1
Sex Otherwise: Intersex, Christology and the Maleness of Jesus
Abstract
Intersex conditions manifest in atypical physical sex, and raise important theological
questions about the significance of human sex. This paper examines the significance of Jesus’
sex, suggesting that Christian theologies grounded in his undisputed maleness require
rethinking in light of intersex. This includes the insistence by some Christians that priests
must be male and not female because Jesus was male. The paper draws on constructive
Christian theologies, including that of Karl Barth, and interviews with intersex Christians. It
concludes that, whilst all humans are irreducibly sexed, sex is a human rather than a divine
attribute and that maleness is not a necessary carrier of Jesus’ soteriological capacity. Human
sex does not in itself image God, but is a channel for other divine characteristics, such as
generativity and relationality, imaged in humans. Maleness is not a quality of God imaged in
Jesus, so also need not be a quality of Jesus which Christian priests “represent”.
Introduction
People with intersex conditions have an unusual physical sex. Their bodies do not fit
current definitions of maleness or femaleness. Often, this atypicality manifests in nonstandard genitals. Someone with “ambiguous” genitalia might, for example, have a phallus
larger than a typical clitoris but smaller than a typical penis. In another set of intersex
conditions, there is no visible atypicality. In these conditions there is a “mismatch” between
genital appearance and other physical characteristics, such as internal organs, gonads,
chromosomes, and sex cells. One of the most common intersex conditions is Androgen
2
Insensitivity Syndrome, in which XY foetuses cannot respond to testosterone and other
androgens. Despite their internal testes and XY chromosomes, people with AIS have an
unremarkably feminine morphology, with female genitalia. At puberty, they develop breasts
and hips. The vast majority are brought up as girls and do not consider that there is anything
male about them. Less common conditions include those where the external genitalia appear
male but there are some invisible female characteristics: for example, ovarian tissue as well
as or instead of testicular tissue (as in some individuals with ovotestes, formerly called “true
hermaphroditism”; and in some XX foetuses with Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia, who have
male-looking external genitalia and female reproductive organs), or XX cells in the same
body as XY cells (as in genetic mosaicism).
Intersex conditions causing unusual genitalia affect about 1 in 2,500 people. 1
However, it is much harder to determine how many people have “invisible” intersex
conditions. Many such conditions cause no physical problems and may be discovered by
chance via medical examinations for other reasons, or not at all. Some people undoubtedly
live their whole lives never knowing that they have an intersex condition.
Intersex raises important theological questions about the significance of human sex. If
not everyone is male or female, and if it is possible to be intersex and not know it, what does
this mean for theological-anthropological assertions about what human sex signifies in
cosmic terms? In this paper, I focus in particular on questions about the significance of Jesus’
sex. If it is theoretically possible that Jesus, in common with some other humans, was
intersex and that this was not known, do theologies grounded in his maleness require
rethinking? What are the implications for discussions about the sex of other humans, and the
1
Sharon Preves, Intersex and Identity: The Contested Self (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press,
2003), 2.
3
insistence by some Christians that priests must be male and not female because Jesus was
male?
The Maleness of Jesus
Debates about women bishops in my own denomination, the Church of England,
sometimes repeat arguments made by those who opposed women becoming priests at all:
since a priest stands in persona Christi, a priest, like Christ, must be male. In this account, it
is ontologically impossible for women to be priests. E.L. Mascall, an opponent to women’s
ordination, argued in 1978,
“Priesthood belongs to Christ as the Son of the eternal Father … The fact that he has
only one sex, and that the male, does not make his humanity incomplete. Humanity
belongs to him fully in the mode of masculinity; he does not need to be a
hermaphrodite2 in order to be fully human, any more than he needs to be a eunuch to
avoid favouring one sex over the other. And because the ordained priest is not
exercising a priesthood of his own but is the agent and instrument through which
Christ is exercising his priesthood, he too must be male.”3
A submission to the Church of England House of Bishops’ 2001 working party on women in
the episcopate from a church in Reading held,
“In presiding at the celebration of the Lord’s Supper or Mass, the priest, acting in
persona Christi, sacramentally re-enacts the saving sacrifice of Calvary … At the altar,
The term “hermaphrodite” was used in the past with reference to intersex people, but is now considered
inaccurate and stigmatizing.
3
E.L. Mascall, “Some Basic Considerations,” in Man, Woman, and Priesthood, ed. Peter Moore (London:
SPCK, 1978), 9-26, here 23.
2
4
the priest represents Christ the bridegroom, and this sacramental sign is lost entirely
when the celebrant is female.”4
A submission from the Anglo-Catholic traditionalist group Forward in Faith argued,
“The Fathers and the Schoolmen were unanimously agreed ... that the maleness of
Christ is Christologically significant. They affirmed that he was the Messiah, the Son
of David; and that he was the Son of the Father. They rightly understood those
categories to be male and to be located in the Jewishness of the chosen culture of our
redemption.”5
In these accounts, Jesus’ maleness is not incidental, but something specific in which his
sacerdotal and soteriological capacity inheres. For Mascall, priesthood belongs to Christ
because of his maleness, so human priesthood is also uniquely male. In the Forward in Faith
submission, Jesus’ maleness is significant because maleness in a first-century Jewish context
underpins inheritance rights, important to Jesus’ status as God’s Son.
Jesus’ maleness is also widely discussed in feminist theologies. For Elizabeth Johnson,
maleness in itself is unproblematic. However, power-structures and hegemonies attached to
maleness distort God’s mission of equality, love and justice. 6 The Cross sums up Jesus’
kenosis of his male privilege and power: “On this reading Jesus’ maleness is prophecy
announcing the end of patriarchy”.7 For Rosemary Radford Ruether, “the maleness of Jesus
In Archbishops’ Council, Women Bishops in the Church of England? A Report of the House of Bishops’
Working Party on Women in the Episcopate (London: Church House Publishing, 2004), 139.
5
In Archbishops’ Council, Women Bishops, 142.
6
Elizabeth Johnson, She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse (New York, NY:
Crossroad, 1993), 151-2.
7
Johnson, She Who Is, 161.
4
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has no ultimate significance”.8 Her famous enquiry “Can a male savior save women?” evoked
questions about whether arguments that whatever is not assumed cannot be redeemed applies
to gender, or whether (as Mascall implies) Jesus’ humanity “covers” women and men alike. 9
More recently, Tina Beattie has suggested that Jesus’ maleness is soteriologically significant
because male sin disproportionately causes problems in the world, so only a male can assume
and thus eradicate it.10 In this kind of account, a selfless, sacrificial female saviour would
only have been doing what females were already expected to do. Stanley Grenz, despite his
significantly different theological standpoint, utilizes similar logic:
“Jesus’ maleness provided the vehicle whereby he could reveal the radical difference
between God’s ideal and the structures that predominated in first-century society …
Given the context in which he lived, only a male could have offered this kind of
radical social critique.”11
But what if Jesus’ maleness is not actually indisputable and incontrovertible at all?
Theologians usually assume that there is no question about Jesus’ historic biological
maleness, whether or not they subsequently hold that priests must themselves be male.
However, as I have noted elsewhere,
“It is not possible to assert with any degree of certainty that Jesus was male as we
now define maleness. There is no way of knowing for sure that Jesus did not have one
8
Rosemary Radford Ruether, Sexism and God-Talk: Toward a Feminist Theology (Boston, MA: Beacon Press,
1983), 137.
9
Ruether, Sexism and God-Talk, 116.
10
Tina Beattie, “Sexuality and the Resurrection of the Body: Reflections in a Hall of Mirrors,” in Resurrection
Reconsidered, ed. Gavin D’Costa (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 1996), 135-149, here 142.
11
Stanley Grenz, What Christians Really Believe – And Why (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press,
1998), 94-95.
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of the intersex conditions which would give him a body which appeared externally to
be unremarkably male, but which might nonetheless have had some ‘hidden’ female
physical features … There is simply no way of telling at this juncture whether Jesus
was an unremarkably male human being, or someone with an intersex condition who
had a male morphology as far as the eye could see but may or may not also have had
XX chromosomes or some female internal anatomy.”12
I am not suggesting that Jesus did not live as a man, interact with others as a man, identify as
a man, and so on. But that is not the same thing as saying he was male in biological terms. It
is unlikely that Jesus had visibly atypical genital anatomy of the kind that some intersex
people do, because it would probably have been noticed at birth and may have rendered a
ritual circumcision difficult (though Jewish law requires that someone with atypical genitalia
be circumcised if possible).13 However, since there are also “invisible” intersex conditions
with no external genital ambiguity, it is not impossible that Jesus had a condition of this kind.
So what would it matter if Jesus had had an intersex condition? What would it mean
for Jesus’ humanity and divinity? What would it mean for theological arguments invested in
Jesus’ maleness which never take it to be anything other than obvious and incontrovertible?
These are important questions not because it is particularly likely that Jesus was intersex – on
the contrary, it is statistically extremely unlikely – but because Jesus’ ostensibly
incontrovertible maleness is imbued with such a great weight of theological signification
which in turn underlies the exclusion of women from serving as priests, bishops and other
ministers in some Christian denominations. If Jesus’ maleness is not so unproblematic after
Susannah Cornwall, “Intersex and Ontology: A Response to The Church, Women Bishops and Provision”
(Manchester: Lincoln Theological Institute, 2012), http://lincolntheologicalinstitute.com/iid-resources, 15
(accessed September 23, 2013).
13
Avraham Steinberg, Encyclopedia of Jewish Medical Ethics (Jerusalem: Feldheim, 2003), 50-54, 462-472.
12
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all, then a set of justifications for opposing women’s priestly and episcopal ministry falls
away.
Humanity and Sex
Arguments about Jesus’ maleness are sometimes grounded in the assertion that for
Jesus to be truly human, he must have been sexed. If to be human is to be sexed male or
female, than Jesus had to be one or the other. Many theologians assert that maleness and
femaleness alone reflect God’s intention for sexed human beings. Any deviation from this
pattern is depicted as unfortunate and undesirable. Dennis Hollinger, for example, says,
“There are sexual anomalies and distortions within the natural state of some human
beings … In the medical world this is called an intersex condition … From a
theological standpoint we can understand these conditions as results of the fallen
condition of our world, including the natural world … We should also understand that
such natural sexual conditions and anomalies in no way undermine the creational
norms .... In a fallen world there will be chaos and confusion that extends even to
human sexuality. But the normative structure toward which God calls humanity is not
the fallenness of nature; it is, rather, God’s created designs.”14
Elsewhere, intersex conditions have been figured as illnesses or diseases which it is
legitimate to rectify via corrective surgery.
15
In these accounts, “divine givens” are so
“given” (and intersex so undesirable) that it is appropriate to reinforce them when another
14
Dennis Hollinger, The Meaning of Sex: Christian Ethics and the Moral Life (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker
Academic, 2009), 84.
15
Christian Institute, “Intersex Conditions – Why They Are Different to Transsexuality”, 2004,
http://www.christian.org.uk/transsexualism/intersex_briefing.pdf, 1 (accessed September 23, 2013).
8
kind of physical sex manifests. 16 Intersex variations might arise in nature; but, add some
theologians, this does not make them part of the divine plan:
“We need not see all differences as God’s mistakes, but we also need not see them all
as God’s will. The fact that children are born with ambiguous genitals may be
incontrovertible evidence that there are not only two ways of being born, but that fact
does not, alone, mean that we should allow every way of living that happens in
nature.”17
Could Jesus have been human without a clear male sex, or any clear sex at all?
Christian theologies, with their characteristically high account of embodiment and
incarnation, cannot disparage human sex without eroding materiality and specificity as goods.
It matters, Christian theologians might say, that Jesus had a physical sex, because he was a
specific person, and specific persons have specific sexes. Karl Barth works according to this
kind of logic when he asserts,
“That the Word was made ‘flesh’ means first and generally that He became man, true
and real man, participating in the same human essence and existence, the same human
nature and form, the same historicity that we have. God’s revelation to us takes place
in such a way that everything ascribable to man … can now be predicated of God’s
eternal Son as well.”18
16
Hollinger, The Meaning of Sex, 84.
Karen Lebacqz, “Difference or Defect? Intersexuality and the Politics of Difference,” Annual of the Society of
Christian Ethics 17 (1997): 213-229, here 224.
18
Jung, “Christianity,” 147.
17
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So the question is to what extent it matters how someone is sexed – and whether being sexed
otherwise than male or female need be understood as problematic in theologicalanthropological terms.
Barth, writing in the mid-twentieth century, makes reference to androgyne figures in
Greek mythology and Indian religions.19 However, he does not give any sense of engagement
with questions raised by real, non-mythological intersex bodies (unsurprisingly, given that
intersex was openly discussed very little prior to the rise of the intersex activism movement
in the early 1990s). Although he speaks of people who wish to transcend their sexed nature,
aspiring “to sexless or bi-sexual humanity”,20 this is rooted in an assumption that humans can
only be male or female and that to deny their specificity via appeals to social genderlessness
would be to deny their humanity. He says,
“Since man has been created by God as male or female, and stands before God in this
Either-Or, everything that God wills and requires of him is contained by implication
in this situation, and the question of good and evil in his conduct is measured by it.
God … requires that he should be genuinely and fully the one or the other, male or
female.”21
For Barth, the crucial point is that the differences between human beings must not be elided:
first, because to do so would be to deny individuals’ specificity; and second, because denying
sex would be denying incarnate human nature.
However, it is ironic that Barth, who rejected natural theologies and believed
knowledge of God came about only via God’s self-revelation in Christ, seems to draw cosmic
19
Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III.4: The Doctrine of Creation, trans. A.T. Mackay et al (Edinburgh: T&T
Clark, 1961), 161.
20
Barth, CDIII.4, 158.
21
Barth, CDIII.4, 149.
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conclusions from what he believes are self-evident “natural” facts (i.e. that all humans are
male or female). Indeed, Graham Ward comments that, in Barth’s anthropological treatment
of humans, he “defines their ethical and social vocation in terms of their biology alone. It is
as if he returns to a natural theology his whole theological system is set up to refute”.22
Because Barth does not distinguish between sex and gender – because he understands
maleness and masculinity to go ineluctably together – he believes one cannot reject one’s
existence as a man or woman without also rejecting the irrefutable fact of one’s sex. However,
interestingly, precisely because he is not aware that human sex can be other than male or
female, he does not overwork the trope of biology itself as the a priori ground on which
masculinity and femininity are built. In this way, he may be closer than he would ever have
suspected to the feminist philosophers whose work he briefly refutes. He considers that the
way in which men act and women respond echoes the way God acts and humans respond,23
but he does not pin this to a biologist assertion about human reproductive capacity or male
initiation and female response in sexual intercourse (though the Church of England’s bishops
did so several decades later).24 Maleness and femaleness per se are less important to Barth
than masculinity and femininity are, though of course he does not distinguish them in these
terms. Indeed, he says, “It is a question of the whole man and not merely of the use which he
makes or does not make of his physical sexual organs”.25
22
Graham Ward, Cities of God (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 197.
Barth, CDIII.4, 175.
24
“In terms of our relationship to God we are essentially ‘female-like’ and feminine and he is ‘male-like’ and
masculine. God always has the initiative and our duty is to respond. Because, psychologically and symbolically
and, to an important extent, biologically, taking the initiative is male, it was therefore appropriate that the Word
was incarnate as a male human being and not as a female human being. The particularity of maleness assumed
in the incarnation and taken into the Godhead signifies divine initiative”. Central Board of Finance of the
Church of England, The Ordination of Women to the Priesthood: A Second Report by the House of Bishops of
the General Synod of the Church of England (London: General Synod of the Church of England, 1988), 27.
25
Barth, CDIII.4, 130.
23
11
So, to recap: human sex is an appropriately creaturely reminder of humans’ status as
human.26 For Barth, not acknowledging the creaturehood bound-up with sex is problematic.
To be human is, irreducibly, to be sexed. However, I wonder whether Barth himself would
maintain, in the face of the existence of intersex in the contemporary world, that sex could
manifest only as male or female. What Barth is getting at, and what really seems
theologically significant in his account, is specificity: existence in, and interaction with God
and other humans, through sexed particularity. It does not occur to Barth that specific sex can
be other than male or female, so he cannot “reject” manhood and womanhood because in his
logic this is to reject creaturehood itself. For us, however, sex and gender need not be so
closely interwoven – especially if we acknowledge what Barth could not, namely that human
sex is not binary even at a biological level, as intersex demonstrates.
Other theologians including Virginia Ramey Mollenkott, Sally Gross and Patricia
Beattie Jung have begun to claim intersex as a non-pathological variation, not something
fallen short of a divinely-instituted plan.27 Interestingly, intersex Christians themselves have
spoken in similar terms; some of those I interviewed during 2012 appealed to their belief that
their intersex was a specific, deliberate act of God: 28
“I’m not an accident, I’m not an aberration, I’m not a mutant … I was meant to be …
God doesn’t make mistakes.” (David, Anglican)
26
Barth, CDIII.4, 124-125.
Virginia Ramey Mollenkott, Omnigender: A Trans-Religious Approach, rev. ed. (Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim
Press, 2007), 98-99; Sally Gross, “Intersexuality and Scripture,” Theology and Sexuality 11 (1999): 65-74;
Patricia Beattie Jung, “Christianity and Human Sexual Polymorphism: Are They Compatible?” in Ethics and
Intersex, ed. Sharon Sytsma, (Dordrecht: Springer, 2006), 293-309.
28
These interviews were conducted as part of the Intersex, Identity and Disability: Issues for Public Policy,
Healthcare and the Church project which I led at the Lincoln Theological Institute, University of Manchester,
UK, between 2011 and 2013. This was funded by the trustees of the Lincoln Theological Institute. The project
website may be accessed at http://lincolntheologicalinstitute.com/intersex-identity-disability (accessed
September 23, 2013).
27
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“I don’t believe it’s an accident that I’ve been born this way … I was created the way
I was created.” (Sarah, Anglican)
“It’s very important for me to believe that my God … created me in a complete way
and that it’s okay and meant to be this way.” (Anthony, Scottish Episcopalian)
“Being a Christian helped me accept myself, because I felt that God made me. So I
probably wouldn’t be as okay with the whole thing, and relaxed about the whole thing
if I didn’t feel that there was purposes for things. And that there was a greater
power … at work … I feel really liberated because the way I feel is, to God, it doesn’t
really matter whether I am a man or a woman. It just matters that I am who I am, who
he made me.” (Poppy, Roman Catholic)
Several suggested intersex had specific spiritual and social benefits:
“Having an intersex condition invites you to step out of a world view that is certain
and predictable to seeing that many of our assumptions as human beings fall far short
of certitude … Having an [intersex] condition can make it easier to embrace the joy of
individuality and not have to feel the need to be like everyone else.” (Vanessa, Roman
Catholic)
“I can really embrace my being intersex and seeing the spiritual gifts that come from
that and I don’t believe it’s an accident that I’ve been born this way. It’s been a very,
very difficult path but it’s been a very powerful path as well.” (Sarah)
“I can understand women more than most men can and I understand men more than
most women can … I see it now as being a sort of a gift.” (Anthony)
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Some identified as male or female, and others as distinctively intersex or “in between”, but
there was no sense that their intersex could not be understood as a good creation of God.
If other humans’ ambiguous sex does not compromise their humanity or represent a
deviation from God’s intention, but exists as another non-moral possibility alongside
maleness and femaleness, then the goodness of Jesus’ humanity need also not be
compromised by the possibility of intersex. Having an intersex condition might, theoretically,
have compromised Jesus’ capacity to procreate: many intersex people are infertile. However,
Jesus’ supposed perfected humanity is not deemed to have been compromised by the fact that
he did not marry or have biological children. The existence and materiality of Jesus’ sex
matter. But, I suggest, it does not necessarily matter what that sex was. Jesus’ maleness is not
inherently soteriologically significant: his humanity, including its specifically-sexed nature, is.
Jesus shares with all humans the quality of having a specific sex, and his solidarity with other
humans inheres in this specificity and particularity. Likewise, all those who minister as
priests and bishops resemble Jesus in simultaneously being specifically, distinctly sexed and
particular, and in sharing this specifically-sexed status with others no matter what that
specific sex is.
Divinity and Sex
If Jesus’ putative intersexuality need not necessarily compromise his humanity, what
about his divinity? In many respects, this is easier: maleness and sex in general are human
attributes, not divine ones. In Chalcedonian terms, there can be no mixing of, or confusion
between, Jesus’ divine and human natures. Nonetheless, there has been, comments Elizabeth
Johnson, “a certain leakage of Jesus’ human maleness into the divine nature, so that maleness
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appears to be of the essence of the God made known in Christ”.29 She notes, “As visible
image of the invisible God, the human man Jesus is used to tie the knot between maleness
and divinity very tightly”. 30 Rosemary Radford Ruether adds, “The unwarranted idea
develops that there is a necessary ontological connection between the maleness of Jesus’
historical person and the maleness of Logos as male offspring and disclosure of a male
God”.31
But God is not male. Maleness and femaleness are not qualities belonging to God.
God is made incarnate in and through sexed bodies, but also transcends and exceeds them. It
is possible to claim human sex as part of what images God in humans without claiming that
sex itself is a quality of God. Human sex is a means by which humans may be generative,
relational and loving, like God. But this likeness is not an exact similarity: God creates and
generates without sex, and humans’ capacity for creativity and generation is not uniquely
linked to their sexuality (humans also do not create and generate only via sex). In Christian
theology, God relates to Godself within the Trinity sexlessly, and God’s relationships to the
creation are not sexed as those of humans are. Jesus’ divinity – his similarity and
pereichoretic relationality with God – does not depend on his maleness, because his sex
belongs to him as human, not as divine.
In the context of the women priests debate, Robert Pesarchick glosses Hans Urs von
Balthasar’s account of priesthood,32 saying that, for Balthasar,
29
Johnson, She Who Is, 152.
Johnson, She Who Is, 35.
31
Ruether, Sexism and God-Talk, 117.
32
Balthasar writes, “The Word of God appears in the world as a man, as the ‘Last Adam’. This cannot be a
matter of indifference … However the One who comes forth from the Father is designated, as a human being he
must be a man if his mission is to represent the Origin, the Father, in the world.” Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theodrama: Theological Dramatic Theory: Vol. III: Dramatis Personae: Persons in Christ, trans. Graham Harrison
(San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 1992), 283-284.
30
15
“The ministerial priesthood is commissioned to represent … Christ as Christ is
commissioned to represent the Father. Just as the maleness of Jesus is intrinsic to this
aspect of his mission/priesthood, so maleness is intrinsic to the ordained priesthood’s
task of commissioned representation.”33
But Jesus’ representation of God cannot include maleness, since God is not male. Priests’
representation of Jesus need not therefore have maleness as an irreducible facet, since
maleness cannot be part of the divinity of God which Jesus mediates to humans and which
priests in turn mediate to the Church.
The problems arise where metaphors of fatherhood and generation in God are
conflated with fatherhood and generation in human terms. Beattie expands on this, noting,
“Balthasar’s Jesus is of necessity a biological male, because he represents God, who is ‘the
Origin, the Father’. Thus there is – at least implicitly – an identification of the divine
fatherhood with masculine sexuality and the male body”.
34
She reads Balthasar’s
essentializing of biological sex, and symbolic designation of creation as “feminine” in
relation to a “masculine” Christ – himself “feminine” in relation to God because he emanates
from him – as failing to problematize the association of biological human maleness with
divinity and initiation. 35 It is essentially a dead metaphor which Balthasar and others attempt
to revivify retrospectively via imbuing maleness (a human characteristic) with divine
significance. Balthasar’s appeal to male sexual generation echoes his appeal to the Genesis
account in which Eve is taken from Adam’s rib: “Both are created by God, but the woman is
made from the man”.36 Like Barth, however, Balthasar works from humans backwards: he
33
Robert Pesarchick, The Trinitarian Foundation of Human Sexuality as Revealed by Christ according to Hans
Urs von Balthasar: The Revelatory Significance of the Male Christ and the Male Ministerial Priesthood (Rome:
Editrice Pontificia Università Gregoriana, 2000), 273.
34
Tina Beattie, New Catholic Feminism: Theology and Theory (New York, NY: Routledge, 2006), 113.
35
Beattie, New Catholic Feminism, 113.
36
Balthasar, Theo-drama III, 340.
16
believes it is only possible to be sexed male or female, and his theology of the Church as
Bride and Christ as Bridegroom follows from there:
“The male body is male throughout, right down to each cell of which it consists, and
the female body is utterly female; and this is also true of their whole empirical
experience and ego-consciousness … Both share an identical human nature, but at no
point does it protrude, neutrally, beyond the sexual difference.”37
But Balthasar’s absence of knowledge of bodies not exclusively male or female down to the
last cell – like intersex people with genetic mosaicism, who may or may not also have
unusual genitalia – leaves him, like Barth, grounding cosmic assertions in “obvious” natural
observations now highly questionable in light of intersex. Maleness and femaleness have had
a great weight of theological signification brought to bear on them, but much of this may no
longer stand if it is acknowledged that male and female are not categories which include the
whole of humanity (and are therefore not an unproblematic all-encompassing cipher).
Maleness and femaleness, in Barth, Balthasar and some who follow them, are taken as
including all humanity. As we have seen, this is already problematic because of the intersex
exception. Furthermore, however, it fails to recognize the discontinuity between God and
humans. Humans image God in many ways, but this is not contingent on their sex, since sex
is a channel through which God-reflecting qualities are outworked. In theologicalanthropological terms, there is a further interruption because of the cosmic work of Christ,
which profoundly alters what it is to be human. Humanness itself is, as David McCarthy
Matzko argues, transformed because of God’s self-revelation in Jesus:
37
Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theo-drama: Theological Dramatic Theory: Vol. II: Dramatis Personae: Man in
God, trans. Graham Harrison (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 1990), 365.
17
“For Christian theology, human bodiliness is given its essential character through the
incarnation. Christ does not simply wear the cloak of an already-complete humanity;
on the contrary, the incarnation of God as human flesh constitutes the human body as
reconciled to God. This reconciled humanity reveals humanity in its true form.”38
In Jesus, human incarnation, embodiment, fleshliness (what Leo Steinberg calls
“humanation”) is furthered.39 Bodies “in Christ” do not mean what they meant before. Tropes
of inheritance (sometimes appealed to as justification for Jesus’ maleness-Sonship) and
hierarchy (that is, the assumption that males’ and females’ distinctness is not merely different,
but different in an ordered, males-preceding-and-females-following manner) are disrupted
despite the persisting particularity and multiplicity of bodily sex. Indeed, though he might not
have known it, this chimes with Barth’s assertion in his essay Christ and Adam: “So it is
Christ that reveals the true nature of man. Man’s nature in Adam is not, as is usually assumed,
his true and original nature; it is only truly human at all insofar as it reflects and corresponds
to essential human nature as it is found in Christ”.40 What is true of humanity as transformed
in Christ is truer than what was true in Adam. I will return to this point in a moment.
Priests and Androgynes
Another argument for Jesus’ essential maleness might lie in his roles as symbolic
High Priest and effective sacrifice (Hebrews 7 NRSV). Would their efficacy be compromised
if Jesus were not a veritably male animal, since only male animals were to be sacrificed at
David McCarthy Matzko, “Christ’s Body in its Fullness: Resurrection and the Lives of the Saints,” in
Resurrection Reconsidered, ed. Gavin D’Costa (Oxford: Oneworld, 1996), 102-117, here 103.
39
Leo Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion, rev. ed. (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1996), 11-12.
40
Karl Barth, Christ and Adam: Man and Humanity in Romans 5, trans. T.A. Smail (New York, NY: Harper and
Brothers, 1956), 92.
38
18
Passover? Leviticus 21:21 NRSV states that priests (like sacrificial animals) may not be
blemished, and Deuteronomy 23:1 NRSV that no-one whose testes have been crushed or
penis cut off may be admitted to the assembly. David Tabb Stewart and others note the
recognition in the Mishnah of androginos, persons with characteristics of both sexes, and
tumtum, whose sex is unknown because their genitals are “hidden”. Stewart suggests both
these categories are subtly different from the “damaged male”.41
According to Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert, being tumtum or androginos in Judaism
precludes an animal from counting as male and being a legitimate sacrifice; importantly,
however, this is to do with readability as male, the external genitals’ appearance.42 Avraham
Steinberg concurs, “That which is decisive in Jewish law is only the appearance of the
external sex organs and not the chromosomal analysis”.43 Gideon Weitzman confirms that
the Talmud Sages determined human sex by external genitalia only, but notes that modern
medical technology means that analysis of chromosomes and internal tissues is also now
possible and desirable in the treatment of intersex children.44 In the contemporary Jewish
context, then, there is acknowledgement that sex for legal and ritual purposes does not lie in
visible genitals alone.
Only those assumed to be male act as priests in the Hebrew Bible. However, that is
important: only those assumed to be male. For humans as for sacrificial animals, sex in this
context was determined by the visible genitalia (which is why tumtum individuals represented
a categorization problem). But maleness (and, indeed, femaleness) is not a stable or
unshifting category. It has not been determined by genital appearance alone in every culture
David Tabb Stewart, “Leviticus,” in The Queer Bible Commentary, ed. Deryn Guest, Robert Goss, Mona
West and Thomas Bohache (London: SCM Press, 2006), 77-104, here 93.
42
Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert, “Bodily Perfection in the Sanctuary: Parashat Vayikra (Leviticus 1:1-5:26),” in
Torah Queeries: Weekly Commentaries on the Hebrew Bible, ed. Gregg Drinkwater, Joshua Lesser and David
Shneer (New York, NY: New York University Press, 2009), 123-128, here 125-126.
43
Steinberg, Encyclopedia, 465.
44
Weitzman, Gideon, “Is Gender Determined by External Organs or by Genes?” B’Or Ha’Torah 19 (2009): 2635.
41
19
or society. It does not always exist incontrovertibly in a given individual from birth to death,
as exemplified by those intersex people who have female-looking bodies in childhood and
then experience male puberties (as with those who have conditions such as 5-Alpha
Reductase Deficiency, brought to wider public notice by Jeffrey Eugenides’ 2002 novel
Middlesex).45 Jesus’ maleness is assumed important to his symbolic priesthood because it is
assumed that all the priests who preceded him were similarly unquestionably male. But their
maleness or otherwise was equally contingent on cultural norms, and equally distant and
impossible to certify in biological terms.
A further argument might be that Jesus’ role as “second Adam” in Christian traditions
– the one who takes on and redeems the human capacity for sin instituted in the first Adam –
necessitates his sharing maleness with the first Adam: either because Adam’s sin was
somehow linked intrinsically to his maleness, so by association the maleness of Jesus is
necessary to redeem it; or because Adam’s standing for all humanity resides in his maleness
as “representative”, covering all humanity.
However, Adam himself was, according to some traditions, not always male, but
originally androgynous, with Adam’s maleness coming about only at the creation of Eve. A
fifth-century Midrash, Genesis Rabbah viii, states, “Jeremiah, son of Eleazar, says: God
created Adam androgynous, but Samuel, son of Nahman, says, He created him ‘doublefaced,’ then cutting him in twain and forming two backs, one to the one and the other to the
second”. 46 Augustine rejects the idea of a primal androgyne in The Literal Meaning of
Genesis (III.22), writing,
45
Eugenides, Jeffrey, Middlesex (London: Bloomsbury, 2002).
Quoted
in
1906
Jewish
Encyclopedia,
“Androgynos
(Hermaphrodite),”
2002,
http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/1508-androgynos-hermaphrodite (accessed September 23, 2013).
46
20
“On account of their being joined in one, God made, it says, man to the image of God.
And in case anyone should think it was only the spirit of man that was made, although
it was only in the spirit that he was made to the image of God, he made him, it says,
male and female (Gn 1:27), to give us to understand that the body was also being
made now. Again, in case anyone should suppose that it was made in such a way as to
represent each sex in a single person, like those called hermaphrodites who are born
occasionally, he shows that he put it in the singular on account of their being joined in
one, and because the woman was made from the man.”47
The idea of humans as originally androgynous has been abandoned in subsequent orthodox
Christian theology, and recent accounts of human sexuality (such as those released by the
Church of England) tend to appeal to the primary, inbuilt either-maleness-or-femaleness of
humans, often with concomitant appeals to gender complementarity.
Here Barth’s argument that what is true of humans in Christ is more authentic and
somehow more primary than what is true of humans in Adam is significant. It implies that
humanity’s true nature is to be transformed for life in community, being reconciled with God,
humans and other creatures. “In Christ”, human sex is not “over” (humans after Christ are
still sexed), but is not significant in the same way. Asserting that sex and gender disappear in
Christ, as some scholars have mooted, is attractive. However, it may also be dangerous,
especially for women, intersex people, and others whose bodies are easily “disappeared”. If
sex passes away in the new creation, it is only a small step to saying that sex differences are
not good in their own right. Ruether notes that Christian sects with concepts of an
androgynous Christ have often reinforced androcentrism; the “lower” female, material
47
Hill, Edmund and John Rotelle (eds.), The Works of St Augustine: On Genesis (Hyde Park, NY: New City
Press, 2002), 238.
21
element disappears in the ostensibly androgynous Christ, and the rational, male element
remains.48 So it matters that we are sexed and not sexless. But it matters less, for salvation in
theological and social life, how we are sexed. Sex persists, but sex as male is not privileged
over sex as female or sex otherwise.
Uncertainty and Simultaneity
So far, I have mostly spoken about the implications of the actual, physical body of
Jesus. Inevitably, however, the symbolic body of Christ in church and community has also
been important. There is a stream within Christianity grounded in Galatians 3:28 (NRSV):
“There is no longer male and female … in Christ”. Many theologians have held back from
asserting that the end of sex could happen pre-eschatologically (and, as we have just seen,
“ending sex” prematurely may threaten non-males especially), but this does not mean that
changes in understandings of sex cannot occur, nor that sex cannot be affirmed as contingent
and penultimate like the other social categories which Paul asserts pass away in Christ.
Graham Ward shows that Jesus’ cosmic body is transfigured in and through the
multiply-gendered bodies of those selves and others with whom Christians worship. In the
new community, gender signifies differently. 49 Ward’s account might not go far enough in
addressing what it means to be someone whose bodily sex is in question pre-eschaton, and
may, as Virginia Burrus has commented, do too little to disrupt the sexism historically
reinscribed through assertions about Christ’s maleness. 50 However, Ward does much in
acknowledging that sex and gender in the new community are not final arbiters of identity.
48
Ruether, Sexism and God-Talk, 128.
Graham Ward, “The Erotics of Redemption – After Karl Barth,” Theology and Sexuality 8 (1998): 52-72;
Graham Ward, “Bodies: The Displaced Body of Jesus Christ,” in Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology, ed. John
Milbank, Catherine Pickstock and Graham Ward (London: Routledge, 1999), 163-181; Graham Ward, “On the
Politics of Embodiment and the Mystery of All Flesh,” in The Sexual Theologian: Essays on Sex, God and
Politics, ed. Marcella Althaus-Reid and Lisa Isherwood (London: T&T Clark, 2004), 71-85.
50
Virginia Burrus, “Radical Orthodoxy and the Heresiological Habit: Engaging Graham Ward’s Christology,”
in Interpreting the Postmodern: Responses to “Radical Orthodoxy”, ed. Rosemary Radford Ruether and Marion
Grau (New York, NY: T&T Clark International, 2006), 36-53.
49
22
The ecclesial body of Christ contains both male and female human bodies. In that sense, it is
no longer (if it ever was) solely male. Importantly, however, it also contains intersex bodies.
The bodies within the Body are not just male and female ones. Differences and particularities
in bodies persist: problems and limitations attached to those differences do not.
Barth and Balthasar each, in their different ways, insist on the irreducibility of Jesus’
maleness-manhood, and, related to it, the irreducible maleness-manhood and femalenesswomanhood of human beings. But a third theological “big B” of twentieth-century Germanlanguage theology, Rudolf Bultmann, took another approach.
Bultmann argues, “The facts which historical criticism can verify cannot exhaust,
indeed they cannot adequately indicate, all that Jesus means to me. How he actually
originated matters little, indeed we can appreciate his significance only when we cease to
worry about such questions”.51 For Bultmann, belief in Christ’s soteriological power cannot
turn on questions about his historical authenticity or details of his historic particularity. We
cannot know with certainty, Bultmann remarks, whether Jesus died on a cross and was
resurrected: people have believed these things as acts of faith throughout Christian history,
and Christians now must do likewise. There will always be risk attached to belief in
unverifiable events, but their proof is the difference faith makes to Christians’ lives.
Christians believe what they have heard in preaching, and in the Christ whose resurrection is
made manifest in their lives.52
Those who hold Jesus’ maleness as historically and theologically incontrovertible fact
are not usually arguing what Bultmann does, namely, that the fact or otherwise of Jesus’
historical maleness is less significant than the beliefs and faith which have grown up around
it. This might be a more honest position. Rather, those who argue that women should not be
Rudolf Bultmann, “The Mythological Element in the Message of the New Testament and the Problem of its
Re-interpretation,” in Kerygma and Myth: A Theological Debate by Rudolf Bultmann and Five Critics, ed. Hans
Werner Bartsch (New York, NY: Harper and Row, 1962), 1-44, here 35.
52
Bultmann, “The Mythological Element,” 41-42.
51
23
made bishops because of their femaleness frequently appeal to Jesus’ historic maleness
(assumed to be unproblematic in biological terms), even though such maleness is not
historically attestable. There might be good theological reasons for wanting to maintain the
importance of Jesus’ historicity and particularity in a way Bultmann does not. However, his
point about the unknowability of certain historical information still stands, and problematizes
biologist assertions about humans’ sex as imaging God.
The Christian avowal of Jesus’ simultaneous humanity and divinity holds mystery.
How do these qualities co-exist? At what point did Jesus, the human child, come into his full
God-consciousness? Christian theologies’ dual appeals to the centrality of Jesus’ actual,
physical body – the proof of incarnation – and to the cosmic-ecclesial body into which
Christians are initiated, means that there is a capacity for uncertainty and simultaneity built
into the tradition. But uncertainty and simultaneity can be uncomfortable to live with.
Christians have often preferred assurance and conviction. The projection of this certainty
onto questions of sex and gender has led to an over-theologization of certain human
institutions (such as heterosexual marriage) as exclusively mirroring aspects of divine
relationality, and a disavowal of provisionality and apophasis (though these latter have begun
to be reclaimed in, for example, some feminist and queer theological accounts). But insisting
on hesitation, on an active refusal to be certain, is particularly significant when it comes to
Jesus’ maleness, because it is the uncertain nature of this maleness which continues to be
denied – to the extent that its assumed incontrovertibility is made a ground for denying
women’s priestly and episcopal ministry in ontological terms.
Fascinatingly, Barth himself owns, “An impenetrable veil of silence lies over the fact
that [Jesus] was a male … The fact of His corporeality is crucially important. The substance
and nature of this fact, which are so desirable and even necessary to a biographer, remain
24
fundamentally hidden”. 53 For Rachel Muers, this is significant because despite Barth’s
insistence that to be human is to be sexed male or female, Jesus the super-human (and model
for all humans) somehow transcends sex.54 Sex is relativized. Barth himself, who accounts
human maleness and femaleness irreducibly part of what allows human relationships to
repeat divine-human ones, is admitting that the nature of Jesus’ maleness is itself less certain
or incontrovertible than it might seem. Bring on the doubt! Jesus’ historic physical maleness
might simply have to be something Christians say less about in theological terms; something
to which they attach less significance, and pin less outworking.
Conclusions
Many opponents of women’s ordination as priests and consecration as bishops
maintain that there must be continuity between the (physical) maleness of Christ and the
(physical) maleness of the human being in persona Christi. For most such commentators,
Christ’s maleness seems self-evident and indisputable. Arguments that gender is constructed
and that the differences between men and women are minimal are unlikely to be convincing
for those who insist that the ontological differences are grounded in biology, and that it is on
biology that gender identity must supervene. In this paper, however, I have argued, first, that
maleness cannot be part of that of God imaged in Jesus (since sex is a human characteristic
and not a divine one), so it also need not be part of that of Jesus which priests “represent”;
and, second, that even if the putative sex of God were imaged in Christ, it is not possible in
historic terms to be certain that Jesus’ biological body was a male one, so it also does not
make sense to insist that “Christness” can only be represented in male bodies.
53
Barth, CDIII.2, 330.
Rachel Muers, “A Question of Two Answers: Difference and Determination in Barth and von Balthasar,”
Heythrop Journal 40 (1999): 265-279, here 270.
54
25
There are certain things we cannot, at this juncture, know about Jesus’ physical sex.
But no sex’s significance is unproblematic or self-evident, since the ways we interpret sex
and the significance we ascribe to it – even when we think we are just reading the bare
biological facts of someone’s body – always depend on a whole host of other circumstances,
such as the norms and conventions of sex in currency in our own context. There is no such
thing as an unvarnished certainty that Jesus as male as we now define maleness. This does
not make the specificities of human sex insignificant (as Barth and contemporary opponents
to women’s priesthood and consecration as bishops seem to fear will happen): indeed, it
makes the acknowledgement of the diverse ways in which human sex manifests – including
the existence of intersex – even more important. Denying the real sexed existence of those
“sexed otherwise” is to undermine their full humanity and shared status as created in God’s
image. Human beings are not exclusively male or female, even if the Church of England and
other denominations continue to insist otherwise. The existence of intersex, and the history of
its analysis and treatment in medical, social and theological discourse, is a reminder that even
“self-evident”, “obvious” accounts of what it means to be human can and do change.