Friends, good morning, and welcome to this conference entitled, Sex, Gender, and Personal Identity. I'm Father Scott Newman, pastor of St. Mary's Church, and president of the Center for Evangelical Catholicism, which is sponsoring our conversation today. And now let us pray, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
God, our Father, you will all men to be saved, and come to knowledge of the truth, as in workers into your great harvest, that the gospel may be preached to every creature, and who are church gathered together by the word of life, and strengthened by the power of the sacraments, may advance in the way of salvation and love, through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God forever and ever. Amen. When I was a boy, my imagination was captivated by Star Trek, and James T. Kirk was one of my first heroes.
In 1969, the final episode of the original series was a story called Turnabout Intruder, in which a woman and Kirk changed bodies while leaving everything else about their personal identities intact. And this is now a common conceit in all forms of fiction, that with the right technology or technique, the essence of a human person can move from one container to another container without that essence being destroyed or even changed, even if men and women move to a body of the opposite sex. And such a notion, of course, first calls into question the very meaning of male and female, and then in due course denies the reality of the distinction. This view of human nature is generally called dualism, and it is ancient.
It recurs time and again throughout history, under many names, and dieses. The ancient Greeks, for example, regarded the soma as the same of the sukai, that is, the body, as the prison of the soul. And the contemporary notion of gender fluidity holds that personal identity, including sexual identity, has nothing to do with the biology of the body, which we are at liberty to alter at will to suit our personal preferences. But in all its various forms, dualism holds that our true nature is entirely spiritual, however that is construed.
And our nature, therefore, is disconnected from the crude physical matter of our bodies, which are less expressions of our personal identity than tools to be used, like a hammer in the hands of a carpenter, tools to be replaced as is judged expedient by the person using the tool. But here arises an insurmountable obstacle for Christians. The gospel of Jesus Christ does not teach dualism of any form and cannot permit dualism of any form. The gospel reveals the substantial unity of body and soul, which is essential to our individual existence and personal identity, the unity of body and soul, which will survive beyond the grave in the resurrection of the dead.
In the glory of the divine life, which the saints will share at the throne of grace, human persons will not be angels who have no bodies. We are and will remain forever what we are when we come to be in our mother's wombs, namely embodied souls or in flesh spirits who are designed and made by God to exist physically and forever as either men or women, according to the Father's eternal plan. And that is why the word became flesh and what among us. For most of the last 2,000 years, the substantial unity of body and soul was almost self-evident to Western people.
But that is no longer true. Consider in 1976, Bruce Jenner won Olympic gold and broke the world decathlon record, earning him the universal acclaim as the greatest athlete. But in 2015, Bruce appeared on the cover of Vanity Fair to reveal that he had become Caitlin, who then received rasurous applause for her courage and authenticity. From that moment, at the very least, every corner of our law, politics, and culture has been intoremual about the very question of what a human person is.
And every instrument of cancellation is now bent on preventing any dissenting voice from ever being heard on these questions again. Hence our meeting today. Our two speakers will address only a few dimensions of this vast galaxy of questions. But we have to start someplace.