Mar 17 Tue
Did God create human beings as male and female?
God endowed human beings with souls and sexed bodies.
In the beginning, God created human beings as male and female to reflect His image through their reciprocal complementarity, and to enable their mutual self-giving as a fundamental expression of love and unity.
The statement “Male and female, He created them," is immediately followed by the blessing: "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth." This dual creation is not arbitrary but essential to humanity's dignity and vocation: both sexes bear God's image equally yet distinctly, called to dominion over creation through their partnership.
Thus, sexual differentiation is not an accident, but a cause for celebration and wonder. We are living beings, dust of the earth and divine breath, body and soul; a substantial unity from which flows the dignity of each person and the dignity of the sexed human body.
This complementarity manifests that all enjoy an equal dignity, while their differences enable mutual support. Masculinity and femininity are two different ways of the human 'being a body’, revealing the body as a ‘nuptial’ sign of the person, oriented to giving oneself.
The Genesis narrative describes human beings with their sexual differences. The incarnation of body and spirit reveals who we are, in such a way that the body makes the spirit visible.
An opposing view is Gnosticism—both past and present—for which the body, matter, is a reality of little consequence, superfluous; the only thing that matters is the spiritual dimension.
The book of Genesis, on the other hand, in contrast to this pernicious Gnostic spiritualism, proposes a healthy Christian materialism that highlights the dignity of the flesh, of the body, understood as a gift of creation.
There is in human beings a reality of body and spirit, and we are called to be connected to what we are.
However, in contrast to this, for the gender theory, there is no Creator; we are free to create ourselves. The body is an object without intrinsic meaning; using technology, we can give it whatever meaning we want. We do not receive meaning from God, nor from our bodies, nor from the world: we impose it.
We are faced with a mentality steeped in merely emotions: “If I want to be, if I can do it, I will do it.” In this theory, the body becomes a mere object, like clay shaped by drugs or the surgeon’s hands. Transgender anthropology follows these paths.
Being a creature, rather than an accident, establishes the human person as someone in relation to God. We are not alone in the cosmos.
Once the human person is understood as created, individuality, including sex, becomes a gift that can be accepted, rather than something that must be fabricated.
Reflecting on the goodness of the created order will help us view the gift of our bodies with reverence, practicing the free acceptance of our being, what we are.
Male-female creation images of the Trinitarian communion: through love, God imprints His reality of love and communion on humanity.
With some excerpts from Francisco Bobadilla