Serving the High Plains
Serving the High Plains
File this one under “Nothing new under the sun.”
An ancient idea has resurfaced in the current cultural phenomenon of transgenderism. I’m not seeking to insult individual people, dealing with serious issues, who have been made in the image of God and thus deserve to be treated as neighbors. As Christ taught, let’s love them like ourselves.
I’m looking at the ideology that is argued for on college campuses and social media, like TikTok. This is the argument that everyone should accept transgenderism as good, normal, and worthy of great support.
At its heart, this gender ideology is a philosophical stance offering an alternate ontology, or study of being (how things exist and what they really are). The whole thing seems new and alien to many of us, but we can trace it back to Plato, the Greek philosopher from the 5th Century B.C.
Plato proposed a radical division between two realms, the higher and the lower. We live in the lower one, characterized by physicality and visible things. The higher, more important realm is the world of thought and reason, where the ideal version of all things exists. The world of our bodily existence is dominated by faulty copies of what exists in the higher realm. To this way of thinking, the lower world is unimportant, ultimately. It’s what is above that matters.
Several New Testament books including Colossians seem to be aimed at this error. They insist on one reality – created, sustained, and ruled by God.
This is opposite of the Platonic ideal, in which salvation involves thinking or “knowing” your way out of this present, faulty, realm. For the Platonist, the goal is to escape the physical world. But Jesus came from heaven to save us here, and to transform the present realm. In Christianity, the Earth itself will be saved. In Platonism, it is abandoned.
On an individual level, this shows up as the assertion that who we are is a matter of the inward reality, not the outward. Thus, it’s possible to “really” be something that is contrary to physical reality. That outward stuff is not so important anyway.
As it infects Christianity, this manifests as a willingness to say that what you do is far less important than how you feel about Jesus “in your heart.” God supposedly doesn’t care about the former, as long as the latter is good. Prayer is considered holier than work, and so on.
When modern gender ideology insists that you are what you feel or think, with no regard to the physical, biological reality, it’s simply a restatement of that ancient idea of two, independent realities. The truly enlightened person can disregard this physical world for the sake of becoming “authentic.”
Insofar as many Christian pulpits have taught the same thing for generations in America (“It’s only about what you believe, not what you do.”) it has invited this sort of thinking and even encouraged it. Then our leading pop-science lights come along, openly doubting whether “reality” is really real, or only simulated.
The Bible says God created all things visible and invisible, and is Lord all. God created this world, including male and female image-bearers, and called it “very good.” Our goal is not escape, but faith-filled conformity to his will.
Gordan Runyan is the pastor of Immanuel Baptist Church in Tucumcari. Contact him at: