Journal: Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society
Volume: JETS 68:3 (Sep 2025)
Article: Trinity And Trans Formation: A Dialogue With Fellipe Do Vale’s "Gender As Love"
Author: E. Jerome Van Kuiken

JETS 68:3 (September 2025) p. 545

Trinity And Trans* Formation: A Dialogue With Fellipe Do Vale’s Gender As Love

Jerome Van Kuiken

Jerome Van Kuiken is Professor of Christian Thought at Oklahoma Wesleyan University, 2201 Silver Lake Road, Bartlesville, OK 74006. He may be contacted at jvankuiken@okwu.edu.

Abstract: Fellipe do Vale’s book Gender as Love offers a sophisticated evangelical theology of gender that, alongside its several virtues, betrays a marked openness to the affirmation of transgenderism. This article makes the case that do Vale’s accommodations to transgenderism detract from his broader proposal and may hinder ministry to trans* persons. As a complement to my critiques of his proposal as it currently stands, I offer a reworking of do Vale’s theology of gender in dialogue with one of his most important interlocutors, Anglican theologian Sarah Coakley, and her account of the transformation of gendered desire through prayerful encounter with the Trinity. The goal of this exercise is to develop a theological framework for the spiritual formation of those with transgender inclinations or identities.

Key words: Coakley, do Vale, gender theory, spiritual formation, theology of gender, transgender, Trinity.

Fellipe do Vale’s 2023 book Gender as Love offers a sophisticated “theological theology” of gender that has won high praise from his colleagues in the evangelical academy.1 Among its attractive features are the following seven strengths: (1) its rejection of a (gnosticizing) purely social constructivist theory of sex and gender, a rejection grounded in part on the orthodox dogma of the incarnation; (2) conversely, its denial that gender is nothing but biology, a reductionism that has served historically to underwrite harmful gender stereotypes; (3) its tethering of gender to sex by means of desired social goods: “gender” describes how a self desires and appropriates social goods as they relate to the self’s sexed body; (4) its understanding of desire in terms of an Augustinian account of love, in which the self’s identity—including its gender identity—is defined by its loves; (5) its reading of gender as love through the biblical metanarrative of creation-fall-redemption-consummation; (6) its epistemic modesty (or apophaticism) about totalizing definitions of gender east of Eden and south of the eschaton, coupled with a pragmatic approach to gender issues in the interim that is open to correction and development; and (7) its commitment nonetheless to gender justice that manifests in a sustained concern for the dignity and equality of women.

JETS 68:3 (September 2025) p. 546