No amount of medical mangling or foreign organs can change a man’s body into a woman’s, even if it allows him to gestate, because his body-plan remains male in every cell, every chromosome, every organ, and every bone. A transplanted uterus no more makes him a “complete woman” than sewing on gills would make him a fish.  

Forty years ago, Monty Python’s Life of Brian mocked a male character who wanted to become a woman and have babies. “You haven’t got a womb, [Stan]!” John Cleese’s character reminds him. “Where’s the fetus going to gestate? You going to keep it in a box?”   
For the most part, men who identify as women (and vice-versa) accept that no amount of cross-dressing, hormones, or surgery can allow them to play the opposite sex’s role in reproduction. As Cleese rightly observed, men can’t have babies because they haven’t got wombs. 
But what if they did? What if medical science enabled “womb transplants,” giving men the ability to carry and bear children within their bodies? Would that make them women?  
In her book, The Genesis of Gender, Abigail Favale tells the story of the first real-life attempt at a “womb transplant,” which took place in Germany in 1931. Danish artist Einar Wegener, who went by the name “Lili,” was obsessed with becoming a “complete” woman. For him, that meant the ability to carry and bear children.  
Wegener turned to Magnus Hirschfeld, a German physician who invented the term “transsexual.” In four grisly surgeries, Hirschfeld removed Wegener’s male genitalia and transplanted a cadaver uterus into his body. Predictably, Wegener’s body rejected the organ, and he died shortly thereafter. That tragic ending to Wegener’s story didn’t stop Hollywood from celebrating him as a so-called “transgender pioneer” in the 2015 movie, The Danish Girl. 
In the 1930s, the technology to do successful “womb transplants” didn’t exist. What about today? In a recent talk, Alicyn Simpson of the University of Pennsylvania Medical Center Children’s Hospital described the possibility of uterine transplants, this time from live donors.  
Citing a number of studies, Simpson (a man who describes himself as a woman) concluded that most men who identify as women would be interested in a uterine transplant. A potential source, Simpson said, are women who “don’t want” their “parts” anymore because they hope to be men.  
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Written by Nicholas T. Batzig |
Tuesday, July 16, 2024
Moses acted servant in the house of God,  whereas Christ acted as the Son over the house. The difference is one of authority. Jesus has divine authority over the church of God since he is himself the eternal divine Son. The writer hotes this contrast when he says, “Jesus has been counted worthy of more glory than Moses—as much more glory as the builder of a house has more honor than the house itself. (For every house is built by someone, but the builder of all things is God.)” (Heb. 3:3-4). Christ is deserving of greater glory because he built the house of God as God incarnate. 

There might not be a passage of Scripture more underappreciated for its rich theological, ecclesiological, and eschatological focus than that which we find in Hebrews 3:1-6. The writer was wishing to highlight the betterness of Christ to everyone in the Old Testament economy to keep the eyes of those to whom he was writing on Christ. The danger was for them to turn back to the weak and beggarly elements of Judaism, with its focus on external ceremonies and preparatory types. All of these things having passed away, the author firsts compares and contrasts Moses and Christ. Since Moses was the typical redeemer of the Old Covenant, it would make sense for the writing to highlight the relationship between the type (i.e., Moses) and the antitype (i.e., Christ). There is a world of theological riches that open to us when we carefully consider this text. 
The first thing that the writer does is to draw our attention to Jesus as “the apostle and high priest of our confession.”Jesus is both the great Prophet, revealing the true God, to His people and the great High Priest, representing believers to God by His atoning sacrifice and continual intercession. He is the Prophet of all the prophets in that he immediately reveals God as God manifest in the flesh. Among all the other prophets, Moses stands unique. In one sense, he is like Jesus in that all the other prophets in the Old Covenant church come under his ministry. Geerhardus Vos explained, 
“Moses. . .is placed not merely at the head of the succession of prophets, but placed over them in advance. His authority extends over subsequent ages. The later prophets do not create anything new; they only predict something new. It is true, Moses can be co-ordinated with the prophets: [Deut. 18:18; ‘a prophet like unto thee’]. Nevertheless the prophets themselves are clearly conscious of the unique position of Moses. They put his work not so much on a line with their own, as with the stupendous eschatological work of Jehovah for His people expected in the latter days [cp. Isa. 10:26; 11:11; 63:11, 12; Jer. 23:5–8; Mic. 7:15].”1
Additionally, Moses authorized the building of the tabernacle with its priesthood and sacrificial system. Until the formation of the Aaronic priesthood, Moses acted in a priestly way among the people of God. He was also a kingly figure in his role as the lawgiver. Vos again noted,
“According to Num. 12:7, Moses was set over all God’s house. It is entirely in keeping with this prospective import of Moses and his work, that his figure acquires typical proportions to an unusual degree. He may be fitly called the redeemer of the Old Testament. Nearly all the terms in use for the redemption of the New Testament can be traced back to his time. There was in his work such a close connection between revealing words and redeeming acts as can be paralleled only from the life of Christ. And the acts of Moses were to a high degree supernatural, miraculous acts. This typical relation of Moses to Christ can easily be traced in each of the three offices we are accustomed to distinguish in the soteric work of Christ. The ‘prophet’ of Deut. 18:15, reaching his culmination in the Messiah, is ‘like unto’ Moses. 
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Christian theologians embrace divine simplicity because it is biblical. It also invites us to trust in His unity, share His sufficiency, and love all of Him. We cannot rank the divine persons; they are distinct from each other but not divided from each other. They are not three parts that add up to a single godhead. John Calvin understood the name God to be “the one simple essence, comprehending three persons.” In our chaos we can come to a God in whom, as the Athanasian Creed puts it, “the divinity of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is one, the glory equal, the majesty coeternal.” Such as the one is, so are the three. “None in this Trinity is before or after, none is greater or smaller” (arts. 6, 7, 25). We can trust one God in three equal, co-eternal persons.

One of the best questions we can ask is also the most challenging: “What is God?”[1] As the Church has searched Scripture for answers it has consistently used a surprising word to describe the divine Being: simplicity. God is simple—not in the sense of “easily understood” but as “being free from division into parts, and therefore from compositeness.”[2] God is one (Deut. 6:4); He is both unique and indivisible.
The word simplicity, like trinity, is not found in the Bible, but reformed confessions affirm that the doctrine is biblical. The Lutheran Augsburg Confession states that “there is one Divine Essence…which is God: eternal, without body, without parts” (art. 1). Dutch Reformed believers confess the same thing: “There is a single and simple spiritual being, whom we call God” (Belgic Confession, art. 1). In the Church of England divine simplicity is taught in the Thirty-nine Articles, “There is but one living and true God, everlasting, without body, parts, or passions” (art. 1). The Westminster Assembly—which convened to modify these articles but then chose to replace them—retained the exact language of Anglicanism (Westminster Shorter Catechism 2.1), as did English Baptists (London Baptist Confession, 2.1). These confessions draw on the testimony of church fathers like Augustine, medieval theologians like Aquinas, and reformers like Calvin, Melanchthon, and Zwingli.
Divine simplicity is firmly embedded in the reformed confessional tradition. If we understand simplicity, we may come to join the doctors of the church in treasuring this doctrine.
What Is Divine Simplicity?
When God revealed Himself to Moses at the burning bush He identified Himself as being—the “I am” (Ex. 3:14). Unlike everyone else, He is not from somewhere or the fruit of ancestors. He is not even a species within a genus. Instead, He is the God who is, “the ultimate principle and …category of all things.”[3] Herman Bavinck wrote, “God is the real, the true being, the fullness of being, the sum total of all reality and perfection, the totality of being, from which all other being owes its existence.”[4] God is truly “all and in all” (Col. 3:11). Drawing from texts like these, divine simplicity maintains that in God there is “no composition, no contradiction, no tension, no process.”[5]
No Composition
God is not a sum of parts, as we are, made up of body and soul, atoms and neurons, past, present, and future. God’s attributes do not add up to what He is. As a child I wore out a book that described a little boy’s attributes—quickness, loudness, bravery—that made him who he was. Here is the climax of the book: “Put it all together and you’ve got me!” That’s true for us. It is untrue for God. Each of God’s attributes is identical with Himself and His other perfections because each is infinite.
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