Theology in the Raw - A Creational Theology of Animals, Disability, and Gender: Dr. Brian Brock

Episode Date: December 18, 2025

This was a fun one! Dr. Brian Brock has written a deeply thoughtful theology of creation, which set the foundation for our conversation. As you'll see, we ended up going down several unexpected paths and honestly got me thinking through things I've never considered before.We talked about what it means to image God, the role gender plays in human creation, and the theological distinctions between humans and animals. Yes, we even wrestled with the question of whether my dog Tank will be with me in heaven.Toward the end of the conversation, we also touched on Dr. Brock’s significant work in the theology of disability,Join the Theology in the Raw community on Patreon for as little as $5/month to get access to premium content. Dr. Brian Brock is Professor of Moral and Practical Theology at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland. He has written scholarly works on the use of the Bible in Christian ethics the ethics of technological development and the theology of disability. He the author of several books including his magnum opus Joining Creation’s Praise: A Theological Ethic of Creatureliness See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

We're offering a limited Christmas discount on registration for the Exiles of Babylon Conference, which is on April 30th and May 2nd, 2026 in Minneapolis. The Christmas discount is 15% off of our already discounted early bird rate. Okay, that means a total of about 30% off if you register before December 31st. Just head over to theology and raw.com forward slash exiles 26. Use promo code X-M-M-M-S-15, okay? That's X-M-A-S-15. Again, this 30% off sale ends December 31st, and I can't wait to see you all there.

What the authors are trying to point us to is a whole snowballing of ways in which our refusal to really recognize others on their own terms spools out into us dominating them. And I think the Dominion domination is a pairing that the text is trying to draw our attention to. Hey, friends, the Exiles and Babylon Conference is happening again in Minneapolis, Minnesota, April 30th, the May 2nd. We're talking about AI, artificial intelligence. We're talking about immigration of the gospel, mental health in the gospel. We're having two dialogical debates this year. The first one is on Christians and war between Paul Copan and Shane Claiborne. And we also have another dialogical debate between Sandy Richter and Pete ends on the historical reliability of the Bible. I can't wait for this conference.

I know I say that every year, every time. I'm like, this is going to be the best one ever or whatever, but I think this is going to be the best one ever. So my guest today, back again, is Dr. Brian Brock, who is professor of moral and practical theology at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland, my alma mater. That's where I did my PhD. Actually, he overlapped a little bit. I was, I think Brian got there as a professor a year after I.

I got there as a Ph.D. student, so we go pretty far back. He's written scholarly works on the use of the Bible and Christian ethics and the ethics of technological development and the theology of disability. He's the author of several books, including his magnum opus. I'm holding it in my hands, which is actually hard to do because it is over 1,100 pages, my word. It's called Joining Creation's Praise, a theological ethic of creatureliness, where he spends 1,100 pages inching his way through Genesis 1 to 3 to build a creation ethic. It is, I didn't read the whole thing. I've got to confess, I read a few chapters, and it is extremely thorough and well, well, well written and very thoughtful books.

So if you like to read massive books, I encourage you to check it out. Even if you're like, I don't think I read a whole thing, there's several chapters in there that are just really, really helpful. for building a solid creational theology. So please welcome to the show. Back for the second time, the one and only, Dr. Brian Brock. All right, Brian Brock, good to have you back on Theology.

I think it's been two or three years or so. This book you wrote. It's almost 1,100 pages. I got to hold it up for my YouTube audience. So beautiful cover. And then when you go like this, it's like, oh, my word. And it's, I mean, it's densely footnoted, a fairly small print.

I mean, how long? I mean, is this like, have you been basically writing this your whole academic career in one way or another? Pretty much, yeah. Because you ask, I went back and looked it up. And I first taught a class called Creation of Christian Ethics in 2006. So I've been kind of chewing over the topic for nearly 20 years now. Wow. how would you summarize i mean it's on i mean it's it's some of the most detailed thorough

exegetical and theological some people might not understand a difference but those are very different approaches with exegetical and then also a theological approach i mean you you inch your way through genesis one to three i'm talking you know dozens and dozens of pages on every single verse but it's not it's not like a tradition you can't think about like a commentary. It's like a, well, it's like a theological reading of Genesis 1 to 3. What was your

when you did start compiling it, I mean, did you just go verse by verse or whatever? Or did you kind of bounce around? Or what was the process like putting this thing together? I, well, I had a, you know, when I kind of came of age as a scholar in ethics,

I was very attracted by Stanley Howard was as kind of ecclesial ethics. But there was basically no creation in it. And on the other side, other poll was Oliver O'Donovan's Resurrection and Moral Order, which is all about creation. So when I entered the field, creation was sort of an open space that hadn't, like, Resurrection and Moral Order is quite slim book. So, you know, it's highly elusive and it's focused on creation, but it's not worked out in any detail. And Tower Wasp was kind of dominating the discussion at that stage. And, and, and, and,

And there was really no creation at all. So it seemed obvious to me that that was work that needed to be done. It's also, you know, creation as framing Christian ethics had largely been the territory of the Reformed, who kind of did a, you know, neo-reformed, there's a range of reformed approaches to ethics, and they very often major heavily on creation. But I actually was, when I was studying, you know, in London, I came across Bart's Church Dogmatics 3-4, which is his ethics of creation, and I was just really blown away by it. I felt like it was, it's sort of, it's a massive, you know, makes my book look thin, but it starts with exegesis and it ends with ethics. But there's quite a bit in between, and I felt like the apparatus in between.

between sort of muted what the scripture was doing. So I thought I had an internal critique of Bart's way of getting at creation. And I wanted to offer this generation, that kind of experience of how everything can connect together without the problems that I saw in Bart. So that's the kind of genetic story. For the theology nerds who may not be well-versed in these sources, you mentioned, How would you position yourself in relation to Bart, O'Donovan, and Hauerwas in terms of this? Well, you said Hauerwas doesn't have much of a theology and creation.

At least he doesn't build that into his ecclesiology. So maybe O'Donovan, Bar, like, where would you overlap and where do you depart from them? I would say that the book is kind of a long riff, starting with Church Dogmatics 3, 4, but then inflected by my long reading of Augustine City of God, which is, I think, it's a kind of global story about what it means to confess Christianity in the midst of cultural churn and all the questions that arise. And kind of architecturally, I really learned a lot from reading Luther's commentary on Genesis. Oh, really? And that's kind of the seminal move that I make in putting the text together, which is that Luther says, he's going to follow exegetically the way the text unfolds, because that's the way God revealed

God's own acts to us. So he commits himself to Seratim commentary. It's not, it's theological commentary, but it's always talking about his time and his place in the way that Augustine is doing in the city of God, dealing with the ways people think Christianity works in his time and place, and he's doing it as a mode of interaction with Genesis. And it was, is, for Luther, it was his, it is his sum of. People don't really realize that, but for the last eight years of his career, when he asked, what am I going to pass on to my, to the preachers who are going to be evangelical preachers? He did it by lecturing through the entire 50 chapters of Genesis and I, so it's, you know, those are, those are all massive projects and I wanted to

enter that space and try to try to somehow be speaking with it. I didn't know that about Luther. So Genesis was his magnum opus sort of. Yeah. Wow. Wow. You cover. It's really incredible because it's a, it's, uh, it's, uh, stenographers were taking, taking the notes.

So, you know, those plagues going through and, you know, you're getting historical events at the same time. And he's doing it every day, day in and day out. Long lectures. Um, you know, getting through 50 chapters is no joke. Wow. Yeah. Geez.

Um, well, I see O'Donovan endorsed the book. I was scared. When I looked around, I was saying, oh, who's going to endorse this? Then I immediately thought, man, when you, when you ask these people to read 1,100 pages and adorts it, that's a, did you have to pay them or anything? Or I mean, it's just, that's a big commitment. I mean, you know how it, you know how it goes. It's, I, I wouldn't put my hand up and say that they read every word of it. In fact, I, you know, if any, if any of your listeners actually reads the whole thing, they can write me. tell me that they have, and I will be happy to give them a personal conversation. Because it's, you know, it's a big gamble writing a book this big. I didn't write it, you know, I thought it was going to, I was going to get to string it out longer, but my editor at the time, Dave, Dave Nelson said, we were, there's too many books that have volume one and volume two never, never shows up. So we, we won it all at once. And that, that was a big lift.

It will come out into volumes in paperback, I'm glad to say. so I don't have to lug it around. Yeah. Oh, Dave Nelson was your editor. He's the one who commissioned this project in the first place. No way. We were students together at Aberdeen. We came in together.

Yeah. I think just a year before you got there. Yeah. Yeah, good dude. Yeah, that makes sense because he's an academic guy. So another question I had was what publisher would say, yeah, we're going to publish an 1100-page book. Like, that's a commitment. I do want to say, I mean, mentioning, you know, people, you know, it'd be quite the chore to read every single word.

But I would say, because I didn't read the whole thing, I did read a few chapters. And each chapter, at least each section, like I felt like it's understood, like they're a bit self-contained. Like you are looking at different themes. Like you have a few chapters on, you know, animals, like a theology of non-human beings, you know. you have a lot on you know sexuality gender uh you talk about disability marriage singleness like and a lot of these you can get a lot out of it without having to read the entire book like they are pretty self-contained is it would that be fair to say i mean did you yeah and i'm trying i try to in the notes say if you are missing the point in this particular discussion see the longer discussion elsewhere

so it's it's cross-referenced i hope to make it so that people can start wherever they want to really yeah it's not it's not the kind of book it you know it's useful to read the first chapter or two just to get the the trajectory of the thing but then after that i expect people to dip into it and i kind of wrote it so that it would be um engaging with the questions of our time in a in a very fine-grained way um i mean my basic approach in addition to following luther's kind of commitment to just taking the text and what they throw up in sequence. I also am committed to the idea that we don't really understand Scripture unless we're

asking real questions about lived existence. So, you know, scripture and the kind of texture of life sort of free float. You know, we kind of know the content of both, but only when we start to ask questions about both the life we're trying to live faithfully and where it connects to scripture. do we start to do theological ethics as I approach it. I'm going to ask you to do something it might be painful as a scholar

who put 25, 20 plus years into this. Let's, I mean, drill down deep, not as deep as a book, but let's unpack a few themes that you deal with. And I didn't mention this to you in the email. I told you I want to talk about disability

and then sexuality and gender. But can we talk just briefly about animals? I mean, you have one. to, I mean, you have, yeah, a couple of different chapters, I think. Like, is there, what is your Christian ethic of how humans should treat animals? Is that even the right, I'm not sure what a question to ask. What's a theology of animals? I try to take it one step back to the question of, in what sense are we separate from the animals. And most Christians enter those kind of questions by presuming that we're better

than the animals. So what I've, in my disability work I talk about, we usually use the best case scenario anthropology. So we think we're the kind of pinnacle of creation, you know, and a great chain of being picture, basically. And that, so the animal's story is a question about how do we talk about the boundary between the human and the animal, given that we are flesh like them? And I think Genesis wants to tell us something about that boundary. And it already starts by positioning us just with the land animals, given the same food. The table is set for us all together in the creation account. In Genesis 9, when after the fall, the kind of second iteration of the dominion command sets up a more conflictual relationship between the human and the animal.

But that raises the question of why the unfallen relation is depicted in the way it is, and what does it mean that we've named the animals? Usually that, for instance, is set up as a mode of self-discovery. God tells humans to name the animals so that humans will discover themselves. But the text says that God commands the first human to name the animals to see what he would call them, which on its surface, textually speaking, is not pointing to self-discovery. It's pointing to something about the human relation to the world. So the kind of impulse to think of ourselves as better in terms of our constitution, you know, Our hardware is, I think, you can't really get it out of Scripture.

The kind of game of human exceptionalism is coming from elsewhere than Scripture. And if you stop thinking about trying to prove that we're better in some way than the animals because of our hardware, then Genesis seems to suggest that we have a kind of responsibility, a vocation in relation to the animals. it's something that God gives to us. It's not a recognition of something that we possess that they don't. And I think that opens up a lot of ethical questions. Okay, so I'm glad I raised this question because I have thought about this topic for maybe like five minutes in my entire life. Okay.

So I, this is, what about, you know, we are creating God's image, animals are, humans are at the climax of creation. We are both on day six, though, I didn't, I'm eating the same thing. There is a lot more word dedication, right, to humans in Genesis. one, and then obviously Genesis 2, a lot more focus on humans. So I probably up until five seconds ago would have used the term better than, more important than or superior to animals. So, yeah. That's very much the default setting, both today and in the tradition.

But it doesn't take long to think about, okay, well, if what does constitute our being better than the animals. Well, it's rationality, for instance, or speech or morality. Those are, those are the three kind of most commonly adduced faculties. But then you're going to have cases of particular human beings who can't do those things or don't have those faculties. And today, often we're finding out more of how animals do have those faculties. Right. So porpoises have proper names for each other. Really? So there's, yeah, they do.

Yeah, they're, you know, kind of to hunt. They need to be able to call one another out by name. And they do, it's been substantiated now that they do have names. So there's a kind of arms race about exactly what we have that no other animal has. And I'm not, you know, I'm not going to pretend like we're not kind of pretty impressively. more developed than every other animal, but there's a lot of people who are pretty constantly trying to specify exactly the ways that we have strong overlaps with animals. And I think that shouldn't be threatening to a Christian theology of creatureliness, because I would say that

the command to image God is addressed to the human, and that any human, born of Adam and Eve, is capable of doing that. And it's not because they have capacities. It's because that's the vocation given to this race. And that, so then in the, I think one of the more contentious claims in the book is that we should talk about the image of God in, as a verb. Yeah. Imaging, right? Like, so all humans are addressed with the call to make God's image present in the world, but that image is Christ. We are called in the New Testament as an injunction to be like Christ. And you can't really have your cake and eat it too with, well, we have it already, so we don't need to become it. And I'm kind of pressing

back to the ways in which we tend to flatten out those New Testament injunctions by presuming basically full possession. So you have to do that work elsewhere. Yeah. So the words themselves are nouns, not verbs, right? I mean, uh, sell them. Is it sell them? Yeah. Tell them. Yeah. And so it, yeah. But is, uh, is the value of the creature addressed and told, uh, made in God's image that God deposits some value from that act or that God has. chosen these creatures, right? Like, yes, it is a noun, but is the value at the, at the God end or at the decideratum end, at the product end? And I think that question is one that I'm

asking over and over in the book, right? So the subtitle of the book is a Christian theology of creatureliness, which is an attempt to draw attention to the fact that usually when we're talking about creation. We're talking about God's act of making something when there was nothing. Or we're talking about the thing that God made. And my whole project is to say, if we take Genesis seriously, our problem is not wanting to be like gods. So we need to learn again as fallen creatures, what it means to be creatures. So creatureliness is by definition not jumping out to ask what does the universe look like from God's perspective, nor is it just saying, well, God made some cool stuff

how many ever thousands or millions of years ago. It's the stance of the human being content with their givenness. And that's, I think, an achievement after the fall. So the fact that humans are, now I'm all messed up, in God's image or called to image God and animals aren't, would you say that would you just express that in terms of difference not superiority or hierarchy or yeah yeah i don't i think it's i think it's simply impossible to get hierarchy out of genesis one there's differentiation there's separateness but there's no hierarchy interesting there's spaces you know days one to three

are creating spaces land air and sky uh uh days four to six are populating those spaces with creatures that belong at those spaces and it's you know you can't say that the land is better than the sea or the air that um so there's a we import a hierarchy and i i've at several places drill down into why we find that such a strongly tempting um reflex to somehow prove that we're at the top of the chain i mean you can see it already you can see it just in a in a common example um trees of descent, you know, kind of evolutionary trees of descent, which we've all seen. Or those little cartoons where it's like, you know, monkey, monkey with a stick, monkey standing upright, human sitting at a computer, right?

Like there's, we tell this story of progress in a thousand ways all the time. And the descent tree is visually often set up in the same way that we're kind of at the, at the last branch of the tree. However, visually, that's represented. But, you know, if we're talking in evolutionary terms, we're no more ancient than any other living thing, right? They've all, even in biblical terms, we've all been here the same amount of time. So the idea that we're somehow at the top of the tree is a piece of special pleading that actually don't think scripture demands from us. What about morality?

You mentioned that. Like, you know, you go to the. the zoo, you go out in the wild, and I mean, you have gang rape all over the place and just, I mean, things that we would say, like, well, I know, I think I never go. Yeah, it's good. No, I mean, these are, these are all the, these are all the right questions. I mean, there are, I have a debate with, uh, my colleague who's David Clough, who's one of the guys on, um, you know, animal theology and ethics.

And he thinks that when a chimp kills a neighbor's baby, that's infanticide. And it's also a sin. So the question is why is it not? Or is it? And he says it is. So all the immoral stuff we see in the animal kingdom, it's not that those are, I don't know how to say that. like moral among animals that it's actually those are violations of an animal's dignity just like it would be when it happens among humans or yeah so and that and the argument his argument

would be that Christ comes to redeem all flesh and um it's it's an arbitrary distinction to say that we're the special ones we're the only ones that can sin uh uh so you know that ape or kind of elephant elephants they can murder I take what I take to be a slightly more biblically defensible line that

where there is no sin where there is no law there is no sin right so in the same it's not that God chose the smartest animals in the bunch and started talking to them gave him a command right it doesn't proceed that way

God simply addressed these hominids and said, don't eat from that tree. And that's the beginning of the story of God with Israel that, of course, culminates in Christ. So where there's, that's, you know, the Romans is for me the definitive text. Like you can't, we have instincts like other primates, but instincts don't equal morality, nor did that equal law in a Torah biblical sense. I mean, if your colleagues write and animals can sin, then I need to send my dog to prison. I got to call the feds quickly.

It's a bad dog. Yeah, I mean, for me, the more problematic aspect is if they do sin and they do have a salvation. economy, then they need a law to and they need that to have been promulgated. And there's insuperable difficulties that come up when we start trying to talk about is the story of the locust in Egypt. Is that a story of the sin of the locust? And I think that's really not what the story is trying to tell us.

Right, right, yeah. So, I mean, this discussion is getting to one kind of deep instinct. that I have, which is that somehow the primeval history is trying to get us to attend to something about reality. It's not a newspaper report about what happened. I'm asking, why have they told us this story and what are they trying to get us to attend to? And what kind of trust in God are they trying to evoke. I think that's what the authors, they're trying to say there's all this world occurrence, there's all these distinctions if we think in terms of wisdom literature, right? You can make endless distinctions, but you can get lost in distinctions. You can get lost in creaturely

occurrence. And the fall story is a story about getting lost in creaturely occurrence. So, I think telling a story of what things really matter in a world before the fall is an attempt to help those of us who read this text afterwards to see something about reality and something enduring about reality. And that reality ultimately is God, not the stuff of the world. yeah okay well i i didn't even plan on uh i i have many more questions but i want to make sure we have time for way off piece but we are we that's okay that's okay we should be shiny objects squirrel literally um disability this is your i mean your primary area of of expertise and research and writing um and you do address it quite a bit in in this book um where do we begin maybe just let's 30,000 foot. What does Genesis 1 to 3 teach us about disability? Is that a fair,

is that a good question to start with? Yeah. I mean, you know, at the 30,000 feet level, I'm, one of my larger kind of academic projects is to try to say topics like disability and other supposedly peripheral topics aren't really peripheral topics. And the only reason they become peripheral topics is if you're, what counts as theology, gets reified. And so part of the reason this book is so big is that I think you have to show what it looks like when you don't reify theology. But you ask, for instance, what does it mean to be a person, including disability? Real quick, reify theology. I'm not tracking. Reify is kind of give an abstract description that's at such a high level that it's hard to see how it actually

touches the ground. Okay, okay. So we, you know, if theology is the kind of articulation of the relation between doctrines so that they're systematically coherent and they handle the material of scripture, if you can do that job and never talk about the particularities that disrupt its, it's kind of balance, it's apparent balance, you've probably got a problem. But I think if most people are doing theology that way, then you have to show them that it can be done in another way. So for me, disability is, I introduce it really by talking about Adam's recognition,

the man's recognition of the woman in Genesis 223, right? This is flesh of my flesh and bone of my bone. Sorry, that's the wedding formulation. This one is like me, right? When he's naming the animals and then he says, God brings the woman to the man. He recognizes her as like him, but also unlike him. And I think that is the place where we should start thinking about disability

because it questions are social hierarchies of who is like us and who is not like us. And if we ask really hard questions about why it is that we would not recognize people with certain disabilities as part of us, then we open up the question of the moral work of, recognition and and our inner recoil at certain human beings and our hierarchy this is where the hierarchy comes back in again like there's there's people in our unconscious experience of other people who are closer to the animals and there are people who are further from the animals so that that kind of chain of being also is a is a cultural apparatus that's you know it's built into colonialism.

So once you start talking about disability, you're starting to talk about the way that our whole cultural world is set up to say they're valuable human beings and they're non-valuble human beings. And disability is just, you know, earlier in the tradition, it was lepers. Yeah. So there's been, there's going to a range of ways that Christians have wrestled with their recoil at some human beings. and I think

if you don't wrestle with that recoil you're not really talking yet about what it means to be human yeah yeah so you draw okay so that recognition

of difference in that context sex difference within human equality you're using that as a lens to refer to all kinds of human human difference Yeah. And I, you know, because he doesn't, in that first interchange, I would say both the first couple sort of recognize one another as of their kind. But they don't recognize yet what their differences are or what they mean. Later on when Adam names Eve, according to her reproductive function, I would say that. That's the first of the fall narratives, naming that sort of narrows the other to some function.

And that's the precursor to, you know, using them for your own purposes, right? There's a whole drumbeat of fall narratives in each of them, the creatures as they fall away from life in the presence of God start using other creatures. for their ends that the fig leaf being the first act right like this this aspect of a plant wants fed this plant but now it's going to cover me totally different use um it was you know we we together as man and woman um would bring future generations into existence um but now i'm going to call you basically the breeder that That leads straight to Lamek, right, who becomes a polygamist, which is a way to co-opt the power of reproduction in order to build political capital, right? So I think what the authors are trying to point us to is a whole snowballing of ways in which our refusal to really recognize others on their own terms spools out into us.

dominating them. And I think the dominion domination is a pairing that the text is trying to draw our attention to. Right. So do you see a relationship between like 316 where he will rule over his wife and then is it 320 when he names her Eve? Like there's a kind of similar acts of domination or oppression might be, well, oppression certainly in 316. Yeah. I mean, I think that I think His naming her, according to one of her biological functions, is a narrowing of her rounded, the divine gift of them to each other has many more aspects than their specific reproductive function. And that narrowing is a signal of his inappropriately naming her. And I think naming is really potent, ethical moment.

Like what we call someone, what we call something is really a, I mean, I think in the Hebrew, it's calling, right? They're calling out to. And I think there's a kind of ownership and kinship that can happen in calling something. I mean, so I always saw, you know, the man called his wife's name Eve because she was a mother of all living, that that was, that only struck me as like a positive thing. That's, that's, that's, that's one strong strand in the, in the tradition. So, you know, you're not in a minority position with that. It's, that question is stringed along with a whole range of questions. about how the man and woman are, what they're doing in the story, like, was the man there at the fall? And if he was there, what does that mean? Was the law, was the woman there when the law was given to the man? Is the law just given to the man that he must give to the woman,

right? You get straight into complementarianism pretty quickly. So I'm trying to navigate all of those pieces at once. And I do think that, in my view, the, The first, this one is like me, is kind of naively recognizing before the full accounts. And it's important to get those two. Like we are humans. We are co-humans before we are gendered humans in the story. Though immediately, because of their difference, they start discovering gender. And they discover it symmetrically, right?

They don't know what they are until they're together. So in that respect, his own self-designation changes from Adam to Issh, and he refers to her as Isha, right? So I'm taking a kind of linguistic point from the text as well that the way the first human is named in the text differs from the way the first human is named in the text differs from the way the man and the woman are named once the woman is on the scene and that that I don't think is accidental either. I mean, you know, you kind of have to let the Hebrew of authors. Yeah. Language do work. And I think, I think they're trying to do some work there. So what way, oh, in 223, she shall be called, this is now, bottom of my bone, flesh of my flesh, she should be called woman because

she was taken out of man. She shall be called Isha because she was taken out of Ish. What's the, yes, can you summarize? Like, what do you think? What's the, what's the, what's the, what's the point there like why what's being emphasized just um i i well like another move that i make is to say you can't really say that the first human is is gendered and i and the shift of language um uh is tied to this splitting uh the you know the taking a taking out of a rib is a pretty contestable interpretation. It's probably... It's not a rib.

It's a side. Yeah. Exactly. Almost always means side, not rib, yeah. Yeah, so there's a splitting in half that happens. And at that point, the conditions for gender are in play, which means that the original, I would say it's, you don't have to say that the first human that was created was Adam. You can say it was just human and God sort of did two-step process to create male and female by separating the two.

And we can do work around that by saying it is probably worth thinking about in ethical terms that human beings are more basically human than they are gendered. And it's important to consider that thought because it's very easy to again reify. our gendered nature as more basic than our human nature. Right. Ooh, I got a couple of questions that came out of that one. I guess we don't need to get into it. It's just for the audience. Like, that's a pretty, a fairly, well, it still might be a minority.

I don't know if it's, I don't know. At least in the ancient world, there was a very common reading of Genesis that the first human was androgynous and it was only after splitting into two that they became gendered. I'm not quite convinced, but we don't, I probably wouldn't be able to defend why because it's been like three years since I read up on that. So, but so yeah, I have thought about the humans being in terms of sex difference, we are more alike than we are different And yet, what, why is it important to recognize that, that male and female are more alike than different? And yet the difference is not, I don't think we should flatten out the difference.

Sometimes it could be overplayed. Sometimes it could be underplayed. But how would you unpack, yeah, the, the relationship between sameness and difference and why does it matter? Maybe I could frame it that way. I think it's very easy to solidify gender roles as an ontological reality. I mean, I think there is a difference, but it's, it's subtle. I mean, it really is there, but it doesn't demand any cultural enactment. So, you know, one thing you can say is that insisting that we're humans more fundamentally than were gendered is just to account for cultural differentiation in how gender is put together,

right? Like, it's very difficult to explain that if men are men and women are women everywhere all the time, you have to come up with a kind of decline narrative where some, you know, where Scots wear kilts and, right? Like, you know, and I don't want to get into. to that game of trying to say there's one gender instantiation that kind of comes up from an ontological status. I also don't want to get into, I mean, I think there, most of the things that we ascribe to gender, especially moral categories, really do apply to both sexes, however you define them, right?

So when we get into the games of manliness means kind of aggressive, penetrative, forward thrusting, and women equals receptive and, you know, penetrated. And I think that's a percrustian bed for talking about what sexuality actually is. That it's a kind of give and take. it's um it's it's it's one in which we uh we should not be threatened by um uh the the kind of different moral valences of the other sex as culturally described right like i think i want to let a lot of the types of considerations you're bringing to bear in your conversations with people on your channel yeah into play and i don't think you can easily do that and even talking

about gender confusion if you say, like, we're more gendered before more deeply than we're human. I mean, I think that just makes a lie of the kind of turbulence that's around gender issues. What about the correlation in Genesis 127 between being created male and female and imaging God? Are you okay with that language imaging God? Because it has a verbal kind of stuff. Okay. Because they seem in the Hebrew poetry, they seem to be correlated pretty strongly. They're not the exact same thing, but it seems like our

sex distinctions and again, I'm not, I don't think there's hierarchy there, but just distinctions are correlated with imaging God. Is that simply procreation? I mean, that does seem to be, the next command is right, be fruitful

multiply filled the earth. So maybe that's Yeah, yeah. So yeah, I try to Tees all those pieces apart. I think in the Genesis 1, 27 and 28, they are capable of shaming one another. And so when they're created in the image, they become, they're called to be in relationships that, you know, to use the New Testament language, edifying the build one another up. And that's kind of natural to them. And the first pair, it's a story that starts with two. And a difference is built into those two. You can tease apart a lot of reasons why that might be the case. But I think the biblical authors are trying to say there's actually some physiological difference in the world. We have to navigate what that is. I do, I sort of follow

in close. There's a whole chapter following 16. different readings of how to think about gender there, you know, is it a spectrum? Is it a, is it a binary? Is it, is it sort of negotiable? There's a lot of different ways that that Imago, male and female, has been tied together. And I, I make the gamble of just slowing down and asking, what are the options for reading this conceptually and textually? And end up saying that we can't ultimately know what the unfallen gender relation is, but in Christ we can be called to a kind of new creation that in which gender is not made a kind of sum of our redemption, nor is it washed away.

Right, right, right. Um, and yeah, you're, these are the sections I read. It's, it's been, I think a couple months now, so I don't recall everything that you said. My apologies. Um, but I do remember when I was reading, um, oh, let me just see. Oh, you have two, you have two table contents. That's actually helpful, the really detailed one. Um, I think I read chapters, uh, well, for sure, 15, 16, 17, 17. and I think I read, I might have read 12 as well. It's mainly around sex and gender. I was really impressed with your, I feel like you were navigating three spheres of literature, exegetical text, theological texts, and also kind of cultural conversations as well.

That, I mean, yeah, not many people can do that well. You did it very well. And you did it very, very, very. very even-handed, to the point to where sometimes I was like, well, yeah, but what does Brian think? Because he did such a fair, non-aggressive, like summarizing viewpoints that I'm like, I think he disagrees at that viewpoint, but he's being so fair at summarizing it. I'm like, there's no jabs, no, you know, and astoundingly, this author says, you know, there's no, there's no adverbial attacks or anything. Yeah. Yeah. And that, that, it's intentional that I've

spread the material out. You have to do your homework to actually get through that material. And I'm being even-handed because one of my basic sensations is that there's been a kind of hollowness at the core of Christian marriage for generations. And the way that's been dealt with is by polemically loading, scapegoating onto quote-unquote debience. Right. So, So I'm intentionally at a range of points genuinely and seriously examining not only the positions of those who've been demonized, but the experience, right? I mean, one of the really contentious things I do in Chapter 2 is say, right, kind of out of the gate, that if you want to understand conversion, you have to think about coming out. like coming out is not bang i i just made a decision and i was out and it was all done with and i'm you know i'm sorted right like it's a continual thing that has to be chosen and rechosen

and has to be chosen in front of people who find it uncomfortable and that's that's probably the closest analog we have to conversions and then i say at the end of that discussion um this is something that's real in our world and if you are so kind of adverse at taking it seriously as a Christian, you're probably not really driven by the gospel, you're driven by something else. And that's not a, the phenomenon of coming out helps us to understand what conversion actually means. That is not the same thing as saying that coming out is the Christian moral position, right? There's a lot more to say about how to deal with having sexual desire, which is demonized in your society, which is what all coming out is,

is like doing the thing that your society demonizes, which could be quite different. But in our society, it's been a cluster of specific desires, which have been demonized very specifically. And I think the reason why that's become a kind of cultural trope for centuries, really, is that it's a way to kind of discharge the front. frustration of marriage that's not really being lived in kind of gospel freedom in any meaningful sense. Man, so much there.

The one, I guess, I like that analogy. The one point of difference, I would say, is, you know, coming out is simply a revelation of a person, part of your personhood, your identity that was always there, were conversion is taken on a new identity that was not there prior. But yeah, I don't want to push it too far. It's just I did think, like, well, there's a lot of similarities in the experience, but also some difference. Not that it matters to your point.

Yeah, sure. I mean, there definitely are differences. And I also compare it to how does one discover oneself as part of a workers revolution, right? So it can be a social phenomenon as well. Like, how do I know that I'm part of this group who's going to, uh you know join the uh the tea party right like i there's a moment when i realize oh like that's my people and i'm i'm part of them right like and you have to you have to act into that so uh there's a there's other analogies but as a phenomenon i'm what i'm trying to say is um christianity is not

believing the right thing and getting your golden key to get into heaven it's it's a question of what is faithful witnessing action in this world. And you're always acting, right? So the analogy is with the idea that you can't sit still, right? So you're always doing something. And I've talked about the subtitle. The title is joining creation's praise, right? You are praising some Lord with your action.

And you need to attend to which power you're trusting in to make your life come out well and that's the I think that's one of the things that the authors of the primeval history are trying to direct our attention to okay um I want to make sure uh because I'm sure a lot of people are like we're kind of dancing around we're going everywhere we're swimming around we're dancing around some really um hot button issues so I'll just ask you maybe straight up and we could respond how you want um what implications does your book have for the current conversation around transgender identities and also the conversation, not so much in culture anymore, but in the church around

same-sex marriage? Does your book have implications for those conversations? I think it does have implications. I'm for all kinds of reasons. I'm, for all kinds of reasons, hesitant to set myself up as the authority. Part of my agenda as an academic and theologian is to say, and it's a reformation position. I can instruct you in the things to which you should attend. And I can say what I think scripture tells us about what God wants from us. But ultimately, you will stand before the judge yourself. And that's true about me.

and it's true about all of us. So I want to, in the way that I think you have very witsomely displayed, take seriously that there are Christians who genuinely think gay marriage is the way Christianity is kind of unfolding. There are Christians who think what happened to celibacy? Like, how did it become anathema to think that, celibacy is a problem. I want to let all that discussion in, in a non-polemical way, and try to let scripture raise some questions about how we navigate it.

And the first, I mean, it sounds like you didn't read the, or maybe chapter 15 that is, like, I think Genesis has a real pretty clear set of, criticisms about the role of desire in designating appropriate action and even in designated our own desire, our own identity. So if you start to unsettle the question of how my identity is constructed and you ask, what does it mean to be a creature, you press questions about how seriously should I take my embodiment? And what role does my embodiment play in Christian faithfulness?

And when you ask that question, of course, there's a whole cluster of questions, which I do ask around remaking the body, making it according to your mental image of it, right? So insofar as I'm discussing these issues, it's not directly, but it is saying Christian should have a coherent position around what's wrong with anorexia and what's wrong with steroid use. and what's wrong with cosmetic surgery and transgenderism is part of the medicalized remaking of the body, and it's remaking according to the definition of our self that is as other than our body. Being a creature, living creaturely, that fits ill.

The medicalized kind of subject as the alternative to the given subject fits ill with the story that I think Genesis is telling us. In terms of marriage, again, I'm trying to admit that it's a kind of live debate in many quarters and that there are Christians of good faith on both sides. And I mean, I basically say that I'm plumping for the kind of, well, the covenant of marriage that's introduced in Genesis. has as part of it the bringing to life of new generations. So I think the task at the moment is thinking Christian marriage without abstracting reproduction from it,

which is not to say there might not be other ways of coupling that recognize certain aspects of the traditional position around the goods of marriage, but that I think it's probably worth still hanging on to the idea that a Christian account of marriage should hold together all the goods of marriage, including some account of how children come into the world. I did read chapter 50. I have it highlighted. I think I skipped a section because I wanted to, yeah. yeah you're you're I mean I you do so much groundwork on on before we've even asked a question

what does this passage say about you know gender identity or same-sex marriage you do so much groundwork it's almost like the a lot theo exegetical prologamana on just getting our arms around the very kinds of questions we should even ask um so it's an extremely thorough account And it's, yeah, it's not, it doesn't, I don't take you as aimed at trying to get to the quote-unquote right answer quickly. I mean, I think the only, the only answer in ethics is the answer you give with your life. So the real problem of ethics is behind the conclusion. And I think the part of the reason why our discussion is so polarized is that people are just swapping conclusions. They're not actually doing what you're calling the prologometer.

And therefore, we have no capacity to speak. in any theological terms about the issues that are deciding the conclusions. So that's why I think the polarized situation we're in around these discussions and lots of other ones have to do with the fact that we've lost the capacity to ask about the kind of fundamental issues that we're assuming drive the conclusion. We're just arguing about the conclusion. And I repeat that cycle on many different topics, right? Like, are Christians capitalists or not capitalists?

Are they, you know, pro-globalization or anti-globization? Are they for wealth? Are they against wealth? Right. Like, there's a ton of these really polarized discussions. And if you don't ask the question that I think Genesis helps us to ask, which is, what domain are we talking about here? What's the environment of the discussion we're having? How is that environment?

I mean, we tend to think about the environment. This is where some of the nature creation stuff starts to play in, right? Like what we think about the environment as like the air we breathe, the stuff around us, I think that creation account is trying to tell us our environment is in the economy of God's works, which is why the creation account ends on Sabbath, right? Like you're really at home when you're with God. And that gets taken up, of course, in the tabernacle. in the temple.

You need to be with God. That's your real environment. Adam and Eve in the garden are with God all the time. We have to kind of make that connection intermittently. And in the end, it'll, you know, will be in God's presence all the time. So that our environment, our real flourishing happens in the presence of God. And that's a kind of hard thought for secular moderns to think, even Christians. before I let you go

I got one more question I want to bring it back to animals I just want to so my kids sort of make fun of me for how much I love my dog I will sit there and pet them for like

I watched the well I actually watched the whole Dodgers game last night it went 18 innings it was a seven hour game but for a few innings I was just I was I don't know if it's a stress relief

but just I could not stop touching his soft face And I just absolutely love my dog. I shouldn't feel guilty about that. I'm hearing you say. Like, is there a natural that just like, like when people say, oh, I just love animals or I'm a dog person, they're really into their animals. They shouldn't.

Sounds like there might be something theologically profound there. Yeah. I mean, I think it's always a good thing when you love creatures. Okay. And you see the beauty of created reality. in this instance, right? I think we are much more inculturated to acquire and make things good, right? Classically, Locke and Marx agree that the world is kind of a waste and it's valueless and our putting labor into it makes it into something. Pets are one of the few places where

human beings have something like the experience of the gratuity of the created world. I mean, you could say they probably should have that experience around having children, but we have a pretty quality control attitude even toward our children. So like the sense in which the goodness of the created realm as given to us and which we can name as given to us, I think any outcropping of that, kind of phenomenal experience of the world is to be hung on to. Are there going to be animals in the new creation? But what my kids want to know is, will my dog tank, his name's Tank, German short hair

pointer, will he be resurrected? Like, will he be in the new creation? Or will there just be a whole new slew of animals that we've never seen before? Because of the disability thing, I get drawn into these discussions in all kinds of weird ways. He didn't prep for this question. And I did not prep for this question. I am speaking in a couple of weeks on disability and the resurrection. And I'm starting to drift toward a more apathetic.

answer to those kind of questions. I think all things are redeemed in Christ. I think the fact that not even Jesus himself was recognized in his resurrected body is a hint that we might be pretty different and that that's not threatening. That's promising. So, you know, in the disability discussion, people are asking in a similar way to the, will my animal be there? Like, will I still look like me? Will I have my identity? And that question, as I discussed in another context, is along with what about the, you know, the vast majority of human beings that never made it to birth for one reason or another? Like, we will be totally outnumbered by them if they're resurrected.

I think, you know, heaven is going to be a place where we are with those we love and where those who had a bad life or didn't have a life or who had a life where they just sat there and got petted for seven hours during baseball will be more articulate and communicative. And that's going to be a kind of, well, I think the kingdom of heaven is the banquet that Jesus is talking about and that it's going to be a great banquet. So you think we'll be able to talk with animals in the new creation? Why not? I mean, I think, you know, people who can't talk now might be able to talk there. But they, they, they, we might also know how to sign with people who never talked. And that's where I think that I think that talk about the afterlife is really designed to ask the question.

What is the kind of foretaste of the end now and who do we need to be to prepare for the, you know, coming before the judge? So this is, okay, so this is going to sound like tongue and cheek, kind of cute, me trying to be funny, but there's a, there's a little bit of seriousness to it. Like you're saying, so you're saying there's a chance. You're saying there's a possibility. You're not going to plant your steak here. There's not like direct versus whatever. You're saying a possibility that I might be able to sit down with my dog tank in the resurrection and communicate with him. Perhaps even reminiscing about all our times together on earth.

Like, yeah, I'm not going to. Oh, I mean, if you want to have this discussion, I would say this is where we're back to the kind of animal human boundary. Like my son, you probably know, my eldest son, Adam 21 now, doesn't speak, and neither does my dog speak. But I know what Freddie and Adam choose, right? There's a whole discussion in animal ethics, actually, around can we give animals human rights? Well, that turns on, can they make choices? And they do make choices, right? So there is communication going on between us and animals.

And there is communication going on between us and nonverbal human beings. And if you really think about those modes of communication, you realize there's a lot of traffic going on there that most of us who are good talkers just forget about. And it doesn't take much turning that dial up for us to think. I mean, you know, dogs are expressive, right? Like they can tell you how they're feeling and they can tell what they're reacting. And, right? So, I mean, it's very easy to get trapped in a heaven is going to be like just 10% better than where we are now. And if there are resurrected animals, there will be relations with those animals that we have, like we have relations with other human beings. And I think they will be more transparent to, will be more transparent to one another.

And that's the kind of, the relationality. that to me is the kind of fundament of reality. It's going to be at a higher degree in the end. Brian, thank you so much for being a guest on the show again. And thank you for your decades of hard work in your book, joining Creation's Praise. It's a, it's a, it's a labor of love. It's a labor. Sure. Yeah. And if, and I meant it, if anybody makes the labor of actually plowing through the whole thing, drop me a line and I will, I will talk to you. There's only, there's, I can count on one or two hands the people who've plowed the whole thing. And I'm looking forward to meeting those people.

We've got some readers. So, yeah, if you want to know everything there isn't know about Genesis 1 to 3, this is definitely the place to start. So thanks again, Brian. Appreciate you. Thanks so much for having me, Preston. Bring it!