Redeeming Gender Upplaga 1

The one-sex theory (or one-sex model) continues to be a major influence on Christian thinking about sex and gender, even if it is largely unacknowledged. Its residue remains an inhibiting and distorting factor in the attempt to transform unjust gendered practices by Gospel graces. It conveniently relativizes the near impregnable cultural notion that there are two sexes, which delegitimizes intersex, transgender, and third sex people. The very pervasiveness of the one-sex theory in history proves that attempts to locate its two-sex replacement in Scripture and Tradition are the consequences of poor hermeneutics. The recovery of traditional meanings of sex and gender provide a powerful and motivating impetus in the moral development of that same tradition, while the cultural specificities of the two-sex theory require a strong degree of prophetic critique. Reddeming Gender is dissected in two parts. Part 1 explains the legacy of both the one-sex and two-sex theories, and fulfils the first 2 aims. Adrian Thatcher uncovers the one-sex theory and its assumptions, and indicates its presence in early Christian thought. It then describes what happened in our social, intellectual and theological history, which leaves us thinking that there are two sexes. In Part 2, Thatcher contributes to an emerging theology of gender in which women and men are fully and equally valued, and in which sexual difference (insofar as it exists at all), is capable of transformation into joyful communion, reflecting the very life of God the Holy Trinity. He exposes the reliance of much Church and theological teaching about sex and gender either on biblical proof texts or upon the language and nomenclature of late modernity, rather than upon considerations of Theology and Christology. Thatcher also indicates how Theology and Christology, in the area of gender, envisions the redemption of human relationships.