GUEST POST - Transgender God
This week’s guest post comes from my friend Mike Koolen, one of the most kind and encouraging people I know. Check out his blog HERE and visit him on Facebook HERE.
Enjoy 🏳️🌈 .
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I have written in the past that I don’t believe Jesus the Son is necessarily pigeonholed to Jesus Christ and that he may have come to earth in other forms at other times as well. Feel free to check it out here if you’d like.
But now I want to shift from Jesus to another part of the trinity that is God. I’m still working through the separate yet the same thing of the trinity and probably always will be but let’s see where this goes.
Transgender God.
Before you grab your pitchforks and torches, hear me out on this one.
I believe that we are made in the image and likeness of God, just like the book tells us.
So, if we take the bible at face value, it means that God is a man based on the various mentions of “Him” as father. What about the women? At the time of this writing, there are nearly 3.9 Billion females in this world; who were they made in the likeness of?
I’ve read articles and heard sermons about the feminine nature of God or motherly aspects of God and I think many have done a great job of showing that God probably has no official “gender” to speak of.
But what I propose to you today is a bit of a flyer, a bit of an out-there idea. What if being transgender actually means one is more like God?
I will put out the disclaimer that I am 100% sure I’m not the first to say this but I believe that anything I haven’t sourced to be my own thoughts.
I’d like to take this even further though. What if we are evolving to have a more fluid idea of gender because that is where humanity needs to go in order to become more like God? To be inclusive and loving of all is to understand that all are unique.
We’ve all heard the sermons and read the studies on what a “Christian Man” should do and how to be a good “Christian Woman” but I have always taken that with a grain of salt. There is no black and white when it comes to the roles of men and women within the church or outside of it.
What science is discovering though is that there doesn’t appear to be black and white when it comes to gender identity either. Our gender exists on a spectrum and we identify often to one side or another but also sometimes with both or neither. For others it’s more of a process.1 I’ve even heard it hypothesized that each person is ultimately their own gender in one form or another as a product of infinite factors in their life, background, environment and even DNA.
If you’re a Young Earth Creationist type, I suspect you’re not still reading but if you are I want to make this clear. I believe in evolution as it’s been laid out by science. I believe that God has helped that evolution and I don’t believe that the timelines that we see as long are necessarily that way to God.
So, I believe it is possible that in our hunter/gatherer days, transgender my not have been much of a thing to speak of. I may be off base on that but if true, a binary gender structure with defined roles would make sense when we were more like the animals.
As humans have evolved however so has our understanding of ourselves and of our world. We’ve also evolved to be less reliant on the hunter/gatherer attitudes and roles.
Many of us live in a world now where survival of the fittest isn’t really at play any more. As a result, we’ve been able to become more in tune with the spectrum that is gender and sexuality and identity. We are coming to a point where gender no longer defines us and I think that’s great.
If we want to go back to the garden, you could argue binary there but perhaps the evolution started there. Being just a Man wasn’t enough. It wasn’t simply companionship that was needed or God could have created another man and left it at that. It was the need for difference and nuance that brought women forth.
This is a topic that is going to take immense research in the coming years but one that I think is important.
Being able to be judged on the type of person you are rather than the gender with which you identify may well be the next step in human evolution.
I don’t believe that God is 100% male or 100% female and to be honest, I don’t know that any human really is either.
1. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/13/opinion/is-god-transgender.html