Puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and gender reassignment surgery are all used to relieve suffering—not physical suffering, but the psychological and emotional suffering caused by gender dysphoria. Most feel alleviating that suffering is a moral imperative; therefore, so is allowing these interventions. Few realize, however, that the psychological and emotional burden often remains even after transition.

Think about it,” my friend said, his voice tinged with aggression. “Why did you become a man? Because you didn’t have any other option socially. Wouldn’t it be better if kids didn’t have such constraints on who they could be?”
My friend (let’s call him Jim) had a preteen with no history of gender dysphoria who had recently come out as nonbinary. Jim was supportive, even enthusiastic. He shared his story with local news and invited questions and dialogue from our small church. So I asked him over to my home to hear more and, when the moment seemed right, express my fears for his family.
Which is undoubtedly why Jim preempted me by asking why I chose and continued to choose the male gender. To reply that, lacking power to swap my male gametes and DNA for female, I had no such choice would have cut too quickly to the heart of the matter. So I deflected the question.
Biding my time did nothing to assuage Jim’s anger. For him, expressing or even implying concern with his parenting choices or his child’s decisions was out of bounds. By voicing that concern, which I eventually did more explicitly, I made him and his child “unsafe.” He seems, in fact, to have experienced my fear for his child as tantamount to assault. Our friendship was over.
I have no doubt that Jim’s motivation was to protect his family. But he had been seduced by a culture-wide mass movement bent on “the quest for freedom from natural limits,” as the English theologian Oliver O’Donovan described it in a series of indispensable lectures when Jim and I were still in diapers. That movement wishes to dispense with human nature especially with regard to sexual difference and sexuality. Nature, after all, implies limitation. “To hate one’s own flesh is the limit of self-contradiction to which our freedom tends,” O’Donovan said. “It is the point at which our assertion of ourselves against nature becomes an attack upon ourselves.”
Happily, these forty-year-old lectures have been reissued in a slim volume that includes a new introduction by Matthew Lee Anderson and a retrospective by O’Donovan. Begotten or Made? remains relevant for its clarifying theological analyses of abortion, in vitro fertilization (and the concomitant disposal of embryos), surrogacy, contraception, marriage, and more. O’Donovan begins, however, by addressing what in 1983 was called “transsexual surgery,” a topic his original audience might have thought a waste of time but will strike no one that way today.
“The great intellectual challenge that faces our age in view of these innovations is not to understand that this or that may or may not be done,” writes O’Donovan, “but to understand what it is that would be done, if it were to be done.” A careful look at what was considered best practice for treating gender dysphoria stood to clarify for O’Donovan’s Thatcher-era audience where our culture’s quest to shed our natural limits was taking us. Likewise, O’Donovan’s little enchiridion will help today’s reader begin to grasp just what it is we do when we begin IVF treatments, use contraception, undertake surrogacy, or undergo so-called “gender affirming care.”
First, it reveals “our cultural conception of freedom as the freedom not to suffer,” a conception that implies a moral imperative to continually push back humanity’s natural limits in order to overcome suffering. Second, it brings to the fore the accompanying “exclusive importance of compassion among the virtues.” Compassion moves to relieve suffering, he writes, and so “circumvents thought, since it prompts us immediately to action.” All of which means that we have little idea what we are doing in continually pushing back the boundaries of human nature.
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As fate—or perhaps providence—would have it, Darby’s premillennial eschatology and the stark intensity of his heaven-earth dualism caught on not just in Southern England, but in America. Reshaped in the hands of other ministers, theologians, and popularizers, his ideas and those of his Plymouth Brethren colleagues would in due time change the trajectory of American evangelicalism and the nation’s culture. The ideas presidents kicked around in the Oval Office can be traced back to his work.

A century ago, dispensationalism was the most dynamic force in American Christianity. Generations before Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth and the Left Behind novels took America by storm, millions fervently believed the rapture could happen at any moment. The signs of the times seemed to say as much, since according to the dispensationalist reading of Revelation, plagues, wars, and a one-world government headed by the Antichrist would come as soon as Jesus spirited his people away to heaven. 
The institutional empire of nonprofits, colleges, and parachurch organizations built by Dwight Moody and his protégés grew in part out of this expectancy. So did the ministries of innumerable premillennialist evangelists, including the aging Billy Sunday. It is what drove sales of that landmark piece of dispensationalist scholasticism, the Scofield Reference Bible. Most important of all, belief in Christ’s imminent coming drew many thousands to burgeoning Bible colleges, serious-minded prophecy conferences, and missions agencies. These institutions inculcated the movement’s theology in a vast army of pastors and interested laymen, who disseminated it to their readers, followers, and congregants. While dispensational thought involved far more than eschatology, all this cultural momentum came from apocalyptic speculation and the scientific aura about its inductive, literalist approach to the Scriptures. A betting man might have put his money on dispensationalism swallowing the nascent Fundamentalist movement whole. 
A betting man would have backed the wrong horse. To be sure, other cultural and theological forces like covenant theology also had significant numbers of adherents in the interwar period. But as Daniel G. Hummel shows in his invaluable new book The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism, neither liberalism nor covenant theology proved to be the movement’s undoing. It was instead dispensationalism’s own vast cultural appeal. By the turn of the twenty-first century, one could hardly find an evangelical theologian who took traditional dispensationalist ideas seriously. What remained, Hummel writes, was “a movement with no vested national leaders, a scholastic tradition with no young scholars, [and] a commercial behemoth with no internal cohesion.” Dispensationalism was dying.
Which is why the story Hummel relates badly needs telling. Magisterial studies like Matthew Avery Sutton’s American Apocalypse, Frances FitzGerald’s The Evangelicals, and George Marsden’s Fundamentalism and American Culture left unexamined the depth of dispensationalism’s impact on the broader evangelical movement, and the roots of dispensationalist theology lay outside the purview of these studies. Hummel, by contrast, takes the reader back to Plymouth, a midsize port city on England’s southern coast that birthed the nonconformist sect known as the Plymouth Brethren.
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