Journal: Eikon
Volume: EIKON 02:2 (Fall 2020)
Article: Nature Vs. Transgenderism
Author: Colin J. Smothers

Eikon 2.2 (Fall 2020) p. 18

Nature Vs. Transgenderism

Colin J. Smothers

Colin J. Smothers serves as the Executive Director of the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood and Pastor of First Baptist Church of Maize, Kansas.

In his book Begotten or Made?, Oliver O’Donovan sets about excavating the epistemological foundations that undergird the modern conscience. Originally delivered as part of the London Lectures in Contemporary Christianity in 1983, O’Donovan’s book is a response to a government-sponsored inquiry into the social, ethical, and legal questions surrounding the then-burgeoning field of assisted reproductive technology in the United Kingdom.

O’Donovan’s response, however, is more than a theological roadmap through the Wild West of medical bioethics. O’Donovan takes his reader underneath the ethics of reproductive technology and plumbs the depths of the human psyche, pinpointing a structural defect pervasive throughout contemporary ethical reasoning.

For O’Donovan, what underwrites the modern approach to these questions reveals a much wider ethical error: the relatively new penchant for viewing humanity as artificial instead of natural, as man-made instead of begotten or created. In the biblical account, God makes man, but man begets man. These terms are foundational: what is made is wholly unlike its maker and remains under the maker’s authority; but what is begotten is of the same substance and relates as an equal. Once man begins to think of himself as made by other men and himself a maker of men, he considers mankind to be a product.

O’Donovan devotes one whole chapter in his book on the ethics of reproductive technology to the issue of transsexualism, which seems out of place until one reckons with the totality of his diagnosis.

Eikon 2.2 (Fall 2020) p. 19

For O’Donovan, modern man’s root error is his failure to accept his God-given nature, which comes with designed limitations. Augustine writes in his Exposition of the Psalms on how the given-ness of our nature is connected to God’s goodness toward us: “From God we have our being and also our well-being.” But in a world full of man-made inventions and technological advancements, we have mistaken ourselves for one more manufactured thing, an artifact of the human will to manipulate. In a perverse corollary to Augustine, if we have our being from ourselves, then so also our well-being.

Confronting Nature

No longer does man appreciate the natural world for its natural-ness; he instead sees it as a series of frontiers to be conquered or manipulated. According to O’Donovan, this mindset sets up a confrontation with the self:

The relation ...