Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 181:724 (Oct 2024)
Article: The Gift Of Wholeness: A Review Essay Of Abigail Favale’s "The Genesis Of Gender"
Author: Mark R. Saucy

BSac 181:724 (October-December 2024) p. 398

The Gift Of Wholeness: A Review Essay Of Abigail Favale’s The Genesis Of Gender

Mark R. Saucy

Mark R. Saucy is a professor of theology at Biola University in La Mirada, California.

Abstract

Abigail Favale offers a compelling account of the roots of gender ideology in Western culture that is, as she says, “confused about what it means to be a person in a body.” This article reviews her recent book and then asks if our own evangelical conversation about gender shadows this cultural confusion. Favale’s call for a return to the wholeness of a “person in a body” for real human flourishing is one we cannot neglect as we think about gender.

Since fracturing the relationships between Adam and Eve in the garden, disintegration and division are the devil’s game. In no place is his move more clearly marked than in the modern disintegration of human identity. The “gender paradigm” is exploding from the academy and trailing smoke through statehouses, school districts, and human resource offices everywhere. Into the breach with others like Nancy R. Pearcey (Love Thy Body, 2019), Carl R. Trueman (Strange New World, 2022), and John S. Grabowski (Unraveling Gender, 2022), Abigail Favale brings a trenchant diagnosis and prescription of our culture’s loss of the identity wholeness it craves. Her book is called The Genesis of Gender: A Christian Theory, and both the diagnosis and prescription provide the basis for a cautionary tale to our own evangelical gender conversations.

The Diagnosis: Disembodiment

Something is amiss in a culture that views the human body as a mere “artifice” (also the title of ch. 7) to be medicalized, bent, and

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broken to fit an ideology. Favale refers to that ideology as the “gender paradigm,” and she proceeds to carefully expound it through its feminist “waves” (also the title of ch. 3) to the present, postmodern moment. Such genealogical work has been done before by others, but two things make Favale’s diagnosis compelling. First is her insider’s vantage point. In the first chapter, “Heretic,” she details an autobiographical arc that starts with her as a somewhat naïve complementarian evangelical who becomes an evangelical feminist in college, affirming that the apostle Paul was a sexist whose words were still further corrupted by the patriarchal culture of his time (17–18).1 Filter him out; brush him aside. The trajectory continues through graduate studies at Oxford (UK), ultimately leaving Favale a revisionist feminist deeply entrenched in feminism’s latest (fourth...