Theology in the Raw - S2 Ep1002: #1002 - What Actually Is “Identity?” Dr. Ryan Peterson

Episode Date: August 25, 2022

Ryan has a Ph.D. in Theology from Wheaton College and is Associate Professor of Theology at Talbot School of Theology and Biola University in La Mirada, CA. He’s also the author of The Imago Dei as Human Identity: A Theological Interpretation, which is the topic of his Ph.D. dissertation.  Ryan and I talk about the concept of identity from both a theological and sociological perspective. The launching point of our discussion is the provocative article by Rogers Brubaker and Fredrick Cooper, “Beyond Identity” https://www.jstor.org/stable/3108478 Is identity essential to our humanity, socially constructed, a blend of both, and how do we know, and why does it matter? Are we ______ because we say we are ________? Or is our identity rooted in nature? What role do things like experience and emotions and personalities play in constructing (or discovering) our identity?  We also wrestle with questions related to sexuality and gender identities in light of the sociological conversation around identity.  https://www.biola.edu/directory/people/ryan-peterson If you would like to support Theology in the Raw, please visit patreon.com/theologyintheraw for more information!  –––––– PROMOS Save 10% on courses with Kairos Classroom using code TITR at kairosclassroom.com! –––––– Sign up with Faithful Counseling today to save 10% off of your first month at the link:  faithfulcounseling.com/theology –––––– Save 30% at SeminaryNow.com by using code TITR –––––– Support Preston Support Preston by going to patreon.com Venmo: @Preston-Sprinkle-1 Connect with Preston Twitter | @PrestonSprinkle Instagram | @preston.sprinkle Youtube | Preston Sprinkle Check out Dr. Sprinkle’s website prestonsprinkle.com Stay Up to Date with the Podcast Twitter | @RawTheology Instagram | @TheologyintheRaw If you enjoy the podcast, be sure to leave a review. www.theologyintheraw.com

Hello, friends. Welcome back to another episode of Theology in the Raw. My guest today is an old friend, Dr. Ryan Peterson. We taught together at Cedarville University many years ago and have been friends ever since. He's a really good dude, really down-to-earth guy, super smart. He has a PhD from Wheaton College in theology, a master's degree from University of Edinburgh, and a master's degree from Biola University. He is an associate professor of theology at Talbot School of Theology and Biola University and is also the author of The Imago Dei as Human Identity, a Theological Interpretation, which is the subject of his PhD dissertation. In this episode, I wanted to talk about, Ryan, about the whole concept of identity.

I know this is something that Christians often talk about. Our identity is in Christ. What is identity? Who are we? Why are we here? And Ryan brings a lot of knowledge from the interaction between theology, philosophy, and the social sciences. And so he sent me a few articles on human identity from a sociological perspective, which were really fascinating. So I said, hey, I would love to have you on the podcast to help me navigate this conversation from a sociological perspective as it interacts with questions around sexuality and gender. So please welcome to the show for the first time, the one and only Dr. Ryan Peterson.

You know, every now and then I have on guests who are scholars, who are also friends of mine, and Ryan is certainly of that number. We both entered into Cedarville University as brand new professors. What year was that, Ryan? 2007. 2007. You had just finished your PhD at Wheaton, right? I was actually still writing my dissertation. That's right.

I think I finished that three years into my time at Cedarville. It took you three years. You know, all those new classes. Oh, my gosh. Well, that's the biggest fear is like when you're applying for a job in your ABD, all but dissertation. Schools are like, we need this thing done. And the candidates always like, all I have to do is just edit the last chapter. Like, I'm just about done.

But it's people like you that cause institutions to say, yeah, we've heard that song and dance before. How long were you at Cedarville? I left in 09. You were there another year? Yeah, yeah. I was there seven years. Oh, seven years. Then went to Moody Bible Institute Spokane campus for a year and then made my way down here to Talbot. Wait, I guess I maybe knew that. A year at Spokane, and that campus isn't there anymore, right? Yeah, that's right.

Yeah, that was crazy. But it was a really wonderful year, actually. It was a great time. It was like a small campus. We met in a church, and all of the students had to live in rented housing. So they were just living in the community, not being able to go into a cafeteria and have someone wash their dishes for them like they had to do all

their own work and so there's like a different sense of like learning to live as christian adults you know in that context so it was a really wonderful year um and then it's been awesome being here how long when did you come to talbot then? So 2015, 2015. Okay. So you've been there. Yeah. Seven, eight years. Are you full professor yet? Or no, I'm a associate and actually I'm up for my tenure review with the, with the board coming up here in a couple of weeks. Um, and so, yeah, that's kind of the stage of things that I'm at. I just became co-chair of the graduate theology department with Rob Christ. And yeah, so that's where I'm at here. With Rob?

Yeah, yeah, Rob. Yeah, he's great. And so we love working together. Rob, when we moved to Aberdeen in the middle of January, from California to Aberdeen, Scotland in January with a seven-month-old kid, we stayed at Rob's place, his little with a seven month old kid. Uh, we stayed at Rob's place, his little flat for like two weeks while we were looking for houses.

So yeah. Good day. Yeah. When we think about our time hanging out with you for those couple of years while you were at Cedarville, um, regularly we think about the fact that, um,

you know, mercy had just been born when we moved there and you already had some kids right so our oldest is now 15 and we were over at you guys's place and every time anyone would like take a bite of food she'd just cry and chris was like i think she's hungry guys so we're like oh okay and so she'd never eaten anything you know yeah and so we're like all right let's try some stuff and then she just ate it but you know was so excited and i didn't even know that really so yeah the first time my daughter ate solid food was at your house oh that's hilarious well um we could go down memory lane all the whole podcast and we'd probably lose the audience after a couple of minutes.

So, you know, in the work that I do with sexuality and gender, the question of identity comes up, obviously, all the time. And you've done a lot of work on identity from just more of a, can I say, theological, sociological level even and i remember some interactions we had i'm like hey what do you think about this and you just gave me such helpful insight from a sociological perspective and then a few months ago you sent me these articles um and i was yeah it's uh one of them apparently in this in the world of sociology has been a pretty well-known or groundbreaking or article yeah i've been influential okay circles i mean it hasn't we'll talk about you know the ways that it hasn't carried the day but okay um it's called beyond identity and it's by rogers brubaker who's a pretty well-known sociologist i've read a book

he wrote a book on trans and racial identities which is really good um and co-authored with frederick cooper i don't know who that is he's a nyu a historian okay and the history of africa and stuff like that okay and then you sent me a book chapter you wrote on called uh created and constructed identities in theological anthropology from a more theological perspective um here's what i want to do i i would love for you to give us kind of just can you for somebody who's completely unaware of the last 40 years of conversations on what is identity in sociological research can you give us a just a basic kind of overview for the people like me that are very unfamiliar with that territory sure i'll

try um i mean it is all over the place part of the argument that brew breaker and cooper make is that really the term is very ambiguous because people use it in so many different ways so maybe i can kind of lay out the different ways that it's used and then um also mention the ways that sometimes it's conflated that's a big part of their argument is like oftentimes people shift from one meaning to another without sort of doing so explicitly. And it's fine in terms of, you know, the way that people are self-describing, but it becomes a problem when you use it as a category for analysis because you're trying to analyze something with an ambiguous term. So that's where it gets tough.

But anyway, so like if I were to kind of lay out a spectrum of ways that the term identity is used, you know, classically, so way before the last 40 years or 60 years, the term identity had to do with like the thing that's most stable about your existence, right? This is what remains the same. And normally it had to do primarily with your nature. Normally it had to do primarily with your nature. So the fact that you're a human being and that there's a nature sort of aimed at particular ends and that that remains the same throughout your life. No matter what ebbs and flows elsewhere, no matter what new relationships you enter into, it's always sort of on this trajectory toward these certain goods. So there's like a kind identity or a natural identity like that. And then there's a personal identity. So in philosophy, by far, the way that the term identity,

you know, the most common way has been to talk about the way that you remain the same, even though everything in you changes, you know, like the ship of Theseus kind of example from You know, like the ship of Theseus kind of example from ancient philosophy. But it's like, OK, so if you have the ship of Theseus and over time replace all the parts, is it still the same ship? And people have compared that to our bodies, right? That like other than a few cells, I think in our eyes, you know, our cells are constantly, you know, we're shedding cells that have died and creating new ones. So all of our parts are different materially. And yet we're the same person across time.

And so in the philosophical discussion, they primarily tried to explain that. Like, how are we how do we remain the same person, even though all of our parts are changing starting probably actually in the 19th century so with freud and some others they started to use the identity language to talk more about psychological self-understanding so like who do i think that i am okay and why do i think that i am who i am and so on so like not not not, not like, um, those more concrete nature identity or personal identity, like baby Preston is still the same person as 45 year old Preston or whatever. Now it's like your own self-understanding is changing all the time. Right. So, um, you know, who you thought you would be when you were five and who you are now, like you're thinking about yourself in totally different ways. And so this is a radically changing kind of concept of identity where it really is connected to self-interpretation, self-understanding and so on.

So that's one of the ways that it got picked up in the psychological literature and then sociological literature they've tied it to the changing social context that we find ourselves in so you know uh let's say you grow up in the middle of iowa and a small town there and then you move to los angeles and like your social context has changed the relationships have totally changed how you're thinking about yourself within your social context and so on and so again it's a very fluid concept based on social relationships so some social psychologists for example have basically said look a baby is born with no identity They don't have an identity until they have some kind of social relationships in which to interpret their own life and

from which other people are interpreting their life as well. So kind of like the term identity has both internal self-understanding notion, but then also a sense of like, how do other people think about you? So we're really talking about a spectrum going from these sort of concrete, strong realities that make you who you are on the one hand, and then like these very fluid and flexible terms that basically either have to do with your own self-determination, like I want to be such and such and therefore I am, or you're sort of digging inside of yourself for kind of a psychological understanding of why you are the way you are. So really,

there, that's a very fluid, flexible, changing sense of identity. And that's really how our culture has picked it up. So that's where now, even though that's a much more recent kind of way of using the term, that's definitely the most common way. If I remember correctly, and you know, whatever you read outside your main field of discipline, it's harder literature to read. So this article by Brubaker, Rogers, such a cool name, Rogers. It's not the easiest, it's a slow read because he's

kind of summing up the state of literature. But if I remember, I mean, please correct me if I'm not summarizing it correctly, but it seems like him and Cooper, their main beef in this article written 20 years ago, which is fascinating, is that the concept of identity has become so fluid and ill-defined and inconsistently used that if everything's kind of identity, then it's not a helpful concept anymore. They even say,

this is on page one, if identity is everywhere, then it's nowhere. It seems like they're kind of protesting how many different things can become someone's identity so that this concept of identity is just no longer useful. Is that a helpful quick summary? Can you expand on what – I didn't finish the article. It's a long article and I really wanted to finish it before this interview and I didn't get to it. But I probably read maybe half of it um it was it is really really insightful and one of the main things they they keep playing on is this essentialist constructionless interplay you know like essentialist would be kind of the object of like we are human whether we want to be or not we are well this is going to become controversial well it's controversial it's only

been controversial in the last few years but you know i am male or i am female um these are objective whether we want to be or not these are objective state or say to be i am 46. um i am 5 foot 11. but then they said now that there's this constructionist constructional what's the best way to say that constructionist yeah yeah okay where you know um get your social environment or even your subjective state of you know um identifying i want i i am this because i say i am this you know um and it's just become utterly from from an academic standpoint sociological sociological standpoint it's become it's kind of rendered this concept of identity useless. Yeah, that's right.

That's what they're arguing. And they were doing this 22 years ago, which was relatively tame compared to the ways that the term identity is used now, of course. And so basically what they were saying was that it's rendered useless as a category for analyzing any phenomena in culture. So like to say, oh, so like you said, let's say I said Preston has a white male American identity. Right. Well, the problem is, is that that could be just a descriptor of sort of your social location. OK. Or it could be that I'm I'm trying to describe the values that you embrace and live from. Right. Like because the word identity means both of those things. So it could just be that I'm describing a fixed reality about, you know, your being.

describing a fixed reality about who you know your being or it could be that this is like your intentional effort to live in the world is to say i want to have american values you know like i'm gonna shoot some guns and you know the stuff that you love you know me right exactly so so the idea is is that the term isn't helpful for analyzing who you are and what your social location is and what values you hold and why you hold them and so on because if i use the term identity no one knows which aspect of your life i'm actually referring to are there people in the scholarly field of i guess sociology or psychology that would really disagree with brubaker and cooper and think that like no we think that the way identity is used today is very helpful and you know um yeah i i think that's probably the dominant view um okay for the kind of usage in uh social sciences, mainly because it's just become the means by which, and it's kind of the standard handbook in psychology.

It's even in the title, right? Self and identity. Because the idea is that they find that to be useful for both understanding self-interpretation and also for that social constructivism. Also for that social constructivism. So the sense that like, yeah, you are the product of your culture and that conditions everything about who you are and why you live the way that you do and so on. And so it's a good way of or at least it's become sort of a popular way of describing how all of our life is conditioned by our social context. Now, the problem, I mean, I think the reason I sent you the Brubaker and Cooper article is I think they raise all the right questions about that dynamic. It's like, they're just saying there's better terms for analyzing that reality. And identity just confuses things. And I think

that it does. Because what they do, they point out that like those. So when someone says, let's say that they have a certain sexual identity, it's hard to know. They might talk about the way that sexuality is fluid and therefore it's a weak concept of identity. Right. It's like something that can change at any moment based on other factors and so on but they're also saying that it's something intrinsic to them so they're actually kind of lending from the more the stronger essentialist uh definitions to sort of argue for why people ought to accommodate it it's because's, it's so essential to who they are. And so they're,

they're sort of people are flexing back and forth between the essentialist support for weak and fluid definitions of identity. And at least that's the claim that they're making is that those get conflated and it makes it difficult then to actually assess the real factors that are at play. And I'm sure we can, I'm obviously interested in the conversation because it's a huge part of the sexuality, gender conversation. So I'm sure we'll,

I'm sure we'll dig into that a bit more. And I would love, you know, I'm typically thinking about it beginning with kind of a theology of sexuality and gender and then kind of going, looking at some of the identity conversation outside of that conversation. I would love to almost hear from you who's kind of coming at it from a different direction. I would love, so your article, Created and Constructed Identities in Theological Anthropology, I would love to hear your analysis of this whole thing. Like, how do you think that concept of identity is, is being used? Is that helpful? Is it unhelpful? What is the best way we should think through identity? I imagine your article touches on that. Can you give us an overview of kind of

your thoughts? Yeah, sure. So one of the observations I try to make is that constructed identities, you know, and if we're talking just to give some kind of context for that, things like racial or ethnic, national, religious, gender, sexual identities, all of those kind of things are different from biblical categories of identity, which actually work around theological categories such as being a creature, being in a covenantal relationship with God, being redeemed from sin, and also, you know, kind of an eschatological fulfillment so we get these really interesting uh biblical insights and like you know about paul's self-understanding from galatians 2 20 and 21 right where he's basically saying um you know he's died and it's no longer he who lives but christ lives in him or in colossians 3 when it talks about how um we've died

in our lives are hidden with christ in god that there's this sense that like our identity is actually tied up in with christ and that's so different from what we mean by identity in this um social scientific sense and so part of my, my interest was trying to bring those into conversation with each other to say, okay, so what would a theological account of identity look like so that we can begin to interface with these other cultural concepts? Do you think it's helpful to have to talk in terms of like a primary identity and then secondary identities so like primary identity i'm as i think about myself i'm i'm human i'm male i'm a christian those are kind of all three inseparable i would say um i which one's more important well my humanity or my

christian it's kind of hard that they kind of are both wrapped up in each other. Secondary identities, you know, I am a husband and father. I am straight. I live in America. You know, these are not insignificant. The fact that I'm a husband and a father, there's a few moments throughout the day where that aspect of my life isn't significant on some level, whether it's 5.30 and I'm still at the coffee shop and I'm late to taking my kid to baseball practice, you know, or like, or, you know, I had a fight with my wife last night

that's unresolved and the next morning I'm still lingering, you know. But there's still second, or is that even the right way to categorize it? Secondary, primary, because my it just seems almost cliched saying it but i mean people say my ultimate identity is in christ everything else is kind of secondary but is that helpful i mean i i or or or maybe to and i don't these are all genuine questions by the way i'm not like asking any questions like maybe when i talk about husband and father i shouldn't even use the category of identity to describe that. Or I don't know. What do you, does that make sense? I'm kind of rambling.

It does. Yeah, it makes a ton of sense. And actually, this is where when we talk about finding our identity in Christ or something like that, where it can become really either insightful or very problematic from my perspective. So oftentimes, what we mean when we say things like that is that we've accepted sort of a constructivist account of identity. And we're just saying that the life I'm constructing is based on my belief about Jesus or something like that, which isn't bad. Obviously, I think Christians should construct their lives in a way that is based on their belief in Jesus. But it's accepting the idea that their identity is determined by their self-determination, right? It's like, I've chosen this for myself. I understand myself.

You know, like, Jesus is out there, and I'm going to set a course for my life, and that life is going to be somehow. It just so happens. I could have chosen anything, but I'm kind of setting a course for my life and that life is going to be somehow. It just so happens. I could have chosen anything, but I'm kind of setting this course for my identity. Like, I think that is a problematic use of the term identity because of the way that, you know, those passages that I mentioned there with Paul, he's kind of saying that like his identity isn't located in what he's determined for himself, but rather the other way around that Christ has determined a certain identity for him. And now he's like learning that, living into it and so on.

It's more a matter of discovering like with my students right now, one of the biggest things that they're facing in their churches is they're interacting with people who are struggling with the traditional evangelical sort of upbringing that they've had, and they're becoming ex-evangelicals, you know, and this kind of thing. And they're trying to figure out how do we pastor people who are in the middle of deconstructing their faith and these kind of things. And part of the thing is, is that the people in the middle of this deconstruction are often still times, still thinking of themselves as determining their own identity and their own, they're still constructing a new identity in place of the old one, rather than thinking that their identity is determined by these theological realities that then would help

them to both critique and revise and reform, like the faith that they were brought up in but but that there'd be some kind of anchor in theological truths interesting i have so many questions along sexuality and gender lines but i don't want to just hijack the conversation but yeah well i mean you so i'm curious about you. So you've really marinated yourself in the identity conversation, both on a theological, psychological level. When you think about the climate of sexuality and gender, what are some questions you have from coming at it from the perspective of thinking about the scholarly discussion of identity? coming out of the perspective of you know thinking about the scholarly discussion of identity yeah what i've tried to do in that in that article and what i've been working on since as well um so i hope to write some more on this uh in the near future but what i was trying to say is that there are these sort of creation related anchors for understanding why human

life takes the form that it does why human life takes the form that it does, why human experience takes the form that it does. But then there's also the reality of self-understanding, self-construction, and so on. And we don't want to sort of deny either end of this process. And it seems to me that a lot of times people who are kind of traditionalist or essentialist want to say that that whole journey of self-understanding and the challenges of trying to make sense of who you are in the world and maybe even questions you have about um you know the way that your body is you know who you are actually whether they fit or not and your body and you know who you are actually whether they fit or not and questions about which relationships will actually help you to flourish and which ones won't and questions about

like what vocations you ought to have in life and all that like those things there's a there's a um there is a radical kind of fluid journey that people are on in navigating those things and so just because they are anchored in my view in these theological realities doesn't mean that the person in that journey isn't um experiencing them as a changing and fluid reality and so we have to kind of say both of those things are true and then that raises a whole bunch of questions about sort of what are identity features or aspects of self-understanding related to the big questions in sexuality and gender and I think race and even nationalism and these kind of things where people are saying, Hey, this is who I am. I am like, my, my life is dictated by these aspects of experience. That statement right there is fascinating. This is who I am.

But then your second statement, my life is dictated. Yes. It's kind of like the Enneagram why some people hate the Enneagram, right? like well i'm an enneagram for it's like people get nervous like so you're just going to be confined to this kind of somebody else's description of who you are and always will be and can never change and accept me for who i am you know i yeah and i love you i i think it's super helpful when it's seen in the right perspective, any kind of personality test. But they can get off the rails a little bit of not just this is who I am, but this is also going to dictate who I always will be, how I will behave. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. So I found Augustine to be really helpful in all of this.

Like I was shocked at how much, you know just going back i was teaching a class on theological anthropology with matt jensen here last semester and we were reading a bunch of augustine in there but how often he's talking about the changeable mutable reality of our nature that we really are we're going to be drawn in kind of any direction and build a whole life in any of these sort of diverse um array of sort of ways based on different desires and loves that we have but then how he says that actually it's the anchor of god you know god kind of anchoring that love our loves and desires that ought to then kind of provide a trajectory for a life well lived. Right. And so, um, it's interesting that he's recognizing in classical theological anthropology,

both of these realities that we can construct lives in lots of different ways. You know, this isn't like a new discovery. People have always known it. Um, but the question is how, you know, what should sort of be the telos or the goal that sort of draws life towards itself and you know augustine's gonna say that's that's god and then the fixed realities of god's character yeah that our character more and more into that image but um yeah i'm interested to know from you because i mean you're you're out there talking about these things all the time in super helpful ways i love your stuff my students all love your stuff

um as well and so yeah your name gets brought up every semester class and in conversations with students so they're they're really benefiting from from the work you're doing but like how is yeah um this this discussion of identity uh hitting in the discussions that you're having yeah yeah i'm in kind of an in-between space on a lot of the identity questions because i am yeah where do i start um well okay let me start here uh teenagers when it comes to gender, especially, you know, we know there's just dozens and dozens of gender identities. And, you know, some of the main ones would be non-binary, trans, genderqueer, genderfluid, probably the top four that I come across with teens. And parents who are either Gen Xers or grandparents that are boomers, when they hear their teen kind of use these identities, they freak out. They're like, what the heck? As I try to pastor the parent, my number one piece of advice is don't freak out.

Don't freak out. Be inquisitive. Be curious. out, be inquisitive, be curious, get to know what your kid means by that identity, not in an interrogative way, not in a cynical way, not in an eye roll, but like be genuinely curious. Not so much about the term, but like, what are they trying to describe about their experience, you know? And I often use this phrase and would love your feedback. You know, I said, you know and i often use this phrase and would love your feedback you know i said you know for a lot of teens these identity markers are a way to name an experience that they're currently going through now even by the way i word that can be taken people like what do

you mean currently going this is who they are and who they always will be. I said, no, no. You should never use the phrase who they are and who they always will be with a 15-year-old. Period. Okay. Just don't ever use that phrase if you want to have a scientifically-based conversation. Yeah. But I also don't want to say just because it's an experience they're currently going through or whatever doesn't mean it's insignificant. My word. because it's an experience they're currently going through or whatever doesn't mean it's insignificant my word you take yourself back to uh you know ryan the first girl who broke your heart at 15 you know i mean have you experienced like deep dark depression where you didn't want to

leave your room now you know five seconds later you got over it well a week later you know but like during the month that was that was an all-consuming experience that was more important than the your skin you know like it was yeah so i want to balance like when i say don't freak out over the identity do identities change can i can identities change of course they can change like for people that like tiptoe around that like i don't don't know, you know, of course they can. Like these are, these are ways that a teenager naming their experience. So, so at this, so I want to help the parent to like have a deep appreciation and honor the experience with that, with while not freaking out like, oh my gosh, when my 13 year old says they're non-binary, they're going to be saying the same thing when they're 85 years old. Maybe there will be 85-year-old women saying they're still identified as non-binary.

Or maybe not. These are ways of naming an experience. These are not as – if the parent has a PhD, I might say. These identities aren't maybe as ontologically significant and stable as they might feel to the person in the moment. You don't say that. First of all, they wouldn't understand what you mean, but I mean, relax, look through the identity, get to know the person who just invited you into their experience. Is that, what do you think about that? So, um, Oh yeah. I think that's I think that's incredibly on point as pastoral advice.

And I think as well that it fits the psychological and sociological literature really well. Because, like I mentioned, in those fields, you're really not dealing with an ontological thing. You're dealing with the person's self-understanding, which of course is fluid, changing. It's always changing. It's always adapting and all of this kind of stuff. So you're not like naming the most essential part of the person. What you're saying is this is what their life feels like in this moment.

And we're going to help them sort of live in healthy ways in light of that experience right and like you said i think your example is great going back to anyone's sort of early teenage years the things that stand out is by far the most vital aspects of life are something that 20 years later you're going to totally recalibrate like the place that those experiences have in life and so on. But at the moment, how can you think otherwise? Right? Right. Right. Yeah. And here's where it gets really confusing, both for the kid, for the team, for people even talking about, especially gender is sometimes the categories that, well, let me just try to think about how to frame it.

Let me just jump into it and I'll frame it after. Like male, female. These are two of, as in biological sex, I use male, female to refer to biological sex. Probably next to just simply being human, it's even inseparable for me. These are two of the most stable, objectively stamped identities that humans have. Where it gets confusing is when we move over to

the more self-understanding realm. The terms male and female can be used both of the objective, unchangeable thing, but also a self-understanding. Why I don't identify, you know, I asked somebody, what do you mean? What do you mean by non-binary? Why don't fully identify as male or female? If you ask them to define male and female in that sentence, it's going to mean something more along the lines of gender, gender expression, gender stereotypes. But they're borrowing categories from something that's the most it's not i mean in one in a science if you just think scientifically that phrase i don't identify as or i do identify as

like if i said ryan d i identify as male that doesn't make sense if i'm talking about i'm blurring two very different categories of self-understanding versus objectively stamped upon me regardless of whether i think I am or not. In the gender conversation, this is where it gets utterly confusing. It really comes down to a lot of just terminological confusion. This is where pastorally, again, don't freak out. There's a lot of just terminological confusion going on. That's not the primary.

We can work through that later. The number one thing is you have a human being standing in front of you who's trying to sort out important life experiences. Would you agree with that? I mean, am I framing that right? How would you word it? Objectively, objective identities that don't care about whether you feel that way or not versus our subjective responses to maybe some of these objective identities yeah yeah i think that's exactly right and i might talk about it in terms of like concrete phenomena of the person's body or their biology right okay and then um yeah their their experience their interpretation of that

experience and uh the ways that they're navigating that so one thing i i haven't mentioned yet i guess in terms of even within the psychological literature two different paths both on the constructivist side is that like there are some features even beyond the biological that are fairly stable and there's a lot of literature showing that right so like personality yeah um features so there's things that you can identify and you know this from having kids like you see them at six months old and then you see them at 16 years old and you're like wow i can like draw you know see the thread of development like there's things about their their formation that is is adaptive but also

their personality features are actually stable over time so there's a lot of literature sort of on that side of things but then on the on the constructivist self-interpretation side so it's like whether you interpret yourself this way or not, not just your body, but even your personality has consistencies that they can identify and predict future behavior and all of this kind of stuff. But actually, it gets kind of scary because it's almost like they can say, oh, yeah, this percentage of people will make these kinds of decisions, this percentage. And then it works out that way. And it's like, wow um what's going on where there's actually these kind of predictable trajectories of development um because of stable realities in the person but then like you're talking about the person's individual sort of

experience of yeah what we might i mean what teenager in some ways isn't confused about sexuality and relationship and and needs mentoring through all of that and really needs a lot of grace and love and people listening to them no matter what you know like whether that it's you know that they kind of fall in what would be considered more traditional sort of pathways or not the thing is is everyone's confused like, how does this actually work out? How do these relationships become healthy rather than, like you said, heartbreak, you know, and everything else. So it was like, I think that pastoral insight is huge.

I think the other question about the conflation of the stable with the fluid is really the big. But I brought that up on the psychology side mainly to say even personality features are far more stable than we might think. And so self-interpretation is really fluid, but actual personality aspects can be stable they do change but they but mostly along trajectories of development not not along like radical conversion to a different personality yeah you know who uh i first came across that with uh reading steven pinker i'm trying to think of the book i've read a few of his books um i'm looking over at my bookshelf it's the one he wrote like 20 years ago and i remember him talking about that that like and you know he he says you know there's a spectrum of you know even they're like

fluid constructionalists kind of view on this and more essentialists and he definitely takes way more on the essentialists all the way to the point to where like he's even talking about parenting and i i i really like pinker i'd be most of the stuff he says i'm like yeah that seems i don't know seems seems right um but even ma was like basically saying like and i don't quote me on this but i mean like you know parents your kids are good you can't really do much to change your kids kind of behavior you know like they're to be who they are. I mean, he's a pretty much anti-Christian. So, I mean, he has zero room in his for like the spirit, you know, doing some kind of work.

But I wouldn't have said that before. I think now I do think personalities are, I would say, more stable than people realize. So, that's interesting. So, that's not an objective kind of state of it's not on par with like being human or male and female and yet it still has a stability even sex you know sexuality sexual attraction and this is so i i think when we talk about fluidity i think everybody gets a lot of people get super nervous because they don't want to be advocating for like ex-gay therapy making gay people straight you know changing people's sexual orientation and i'm on the front lines of also yeah not wanting to to go there um and yet we

can still talk about sexual fluidity without talking about orientation change i mean there's been a lot of work done, especially on female sexuality. That's pretty well established now. Like few people I know in the field would question that female sexuality is incredibly fluid. Doesn't mean that you just wake up one day and choose who you're attracted to. What it does mean is for whatever reason, human adult females, adult females, their sexuality is fairly significantly affected by their social environment. And that's just social environment has layers and layers and layers and layers to it, both, you know, one-on-one relationships as they get older, as they interact with men and women and different socioeconomic geographical locations. And diamond is is one of the most well-known people who has done

work on this she she traced 100 non-straight women over a period of 10 years 10 years so non-straight that they all identify as you know all over the map but none of them said they're straight and over 10 years something like i think it was something like three percent of them had the same identity every two years over the 10-year period you know um none of them were like went from like fully opposite sex attracted to fully same-sex attracted but there was a lot of fluidity within kind of a general general orientations um and now there's been more studies being done on like male sexuality is more fluid than we realize um and certainly with something like gender gender is such a nebulous

concept but like if it has something to do with how we think through and respond to our biological sex goodness i i of course that's going to be affected by our social environment even though that's so unpopular to say in some circles i mean i think the average person is like yeah i told me you know but like can't say that on like social media but um right right exactly but as soon as you do some uh traveling you know spend time in different cultures yeah like you just realize that people are constructing what it means to be a man and a woman in lots of different ways and cultures. There are there are sort of themes that arise. But but in terms of the particularities of like what that means for life decisions, the roles that people ought to play. And that's where I think the disruption of the cultural norms in America is causing a lot of confusion, right? Just because we actually are intentionally saying, let's get away from the to be a man? And the answer is, I can't really tell you because that would be to rig the game, you know? Or what does it mean to be a woman? So like here we've got, you know, a situation where we have a whole lot of adolescents who are trying to learn models, but we're constantly also undermining by saying, you shouldn't follow these models because

actually they're oppressive or whatever. And so, so we're, we're, you know, culturally trying to kind of create a new state of affairs. Interesting. So, so that's going to be like, and that could be bad. It could be, I mean, I'm not trying to assess that fully right now. I'm just trying to say that's, that I think is where a lot of confusion is coming from. What are some questions your students are asking along the lines of sexuality and gender when you start talking about identity? Like, does this come up in class? Oh, yeah. Yeah. It comes up a ton. I mean, in their churches. So so we have just an amazing and diverse student body.

we have just an amazing and diverse student body, but even with all of the diversity, Southern California diversity here and our Talbot student body, it's like they all have these, these same kinds of challenges and their churches related to sexuality and gender and the questions around this mainly because as people are becoming Christians, let's say it's a gay couple that joins the church and then they're starting to get involved in church ministry and so on, you know, there's all kinds of questions about like, how do we, like what levels of,

you know, leadership and involvement and all of this, are we sort of open to as a church related to this dynamic? And then also like, what does discipleship look like then for a gay couple in the congregation as they're trying to say, this is what it means to follow Jesus for the next 20 years. Like what are the things that the church ought to advise for their relationship and for their walk with Christ? Which I think it's such a complex and difficult thing. I mean, you're talking about this all the time, so you probably have some great answers to that question. Yeah, well, I got it. It's definitely what they're struggling with.

And then the same thing on the gender front. Yeah, well, I got definitely what they're struggling with. And then the same thing on the gender front. So you've got people who start attending church, who, you know, are gender fluid, and they're getting involved more, you know, not only with small groups, but you know, families hanging out maybe with the children in church and so on. And so that makes more traditionalist families nervous because it's like, well, now our kids are learning from a model that isn't really what we want to support. So it's all questions of the nitty gritty of what do we do to sort of integrate everyone into the church community and allow everyone to play a role in the ministry that we have, but also shepherd our young, young people well and all of that. Those are at least the big questions. Yeah.

I think there's two big ones for me when it comes to sexuality and gender that I think the church could, some environmental things that the church should be aware of. Number one is, is how the church reinforces gender stereotypes. You know, I remember years ago talking to a gay guy, he was a former worship leader at a church, came out as gay.

They kicked him out of the church. And, but he said, you know, he was a convert. Like he got saved as a late teenager and, you know, a little more on the feminine side of things. But he says, I never questioned whether I was a man or not until I got to church. Yeah. Like these real rigid things. Like if you're a man, you drive drive a big truck you go to men's

retreats and you're you know these stereotypes are just exacerbated and it was like oh so to be a christian is to be this kind of stereotypical masculine man um how sad is that that wasn't until he got to the church when he questioned whether he was a real man or not you know um so i think the church could should be aware of of that and also you or not, you know? So I think the church should be aware of that. And also, you know, the church, you know, we always bemoan how sexualized our culture is, our secular culture, which is true, totally true. But I think we play a role in that

by idolizing marriage and sex, you know, our one footnote to the idolization of sex is wait till marriage, you know, but we do have an underlying kind of message that you can't really flourish as a human unless you're married and having sex, the person you desire. And then we turn around the gay people who want to follow Jesus and says, but you can't get married and have sex with the person you desire.

It's like, and that's when my affir and friends will say, yeah, we need to change the second part. I'm like, well, let's change the first part. Let's, let's not give the message that you can't really survive until you're married to the person that you sexually desire. Like that's the fundamental problem. So I, I, I, you know, I've heard people ask me and you know, how viable is something like lifelong celibacy in an environment

a secular environment that idolizes sex a church environment that idolizes marriage and i'm like yeah that's that's tough but that's that can't i don't want to form an ethical belief based on our social environment right that's That's not how ethics work. And yet same time, I'm like, yeah, we've kind of created an impossible environment for people to go without sex and marriage. I don't want to say impossible, but you know, that's right. A difficult one. Would that be legitimate from a sociological perspective that one's like, what if we were in an environment where the heroes of culture were all like monks and where you have, I mean, is there a, as powerful as our sexuality is, is that enhanced by our environment? If we're in another environment, would it not be as raging and it is seemingly impossible to go without

fulfilling their sexual desires? Yeah. Yeah. I think that's exactly right. I think we don't talk about, you know, something I've heard you talk about before, which I totally agree with, and is also a very Augustinian insight. And that is just that our desires for sex is really a desire for God and union, right? Like, so that's what it is. It's a desire for union. And if we helped people to have a range of forms of union, besides just a sexual union, then that desire can be fulfilled in fruitful ways in all of life. I mean, with the amount of sex that people are having and sort of a sex-focused life, it's amazing how lonely people are. focused life it's amazing how lonely people are right it's like this is just a a huge epidemic um you know relationally is that people are having a ton of sex and being lonely all the time because

they're not thinking of sex as a form of union like personal union but they're also not pursuing union in ways outside of sexual relationships. So like deep forms of friendship and finding, you know, mentors and walking the Christian life with other people. So ultimately I think that desire is our desire for union with God and then union with the people of God. And so at least that's what Augustine wants us to say, is that it is a raging biological reality. There's no doubt about that. When we interpret that from a Christian perspective, it actually gets transformed into this desire for personal union, which is a good thing.

And that's what you're saying is like, in our church, social context, we oftentimes exclude people so that they're not actually building those deep friendships, having a relational union in other ways, but then we're telling them remain celibate. And it's like, we're really leaving them with no option at that point. But I don't think it's just because of the biological sexual desire. I think it has to do with that desire for personal union. That has to be something that's fulfilled. There's several gay friends of mine who are pursuing celibacy. I've often said, I could live without sex, but I can't live without love and intimacy.

And until the church understands the difference, it's hard to live, right? And I would say the celibate gay friends that I can think of, their level of flourishing is deeply, I'm just thinking through different scenarios right now in my head, is their level of flourishing is intrinsically connected to two things. Number one, the level of intimacy they have with God and the level of love and intimacy they have with other people in the body of Christ. And this is where I, you know, and I like to say, you know, every now and then to drive home a point, I say something that might be a little over the top. People are like, yeah, you think? But like, People are like, yeah, you think? But simply having a traditional sexual ethic is inadequate without also supplementing that with fostering a community with deep love and intimacy. but the Holy Spirit also works in community. Like to tell somebody to go and be celibate in 2022,

when we idolize marriage in the church, idolize sex everywhere else and say, but I'm not also going to like, whether you can find intimacy or not, not my problem. Just don't have sex. That's just, it seems like an inadequate and incomplete and naive sexual ethic. You know, I don't want not true it's just incomplete yeah yeah i think that's right i think that's true even for straight married

if we even are thinking about uh married couples who are having sex the thing is is that i think it's their lives are incomplete without these other avenues of relationship as well and so it's not just like let's have some small groups but it's like really thinking differently about what the church is um as this uh sort of supportive community of discipleship and then that way we can welcome people who are going to, for whatever reason, sort of be single and walk out, you know, in celibacy or whatever. The thing is, is that we're welcoming them into a rich community of fellowship and not just, you know, they show up and sit next to some people and then go home and have to then like gut it out the rest of the week.

Yeah, yeah. Hey, I got another question. This is related, but a little off the topic while I have you. You did your PhD on the rest of the week. Yeah. Yeah. Hey, I got another question. This is related, but a little off the topic while I have you, you did your PhD on the image of God, right? That was your PhD. Yeah.

Yeah. Okay. So, um, and that's what got me into the identity stuff because the title of my book is the image of God as human identity, where I'm trying to say this is a kind of a theological anchor for understanding everything else about ourselves.

So in Genesis one 27, the first time we see image of God, one of the only times, the main one, in the image of God, he created them. Male and female, he created them. I've often said that without getting specific, our male and female sexed embodiment is somehow intertwined with bur bearing God's image. I've said that now I'm nervous saying that in front of you, just in case you're like, nah, you totally misunderstood the passage. I spent three years researching. Would you say that? Would you reframe that? What do you think? What's the relationship between bearing God's image and our sexed embodiment? Yeah. Yeah. So the language actually that I would want to modify a little bit there is,

is the idea of bearing the image of God, because I think that sometimes we think of like humanity as a, as a thing that already exists. And then the image of God sort of stamped on top of that. And what I want to do is reverse that relationship so that like god creates this cosmic temple and then he places an image inside of that temple that image is humanity so then the question becomes why does humanity have the form that it has and everything follows from the image of god so why are we both body and soul why are we both male and female and why do we have the vocations of worshiping and imitating God, the vocation of friendship with other humans, and then the vocation of dominion over the earth? All of that follows because we're made in God's image.

So instead of saying we're a thing that bears the image, it's more like we're the image. We are the image. We are the image of God. And that dictates the form of life that we have. So then in that case, yes, being male and female is crucial to that. And I really think that that is a sort of a built-in requirement, right, to seek out fellowship and union. Yeah. Because you can't actually do any of these other vocations without doing it together as man and woman.

And especially if there's only one man and one woman at the beginning. What does it say about God that we are in his image as male and female and God doesn't have a biological sex? Even though his revealed identity is primarily, well, exclusively male. Even though he does have feminine metaphors that God also uses to describe himself. But he's also, because it's easy for me to say our male and female sex embodiment is significant for being in God's image. But what does that say about God not being gendered or not being sexed? I don't like using gender. Well, it seems to me that God is the source of sex and gender, but not the, uh, like it doesn't condition his life. Okay. So he transcends these things. Right. Um, and the reason we call God, he is not because

he's a big man or whatever, but instead it's because we have to use a personal pronoun because God's not impersonal. He's not just a thing, right? He's personal. So, and then there's, in a sense, if you think about male in some ways as making, you know, the man makes a woman fruitful in a certain way. There's kind of a sense in which God is the man and all of us are female in this sense that we're the ones who receive from God and are made fruitful by him. So to like take the whole sexual analogy there to a spiritual analogy. And so it makes way more sense to talk about god as he but it doesn't mean that he has a sex at all or a gender obviously and so he's transcending that male and female come from that and then there's like a creaturely analogy then in humankind to kind of give us these

anchors that god's going to use for teaching us about himself. So like, what does it mean that he's the father? What does it mean to call the son, the son and so on? All of that of course is going to have an interplay with human relationships. So I think human life takes the form that it does so that there are rooted analogies that can help us understand who God is. It does feel right. i'm honest a little patriarchal yeah yeah like i and maybe that's maybe that's uh well yeah scripture was written

in in a patriarchal culture so these are the categories they would have understood but it's still like how come god gets how come men get the pronouns that god uses or like you know husbands love your wives as christ loved the church and there's so much beauty in that passage not to diminish it but it is the man who's in the category of jesus that you know the women which okay well yeah he washed feet died for the person, so I mean, he's subverting the whole patriarchal skeleton that he's working with. That's the thing. It's definitely, there's a sense in which there are these themes of initiative taking or whatever, maybe. But like you said, entirely the goals for that taking of initiative totally undermine the goals that would have been normal, as you know, in the Roman environment, but basically in all human environments, right?

So the idea there is that Christ takes the initiative to give his life for someone. And that's the same thing that he's asking husbands to do for their wives. I never thought of this. I'm going to ask it because it's theology in Iran. If the Bible was written in a culture that wasn't patriarchal, but matriarchal, do you think they would have presented God as the matriarch? Or even today, even today in more of an egalitarian West, you know, where if scripture is written today and we're adopting cultural norms that people can understand, it'd almost be like God would reveal himself as a parent duo or something, you know, or like, it'd be kind of a, like in, in the patriarchal culture that the Bible is written in. It only made sense that God was the father.

Um, but today it'd be like, Ooh, that'd be a little bit like, those aren't the categories that would be, that would resonate with a lot of people that we're trying to reach. Um, I'm sure I'm missing something. I think Wayne Gruden would spank me right now saying no there is something essential yeah yeah yeah i'm sure there's people who would freak out but i mean i like the question i think no matter how confusing like different cultures can sort of uh in terms of the way that we address these questions of sex and gender, societies sort of put a different lens on that reality. But there's no way to overthrow that reality or to subvert it entirely, right? sacrament we might want to say you know like a a picture in physical terms of a spiritual reality

i think that god's still going to reveal himself the way that he does according to that reality because then we can look back at ourselves and realize these these truths that maybe we didn't even see prior to that so like the fact that the man needs the woman to be himself you know from genesis chapter 2 like he can't be himself without without the woman again that subverts a certain kind of like lone ranger male you know hey i can be anything i want whenever i want and just kind of charge ahead. And so it's like, no, like literally you're called into fellowship with another without whom you can't be who God wants you to be. Right. And that doesn't.

So. So to me, I think that he's teaching us through this and therefore God's going to reveal himself that way anyway. Well, in a sense, I mean, Genesis one and two is, I think, I know there's different readings on it,

but it seems pretty egalitarian. And I'm not, I'm not using the term in the sense of like women in ministry, whatever, but male and female burying God in the image of God. So, and yet God still, and I'm not saying Genesis one and two weren't written in a certain culture,

but man, the themes there seem to transcend that kind of patriarchal and right out of the gate challenge it. So the fact that God still reveals himself as he, him father, you know? Yeah. I don't know. And even using the plural inesis one that god says us yeah um so he doesn't just say i and he in that sense but talks about us um let us make humanity in our image but then in chapter two you know the use of the term helper which half the times it's used in the old testament it refers to god so So they're the idea that the woman is the one without whom the man cannot succeed.

Right. That's absolutely elevating the role. To be clear, I don't think you're saying like man is incomplete without being married to a woman. You're saying just the existence of men and women together in community. Yeah, that's right. And that's where we could go back to our discussion before about like fellowship in the church. to a woman you're saying just the existence of men and women together in community okay yeah yeah that's right and that's where we could go back to our discussion before about like fellowship in the church like that's going to include single people so it doesn't mean marriage but what it does mean is men and women living life together there's this great sermon that carl bart has where

he basically he's talking about like small groups and and these sort of groups where people move out into only men and only women groups. And then he's like, who gives them the right to do that? Like, that's not from the Bible. The Bible doesn't say, like, just could join a men's group or join a women's group. Like, the Bible says men and women together. Like, that's the life of discipleship. Really? He talked about small group stuff in church? He doesn't say small groups, but he describes that

because that was happening in Germany at the time. It's just amazing. Yeah, but he doesn't call them small groups. That's not like the German word to use or whatever. But the concept was already present there. It's like men hang out with men, women hang out with women. That's not what we're called to in um scripture right we're called to live life together so that i think is very profound and a challenge to a lot of our instincts right like we do discipleship best when it's all men together or all women together wait that's not it's not biblical was he was it carl bart yelling

that's a good question i don't know i i looked all this up again because i had heard it and it hit me with such a kind of force i was like where is this and then i dug the sermon up but i didn't actually look at to whom the sermon was preached so i'd have to check that out hey man i'll let you go i took you over an hour. Yeah. Well, thank you so much. It's great to kind of just think out loud through these categories of somebody who's thought through it from a much deeper angle than I have. So I want to finish. Yeah. Brubaker's article and then yours.

And yeah, I'll probably shoot you an email with some thoughts as I work. Yeah. Yeah. Sounds good. Well, I really appreciate you having me on, Preston. It's been great hanging out with you. Yeah. A little shout out to a Talbot seminary. Any, uh, you want to give any free advertisement on what you guys are doing down there? Oh yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So we have just, um, obviously we're the seminary at Biola university and have

just a really a spectacular faculty here. So any of you who are looking for seminary training, we'd love to have you as students in our MA, MDiv programs. And also those of you who want to get into classic sources like Augustine, we have a fairly new, like a three-year-old program called the MA in Classical Theology, where we're reading all the theological classics as the curriculum for the program. So that's a really exciting one. How would you describe that? I mean, you've been in different educational institutions. What's the flavor, the distinction of Talbot Seminary? How would you describe it in ways that, yeah, this is kind of the, if you come here, you're going to get this and you might not get this kind of flavor somewhere else. Yeah. mean what i love about uh what we're doing is we're uh intentionally and sort of determined

to be biblical so constantly going back to scripture to figure out like how do we sort through these things but we're also culturally engaged on questions like the ones that you're constantly working on so it's not like we following, we're biblical in the sense of like, we go back to, you know, what culture was like a hundred years ago, but it's like, no,

how do we live well as Christians today? Which is good preparation for pastors, obviously here in Southern California, people are facing that in their churches. But then two other distinctives that I've mentioned, one of them is our spiritual formation focus, because we're really committed that you can't pastor a church unless you yourself are walking faithfully with God. So it's not like you just learn skills to preach, but you're actually involved in your own spiritual formation. We have courses dedicated to it, but they include things like spiritual direction, ways of thinking about their personal discipleship. And then another thing is, our philosophy program here has really been a leading program. But because of that, you're

always sort of students, no matter what program they're in are rubbing shoulders with philosophers who are approaching a lot of today's questions in a different way with a different sort of artillery for addressing those questions and so it it leads to really really great integrative discussion among the students so i'd say like our biblical focus, the commitment to spiritual formation, and then also to philosophy are really key. You seem culturally very aware. And I know other schools that are too, but I think being in Southern California does give you a unique,

you know, Southern California is kind of at the leading edge of where culture is or is going. So just, I would imagine that social environment does, you know, shape kind of the flavor of the classroom even and you have a bunch of professors that surf i think so that's that's an added added plus that's right exactly we get in the ocean surfing professors

yeah it is it's been really a delight to be on the faculty here. And so I feel that way. I'm blown away every semester. I start my classes by having students talk about kind of what they're up to in life. And I'm just blown away by our student body in terms of the ministries that they're doing, but the lives that they're living, and the work that they're doing here. And then they're getting that training taking it right back out yeah either in southern california we have a growing online student body as well and i'm just really really appreciate the students i get to work with but also all my colleagues just fantastic people yeah i remember i was there when was that year ago yeah for like two well two days but man they had me running ragged it was like 8 a.m to like

you guys had some late night chapel i spoke at after speaking all day the two days straight it was probably the most i've ever spoken on two days but i i just i loved both the colleagues i mean the faculty which i feel like i know half the faculty there personally but then the students were just you just really enjoyed the student body asking really good questions. And they were very honest. Like they were like, yeah, I just really enjoyed interacting with them. So, um, yeah, I would say that that's been one of the most refreshing, um, parts about being here is that there really is an openness to saying, Hey, we're, we're all wanting to follow Jesus, but we're also all facing our own difficulties and struggles in that. Let's be honest about it and, and, uh, work together on, you know,

living, living for Jesus. Well, so that's, that's, uh, it's, it's a pretty remarkable context. Good. Good. All right, man. Hey, thanks for being on the show. Appreciate you. Yeah, appreciate you. Thanks. This show is part of the Converge Podcast Network.