Article by Andrew T. WalkerProfessor, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary Pastors have no shortage of issues that they are called up to address in their ministries. The pressure to be an expert on every new issue can be daunting when thinking about everything else on the pastor’s plate. Most pastors need fewer burdens, not more. But when issues of what it means to be human surface — and this is at the center of the debate over transgenderism — it’s important that pastors seek to bring the full counsel of God’s word to bear on the issue at hand. Having written a book on transgenderism, my purpose here is to simplify for pastors what I think are the absolute essentials for them to consider when addressing their congregations and counselees on the challenge of transgenderism. Necessity of Nature What is a man? What is a woman? Until just a few years ago, these questions would have hardly been controversial. But
male and female
Male and Female He Created Them
Maleness and Femaleness Are Essential for Image Bearing Sam Allberry: There is an important way in which we humans are like every other creature God has made—he is the Creator and we are his creation. We depend on him and are subject to him. We tend to think too highly of ourselves and quickly feel that we might know a thing or two more than God does about how to run the universe, but at the end of the day, we and the universe fully belong to him and not he to us. But there is also an important way in which we are quite unlike all other creatures. The text in Genesis 1 has already shown us. We are made in his image: 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
Already Not Yet 