex of the individual without at the same time repudiating the biblical ontology of personhood rooted in the fabric of reality . For this reason we must necessarily visit real spiritual, psychological and emotional harm on those we affirm such identities for. We cannot do so also without violating our own identity as new-creations-in-Christ. If we choose to deny ontological reality we too must live with the conflict between what is ontologically necessary – necessary in terms of our body-soul unity and our new creatureliness - and our own words and actions.
In Scotland today there must necessarily be consequences for affirming a true biblical ontology of personhood. But let us reckon seriously with the fact that there will also be consequences if we do not.