When I opened the program guide for this year’s meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society in Denver, I was surprised by a paper titled “Walking across Gender in the Spirit? The Vocation of the Church and the Transgender Christian.” My interest piqued, I made plans to attend the session to hear the presentation. I honestly thought going into it that the title was intended for shock value to garner interest in order to set up an evangelical rebuttal of transgenderism. But what I heard from that paper went beyond anything I had thought possible at the Evangelical Theological Society.
The paper argues for the legitimacy of transgender identities. It appeared in an “Evangelicals and Gender” section, which means that the paper was vetted by committee members before being accepted into the program. Every member of the steering committeeexcept one is a contributor to an evangelical feminist group called Christians for Biblical Equality. This raises the question: does CBE now accept the legitimacy of transgender identities? In addition to this session, there is at least one article that suggests it might.
Andy Draycott, Associate Professor of Theology and Christian Ethics at Talbot School of Theology, Biola University, delivered the paper to a crowd of maybe thirty or forty. Draycott set out his thesis at the beginning of his paper in answer to the question, “Should we consider ‘transgender Christians’ as having a good self-understanding?” His answer was an unqualified yes, that “transgender Christians” do have a good self-understanding when they perceive themselves to be gendered opposite their biological sex.
The man’s arguments are borderline incoherent. It’s more like a statement (“we’re here”) than an honest attempt at theological argument.
ReplyDeleteThis blasphemous, despicable paper is causing quite the little fuss. Biola's dean of faculty has issued a blatant cya statement to the effect that Draycott was writing an "exploratory" paper, now realizes that what he was "exploring" is a "dead end," and unquivocally affirms that God made man male and female and that transgender identities are the result of fallenness.
ReplyDeleteHow do you spell "trial balloon"?
So Draycott will go on his way, putting this piece of heinous garbage into the closet (so to speak) for the time being.
It strains credulity that Draycott was really just...what shall we say? Youthful, foolish, and dumb as a rock, so dumb as to be unqualified to teach anywhere, much less at Talbot, and hence that he just sort of stumbled into "exploring" this kind of horrific, postmodern, blasphemous nonsense, and (moreover) that, by sheer coincidence, his intellectual enlightenment that it is a "dead end" (nice, neutral word, that) has come about just as the !@#$% hit the fan when hoi polloi learned that he presented it at the ETS and he got called into the office of the Dean of Faculty.
Yet that is the best case scenario.
The alternative is that he is a wolf in sheep's clothing, took down the trial balloon when he received word that he's five-ten years ahead of the times at Talbot, and will bring it back out again when the time is right.
This whole thing is sickening.
And someone on Biola faculty reports as a witness that Draycott apologized to the entire Talbot faculty yesterday and made no attempt to defend himself. Okie dokie. So do we go with the best case scenario then? Because y'know he should be fired in that case anyway.
ReplyDeleteI've obtained a transcript and have a post up.
ReplyDeletehttp://whatswrongwiththeworld.net/2018/11/transgender_blasphemy_at_the_e.html