Searching for self and God. . .

The old heresies are the best -- they keep returning and the Church keeps addressing them but they do not go away.  So it is with Gnosticism.  It is the gift that keeps on giving and has not retreated or demurred from its place as one of the first of the great apostasies and a perennial one at that.  Now it shows up in the grand delusion that gender and biological sex are unrelated and may, indeed, be enemies.  How foolish it is.  But there it is.

The Gnostic is unhappy with his (or whatever pronoun suits you) situation.  The problem is not sin but a badly organized world (which you might call "sin").  Salvation is possible but it means being redeemed from the world.  And for salvation to occur, the order of being must be changed and this happens through an ordered historical process of redefinition.

Of course, the Gnostic accepts as a basic tenet of faith that this salvation can and can only be achieved through man’s own efforts.  In the end, the Gnostic task and vocation is to discover the right means to accomplish such a change -- to separate the flesh and the spirit -- and to purely pursue the  knowledge – gnosis – that will alter being and then impose this revelation upon society -- if not willingly then forcibly for their own good.

In order to swallow the deception that is gender identity, one must believe that the true self is the unembodied self.  That the true self is the imagination of the individual, distinct from and apart from the flesh and blood of the body.  This is, whether religious or not, surely built upon the tenuous tenets of the Gnostic unreality of spirit and flesh in which spirit transcends the flesh and must define it.

There is only one problem.  We are embodied beings and it is impossible for us to experience the world in a disembodied form or to exist disembodied (apart from the sleep of death that awaits the resurrection of the body and the life that is everlasting).  

While it is being paraded as science to describe our bodies as a people separate from that body, it is the worst possible science of all.  No one can tell us what it is like to actually be a disembodied person because everyone is an embodied being.  Even the categories of maleness and femaleness do not exist in the absence of the other.  They are and have always been relational terms.  Male is male not in some imagined sense but in relation to the female and the other way around.  This is the created order from which no one can escape -- not even the one who presumes the body to be opposed to the idea of his or her gender.  St. Paul acknowledges this when he writes:  Nevertheless, in the Lord woman is not independent of man nor man of woman; for as woman was made from man, so man is now born of woman. And all things are from God.  (1 Corinthians 11:11–12)

The Gnostic rejects the relational as well as the physical.  It is no secret that we have a genderless Jesus and to have a Savior without being male or female, he must seek and save those who are like Him.  It is therefore the goal of this construct to relieve the Church of biological sex and to replace it with the genderless form that is neither male nor female (hopelessly confusing what St. Paul says to the Galatians).  What do we do with Jesus if He is not male flesh?  What do we do with His mother if she is not female flesh?  And what do we do with priestly service that is male only?  We can have only one choice -- to reject it and reconstruct it out of the Biblical framework of God's own revelation until it fits with our own disordered and chaotic experience -- and then call it science!  It is Gnosticism at its best and worst all at one time.

There was no problem with male and female in Scripture or in the Church until Gnosticism led us down a path with no outcome but heresy.  The problem of male and female in the life of the world and in the life of the Church is a problem of modern construction -- not because it is modern but because it has already rejected the wisdom and order of God in which everything that is exists and replaced it with an imaginary reality perceived spiritually and living alone within sentiment, feeling, and false perception.  Gnosticism remains a threat not simply to the Gospel but to our very human dignity and identity.