The Inner and Outer Man: How Historical Christian Anthropology Addresses Transgenderism

This article first appeared in the Christian Research Journal, volume 46, number 1/2  (2023). Note: This is part of our ongoing Philosopher’s Series. 

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​Modernity presents the faithful Christian with a series of dilemmas — not the least of which is the ever-expanding discrepancy between his operating first principles and those of the modern man. Nothing displays this discrepancy, and the danger it poses, more clearly than the landscape of transgenderism.

While the first chapters of Genesis might have been leveraged in previous eras to uphold the simple, biological fact of sexual differentiation, today maleness and femaleness have been severed from biology as a result of the psychologicalization of sexuality and identity.¹ From this 19th and early 20th century development arose the academic discipline of gender theory in the late 20th century, which deconstructed the binary in favor of performative gender fluidity. But at the dawn of the 21st century, as it trickled down into popular culture, sex and gender have been simplified into two distinct categories: 1) external biological sex (or sex assigned at birth) and 2) internal gender identity.

The concept of an internal sex or gender that differs from one’s biological sex is a uniquely modern idea.² Yet the emphasis on internal life as distinct from, but connected to, the external body establishes a boundary within which the Christian can address the issue from the vantage point of theological anthropology. Although popular culture has appropriated the soul-denying evolutionary anthropology of philosophical materialism, it has added to it a pseudo-Christian dichotomy between the inner and the outer man — as made evident by the emphasis of trans-identifying individuals on inner identity over and against biological form. This introduces a unique opportunity for Christians to present a holistic view of the human being as body and soul. And to ultimately ask the question: are souls gendered? And if they are, can a man be born with a female soul — or vice versa?

First Principles: Anthropology of the Inner and Outer Man

What does Christian theological anthropology have to say about sexual differentiation? In order to answer this question, we will first explore what it means to be a human being, followed by an assessment of the sexually differentiated body and gender theory, and finally, what Christian anthropology tells us about the relation between sex or gender and the soul.

Genesis and the Old Testament. The creation narrative describes the human being as a living being (LXX Gr. psyche zaō) created in the image and according to the likeness of God (Gen. 1:27; 2:7). The first man was formed from the dust of the ground and animated by the breath of life (Gen. 2:7). The dust points to the materiality of the body (Gr. soma); the breath of life, to the spirit (Gr. pneuma) or soul (Gr. psyche; Heb. nephesh; see 1 Thess. 5:23; Eccl. 12:7). On account of the former, human beings share in the corporeality of material creation, and on account of the latter, the incorporeality of the intelligible creation — that is, the angelic hosts.³ The human being is, therefore, a unity in plurality: body and soul together and not one without the other. Although created in two distinct sexes, male and female do not differ by substance or essence; everything that it means to be a human being belongs to both the male and the female, for there is but “one kind of flesh of men” (1 Cor. 15:39).⁴

Pointing toward this reality of unity in plurality, generally, the Old Testament usage of soul reflects the understanding at the time of its writing and therefore only obliquely refers to a distinction between the human soul and the animating souls of animals, which are “in the blood” (Lev. 17:11; cf. Gen. 9:4). Throughout the Old Testament, one can trace a gradual revelation of the human person and the economy of salvation, which is manifested fully in the incarnation of Jesus Christ.

The New Testament and Early Church. Although the nature and end (telos) of man were revealed and fulfilled at the Incarnation — which manifested the vision of the sanctification of man — such were not expressed with uniform terminology, even in the New Testament. Paul, for instance, uses the words heart (Gr. kardia),⁵ mind (Gr. nous),⁶ spirit (Gr. pneuma),⁷ and soul (Gr. psyche)⁸ to refer to the inner man; he uses body (Gr. soma)⁹ and flesh (Gr. sarx)¹⁰ to refer to the outer man.

Sometime around the fourth century, after the persecution had ended, Christians began writing extended commentaries on the Scriptures, explicating — and in a sense homogenizing — the language used to describe the realities therein. In light of this, the human being came to be seen as a microcosm of the material and intelligible creations in that he is both material and immaterial.¹¹

The Human Soul. The soul is described as single, simple, and intelligible (that is, not corporeal).¹² Gregory Palamas stressed the indivisibility of the soul in the 13th century, noting that although there are different powers of the soul, it is a single entity.¹³

The distinction between the material body and the immaterial soul is that the body admits divisibility into parts without divisibility of substance. On account of this quality exists the variation of skin or eye color, sexual reproductive organs, and so on — different material parts participate in the same material substance. The soul, on the other hand, as an intelligible substance, is simple and not divisible into parts without division of substance.¹⁴ Although the intelligible creation does admit distinction of being, such distinctions are on the level of substance (e.g., the substantial difference between angels and human souls). Material creation allows human beings and animals to participate in the same physical material, but because intelligible substances are without parts, any distinction among intelligible creation must be one of substance. Therefore, the category “human soul” differs by substance from the category “angelic being.”

How does this understanding apply to differences between men and women? Every human soul, of both men and women, is of the same substance, for to introduce a distinction between male and female souls would be to introduce a category distinction of substance wherein male and female souls differ from one another as “human being” differs from “angelic being.” This teaching is vital for Christian theology because, as the church proclaims, Christ came to heal the whole person: body and soul. He did so by taking on both body and soul at the Incarnation. Although He was incarnate as a human male, rather than female, He can save both men and women because the distinction between male and female is arbitrary insofar as materiality is one substance. Just as Christ can save a man with only one leg, even though Christ Himself had two, He can save women, even though He did not have a uterus. Again, intelligible substance is not divisible into separate or opposing parts without division also of substance. To say otherwise would give rise to a serious question: if the souls of men and women are different in substance, and Christ was incarnate as a man with a “male soul,” then are the souls of women saved?

The Human Being in Gender Theory

Modern gender theory as an academic discipline was functionally inaugurated by the 1990 book, Gender Trouble, written by the notoriously opaque¹⁵ U. C. Berkeley professor Judith Butler. According to Butler, gender naturally fluctuates in accordance with the societal status quo — and so do human bodies.¹⁶ Furthermore, there can be binary categories, such as men and women, only in a world where these roles are acted out, for “the performance produces its subject and not the other way around.”¹⁷ At the time, this theory made waves in academic circles. For Butler, “gender…is not some internal truth, some irrefutable fact of our existence, but rather a performance that we produce through ‘stylized repetition’….[G]ender is not something that we are, but something that we do.”¹⁸

Given Butler’s idea of gender performativity, gender social construction, and subsequent evolutionary adaptation, it is not surprising that her anthropological model differs greatly from that of the Christian. Yet something strange happened as her ideas began to take root in popular culture: people began seeing gender as an internal reality — a psychological or feeling state — that could be at odds with the body and to which the body should be forcibly conformed. In short, the idea was that the soul of a woman could be trapped in a biological male, or vice versa. As one of Butler’s devotees put it: “This notion of a gendered soul, which we then externalize through performance, seems potentially at odds with Gender Trouble, which describes gender as a product of performance rather than its root.”¹⁹ The popular culture, therefore, both appropriated and bastardized Butler’s theory: biological bodies do not define gender but internal, gender self-identification does.

Pop Gender Theory. In 2015, Bruce Jenner shocked the world by claiming that he is, in fact, a woman. Sporting a pony tail and a blue blouse, the misty-eyed Jenner would explain that he has always felt this way — that the macho Olympian aspect of his life was his attempt to compensate. It was roleplay. It was a lie. And he could no longer live that lie because — as he put it — he is, in his soul, a woman.²⁰ In the intervening years, Bruce would change his name to Caitlyn, use she/her pronouns, begin publicly presenting as a woman (called social transition), start hormone therapy (estrogen), and eventually move on to full, cosmetic transition, which is shorthand for undergoing a series of serious surgeries: penectomy, orchiectomy, breast augmentation, and vaginoplasty. The reason for the radical physical transformation: to conform the outer reality to the inner. That is, to transform Jenner’s original male body into an approximation of a female body to match his supposedly female soul. Notice how Jenner here stays within the binary, noting only the perceived conflict between his external male body and his internal, female gender identity. This is what I call “popular gender theory” in order to distinguish it from the “academic gender theory” of Butler.²¹

Gender Self-Identification. Today, society’s operating first principle surrounding gender non-conformity is much closer to that of Jenner’s expression than Butler’s: souls are sexually differentiated and can be trapped in biological bodies of the opposite sex. Here I should note that, although the underlying conviction is that there is a mismatch between the internal aspect of the person (their gender) and their physical body (their biological sex), not everyone will express it as a difference between body and soul.²² This inconsistency in anthropology is symptomatic of a culture stuck in the wake of the systematic deconstruction of the human being. What is clear is that the radical materialism bestowed upon this generation cannot bear the weight of the existential questions being asked of it.

The Church Fathers on the Sexual Differentiation of the Soul

The early church fathers, called so for their valiant work in defending and defining the dogma of Christian theology, are uniform in their teaching that the soul is sexless. A commonly used term for this uniformity is consensus patrum. Although the church fathers were not arguing for the sexlessness of the soul for its own sake, they did use the teaching in a way that indicates it was a given in philosophy and a culturally accepted tenet of theological anthropology. Indeed, the whole of ancient and medieval Byzantine and Western metaphysics held that an intelligible, immaterial being was sexless, including the natural Christian belief in the sexlessness of angels. Further, while these men were not dealing with the transgender anthropological crisis we have today, they did have their own cultural crises to which they were responding. And from these responses we have a significant number of passages from which we can draw guidance and inspiration.

Athenagoras (Ps.-Athenagoras, c. A.D. 133–190). Responding to the dualistic thinking of Gnosticism that was sneaking into the church, the early Christian apologist and philosopher Athenagoras penned a treatise entitled, On the Resurrection of the Body. To make his case for the bodily resurrection, he argues that both soul and body must be resurrected in order for the final judgment to be just — for the injunctions of the law apply not just to the soul but the body also. In other words, the body is the vehicle through which the human commits adultery, theft, and the like and must therefore be resurrected to receive its just punishment. Here, Athenagoras makes an interesting point: “God has not enjoined on souls to abstain from things which have no relation to them, such as adultery, murder, theft….nor could the command, ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery,’ ever be properly addressed to souls, or even thought of in such a connection, since the difference of male and female does not exist in them, nor any aptitude for sexual intercourse, nor appetite for it.”²³

Notice how Athenagoras argues his point: the body must be resurrected because it is the vehicle through which man participates in chastity or unchastity — because there is no difference between male and female in the soul. Athenagoras simply assumes the sexlessness of the soul as a self-evident tenet of the Faith. The sexually differentiated body, therefore, must receive its just reward or punishment together with the sexless soul at the final judgment. The reductio ad absurdum for Athenagoras is that, if the body is not resurrected, then the perfect justice of God is not just.

Jerome (c. 345–420). Jerome likewise took pains to explicate the bodily resurrection. But it was not a treatise on the resurrection through which he wrote about the sexlessness of the soul. Rather, he does so in a pastoral letter to a man named Rusticus, who together with his wife, Artemia, made a vow of continence but broke it. Artemia, having repented and returned, was praying for the return of her husband. “She draws you to her by her prayers,” Jerome writes, “that you may be saved, if not by your own exertions, at any rate by her faith.” Seeing her faith, he likens Artemia to the woman from Canaan who entreats Christ to heal her daughter (Matt. 15:21–28). Within this analogy, Jerome calls Rusticus’ soul the daughter of Artemia, for like the woman of Canaan who sought Christ to heal her daughter, Artemia ardently implores Christ to heal her husband and bring him to repentance. Jerome makes the following caveat to support his analogy: “Souls are of no sex; therefore I may fairly call your soul the daughter of hers.”²⁴ Jerome’s casual reference to the sexlessness of the soul suggests that it was already a widely known anthropological truth.

Augustine of Hippo (c. 354–430). The anthropology of a young Christian by the name of Victor Vicentius was the reason for Augustine’s four-part work entitled, On the Soul and Its Origin. Responding to Victor’s claim that the creation of the woman in Genesis 2:23 refers only to the flesh not the soul, Augustine notes that although “the soul is undistinguished by sex,”²⁵ the text is referring to the whole woman: sexually differentiated body and sexless soul together.

Gregory Nazianzen (c. 329–390). In a funeral oration in praise of his sister, Gorgonia, who demonstrated by her piety that women are not inferior to men (contrary to the claims of Aristotle and others of antiquity), Gregory Nazianzen argues that the distinction between male and female is a physical distinction but does not impede salvation of the soul. Thus, Gregory exclaims that by her piety and saintliness, Gorgonia proves that “the distinction between male and female is one of body not of soul.”²⁶ This oration is a demonstration of how early Fathers would use a theological point to build an inspirational, practical example of Christian living.

Theodore the Studdite (c. 759–856). Is God circumscribable? This question was posed to Theodore the Studdite during the second outbreak of iconoclasm in the A.D. 800s. The argument against the use of iconography was that icons attempt to circumscribe (limit or make finite) the uncircumscribable God and therefore are a form of false theology and idolatry. Theodore simply points to the Incarnation, saying that Jesus Christ, as God Himself, is circumscribed in the body. Thus, according to Theodore, Christ, who is God, is circumscribed in His human nature, which makes possible His representation in the icon. To drive the point home, he argues that “If Christ were uncircumscribable, as being without a body, he would also be without the difference of sex…[for] maleness and femaleness are sought only in the forms of bodies.”²⁷

Elsewhere, Ambrose of Milan (c. 333–397) notes that sex is in the nature of our flesh,28 while Cyril of Jerusalem (c. 313–386), in his Catechetical Lectures, puts it thusly: “all souls are alike both of men and women; for only the members of the body are distinguished.”²⁹ In short, all of the church fathers agree: the soul itself is sexless. The human being, as body and soul in unity, is made up of the sexed body and the sexless soul. On account of the bodily resurrection, every human being is resurrected in his or her sexually differentiated body, which makes sexual differentiation an eternal reality. However, the resurrected man and woman will not engage the functions of sex (in sexual intercourse) — and on this account will be like the angels in heaven (Matt. 22:30).³⁰

What This Means for Us Today

Historical Christian anthropology precludes the possibility that the internal, subjective, immaterial aspect of the human being is gendered at all — let alone capable of reflecting the opposite sex or gender of the body. Ontologically, in terms of nature or essence, it is not possible to be a man trapped in a female body, or vice versa.

Although Christians cannot truthfully maintain that a man can be a woman, it is important to acknowledge that gender dysphoria³¹ is a painful condition that does exist. Here, Christians must lead the charge to care for these suffering brothers and sisters. First, by understanding Christian anthropology (that’s the easy part). Second, by lifting them up in prayer. Third, by recognizing that all people are guilty of the same delusion in a different form: placing one’s sense of identity in something other than Christ. As we seek Christ, we too will suffer from countless “identity crises,” as He shatters our idols and reorients us to Himself. This is a perpetual process; indeed, this is the process of how we become our true selves: little Christs.

Benjamin Cabe (M.Div.) is an Eastern Orthodox Christian, author, writer, and lecturer who specializes in addressing modern issues from the vantage point of Christian anthropology.

NOTES

1. See Harry Oosterhuis, “Sexual Modernity in the Works of Richard Von Krafft-Ebing and Albert Moll,” Medical History 56, no. 2 (2012): 133–55, https://doi.org/10.1017/mdh.2011.30.
2. See Benjamin Cabe, “The Engendered Soul in Apelles and Tertullian,” Studia Patristica, vol. CXXVI, 2021, 301–08, JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv27vt51m.28.
3. See John of Damascus, Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, 2.12; John notes here that, compared to God, the essence of the incorporeal creation (viz. of angels, the soul of man) has a kind of “denseness,” for God alone is purely immaterial (Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, 2.3).
4. All Scripture quotations are from NKJV.
5. E.g., 2 Corinthians 9:7; Ephesians 1:18, Colossians 3:15.
6. E.g., Romans 1:28, 7:23, 25; 1 Corinthians 1:10, 2:16; Ephesians 4:23.
7. E.g., 1 Corinthians 5:3–5, 6:17, 7:34; 2 Corinthians 7:1; Galatians 6:18; Colossians 2:5. Paul tends to contrast spirit (pneuma) with flesh (sarx).
8. E.g., Romans 2:9; 1 Corinthians 15:45; 1 Thessalonians 2:8, 5:23.
9. E.g., Romans 1:24, 4:19, 6:12; 1 Corinthians 6:13, 15; Colossians 2:23; 1 Thessalonians 5:23 (in the latter passage, Paul uses pneuma, psyche, and soma).
10. E.g., Romans 1:3, 2:28, 4:1; 7:5; 1 Corinthians 15:39.
11. See Gregory of Nyssa, Commentary on the Inscriptions of the Psalms, 2; Maximus the Confessor, On the Ecclesiastical Mystagogy.
12. See John of Damascus, Exact Exposition on the Orthodox Faith, 2.12, 31; Athanasius, Against the Heathen, Part 2, 30.
13. Gregory Palamas, Those Who Practice a Life of Stillness, 3, 334.
14. This was made abundantly clear in the fourth century by Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory the Theologian, and Basil the Great in their critiques of Eunomianism.
15. See Martha C. Nussbaum, “The Professor of Parody: The Hip Defeatism of Judith Butler,” The New Republic, February 22, 1999, https://newrepublic.com/article/150687/professor-parody.
16. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990, 2006), 190–92.
17. Naomi Gordon-Loebl, “Reading Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble in the Age of Ron DeSantis,” The Nation, December 14, 2022, https://www.thenation.com/article/society/judith-butler-gender-trans-1990s/.
18. Gordon-Loebl, “Reading Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble.”
19. Gordon-Loebl, “Reading Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble.”
20. See Diane Sawyer, “Bruce Jenner, ‘I’m a Woman’: Part 1,” ABC News, April 25, 2015, https://abcnews.go.com/2020/video/bruce-jenner-interview-diane-sawyer-woman-part-30572231.
21. See Benjamin Cabe, “The Orthodox Church and Modern Gender Theory,” On Gender and the Soul: An Exploration of Sex/Gender and Its Relation to the Soul According to the Church Fathers (Bozeman, MT: Fish and Vine Publishing, 2021).
22. Some will refer to it as “true identity” or “brain sex.” Although the latter refers to the structural differences between the male and female brain (that is, between physical differences, not spiritual or psychological per se), I believe that it is misplaced in this dialogue, as the differences between male and female neurology exist because of the differences in male and female hormones. And so it becomes a moot point (see Debra Soh, The End of Gender: Debunking the Myths about Sex and Identity in Our Society [Threshold Editions, 2020]). In this sense, there is no getting around the reality that trans-identifying individuals are pointing to something more than physical, material reality.
23. Athenagoras, On the Resurrection of the Body, 23, in Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 2, eds. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 2012), 161.
24. Jerome, Letter 4, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, series 2, vol. 6, eds. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 2012), 229.
25. Augustine of Hippo, On the Soul and Its Origin, 1.29, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, series 1, vol. 5, ed. Philip Schaff (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 2012), 328. For other instances of the sexlessness of the soul in Augustine, see City of God, 14.22; On Marriage and Concupiscence, 2.13.
26. Gregory Nazianzen, On His Sister Gorgonia, 14, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, series 2, vol. 7, eds. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 2012), 242.
27. Theodore the Studdite, On the Holy Icons, 3A.44, trans. Catharine P. Roth (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1982), 94.
28. Ambrose of Milan, On the Christian Faith, 1.78.
29. Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechetical Lectures, 4.20, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, series 2, vol. 7, eds. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 2012), 24.
30. For a robust treatment of Matthew 22:30 and Galatians 3:28, as well as a full treatment of the soul, the church fathers, and a pastoral response to those suffering with gender dysphoria, see my book On Gender and the Soul.
31. Distress over a sense of disparity between one’s perceived internal gender and outer biological sex.