The Sad Path to Transgenderism #1

Thanks for joining us on the Truth Pulpit with Don Green, Founding Pastor of Truth Community Church in Cincinnati, Ohio. Hello again, I'm Bill Wright. Today, Don continues with our current series titled The Bible and Pride Month, with a message he's titled The Sad Path to Transgenderism.

Have your Bible open and ready as Don continues teaching God's people God's Word from the Truth Pulpit. I was a teenager when Bruce Jenner won the gold medal in the Olympic decathlon in 1976. I was a middle-aged man when he made other headlines. On April 24, 2015, the television program 20-20 aired an interview by Diane Sawyer with Jenner. Jenner at that time announced that he was transgender and would now be known as Caitlyn Jenner. And on June 1, 2015, Jenner tweeted to the world, and I quote, I am so happy after such a long struggle to be living my true self. He was born a male, he lived as a man, he competed as a man, but now he considered and considers himself a woman.

And he lives as a woman. And many people point to Jenner's interview as the time that transgenderism came to age. Transgenderism being the idea that somebody has a soul that is different from the body in which they were born, and so they live across the gender, the sex that they were born with. And Jenner's outcoming was the first really public splash on this that really transcended so much of our culture.

But here's the thing, beloved. We were walking the transgender path long before then. What I want to show you is my sense of the fact that the transgender moment, as it has been called, is far more than simply individuals and the way that they choose to dress and live and present themselves. The transgender issue is actually a monumental conflict between truth and lies and between what is a true worldview and that which is false. And as we go along, I think what you'll find as we study this issue and this matter together is that the contrast between the worldview that produces a transgender mindset, a transgender ideology, the contrast between that and the biblical worldview is a clash of ultimate truth in a way that I'd clarify for us what it means to have a Christian worldview, what it means to have a biblical mindset about all of life. The sad reality of it is, I suppose you could call it sad, in one sense it's quite exhilarating, to me at least, is to recognize that the church, the true church of Jesus Christ is all that stands between truth and this transgender era sweeping over and taking over everything else. The corporations, the media, celebrities as we've seen, everyone is sympathetic to this transgender movement so much so that even recently there was a transgender woman, meaning born a biological male now living as a woman, strong masculine woman in quotes, won a female bicycling championship in record time for the second consecutive year.

And the whole sporting industry affirms that as being something that is good and right and proper without regard to the way that it affects those biological females and their desire to compete on equal terms. The issues go in a lot of different directions as you will see. Well, this is the world now in which we live and we need to be prepared to understand and how to respond to it, how to understand it, how to raise our families in the midst of a world like this, how to deal with our little ones and to protect them, how to engage those who are in this world, and how to consider it as a church.

There's a lot that goes into all of it. So with that little bit of introduction as I ask your indulgence for what lies ahead, a biblical writer said, the minister should preach the word and only the word, but this does not at all mean that he must ignore the world. It is his business to declare what the word has to say about the world. I need to declare what the word has to say to our transgender world, and that's what I intend to do, Lord helping me.

And here's what I want you to see and to understand. If you're like me and this whole transgender thing kind of exploded on your consciousness within the past few years or so, maybe for some of you it's still new and you wonder what I'm talking about, and it all seems like it's kind of arisen so recently, I want to make this point very clear. We, meaning we as a society, we as a culture, we as a world, we did not fall off a cliff into transgenderism and the acceptance and the promotion of it.

No, we took the stairs down, one step after another going down, and the individual steps down collectively made transgenderism a virtually inevitable part of society. This is the natural outcome of centuries of philosophical thought that have developed over time, of decades of sexual license within the Western culture, and all of these things kind of flowed together. If you think about a flood, a river flooding over on its banks, and you're standing downstream and you're seeing a river rise and rise and flow over and flood out the ground around it, what's producing that flood in front of you is the result of a lot of things that were happening upstream. There were a lot of rains following and streams that were swelling up and brooks that were filling, and as they converged together, the force and the volume of that produced the result that you see as you stand watching a riverbank overflow.

There were things that were happening beforehand, upstream, that coalesced and came together to cause the flood that you see in front of you. Well, the whole transgender issue is like that. We are addressing transgenderism primarily as an ideology. What is the thinking?

What is the philosophy that produces that? How can people think this way? I want to address it from that perspective, and dealing with transgender individuals only incidentally much later in the series, and so that's important for us to recognize and to understand. Along with that, I just want to say one other thing that I think is just really, really essential for us as Christians to recognize. First of all, at the highest level, this is not a matter that can be resolved by simply appealing to one or two Bible verses and thinking that that's going to settle the matter and make it go away. That is far too simplistic and underestimates the cultural forces that are at play and the worldview issues that are at play in this. You cannot apply one or two verses as a band-aid and think that that's going to solve the issue. Along with that, I want to say by way of pastoral encouragement and also exhortation, is that it is not going to do anybody any good, it's not even going to do you any spiritual good, to simply make this a matter of derision or mocking or joking or a quick dismissal with a wave of the hand.

Well, that's just craziness and I don't need to deal with that. Look, all of the forces that make transgenderism possible define the environment in which you are living as a Christian now, as you will see. And so, I believe that if we take this matter seriously and we deal with it earnestly, we're going to have our eyes open to a lot of things that will help us discern the world in which we live and to be able to respond to this in an earnest and hopefully more effective way. There are two paths to transgenderism that I want to show you, giving you some historical background here. The intellectual path and the cultural path to transgenderism that I'll lay out and then I'll have some biblical comments about it all here in the end. Let's consider first the intellectual path to transgenderism. Now, here's the deal. The essence of transgenderism, whatever you think about the causes that produce this in somebody's mind, the idea that somebody has a conflict between their inner man and their outer man, their mind and their physical body, the question is how does somebody get to that point and how is it that people come to think that what they feel inside overrides the external objective reality of their physical body?

How does that happen? Well, I want to offer this oversimplification, this gross oversimplification that I make in acknowledged reliance on other authorities and what I'm about to say. There are centuries, as I perceive it, there are centuries of development in human thought that lead us to precisely this point and that's what I just want to lay out for you ever so briefly here. You and I, we're familiar with the Reformation, right? In the 16th century started in 1517 when Luther nailed his 95 theses to challenge Roman Catholic practices at the time. The Reformation, among many other things, had this effect. It recovered the place of God's revelation in Scripture as that which determines what is true. The Reformation brought back to conscious recognition and submission that the Scripture is the place where truth is found. And the Roman Catholic Church kicked against that because it was the death knell of their truth claims, but the Reformation brought us back to the reality that truth is found in the Scriptures.

Jesus said in John 17, 17, as he prayed to his father, sanctify them in the truth, thy word is truth. And so Scripture in the Reformation had the place of being that which was the source of truth claims. It taught us the place and the priority of revelation. Now, that went on for a while and the Reformation went in different directions with different groups of course, but a couple of centuries afterwards, maybe in the 1700s, it introduced a period called the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment. And human thought in the Enlightenment was no longer satisfied to rely on external authorities like the Bible or like the church or the state and did not want to grant to them the position of determining and saying what was true. The motto of the Enlightenment was, quote, have courage to use your own understanding. And so the priority was placed on human reason and it was shifted away from truth being that which was given by revelation and placed in the mind and the reason of man to help determine what was true. Now, the world of the Enlightenment relied on science and technology to give understanding to life and to define the nature of progress.

It's commonly called the age of modernism. Modernism preferred the new over the old and so an appeal to ancient authority suddenly, you know, appealing to scriptures that were centuries old suddenly was out of bounds. It was outside the realm of what was considered to be true. Something that was new was better than that which was old and established.

And so what happened during this age? Well, moral and political philosophies arose which put man's reason in the place that was previously held by divine revelation. So that man went to his mind to determine what was true rather than to appealing to scripture and submitting to God's Word. Now, one writer picks up the story from there and I quote, it says, The Enlightenment began with great confidence that reason could lead us to the truth, but that optimism gradually disappeared when it became evident that even the greatest human thinkers could not agree on fundamental issues.

And so you have the best of human minds that can't agree on fundamental issues. And all of a sudden the limits of reason and man's reason were laid bare for all to see as a practical matter. Along with that, in part, the progress of reason was stopped cold when it met the reality of world war.

Sad. You've got two world wars within a period of roughly 25 years of each other, and men found that they could not think their way out of that one. This was beyond the scope of reason to deal with and to answer and to solve. And so, again, oversimplifying, in time that led to the rise of what is known as postmodernism as a worldview. It is difficult to define, but the basic sense for our purposes is that postmodernism believes that truth is relative rather than absolute. And so, at best, in a postmodern world, the Bible is simply one competing truth claim among others that all have equal validity. And one writer explains it this way about postmodernism. He says, according to this perspective, the perspective of postmodernism, there is no single correct view of the world, but countless views that are correct in their own way. Influenced by this sort of thinking, some in the popular culture have concluded that, since there is no single true perspective, we should strive to be enriched by as many different views and behaviors as possible." And so the idea is there is no absolute truth, which you should immediately recognize as being a frontal assault on the claims of biblical authority. There is no absolute truth according to postmodernism.

Every view is legitimate. Every view has its own perspective. What's true for you may not be true for me, but it can both be true. And so there's this fuzzy thinking that is taking place that has diminished the very concept of truth and elevated human preferences above all else. So, as we consider this intellectual path that led to transgenderism, where does that leave us in the 21st century?

Now, beloved, this is really important here. We are living, you and I, in a culture that has not only rejected divine revelation, it has rejected even the concept of objective truth. There is no ultimate truth to be found. There is no objective truth that can be arrived at. And that becomes especially true in the realm of human morality, so that, watch how this works, we were in an era where the Reformation upheld the priority and the centrality of divine revelation, shifted over to human reason as being the source and grounds of truth, shifted away from reason into just the fact that there is no truth to be found, and therefore we're each on our own and we can kind of make it up as we go along and we can determine for ourselves, you and I can determine independently for ourselves what is true. What I want you to see in this simple overview is that there have just been these steps down from revelation down to human reason, down to a rejection of both, so that there has been this enveloping, growing cloud of darkness over the human mind and over the human heart that has taken place over the course of centuries, and now we find ourselves standing on the banks of a river that is overflowing from everything that happened in years gone by.

What's the consequence of that? If every belief is legitimate, if your truth is not necessarily my truth, if every belief is legitimate, then no one has the right to contradict me. There is no authority by which my thought, my approach to life can be declared to be wrong because I am the master of my own destiny.

I'm even the master of what is true. You can see how it appeals to the pride of man to say, I not only live my own life, I am the one who determines what is true. Now, how does that intellectual path, how does that apply to transgenderism? How does it make transgenderism, I would say, inevitable as a consequence? I am not suggesting that every person with gender identity issues, and we'll explain terms in the future, I'm not suggesting that every person with gender identity issues has thought through his condition philosophically and has consciously walked through the realms of human thought and adopted that as his own. It doesn't work that way.

It would be foolish to talk that way. But, beloved, here's what you need to see that I think is not emphasized enough in some of the discussions that take place about this. Transgenderism as an ideology, as a phenomenon, it exists in a philosophical context that makes it possible. How is it possible for someone to say my body does not determine the kind of person that I am? Understand that what makes that possible is a mindset that says my subjective opinions determine truth about everything so that my subjective opinions even determine what is true about me and true about my body, and if I disagree with the outward aspects of my humanity, what I believe inside triumphs over what is apparent to everyone else.

Because without objective truth, you get to define your own reality. And that means that you can even define your gender without reference to biology. So that the nature of transgender medicine is such that the body is made to conform to what the mind thinks rather than having the mind conform to the objective external reality of the body.

That is the difference. And so we go to great, great, great lengths to modify a body to make it conform to what is present in a person's mind. The mind, the heart, the opinions, the feelings override everything else so that in that mindset you enjoy complete and absolute autonomy. You can just be true to yourself and no one has the right to question how you feel or what you believe.

Postmodernism has made that inevitable. It is the premise of it that there is no objective truth and therefore you can determine it for yourself. So if I am inclined toward transgender sensibilities, I can say I feel like a woman and I want to live as a woman.

Not only that, I am a woman. And because of this mindset and philosophy in which we live, you have no right to object, to say that that is not true. And the growing reality about this is, is that if you say that I am wrong, you should be punished for that opinion. Because you do not have the right to transgress on my view of reality.

And the more liberal states are already enacting laws to enforce speech codes, to enforce this under the pain of governmental penalty for those who do not comply. This is very serious and it's the world in which we live. We've been listening to Don Green with part one of a message called The Sad Path to Transgenderism. Part of a series called The Bible and Pride Month here on The Truth Pulpit. And we hope to see you again next time.

But before we go, here again is Don with a closing word. Well my friend, thank you for being with us today on The Truth Pulpit. Our biblical voice on these ethical matters is an increasingly minority opinion in culture today. But I'm encouraged nonetheless. It may surprise you to know that our ministry reaches nearly all 50 states and over 40 countries on a consistent monthly basis.

And so God's word is having an impact and he will never allow it to return void. You know, friend, would you consider supporting our broadcast to enable these podcasts and airing over local radio stations to continue as we minister God's word? You can find the ability to give on our website, thetruthpulpit.com.

That's thetruthpulpit.com. Thank you so much and God bless you. Thanks, Don. And thank you, friend, for joining us today. I'm Bill Wright and we'll see you back here next time on The Truth Pulpit where we teach God's people God's word.