Category: Biblical Theology

Posted on

The Promise of Disembodiment? A Big Lie! – Podcast

Image of ghost, produced by double exposure. 1899.

[This podcast is for all my Christian brothers and sisters. Especially those who attend churches that have been seduced by gender ideology.]

Welcome back to the Podcast. I’m glad you’re here with me today. We’re tackling a big cultural question—the growing obsession with what can be called the promise of disembodiment. That’s the idea that our bodies don’t matter, that they’re just clay to be reshaped, husks to be discarded, or even obstacles to the “real” self.

And here’s the spoiler: it’s a lie. A very old lie dressed up in new clothes.

Today, I want to walk with you through this lie, why it’s so appealing, and why the Christian vision of the body offers a much more beautiful, hopeful truth.

Naming the Lie

The cultural signs are everywhere. Abortion framed as a right to bodily “autonomy.” Gender ideology claiming male and female are optional. Assisted suicide presented as dignity. Even futuristic fantasies of uploading our minds into machines. (Yeah, there are some technologists out there that are presenting that as a possibility.)

All of these share the same root assumption: the body doesn’t matter.

Liel Leibovitz, writing recently in First Things, puts it bluntly:

“Those of us who know that we were created in God’s image have no choice but to acknowledge our bodies, those awkward earthly vessels that matter and cannot be manipulated as if they were raw material for our disembodied wills.”

That’s exactly it. Either the body is a gift with meaning—or it’s just raw material, something to use, discard, or redefine.

And when we lose the sense of the sacredness of the body, Leibovitz warns,

“Take away this belief in the sacred character of the body and it becomes not a temple but a speed bump.”

A speed bump. Something in the way. Something to get past. That’s the lie we’re facing.

Why the Lie Is Attractive

Let’s be honest—this lie is appealing because it promises freedom. If my body doesn’t matter, then I can do whatever I want with it. I can erase biological sex. I can evade the consequences of sex. I can even reject life itself if it doesn’t feel worth living.

But this so-called freedom is actually a prison. Leibovitz writes:

“When you do away with the sanctity of the body, you invite tyranny, because you are no longer bound to acknowledge what is real, only what is willed.”

If all that matters is my will, then whoever has the strongest will gets to impose their version of “reality.” And that’s not freedom—that’s bondage.

The Christian Response

Here’s where Christianity gives us something radically different.

The very first chapter of the Bible declares:

“So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them” (Gen. 1:27).

Jesus himself reaffirms this in Matthew 19:4: “Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female?”

The Apostle Paul drives it home: “Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you…? You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your bodies” (1 Cor. 6:19–20).

The Christian response to the lie of disembodiment is simple but profound: your body matters. It’s not a mistake. It’s not an accident. It’s not raw clay for you to remake. It is God’s creation, God’s gift, and God’s temple.

Why This Matters Today

This isn’t just theory. It affects the way we live right now.

  • Children are told they can “change” their sex.
  • The elderly are told their lives are no longer worth living.
  • The unborn are treated as disposable tissue.
  • And technology dangles the fantasy of living without flesh at all.

But Christians know better. As Leibovitz reminds us:

“The rejection of the body is the rejection of limits, and the rejection of limits is the rejection of responsibility. And where responsibility vanishes, so does love.”

That’s the key. Love requires limits. Love requires responsibility. Love requires embodiment.

Think about it: Christ didn’t love us from afar. He took on flesh. He bore our sins in his body. He rose bodily from the grave. Real love shows up in the flesh.

It is no good to say: “Be warmed, be filled, go in peace” to the poor person (James 2:15-16). You gotta give them a cloak. You gotta give them food. That’s what it means to love your neighbor.

The True Promise

So what’s the alternative to the lie?

It’s not escape. It’s not disembodiment. It’s resurrection.

The gospel promises that these very bodies—frail, weak, mortal—will be redeemed. Paul writes in Romans 8:23 that we await “the redemption of our bodies.” Christ himself is the guarantee, the firstfruits of the resurrection.

So, no, we don’t hope for disembodiment. We don’t hope for escape. We hope for restoration, fulfillment, resurrection glory.

Friends, the promise of disembodiment is a lie. It sounds like freedom, but it ends in alienation and death. The true promise is this: your body matters. God made it, Christ redeemed it, and the Spirit indwells it.

So let’s live that truth with courage and joy. Let’s reject the lie. And let’s proclaim to the world: our hope is not to leave the body behind—but to rise with it, made new, forever.

Thanks for joining me today on the Podcast. Until next time, remember—your body is a temple, and your destiny is resurrection.

+++

Celebrate God’s Good Creation

Posted on

When Academia Baptizes a Mountain: The Rise of the New Earth-Religion

Wesley J. Smith’s recent essay (behind the National Review paywall) exposes a remarkable—and troubling—shift inside the world’s most prestigious academic and policy institutions: the rapid ascent of the “nature-rights” movement. What began as environmental fringe activism has now won the imprimatur of Cambridge University, major law societies, scientific journals, and global U.N. networks.

The core claim? Nature itself—mountains, rivers, glaciers, ecosystems—is a living person endowed with legal rights.

Cambridge’s new policy journal, Public Humanities, is devoting an entire issue to this concept. Its call for papers is shockingly explicit:

“We urgently need to change the way we relate to nature. One of the ways to do so is to consider nature as a subject of rights, as a living entity that has the right to exist, to be respected, to fulfil its natural role without arbitrary interference and to be repaired when its rights are violated. The constitution of Ecuador… has recognized nature as a subject of rights and calls it Pacha Mama (Mother Earth)… Dozens more countries have followed… The views of nature as a being is expanding in a variety of realms from the arts, to philosophy and the natural sciences.”

This is not metaphor. It is metaphysics—and law.

The Premise: A Living, Sacred Earth

Smith notes the obvious: most of nature is not alive. Sand, granite, and air do not possess consciousness, agency, or moral standing. Yet Cambridge’s editors treat “Pacha Mama”—the Incan earth-goddess—as a model for modern law. The result is not environmental stewardship but a revival of Gaia-style mysticism 1Gaia mysticism is the belief that the Earth is a single living, divine organism—a conscious being that unifies all life. It treats natural systems as sacred and intelligent, often blending environmentalism with spiritual or neo-pagan reverence for “Mother Earth.”cloaked in academic respectability.

From a Christian vantage, this is Romans 1 in institutional form: worshiping creation rather than the Creator.

The Consequence: Human Beings Become the Problem

If nature has a “right” to exist without human “interference,” then several pillars of civilization become violations:

  • mining and resource extraction
  • large-scale agriculture
  • transportation networks
  • modern sanitation
  • energy development

Smith argues the implications are unavoidable: nature-rights law would make modern prosperity impossible.

This is not conservation; it is an attempt to curtail human exceptionalism—the biblical truth that humans, and not mountains, bear the image of God.

The Epistemology: Mysticism Over Science

The Cambridge initiative treats “indigenous lifeways” as privileged sources of knowledge about nature as a living being. Smith respects indigenous cultures, but he rightly notes:

  • these worldviews are pre-scientific
  • they cannot sustain modern economies
  • they are now selectively weaponized for ideological ends

In other words, the academy now elevates myth when it serves a preferred political religion.

The Politics: Anti-Capitalist and One-Sided

The call for papers warmly encourages scholarship on:

“the relationship between capitalism and the rights of nature.”

Conspicuously missing:

Any mention of the catastrophic environmental records of communist states—from the Aral Sea to Chernobyl to China’s ongoing ecological destruction.

When critiques run only in one direction, ideology—not science—is doing the talking.

Why This Matters: The Elites Are Converting

Smith’s final warning is stark. The nature-rights movement is advancing not because it is rational but because it is religious—an earth-religion that has seduced the institutional elite:

  • universities
  • scientific journals
  • international policy bodies
  • legal societies

People assume the movement is too absurd to gain traction. But fringe beliefs, once adopted by elite institutions, quickly become policy (e.g. transgenderism).

The Theological Stakes

The deeper issue is anthropological. When inanimate nature receives “rights,” humans lose theirs. The Creator/creature distinction collapses. Stewardship becomes theft. Human beings become intruders, not image-bearers (i.e. agents of the Creator.)

What Smith describes is not environmental ethics—it is neo-paganism with legal authority, the inversion of the Christian doctrine of creation and the dignity of the human person.

Unless scientists, policymakers, and Christians recognize what is happening inside the intellectual centers of the West, this new earth-religion will not remain symbolic. It will reshape law, limit human flourishing, and weaken the moral foundation on which human dignity rests.

Source: Academia Embraces the Unscientific Earth Religion of ‘Nature Rights’ by Wesley J. Smith, National Review Online.

+++

Celebrate God’s Good Creation

Posted on

Reality Restored: A Federal Court Upholds the Truth About Sex and the Human Body

On October 22, 2025, a federal judge in Mississippi handed down one of the most significant rulings yet in the legal struggle over “gender identity” mandates. In State of Tennessee et al. v. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Secretary of Health and Human Services, Judge Louis Guirola declared that the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) had exceeded its statutory authority when it redefined “sex discrimination” to include “gender identity” under the Affordable Care Act.

The ruling does more than settle a technical dispute about regulatory authority. While the court’s purpose was to determine whether HHS exceeded its legal authority, its conclusion coincides with a deeper truth I affirm as a Christian — that our bodies are not social constructs or psychological projections, but part of the created order.

The law, in this instance, has returned to reality.

The Case: Tennessee v. HHS

In 2024, the Department of Health and Human Services issued a sweeping regulation titled “Nondiscrimination in Health Programs and Activities.” The rule reinterpreted “sex discrimination” to include five categories: sex characteristics, pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender identity, and sex stereotypes.

That redefinition would have required states, hospitals, and insurance providers that receive federal funds to cover or perform “gender-affirming care” — including puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries — regardless of conscience or medical judgment.

Fifteen states, led by Tennessee, sued. They argued that the rule went far beyond the authority Congress gave HHS in Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act, which prohibits discrimination “on the ground prohibited under Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972.” And as the court noted, Title IX’s meaning of “sex” is biological, not ideological.

The plaintiffs weren’t asking for special treatment. They were asking that federal law mean what it has always meant: that “sex” refers to male and female — not to self-declared identities.

What the Court Decided

Judge Guirola’s 26-page opinion is a model of clarity. He ruled that HHS’s 2024 rule:

  1. Exceeded its statutory authority under Title IX and the Affordable Care Act.
  2. Misapplied the Supreme Court’s Bostock v. Clayton County decision, which concerned employment discrimination under Title VII, not healthcare or education.
  3. Was unlawful in its entirety and therefore vacated nationwide.

The opinion states plainly:

“Congress only contemplated biological sex when it enacted Title IX in 1972. Therefore, the Court finds that HHS exceeded its authority by implementing regulations redefining sex discrimination and prohibiting gender-identity discrimination.”

The judge further held that the refusal to perform or cover procedures for “gender transition” is not discrimination “because of sex.” As he explained, if a doctor performs mastectomies for women with breast cancer but declines to perform them for patients with gender dysphoria, the distinction is not based on the patient’s sex but on the diagnosis itself.

In other words: medicine is about biology, not ideology.

Bostock Doesn’t Apply Here

The court’s analysis directly confronts HHS’s reliance on the Supreme Court’s Bostock ruling, which found that firing an employee for being homosexual or transgender violates Title VII’s ban on sex discrimination.

But Bostock explicitly limited its holding to employment law and said nothing about education, healthcare, or the broader cultural questions now before us. Title IX, unlike Title VII, contains explicit sex-based distinctions — for locker rooms, dormitories, sports teams, and bathrooms. Those provisions would be meaningless if “sex” were redefined to mean “gender identity.”

As Judge Guirola noted, interpreting “sex” as “gender identity” would create legal chaos. Schools could no longer maintain separate facilities for men and women. Sports competition would lose integrity. In the healthcare context, even legitimate medical distinctions — like sex-specific treatments — could be labeled “discrimination.”

That is precisely what the rule attempted to do, and why the court struck it down.

A Restoration of Constitutional Balance

Beyond the immediate issue of gender policy, this ruling restores a key principle of constitutional government: agencies do not have unlimited power to redefine law by executive fiat.

Quoting recent Supreme Court precedent (Loper Bright v. Raimondo), the court affirmed that statutes “have a single, best meaning fixed at the time of enactment.” Agencies are servants of Congress, not substitutes for it.

This is a vital reminder that the administrative state cannot function as an ideological laboratory for social experiments. The judiciary has begun to reassert the boundaries of delegated power, curbing the long pattern of executive agencies imposing cultural revolutions under the guise of “civil rights enforcement.”

The court’s language is unmistakable:

“Agencies do not have unlimited power to accomplish their policy preferences until Congress stops them; they have only the powers that Congress grants.”

That line deserves to be remembered.

Reality, Restored to Law

The court’s approach to statutory interpretation is refreshingly rooted in reality. Citing 1970s dictionaries, Judge Guirola observed that “sex” was universally understood to refer to biological distinctions between male and female. There was no concept of “gender identity” in 1972 law — because there was no such category in common understanding.

As simple as that sounds, it’s revolutionary in today’s legal landscape. The court refused to participate in the linguistic shell game that has corrupted public discourse. It chose to honor what words actually mean.

The Cultural and Moral Stakes

This case is not just about regulatory overreach or administrative law. It’s about truth-telling in a time of cultivated confusion.

For over a decade, we’ve watched federal agencies, medical institutions, and activist networks work to erase the distinction between man and woman — replacing embodied reality with subjective identity. In medicine, this ideology has demanded that doctors violate conscience, that parents affirm medical harm, and that the state compel participation in a collective fiction.

From a Christian Viewpoint: Creation and the Meaning of the Body

From a Christian perspective, this ruling affirms something far deeper than statutory interpretation. It affirms the created order.

Scripture tells us that humanity was made “male and female” (Genesis 1:27), and that this distinction is not arbitrary but sacramental — a sign of the divine image itself. As Notre Dame Professor Abigail Favale has written, the difference between man and woman “is not about completion, but communion.”

When law denies that created truth, it participates in what St. Paul called “the exchange of the truth of God for a lie.” The lie of our age is that the self is sovereign, that the body can be remade at will, and that nature itself must yield to the will of the autonomous individual.

This ruling marks a step back from that precipice.

Rejecting the New Gnosticism

Modern gender ideology, at its core, is a revival of the ancient heresy of Gnosticism — the belief that the material world is an obstacle to true identity, that salvation lies in self-knowledge detached from embodiment.

The court, perhaps without intending to, has reaffirmed the opposite: that embodiment is integral to who we are. Our bodies are not meaningless matter to be “corrected” by technology; they are the visible expression of the person God created.

When the judge wrote that Title IX’s use of “sex” referred to biological distinctions, he was defending more than a word. He was defending a vision of human integrity — one that law, medicine, and theology once shared.

Law and Compassion: Not Enemies but Allies

Critics will call this ruling “cruel,” claiming it denies care to transgender patients. But compassion severed from truth is not compassion — it’s abandonment. To affirm someone in a self-damaging illusion is to cooperate with harm.

True compassion tells the truth even when it hurts. The court did not deny anyone’s humanity; it denied the government’s power to redefine humanity.

Christians must remember: Love without truth is sentimentality. Truth without love is cruelty. But love in truth is the only path to healing.

This ruling doesn’t forbid care; it forbids coerced compliance with an untruth.

The Broader Implications

This decision will likely be appealed, but its reasoning aligns with the broader judicial trend of rejecting agency-driven redefinitions of “sex.” Other courts — particularly in the Fifth and Sixth Circuits — have already pushed back against the Biden administration’s interpretations of Title IX and the Affordable Care Act.

If upheld, the Tennessee ruling will shape how federal law treats sex distinctions in medicine, education, and beyond. It signals the end of a bureaucratic era in which ideology could rewrite biology by regulation.

For Christians and others who believe in the moral coherence of creation, this is not a moment for triumphalism but for thanksgiving and vigilance. The cultural pressure to conform to unreality will not disappear overnight. But truth has a way of resurfacing, and in this case, through the language of the law.

Conclusion: Living in the Truth

Judge Guirola closed his opinion with a reminder:

“Neither Defendants nor this Court have authority to reinterpret or expand the meaning of ‘sex’ under Title IX.”

The law is at its best when it reflects the created order rather than attempting to erase it. For years, American jurisprudence has been asked to pretend that male and female are mere social scripts. This ruling breaks that spell. For now.

In the words of St. Irenaeus, “The glory of God is man fully alive.” To be fully alive is to live in the truth of what we are — body and soul, male or female, created and loved by God.

Source: THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE SOUTHERN DISTRICT OF MISSISSIPPI

+++

Stay Human