Rule 16
- Rule 16.
ⲛⲉⲛⲉⲣⲏⲙⲓⲧⲏⲥ
ⲟⲩⲣⲱⲙⲉ ⲡⲉ ⲏ ⲟⲩϩⲓⲙⲉ·
ⲕⲁⲧⲁ ⲡⲉⲩⲟⲩⲱϣ.
Our hermits may be man or woman,
according to their will.
- End of rule 16.
Commentary on Rule 1 (on Sex and Gender)
The Church of Humans does not treat sex and gender as the same thing.
Sexed embodiment is real. Bodies matter. Birth is bodily. Male and female are not imaginary categories, nor are they meaningless. But neither are they final covenantal identities. In Christ, the body is honored, but it is not enthroned as law.
Gender, in our view, is role, relation, manifestation, and spiritual function. It is not reducible to anatomy. A person may be born into one bodily condition and yet manifest, in spirit, another mode of being. This is not a modern scandal. It is an old Christian mystery.
Paul says:
- There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.
This does not mean bodies disappear. Jews and Greeks still existed. Slaves and free persons still existed. Men and women still existed. But those categories no longer governed standing in Christ. They were no longer ultimate. They were no longer the measure of covenantal identity.
Christ also says that in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage. Marriage belongs to the present order. It is not the final structure of life in God. This alone should make Christians cautious about treating earthly sex roles as eternal law.
The Church of Humans is post-church. We do not receive church offices, household codes, apostolic customs, or inherited social arrangements as commandments of the New Covenant. We recognize only the Seven Commandments of Christ as covenantal commandments. Other sayings, stories, letters, rules, and traditions may instruct us, warn us, or illuminate the path, but they do not become additional commandments by interpretation.
This matters for sex and gender because many Christians have mistaken inherited social order for divine commandment. They have taken roles assigned by men, defended by men, enforced by men, and then called those roles the will of God.
But even older Christian theology was not so simple.
Medieval Christian writers did not teach modern gender identity. They did not speak in the language of contemporary psychology, self-definition, or medical transition. But they did distinguish sexed embodiment from gendered role. They could speak of father, mother, bridegroom, nurse, king, and bride as theological roles not always reducible to anatomy. This has been called a proto-gender distinction: not modern gender theory, but a pre-modern recognition that biological sex does not exhaust spiritual or symbolic function.
The clearest example is maternal Christology.
Christian writers such as Anselm of Canterbury, Bernard of Clairvaux, and Julian of Norwich spoke of Christ as mother. They did not deny that Christ was incarnate as male. They did not make the incarnation androgynous. Rather, they understood that Christ gives birth to believers, labors for their salvation, feeds them with his own body, and nurtures them into maturity. Christ remains male in body, yet acts maternally in salvation.
The same pattern appears in the image of the Church born from the wounded side of Christ. As Eve is formed from Adam’s side, the Church is born from Christ’s side in blood and water. Christ gives birth without female organs. The Church is born without sexual reproduction. The body matters, but the mystery exceeds the body.
Therefore, when the Church of Humans says that gender is role, relation, and spiritual manifestation, we are not importing an alien idea into Christianity. We are rememberi something Christianity has already known: sex is real, but sex does not exhaust meaning.
We also note with respect that ancient Jewish law recognized more than a simple binary in cases of intersex embodiment. The existence of such categories does not bind us to rabbinic law, but it does warn against the lazy claim that every serious pre-modern tradition treated human embodiment as a simple, universal, and exceptionless binary. Human bodies have always been more complicated than internet scolds allow.
The Church of Humans believes that all births are gendered. A natural birth places a person into a sexed and gendered world. But Christ speaks of being born again in the Spirit. If natural birth is gendered, why should spiritual rebirth be treated as neuter? We do not find it mysterious that when one is born again in the Spirit, one’s spiritual gender may differ from one’s physical sex.
The Spirit is not bound by the paperwork of the flesh.
This does not mean the body is evil. It does not mean sex is unreal. It does not mean anyone may command others to accept every claim without discernment. It means that Christians should be very slow to condemn what they do not understand, especially when their own tradition gives them images of male and female crossing, mirroring, and being reconciled in Christ.
The Gospel of Thomas says:
When the two become one,
inner mirroring outer,
outer mirroring inner,
upper and lower each other,
uniting male and female
so that both disappear:
eye to eye,
hand to hand,
foot to foot,
mirror to mirror —
Thus shall ye enter.[Logion 22]
This is not a denial of difference. It is the reconciliation of difference. Male and female are not destroyed by contempt, but fulfilled by union. The goal is not the domination of one by the other. The goal is not a law of permanent hierarchy. The goal is mirror to mirror, hand to hand, eye to eye.
Therefore the Church of Humans supports those in whom the Spirit is accomplishing this mystery.
We do not support cruelty disguised as doctrine. We do not support men using Scripture to police souls they have not been given to govern. We do not support the reduction of human beings to reproductive anatomy. We do not accept the claim that Christ’s freedom ends wherever Paul’s social advice begins.
In Christ there is no male and female. In the resurrection there is no marriage. In the Spirit there is rebirth. In the mystery of salvation, Christ himself is son, bridegroom, mother, nurse, shepherd, lamb, door, vine, and body.
If Christ may be male in body and mother in salvation, then Christian theology has already admitted that gendered function is not imprisoned in anatomy.
The Church of Humans stands for all humans.
This page is part of a commentary on A Rule for Humans.