I am grateful to Preston Sprinkle for his generous introduction to my book and his invitation to start a conversation with me about its content.
Preston is a Biblical scholar, author, and Vice President for Eternity Bible College’s Boise extension. He holds to conservative (heterosexual) ethics on marriage but wants the church to do a better job loving sexual minorities. His forthcoming book, People to be Loved, works toward shoring up traditional readings of controversial passages while critiquing conservatives for hypocrisy, homophobia, and more. You can pre-order your copy here.
I won’t copy his entire blog post. Read it here. But the following gives you a glimpse of the way he is trying to read my book–generously, carefully, critically.
I can’t ask for more than that.
Among other things he says:
“Over the summer, I spent many hours combing through Megan DeFranza’s fascinating book Sex Difference in Christian Theology: Male, Female, and Intersex in the Image of God. I don’t think I’m being overly dramatic when I say that Megan’s book is quite simply one of the most important and challenging books I’ve read in the last couple years. This is why I’m going to spend a few blogs interacting with it.
…
This [medical evidence of intersex] certainly challenges my assumptions about sexuality. Do we determine someone’s biological sex based on chromosomes or genitalia? What if a baby has gonads and a uterus? Is it a boy or girl? In the case of genital ambiguity, who gets to decide what sex the baby is? Could it be that some people are born neither male or female?”
(Marginal note from Megan: For the record, “gonads” is the generic term for both ovaries and testes. I think Preston meant to ask “What if a baby has testes and a uterus?” Still, this is a combination I do not cite. But there are people with testes and a vagina and clitoris, and people with one testis and one ovary… or gonadal tissue that is testicular in some parts and ovarian in others, among other variations of intersex. But back to Preston’s introduction…)
…
“Christians can’t just shove their fingers in their ears and say, “No! No! LahLahLahLahLah…” We need to interact with these questions in order to cultivate a robust Christian anthropology. Megan has done the church a great service in raising many good questions that most of us have never considered.
However…”
I was grateful for the introduction and still am.
He left readers hanging until today. I was wondering when (and how) the other shoe would drop. You can read his second post here. I’ll respond to him in a little while but I want to give you time to digest these first two posts from him and invite you to to see what you think.