Gendered souls
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On another thread @ChastMastr mentioned the idea that there exist (potential?) theologies that suggest the human soul is gendered.
I don't have anything to offer here from my experience, but I'm interested to learn more.
Is there really a defined theology that suggests individual human souls have a gender? How many people believe that? Does this have implications with reference to acceptance of trans people?
I've not been able to find much online as I don't really know what I'm looking for or at. It seems like this might be something relevant to Mormons, who apparently believe something I don't fully understand about family relationships in the afterlife.
(ETA Capitalised title, DT)
I don't have anything to offer here from my experience, but I'm interested to learn more.
Is there really a defined theology that suggests individual human souls have a gender? How many people believe that? Does this have implications with reference to acceptance of trans people?
I've not been able to find much online as I don't really know what I'm looking for or at. It seems like this might be something relevant to Mormons, who apparently believe something I don't fully understand about family relationships in the afterlife.
(ETA Capitalised title, DT)
Comments
Seems like a strange debate to me. "Hey, this thing that we don't really know exists at all, if it does exist, does it have gender?"
Very hypothetical. I mean how would we test the idea?
I don't know if it's a debate, if it is not one I've ever come across. It sounds like an asserted dogma to me.
I remember because until then it had never occurred to me that souls could have gender or indeed soecies. I thought of them all as more or less undifferentiated bits of soul/mind/spirit stuff, and thought that gender and species were purely a matter of the body. But a number of posters chimed in to say they had a very clear sense of being gendered apart from the body, which confused the heck out of me as i have no such thing myself.
Indeed, yes. I certainly think that there is a connection between soul and personality, though how it specifically works is something we'll find out later. What parts of us will fall away once we die, and/or are resurrected? I trust that my various emotional difficulties, while they're part of my personality in many ways now, will no longer be a problem (but will it turn out that some of those can be redeemed rather than being merely damage to be healed? Rather than just falling away, will they be turned into something wonderful and glorious? I don't know).
Or doctrine, at least, along with the doctrine/dogma of the soul, and the afterlife, and God, and Jesus.
I'm assuming here that we're taking the notion of souls (particularly in a Christian context) as a given. I don't think there's a way to test it (even the paranormal TV shows are not absolute evidence, and one's own experiences are not necessarily repeatable in any kind of scientific way--we're dealing with sapient beings, rather than rocks or something).
Mormons believe that family life, marriage, etc. continues after death. (Of course, by orthodox Christian standards, their theology is startlingly heretical, far more in their doctrine of the nature of God, Christ, etc. with the notion of "eternal progression," etc.)
I don't think Christianity requires us to believe that our souls are gendered, but if we are resurrected with perfect bodies, then presumably our souls will fit perfectly with whatever bodies we are raised with.
Yes, I'm taking orthodox Christian theology as a given in this matter. And of course it depends on the philosophy; the sciences don't really deal with this kind of thing, whatever some scientific popularizers may say (there's no way to scientifically test for a soul one way or another, so technically, even the greatest scientists are on the same level as everyone else regarding souls, spirits, angels, God, etc.).
It think a body is an entity viewed as affecting and affected by other physical bodies, a mind is (possibly *) the same entity viewed as capable of representing and reflecting on the world, and a soul is that entity viewed as capable of finding meaning in the world.
Gender I suppose is a form of meaning and therefore I suppose belongs to souls.
(I think the above understanding of souls is in line with the Thomist tradition that the soul is not a separate immaterial entity parallel to the body as a material entity.)
* possibly because I don't know whether eg beetles have minds.
1) Yes
2) In my circle, many.
3) Depending on whom you ask, yes, absolutely.
Regarding item 1, it depends on what you mean by "defined" and how various church traditions/denominations handle the way the "codify" doctrine. The Westminster Confession, for example, has quite a lot to say specifically about sex, less about gender, but a good deal could be and is "gathered" from it regarding what the statements of the confession mean in real life. My background is in churches that don't use such succinctly and thoroughly composed doctrinal statements, but much of the theology is still incredibly consistent from church to church.
Groups like The Council of Biblical Manhood and Womanhood demonstrate in their article "Body, Soul and Gender Identity" that they find this issue to be of great importance and with direct implications for trans people.
The Creation Research Institute finds the issues connected as well: An Exploration of Gender and the Soul with Benjamin Cabe – Part 1 and important for the same reason, and probably others.
Recently, I head a guest speaker at church describe "the World" as obsessed with sex. My daughters looked at me questioningly. I rolled my eyes and shrugged my shoulders.
As for implications about acceptance of trans people, for some of us yes, and for some of us (including me), no, not at all.
To be fair, if the Creation Research Institute told me water was wet I'd go and shower to double-check.
Ditto.
Good advice.
Normally, if they say anything , I am not aware of it.
Having said that, I don't think it's useful to think of your soul as some abstract entity that floats around independently of you. At the moment your body, your spirit, your mind, your soul, collectively make up you. If you're gendered at the moment, then your soul is too. If you're not, it isn't. Whether you, or your soul will be gendered in the resurrection I don't know, and I defy anyone else to claim they know. The most anyone can say is that marriage only belongs to this life. In the resurrection we neither marry nor are given in marriage.
How would you normally define it?
I've been involved with similar discussions involving disabilities. My daughters who both have different physical disabilities, have read some psychology and theology relating to them. One has albinism and is quite clear that she has no desire to be differently. I am quite content with my genderedness. But I am quite happy for it to be seen as of no qualitative difference from any other and in no way affecting my position or role in Christ. Which is what I think is the point of the verse.
This reminds me of I think CS Lewis's observation that a soul without a body is a ghost, and a body without a soul is a corpse.
Exactly!
Me, or society? There is nowadays a distinction made between sex and gender, sex being biological, your genitalia and chromosomes, and gender being how you feel/identify. However, not everyone, particularly older, more conservative types, seems to be aware of this distinction, or to acknowledge/accept it. But to me it seems essential to know whether this distinction is being made if we are talking about gendered souls. Are we talking about genitalia or identity?
But I am of the view that we are saved as people and to be a human being you need a body and a soul (or whatever you want to call it.) Sacramentally our bodies are intimately bound up in our salvation. I don't believe that a disembodied soul (if there is such a thing) is a human being. I think that we are given a some sort of a body after death to preserve out entire humanity (thinking of parallels with the Ascension here.) And its sex (or whatever) remains the same.
I would add “essence” in the ontological sense as well to physical and how one feels/identifies.
Well, yes, we do get bodies in the General Resurrection, with the new Heaven and Earth, according to traditional Christian teaching.
Traditional depictions and descriptions (not Victorian art), when they weren’t freaky things like rings full of eyes, etc., had them as male or masculine.
I’m going for the oldest/earliest Christian traditions here—RC and Eastern Orthodox.
I’m not aware of different ones in these particular cases within these traditions. Especially going way back. Can you point me to a resource?
Yes. But I was thinking more of straight after death, hence my reference to the Ascension (and in some traditions to the Assumption.) There seems to be a line of Traditional theology that there is something about the afterlife that can admit some sort of physical body.
Indeed, yes. And Elijah!
As I posted elsewhere: From that article:
“… the important thing to recognise is that these two perspectives (or worldviews) are essentially (and existentially) incompatible.”
Agreed. Though one could be an essentialist and hold that humanity has an essence, an intrinsic nature, but that gender is not in itself intrinsic—one would have that immutable humanity, but that gender (or even binary gender) is not necessarily one of the intrinsic parts of that essence (one could think that it’s more like eye or hair color). Or another essentialist could think that gender is metaphysically intrinsic even for souls, but with a far wider range than masculine/feminine (and/or any number of combinations or the like).
Here, I'm not sure that denying the intrinsic nature of gender gets you to any better a position in relation to the issue of our gender identity.
Even if you somehow changed the definition to include a wider "range" of intrinsic genders, I struggle to see how the permanent, unalterable and eternal nature of things, inherent to essentialism, would be able to accommodate the concept of gender-fluidity.
Fundamentally, I'm afraid I can't see any way round essentialism's denial of an individuals' determination of their own modes of being, values and destinies.
For an own-voice take, Judith Butler is a philosopher and gender theorist who has been looking at the issue for over 30 years. From The Conversation:
By better, I assume you mean a more true one?
It might be somewhere on a scale we can't quite comprehend. Like that the range wouldn't just be one-dimensional like a line, but two or three like a plane or a solid, so it wouldn't be so much right or left on the line, but up or down or such. It could be like a new color we've not seen before. Again, this is a possible way someone who believes in philosophical essentialism might approach the notion.
What does that have to do with whether or not it's true or false?
https://archive.org/details/onholyvirginity00ambr/page/42/mode/2up?view=theater
Well, in my understanding, we are all feminine in relationship to God, as well as being the Bride of Christ…
It has everything to do with how accepting or how harmful it is.
Er... isn't the most important thing about any notion whether or not it's true?