Abstract
In Acts 8 Philip baptizes an Ethiopian eunuch. In this article I note that the eunuch is someone who falls outside the gender binary of male and female. Although our gender questions are different to first-century ones, can the inclusion offered to the eunuch in baptism point us to a more inclusive stance in today’s church? Can this story speak to those who challenge gender binaries particularly intersex and transgender individuals, and can that challenge the Church to think beyond such binaries?
The church I attended from the age of eight until I went to train for ordination in my early 20 s was a very ordinary Anglican parish church. I say that, but as I look back I realize that it was an unusually inclusive community. We were a diverse bunch. My own family was single parent headed by my father. Amidst the mix of unusual family patterns and interesting characters was one person who I would now identify as intersex. Sometimes he dressed as Ted, the name he had been given as a child and had used for most of his life. Other times she was Hazel. He explained one day, to my slightly embarrassed teenage self, that he had been born with a micro penis: enough to identify him as a boy. Yet at puberty nothing really happened. He moved into adulthood with an unbroken voice and little change in his genitals. At last in his 60 s there was a feeling that this non-conforming body could live out a non-conforming lifestyle expressing through name and dress the mix of identities that Ted/Hazel felt. At church we just took our clue from the clothing and used the name that went with the clothes.
Questions of gender
It seems that the Church of England has been debating the question of gender for a long time. However, the debates, which have been so fixated on what roles women can occupy, have only just begun to address the realities of people like Ted/Hazel. The Church has assumed that the main issue is whether women can do things that men have traditionally done, and the deeper complexity of how we understand gender has largely gone unexamined. The subject of sex and gender is much more complex. There is now a wider recognition that some people defy neat biological definitions of sex. 1 There is also an increasing awareness of those who feel that the bodily sex they inhabit is not the gender that they are.
Intersex bodies challenge accepted views of biological determinism. Questions of transgender unsettle not just traditional ideas about gender binaries but also feminist ideas about the social construction of gender. Some prominent feminists have been vilified for questioning whether a transwoman is a woman. 2 Recent headlines have questioned at what point someone is a woman: when she chooses to live identifying as one or when her body has been physically altered? Should a pre-op trans woman be placed in a male or female prison? 3 Though these binary confusing realities affect a minority of individuals, they pose questions for us all about the continued limitations of neat gender definitions.
The difficulty is that we are still wedded to the language of gender binaries, of male or female. Feminism has challenged assumptions that define women as essentially opposite or complementary to men, affirming women’s abilities to enter what were previously considered male spaces of education, work and lifestyle. Yet, feminists in campaigning for women’s equality have needed to practise what Serene Jones calls strategic essentialism, 4 arguing that women’s difference needs to be represented in these places and that the invisibility of women in so many important spheres is detrimental to their experiences and opportunities. Feminism has sought to dismantle gender binaries, but, in campaigning for women’s rights, it has also needed to use them.
This is true in the theological debates as well. There is a tension between the rightful emphases of our common human identity, made in the image of God, and the need to find specifically feminine language and imagery to affirm women as visibly present in our understanding of God and salvation. It is all too easy to fall into the language of soft complementariansim and to continue to perpetuate binary ideas about the God-givenness of being male or female. We change brethren to brothers and sisters, affirm that men and women are made in the image of God and allow women, with appropriate caveats, to hold office and speak the words of God liturgically. We read Galatians 3.28, ‘in Christ there is no male and female’, to mean that in Christ both men and women are acceptable rather than a potential pointer to the meaninglessness of such categories in the light of our new creation in Christ.
Acts: Philip and the eunuch
While it is inappropriate to try and read into biblical texts the kind of concerns we have about gender inclusion in the twenty-first century, it is fascinating to note that they needed to engage with a different ‘gender’ issue. In Acts 8.26–40, early in the unfolding story of the Christian Church, we find an encounter between Philip the evangelist and a eunuch from Ethiopia. The inclusion of this story points to an interest in the question posed towards its end. ‘What is to stop me being baptized?’ or as I have titled this piece can a eunuch be baptized; can a eunuch become a new creation in Christ, part of the body of Christ?
Eunuchs were a reality in the first century. They were usually boys who had been ‘castrated’ at some level, pre-puberty, giving them an adult body which was neither fully male nor female but recognizably other. Jesus’ words in Matthew 19 point to an awareness that some eunuchs were born with a condition that made them ‘eunuch’-like, but the majority would have been deliberately castrated. As with this individual, they were most often servants or slaves within a royal household, though not simply there to guard harems; their level of responsibility was much wider. They often held high office, trusted because they could not have families of their own and thus were presumed to be loyal to their master or mistress. Within the Roman Empire a slave eunuch was a status symbol, a luxury high-end commodity. In the early church, with its inclusion of slaves, it is likely that some would be eunuchs.
Here we have a eunuch who holds high office in the court of the Candace, the female ruler, of Ethiopia. Clearly the eunuch is an educated individual and deeply interested in the Jewish religion. Many commentators over the years have suggested that the term eunuch can simply be understood as referring to his job. Yet, Brittany Wilson notes that the term eunuch is used repeatedly throughout the story and other terms are used alongside it to describe his role: Luke’s repeated designation of the character as ‘the eunuch’ suggests that this designation is central and should thus be the guiding principle in our interpretation.
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In terms of their setting, the eunuch and Philip are spatially ‘betwixt and between’: they are neither here nor there, but on a deserted road in the middle of the wilderness. As the ultimate boundary-crosser, the eunuch is from a nation that lies on the borders of the so-called civilized world and greets Philip on the borders of civilization itself.
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She concludes: Because of his primary identification as ‘the eunuch’, the eunuch emerges above all as a gender-liminal character … the eunuch is neither male nor female, neither Jew nor Gentile, neither elite nor non-elite …. Luke lifts up a eunuch official, or impotent ‘power’, and points to Jesus’ own impotent power as the suffering servant of Isaiah 53, the slaughtered and shorn lamb who is humiliated and exalted, crucified and risen.
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Yet, alongside these texts of exclusion there are more hopeful texts. Isaiah 56.1–5 speaks of salvation for both the foreigner and specifically the eunuch. The faithful eunuch will receive a place in God’s house and ‘a monument and a name better than sons and daughters’ (Isa. 56.5,
So can a eunuch be baptized? This passage in Acts is emphatic. No words are offered in response to the eunuch’s question just inclusive action. Philip baptizes the eunuch who continues on his journey rejoicing. It seems that the Church welcomes in the outsider, and in baptism the eunuch finds a place in God’s house accepted as he is and welcomed into the body of Christ. We can, I think, assume that the inclusion of this encounter in the book of Acts was a deliberate pointer to the inclusion of eunuchs into the baptized family of the Church. Those who were neither male nor female can find an equal identity within the new creative community of Christ.
Inclusion in today’s church
So how does reflecting on this encounter in Acts help us in thinking about gender in today’s church? It is not appropriate simply to map the term ‘eunuch’ on to those who are intersex or transgender. We are living in a different time with different gender questions. Yet, it is important for us to recognize and speak about the Bible stories of people who did not fit into the neat binaries of male and female. This can be a helpful scriptural challenge to our fixed ideas about gender. Recognizing that Daniel and his companions – Old Testament heroes of the lion’s den and the fiery furnace –were probably eunuchs provides positive examples of such liminal figures. They are described as young good-looking boys from good households taken captive and trained for office in the Babylonian court by the head eunuch. The practice of taking young foreigners of good birth as spoils of war and making them eunuchs is well attested.
We should also note that Nehemiah, cupbearer to King Artaxerxes, was almost certainly a eunuch. He would be unlikely to hold the position if he was not. These are individuals used by God, blessed by God and held up as examples of faithfulness who did not conform to normative ideas of maleness, who existed in a liminal gender identity. And the prophecies in Isaiah and Wisdom point to this ideal of the faithful eunuch who God will bless. These stories and prophecies need to be part of ordinary preaching, affirming that God works through those who might be considered different. I cannot count the number of sermons I have heard about the Ethiopian eunuch which have made no reference to the significance of his being a eunuch!
The Acts 8 story itself offers an important reminder to make inclusion a priority. Baptism becomes for the Church the mark of a Christian and, unlike circumcision, it does not require a particular gendered body. Women can be baptized and so too can those whose bodies do not conform to gender norms. This is all part of the good news of the community of Jesus Christ. What was true then is true now, and this has pastoral implications in caring for those who do not fit into our binary gender categories.
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We need to hold on to the priority of inclusion in the baptized family of the Church. Cornwall quotes Sally Gross, an intersex ex priest, who was told by fellow Christians that her baptism was invalid since ‘as she did not fall into either of the categories ‘determinately male’ or ‘determinately female’, she also did not fall into the category’ human’, and was therefore not ‘the kind of thing which could have been baptized validly’.
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Clergy need to be aware of the pastoral needs of families with intersex babies who may want baptism before they feel they can assign a gender to their child. Registers ask for the child’s sex, but surely this is not a necessary requirement of baptism. In a culture where children are often identified as male or female by scans, even before they are born, the families of those who cannot be so neatly categorized need compassionate pastoral support. Parents, wider families and friends may need creative language to help affirm the child. This includes positive assurances of God’s love and blessing.
A number of intersex conditions only become apparent during puberty. Again young people and families need those who can speak with affirmation about the rich diversity of humanity and, where necessary, affirm the inclusive nature of God’s love. There may well be a sense of loss for those who discover at this stage that they are females without a womb or boys who will not experience a full transition into an adult male body. Our theological definitions of male and female are so deeply grounded in procreation, and those whose bodies are not made to easily reproduce challenge us to find positive religious language about who they are and how they are fruitful. They challenge us to think about what makes someone male or female.
Where intersex individuals challenge long held assumptions about the ‘natural’ division of humanity into male or female, transgender individuals challenge understandings about the body and gender identity. For those, like me, who have been deeply shaped by feminism, gender reassignment appears to point to a failure of the challenge to gender norms; we see people associating particularly bodies with particular gender identities. They appear to reinforce the sharp distinction between male and female while presenting a new way of inhabiting the gender with which they identify. We need to listen to those who have and are making such transitions and learn from them to reflect again on the complexity of human identity. 10 There are churches which welcome those who do not fit the gendered binaries, but many struggle to make an affirming space for those in transition. There needs to be greater theological education around these issues, and this will include the acknowledgement that we do not necessarily understand.
In practical terms, there are pastoral issues for those who change their baptismal names when they change their gender. We may well need to develop rituals around such changes. There are ongoing questions about marriage of those who now inhabit a gender different from that of their birth certificate. This is particularly difficult within the Church where current prohibitions of same-sex marriage are grounded in complementary views of men and women which see gender binaries as God given. In fact, the debates around sexuality often show unthinking assumptions about gender. Cornwall points out that in these debates intersex tends to be acknowledged as a rare disability to be treated with sympathy, while transgender identities are seen as a product of disordered thinking. 11
It is important that writers, like Cornwall, have challenged the Church to recognize those who do not fit into our neat categories of male and female. The Church needs to learn from Philip in Acts and welcome in those of liminal gender. What these challenges also highlight is the continuing need for the Church to theologically examine its gender assumptions. Unfortunately, debates around what women can and cannot do in the Church, alongside debates about what gay and lesbian people are permitted to do, have led to adversarial rather than exploratory discussions of gender. Much of the progress within the Church to allow women to hold office as priests and bishops has happened without a proper rethinking of these assumptions. While restrictively deterministic ideas of complementarity are held by a minority, many, including those who have argued for women’s inclusion, still work from a soft complementary position grounded in a reading of Genesis 1:27 that maintains that men and women are different even if equal. To be a human person is to exist bodily as either a male or female and to relate to God and other people as such.
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Yes, each of us is an embodied person who needs to live out our life within the particularity of our bodies. For many of us that may well mean we live in relationships that conform to normative social understandings of men and women. However, we need to do so in the knowledge that neatly defined gender identities do not work for everybody. We also need to resist the sense that Genesis 1 and 2 assume difference beyond procreation. As human beings we are made in the image of God (Genesis 1) and made for relationship with God and each other. As the Genesis 2 story tells us, Adam was delighted by the likeness of Eve. Here at last is someone who is bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh. And as we rejoice in the first creation we rejoice too in the inclusive nature of the re-creation offered to all human beings in the person of Christ. There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female: for all of you are one in Christ.
Cornwall points out that our imagery of Christ and of God needs to reflect the diversity of humanity. To assert that Christ is female, intersexed, disabled or of a variant ethnicity is to make a claim not about the historical human body of Christ (for he, like every other human, was limited to being some things to the exclusion of others), but about what Christ (and God in Christ) has become since, in and through the human members of the Body … . It is just as Christ like to be intersexed and impaired as it is to be male and able-bodied.
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