You may think your work is very ordinary or unimportant, but if it is being done for God, it IS important. And that is why it needs the help of the Holy Spirit to be done right. Whether it is building chairs, cooking foods at a rescue mission, or writing articles for a website, in all these areas – and more – we need the Lord and his empowering. Yes, you might have long felt gifted as a cook or a woodworker or a writer, but if we are doing these things for Christ and the Kingdom, we need his Spirit to guide us and use us as we make use of those giftings and talents. Without him we are nothing great – but with him we can do great things.

We all have gifts and abilities which have been given to us by God. And God expects us to use them for his glory. It may not always be clear what your particular gifting or talent is, but God does have a job for each of us to do, and he equips us for that task. I recently wrote about what my giftings might be. As I said in that piece:
Often the abilities and talents that you had as a non-Christian are what God will have you make use of in Christian service. Before I became a believer I read a lot and I wrote a lot. Of course I was reading a lot of stuff I now no longer embrace, and I wrote things (such as articles for underground newspapers) that I now no longer agree with.
But where did that talent or ability come from? I believe God gave it to me, and for a while I used it for pagan purposes, but upon becoming a Christian God took those same talents and baptised them into his service. So something I always liked and was good at God used for his work. https://billmuehlenberg.com/2023/01/08/on-reading-and-writing-its-what-i-do/
I also mentioned in that piece that sometimes God may call you to give up a talent or ability:
I think here of the committed Scottish Christian Eric Liddell whose story was made famous in the 1981 film Chariots of Fire. He was born in China to missionary parents, but studied in the UK. He became a terrific runner and even competed in the 1924 Paris Olympics. But he gave this up, returning to China in 1925 as a missionary, where he died 20 years later. He said he ran for the glory of God.
What might be a general rule of thumb is this: Usually we are to use the abilities and talents that we have, knowing that they come from God, although we always need to be willing to give them up if we are asked to do so. What ultimately matters is not any great talents or gifts that we have, but our obedience.
I say all this because as I keep reading through the book of Exodus I was again struck with this notion of God gifting his people to perform his tasks. Exodus is known for several things, most noteworthy being the actual exodus of God’s people out of Egypt. The first third of the book discusses that (chapters 1-18). The next six chapters (19-24) are about Sinai and the giving of the law. The last chapters (25-40) are about the tabernacle and its construction.
Sixteen entire chapters are devoted to this final topic, and great detail is provided there. One thing that stood out to me as I again read this account is that of two individuals who are specially named concerning this task. I refer to Bezalel and Oholiab. They are referred to a number of times in Ex. 31-38, and a few times in Chronicles.
We might call them master craftsmen. That they are specifically highlighted in these chapters tells us of their importance in the making of the tabernacle. Consider these two passages:
Exodus 31:1-11 The Lord said to Moses, “See, I have called by name Bezalel the son of Uri, son of Hur, of the tribe of Judah, and I have filled him with the Spirit of God, with ability and intelligence, with knowledge and all craftsmanship, to devise artistic designs, to work in gold, silver, and bronze, in cutting stones for setting, and in carving wood, to work in every craft. And behold, I have appointed with him Oholiab, the son of Ahisamach, of the tribe of Dan. And I have given to all able men ability, that they may make all that I have commanded you: the tent of meeting, and the ark of the testimony, and the mercy seat that is on it, and all the furnishings of the tent, the table and its utensils, and the pure lampstand with all its utensils, and the altar of incense, and the altar of burnt offering with all its utensils, and the basin and its stand, and the finely worked garments, the holy garments for Aaron the priest and the garments of his sons, for their service as priests, and the anointing oil and the fragrant incense for the Holy Place. According to all that I have commanded you, they shall do.”
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This is the simple yet profound good news of Christianity: God and man may be reconciled through the God-man, Jesus Christ. This is orthodox Christianity, the Christianity that Machen worked so fearlessly to defend and that modern liberalism still works so fiercely to oppose.

J. Gresham Machen lamented the loss of the conception of God and the consciousness of sin on the modern mind. According to Machen, modern liberalism had, in the first instance, challenged the need even to have a conception or knowledge of God. To inquire after a knowledge of God is the death of religion, it was argued. We ought not to know God but to feel Him; and if we are to conceive of Him, we must do so in vague and general terms. God is Father, but this means nothing more than His universal fatherhood for all creatures, which in turn encourages a universal brotherhood among all peoples.
Machen was, of course, willing to acknowledge that the Scriptures speak in one sense of God’s universal fatherhood (see Acts 17:28; Heb. 12:9). But only a few isolated texts provide support; the predominant understanding of God as Father in the Scriptures is in relation to His redeemed people. For Machen, however, the fatherhood of God was not the center or core of the Christian doctrine of God. Rather, a single attribute “render[s] intelligible all the rest”: the “awful transcendence of God.” Machen was speaking about the awesome holiness of God—His distinctness, His otherness. This, for Machen, was the truth of which modern liberalism had lost sight. As a result, liberalism had erased the Creator-creature distinction that is so fundamental to true Christianity. It had instead produced a pantheistic God who is simply part of the “world process.” God was no longer a distinct being; His life was in our life and our life was in His life. In Machen’s own words:
Modern liberalism, even when it is not consistently pantheistic, is at any rate pantheizing. It tends everywhere to break down the separateness between God and the world, and the sharp distinction between God and man.
A corollary of this (mis)conception of God was a (mis)understanding of man and, in particular, “the loss of the consciousness of sin.” Since God is no longer conceived of as holy and transcendent, He rests lightly on the modern mind, and thus does sin as well. Machen sought to discern the precipitators for this shift in modern thinking. Writing shortly after World War I (1914–18), he believed that war produced an overfocus on the sins of others to the neglect of one’s own sins. In war, where one side is viewed as the embodiment of evil, it is easy not to see the evil in one’s own heart. There was also the problem of the collectivism of the modern state, in which everyone is a victim of circumstances, obscuring “the individual, personal character of guilt.” Behind the shift in the modern doctrine of sin, however, Machen saw a more sinister and significant cause: paganism. By paganism, Machen did not mean barbarianism. During the height of the Greek Empire, paganism was not grotesque but glorious. It was a world-and-life view that found “the highest goal of human existence in the healthy and harmonious and joyous development of existing human faculties.” That is to say, humanity is essentially good and can attain the good, through the proper engagement and discipline of its mind and body. For Machen, such a perspective had become dominant in his day, replacing the Christian view of sin and personal guilt before a holy God.
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Written by Robert S. Smith |
Tuesday, December 7, 2021
Helping and supporting those who are navigating gender identity conflicts requires considerable wisdom and deep compassion. But unless our care is grounded in and guided by anthropological reality (as revealed in Scripture), it will neither be truly wise nor genuinely compassionate. The theological task, therefore, is paramount and necessarily comes first.

Understanding Human Constitution
In his recent book, Embodied: Transgender Identities, the Church & What the Bible Has to Say,[1] Preston Sprinkle helpfully maps out the four main views of human constitution —i.e., the relationship between the material and immaterial aspects of the human person. The first is physicalism, which denies the existence of an immaterial soul or spirit. The second is non-reductive physicalism, which affirms that we are more than our bodies but denies a body/soul distinction. The third is soft dualism, which acknowledges a body/soul distinction but insists that both are necessary for human personhood. The fourth is strong dualism, which sees body and soul as fundamentally distinct substances and equates the human person with the soul, not the body.[2]
Sprinkle, quite rightly, deems views one and four to be sub-Christian. His own view (I think) seems to hover somewhere between two and three. However, in my judgment, non-reductive physicalism falls somewhat short of the biblical presentation of humanity. While its proponents are quite right to point out that both the Hebrew term nepesh and Greek term psychē often refer to the whole person rather than just the inner person (e.g., Gen. 2:7; 1 Pet. 3:20), the question is whether the Bible draws a distinction between the inner and outer person. The unequivocal answer of both testaments is that it does (e.g., Eccl. 12:6; 2 Cor. 4:16). And, what’s more, it sometimes uses both nepesh and psychē to refer to the inner person specifically (e.g., Gen. 35:18; Matt. 10:28).[3]
So that leaves us with soft dualism or, what I think is a better term, dualistic holism, the view that human beings are “integral personal-spiritual-physical wholes—single beings consisting of different parts, aspects, dimensions, and abilities that are not naturally independent or separable.”[4] It also brings us to the question I want to pursue in the remainder of this article: How does such an understanding of human constitution help us assess (what might be called) spiritual gender identity theory —i.e., the claim that a person can have the spirit or soul of one sex in the body of another?
Before proceeding, I want to stress that this is not a pastoral article; it is an exercise in theological thinking. It will certainly have important pastoral implications. But it’s not my purpose here to tease these out. Helping and supporting those who are navigating gender identity conflicts requires considerable wisdom and deep compassion. But unless our care is grounded in and guided by anthropological reality (as revealed in Scripture), it will neither be truly wise nor genuinely compassionate. The theological task, therefore, is paramount and necessarily comes first.
Assessing Spiritual Gender Identity Theory
The Implausibility of a Body-Soul Mismatch
The holism of the scriptural presentation of anthropological constitution leaves no room for a conception of human beings as “composed of two separate entities joined together in an uneasy alliance.”[5] Accordingly, John Cooper regards it as “anti-scriptural” to think of the soul as being “in tension with the body.”[6] The reason for this is that body and soul, although distinct, interpenetrate one another —we are just as much ensouled bodies as we are embodied souls. As a consequence, “[b]iological processes are not just functions of the body as distinct from the soul or spirit, and mental and spiritual capacities are not seated exclusively in the soul or spirit. All capacities and functions belong to the human being as a whole, a fleshly-spiritual totality.”[7]
My thesis, then, is this: such synthetic integration necessarily rules out the possibility of an ontological mismatch between the (visible) body and the (invisible) soul. Consequently, if a person’s body is unambiguously sexed as male, it is simply not conceivable that their soul could be female (and vice versa). Indeed, a radical elemental disjunction of this kind would effectively “destroy the unity of the human person which is at the heart of a biblical anthropology.”[8]
Terrance Tiessen’s Counter-Proposal
Nevertheless, it is precisely this kind of disconnection that has been proposed (albeit tentatively) by theologian Terrance Tiessen.[9] To make his case, Tiessen relies on a particular version of Thomistic dualism drawn from the work of J. P. Moreland and Scott Rae.[10] According to Moreland and Rae, “the human person is identical to its soul, and the soul comes into existence at the point of conception.”[11] From that moment on, the soul “begins to direct the development of a body” guided by “the various teleological functions latent within the soul.”[12] Therefore, not only is the soul “ontologically prior to the body,” but “the various biological operations of the body have their roots in the internal structure of the soul, which forms a body to facilitate those operations.”[13] On the basis of such an understanding, Tiessen draws the conclusion that the “maleness or femaleness of human beings is an aspect of the soul.”[14]
He then considers the reality of the Fall in order to hypothesise “the possibility of soul/body disjunction.”[15] He begins by drawing attention to the phenomenon of DSD/intersex. His argument is that while each person’s soul is either male or female, in some cases “abnormalities occur in the development of the person’s body so that doctors find it extremely difficult to say whether the person who has just been born is female or male.”[16] Then, by extension, he suggests that perhaps others (he cites Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner as an example), whose bodies are unambiguously male or female, might experience a total “incongruence between the sex of their soul and the sex of their body.”[17] So, while Tiessen rejects the idea that “sexual identity is a social construct” and affirms that our goal should be “to live as God has created us,” his contention is that the truth of our created sex is not ultimately found in the body but in the soul.[18]
Responding to Tiessen’s Hypothesis
In response to Tiessen’s proposal, four points can be made.
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