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Gender as Love: A Theological Account of Human Identity, Embodied Desire, and Our Social Worlds
In recent years, the issue of gender has become a topic of great importance and has generated discussion from the kitchen table to the academy. It is an issue that churches and Christian educational institutions are grappling with as well, since gender is a crucial aspect of identity, affecting how we engage socially and understand our embodiment. Upstream from all these conversations lies a more basic What is gender?
In Gender as Love, Fellipe do Vale takes a theological approach to understanding gender, employing both biblical exegesis and historical theology and emphasizing the role human love plays in shaping our identities. He engages with and explains current theories and debates, but his approach is unique in that it avoids the present impasse between social constructionist and biological essentialist paradigms. His emphasis is on love as identity forming.
This fresh, holistic approach makes an important contribution to the literature and will benefit scholars and students alike. Foreword by Beth Felker Jones.
In Gender as Love, Fellipe do Vale takes a theological approach to understanding gender, employing both biblical exegesis and historical theology and emphasizing the role human love plays in shaping our identities. He engages with and explains current theories and debates, but his approach is unique in that it avoids the present impasse between social constructionist and biological essentialist paradigms. His emphasis is on love as identity forming.
This fresh, holistic approach makes an important contribution to the literature and will benefit scholars and students alike. Foreword by Beth Felker Jones.
265 pages, Kindle Edition
Published November 21, 2023
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October 13, 2023
In this cultural moment, gender is one of those things that it seems we are not allowed to have thoughtful, quiet nuance on. There are two sides: you either believe in a highly prescriptive masculinity and femininity that reflects something essential about who you are, or you believe that gender is entirely a social construct that can thus be deconstructed, reconstructed, and remixed in endless ways. The essentialist view seems for some to be the only viable option for those who believe in the "givenness" and goodness of the material world, and yet others are able to highlight the many ways in which it results in excruciating oppression—so how could it be good? The social construction view has been embraced by many precisely because it seems so able to confront this oppression. Yet at the same time if gender is merely the construction of different social groups in their own cultural contexts and there is no stable ground underneath that, we forfeit any ability to morally confront the subjugation of, say, women or intersex/DSD individuals in other cultures or other times.
Fellipe do Vale believes that there is a better way forward than either of these options in the way that we think about and do gender. With his new work, Gender as Love, he makes the case that gender is something worthy of theological reflection, and that in fact theologians could offer a word that is clearer, more compassionate, and more just than any offerings available in the current conversation. His primary convictions are these:
1. Contra social constructionists of gender and especially sex, reality as it comes at us in our sexed bodies is stable beyond merely what we make of it; it is real and not merely a social matrix.
2. Contra gender essentialists, gender is more complicated than just a straight line derivation from reproductive biology or else it would always and at all times present in exactly the same way.
His example for the first conviction is that while his grandfather lived in 20th century Brazil and "observed standards of masculinity" to which do Vale doesn't hold, that the two of them are nevertheless the same kind of thing. Similarly, it is important for him to be able to tell his daughter that while they were of a different time and culture than her, "women such as Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth" are nevertheless similar to her in meaningful and important ways and that she could therefore aspire to be like them.
In regard to the second conviction, he says this:
He distills these convictions into four theses for "tenable theologies of gender":
1. Gender is an essence, though this is not reducible to or identical with biological determinism or biological essentialism.
2. The complexity of gender, the noetic effects of sin, and the current conditions of oppression complicate our epistemic access to gender’s essence. All the same, we can be assured that issues surrounding gender will be rectified in the eschaton.
3. Any theory or theology of gender must be consistent with and supportive of the cultivation of justice.
4. Gender is concerned with selves or identity and with the way selves organize social goods pertaining to their sexed bodies.
Much of the book, then, is given to explaining and defending these four theses. Ultimately, do Vale ends up with a view of gender as something that comes at us in our lived experience, and it is a complex mixture of biology and history and culture and ideology all at once that we don't even necessarily need to police in a theological way. He leverages 1 Corinthians 11 to say that "The interesting thing about a Christian theology of gender is that there is, in fact, nothing (or, at most, very few things) explicitly state in Scripture about what women and men must be like in context-independent ways or what the specific goods are by which a woman or a man must be identified." He unpacks that further to say that even where Scripture calls men and women specifically to act in certain ways, "they are often injunctions about how best to live as Christians within the culture in which they find themselves, a culture having already provided gendered goods for them to love. In their world, these are gendered goods; how should a Christian think about them?"
This isn't so much a gender agnosticism as much as an epistemic restraint: though we have moral grounds for the evaluation of some goods, we must be very careful not to say more than we actually have warrant to say. In contrast to Christian theologians who task themselves with recovering a purported biblical manhood and/or womanhood, that is, trying to say something ontological about who all men are or who all women are, do Vale's explicit aim is to move this conversation out of the world of ontology and into the world of ethics.
For some, I suspect that this will probably feel somewhat unsatisfying. Many, if not all of us, feel that existential ache to understand ourselves, and it would be quite lovely to have an exhaustively specific divine word outlining every corner of what our sexed and gendered existence must and must not be and how to make sense of the ways in which our bodies and minds and desires deviate from what seems to be the average experience. For do Vale, though, a project to find such a word is doomed from the start.
In many ways, I appreciate what he's trying to do. I come into this world, into 21st century American culture, as a male not having chosen what this culture deems to be acceptable norms for males, and finding that while some of them are true of me, others are not. I hate football, I'm vegetarian, and I'm not a gym beast. But on the other hand, I'm pretty handy with house projects, I do the work on my own car, and I have a mustache. I could go on. I didn't choose for any of these to be male stereotypes that I either align with or buck against. Some of them are ephemerally cultural (Working on cars being a "masculine" activity that Paul quite certainly did not engage in!) while others stem from my biological existence (e.g. my mustache).
I think that do Vale would encourage me to come at these gendered norms as a Christian not with heavy-handed pressuring to live up to every last one, nor with the indifference of "you do you" with regard to gender. Instead, I should come at them with a mind of moral evaluation. For example, the alpha masculinity of the alt right that trades on the objectification and subjugation of women is something that a Christian ought to reject because it is unjust and screechingly grinds against the ethic of gender as a way to love my neighbor.
I did find his overall posture of epistemic restraint to be sometimes wise and sometimes coming close to a cop out. His final word on the question of intersex/DSD individuals, for example, is more or less a shrug. He argues that "we are simply not in a position to know" what to make of such sexual ambiguity. That's better than blustering if one does not know, but it struck me as strange to bring up the issue and take so much time confronting the work of Defranza and Cornwall only to say that he doesn't have that much of an alternative other than "let's not make a world where they feel uncomfortable."
To the intense shame they may feel in a world in which they do not seem to fit, he proffers communities of grace where one's worth and dignity is not a function of living up to the community's stereotypes of a body's maleness or femaleness. This sounds nice, but it's unclear to me how this would materially be different than most churches' currently (stated) positions. Churches that adhere to traditionalist readings of gender, for example, would overwhelmingly "welcome" an ambiguously sexed individual into their congregation, but they would nevertheless most likely deny such an individual any meaningful participation in church leadership—thus reinforcing the felt shame of their existence and the challenge of believing in the God who created them. do Vale makes clear in the book that he does not see ordination as a gendered good and so this scenario wouldn't even arise for him, but the fact of the matter is that it would arise for thousands upon thousands of churches across the world, and it goes unaddressed in the present volume.
That being said, overall I found the work to be interesting, clear, and thought-provoking. I appreciated his epistemic restraint for the most part and his inclination to speak of gender in ethical rather than ontological ways. I'm on board with the call to morally evaluate gender as it exists before us and how we might live in it as Christians rather than to try to attempt some kind of "theological police" action. I would recommend the book to anyone who wonders how to bring moral-theological tools to bear on how to think about our gendered existence.
DISCLAIMER: I received a copy of this book from the publisher for the purpose of a fair, unbiased review.
Fellipe do Vale believes that there is a better way forward than either of these options in the way that we think about and do gender. With his new work, Gender as Love, he makes the case that gender is something worthy of theological reflection, and that in fact theologians could offer a word that is clearer, more compassionate, and more just than any offerings available in the current conversation. His primary convictions are these:
1. Contra social constructionists of gender and especially sex, reality as it comes at us in our sexed bodies is stable beyond merely what we make of it; it is real and not merely a social matrix.
2. Contra gender essentialists, gender is more complicated than just a straight line derivation from reproductive biology or else it would always and at all times present in exactly the same way.
His example for the first conviction is that while his grandfather lived in 20th century Brazil and "observed standards of masculinity" to which do Vale doesn't hold, that the two of them are nevertheless the same kind of thing. Similarly, it is important for him to be able to tell his daughter that while they were of a different time and culture than her, "women such as Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth" are nevertheless similar to her in meaningful and important ways and that she could therefore aspire to be like them.
In regard to the second conviction, he says this:
If being a woman is identical with being an adult human female, then it does not matter for gender’s definition whether a woman shaves her legs, wears certain kinds of clothes, or performs any other kind of social activity. This, it seems to me, is a steep price to pay on account of the high import virtually all humans place on some kind of cultural activity for their genders. On this traditional view, therefore, culture is deflated and made irrelevant to gender.
He distills these convictions into four theses for "tenable theologies of gender":
1. Gender is an essence, though this is not reducible to or identical with biological determinism or biological essentialism.
2. The complexity of gender, the noetic effects of sin, and the current conditions of oppression complicate our epistemic access to gender’s essence. All the same, we can be assured that issues surrounding gender will be rectified in the eschaton.
3. Any theory or theology of gender must be consistent with and supportive of the cultivation of justice.
4. Gender is concerned with selves or identity and with the way selves organize social goods pertaining to their sexed bodies.
Much of the book, then, is given to explaining and defending these four theses. Ultimately, do Vale ends up with a view of gender as something that comes at us in our lived experience, and it is a complex mixture of biology and history and culture and ideology all at once that we don't even necessarily need to police in a theological way. He leverages 1 Corinthians 11 to say that "The interesting thing about a Christian theology of gender is that there is, in fact, nothing (or, at most, very few things) explicitly state in Scripture about what women and men must be like in context-independent ways or what the specific goods are by which a woman or a man must be identified." He unpacks that further to say that even where Scripture calls men and women specifically to act in certain ways, "they are often injunctions about how best to live as Christians within the culture in which they find themselves, a culture having already provided gendered goods for them to love. In their world, these are gendered goods; how should a Christian think about them?"
This isn't so much a gender agnosticism as much as an epistemic restraint: though we have moral grounds for the evaluation of some goods, we must be very careful not to say more than we actually have warrant to say. In contrast to Christian theologians who task themselves with recovering a purported biblical manhood and/or womanhood, that is, trying to say something ontological about who all men are or who all women are, do Vale's explicit aim is to move this conversation out of the world of ontology and into the world of ethics.
For some, I suspect that this will probably feel somewhat unsatisfying. Many, if not all of us, feel that existential ache to understand ourselves, and it would be quite lovely to have an exhaustively specific divine word outlining every corner of what our sexed and gendered existence must and must not be and how to make sense of the ways in which our bodies and minds and desires deviate from what seems to be the average experience. For do Vale, though, a project to find such a word is doomed from the start.
In many ways, I appreciate what he's trying to do. I come into this world, into 21st century American culture, as a male not having chosen what this culture deems to be acceptable norms for males, and finding that while some of them are true of me, others are not. I hate football, I'm vegetarian, and I'm not a gym beast. But on the other hand, I'm pretty handy with house projects, I do the work on my own car, and I have a mustache. I could go on. I didn't choose for any of these to be male stereotypes that I either align with or buck against. Some of them are ephemerally cultural (Working on cars being a "masculine" activity that Paul quite certainly did not engage in!) while others stem from my biological existence (e.g. my mustache).
I think that do Vale would encourage me to come at these gendered norms as a Christian not with heavy-handed pressuring to live up to every last one, nor with the indifference of "you do you" with regard to gender. Instead, I should come at them with a mind of moral evaluation. For example, the alpha masculinity of the alt right that trades on the objectification and subjugation of women is something that a Christian ought to reject because it is unjust and screechingly grinds against the ethic of gender as a way to love my neighbor.
I did find his overall posture of epistemic restraint to be sometimes wise and sometimes coming close to a cop out. His final word on the question of intersex/DSD individuals, for example, is more or less a shrug. He argues that "we are simply not in a position to know" what to make of such sexual ambiguity. That's better than blustering if one does not know, but it struck me as strange to bring up the issue and take so much time confronting the work of Defranza and Cornwall only to say that he doesn't have that much of an alternative other than "let's not make a world where they feel uncomfortable."
To the intense shame they may feel in a world in which they do not seem to fit, he proffers communities of grace where one's worth and dignity is not a function of living up to the community's stereotypes of a body's maleness or femaleness. This sounds nice, but it's unclear to me how this would materially be different than most churches' currently (stated) positions. Churches that adhere to traditionalist readings of gender, for example, would overwhelmingly "welcome" an ambiguously sexed individual into their congregation, but they would nevertheless most likely deny such an individual any meaningful participation in church leadership—thus reinforcing the felt shame of their existence and the challenge of believing in the God who created them. do Vale makes clear in the book that he does not see ordination as a gendered good and so this scenario wouldn't even arise for him, but the fact of the matter is that it would arise for thousands upon thousands of churches across the world, and it goes unaddressed in the present volume.
That being said, overall I found the work to be interesting, clear, and thought-provoking. I appreciated his epistemic restraint for the most part and his inclination to speak of gender in ethical rather than ontological ways. I'm on board with the call to morally evaluate gender as it exists before us and how we might live in it as Christians rather than to try to attempt some kind of "theological police" action. I would recommend the book to anyone who wonders how to bring moral-theological tools to bear on how to think about our gendered existence.
DISCLAIMER: I received a copy of this book from the publisher for the purpose of a fair, unbiased review.
July 12, 2024
This book is a slow burn, let me tell ya. The first five chapters felt rather dense. As someone who is relatively well versed in Christian theology, it has a struggle for me to get through. The author covers everything from gender theory to Augustine’s theology of love. I had to look up a lot of words because I simply had no clue what they meant. Many of his sentences completely stumped me and I had to keep re-reading them, and even then only kinda understood them. But then came chapters six and seven! Oh glory! They were incredibly insightful and informative when it comes to gender based violence and discrimination, especially when it comes to intersex individuals. I could really feel the compassion and heart of author through the pages. I just feel like that compassion got a little lost in the academic language of the first five chapters. Overall, the book felt like I was reading a dissertation… but would recommend if only for the last two chapters!
May 5, 2026
My biggest takeaway from this book is that the theologian's task is not to define gender or what is male and female but rather to think through how to engage with practices and things that are already gendered, either because of our biology or because of culture. Do Vale uses Paul's instructions about veils in Corinth as his example: Paul is not making a statement about whether wearing veils are or should be a gendered behavior; he is saying that they already are, culturally, for better or for worse, and so he is advising Christians how to honor God and each other within their culture’s gender assumptions.
I'm of two minds about this approach. On the one hand, it does free us from focusing solely on thorny philosophical debates, which is valuable not because those debates are unimportant but because they can often distract us from the ethical issues of how to actually love the people around us. As he says, “my model attempts to take a discussion normally held in the realm of ontology and transpose it to the world of ethics, the world in which concrete individuals actually live.”
I also agree that it is foolish, unhelpful, and even illogical to make universal statements about what is “feminine” and what is “masculine.” Do Vale explains, “We do not have to try to be gendered, nor do we have to wonder which are those social goods which make up our genders. We walk out of our doors in the morning and encounter them directly, often with force. The goods are right there to be loved, and this is why I am not taking any time to specify which gendered goods constitute masculinity and femininity. Such a task would be impossible, for those goods will differ contextually.”
On the other hand, I do think we need to be able to say something about what gender is. Not only does sidestepping that question feel like a copout, it's philosophically dangerous because our metaphysics cannot be divorced from our ethics. Ethics is downstream from metaphysics. I laud do Vale’s emphasis that “any theory or theology of gender must be consistent with and supportive of the cultivation of justice” but that requires a pre-existing account of justice.
To be fair, do Vale does actually say something about what gender is. He brilliantly threads the needle between gender essentialism and social constructivism. Regarding essentialism—the idea that gender is purely biological and can be defined by physical traits—he warns against its tendency to conflate universal traits with natural ones. He cautions,
“Even if it could be shown that some gender trait is universally demonstrated throughout all time and places, it still would not be the case that this trait can be assumed to be natural. Consider a trivial counterexample: it is universally the case that every human baby has not been born on the moon. Yet, if a baby was born on a space station on the moon, would that baby not possess a human nature? Of course it would, because universal properties and natural properties are not the same. This is precisely why biological essentialism often ends up baptizing culturally particular (and very often sexist) assumptions about men and women and inscribing them into 'the law of nature,' when at most they are merely universal.”
Yet gender is not completely socially constructed either. Wholly embracing that theory leads to other problems:
"[T]he social constructivist view commits one to the conclusion that there is no single social kind, 'women' (and mutatis mutandis for any other gender); rather, there are numerically distinct social kinds corresponding to genders of different times and places. What must be realized, however, is that this has devastating metaphysical and moral consequences. It results in an incoherence in gender theory and renders particular genders morally unevaluable, something I take to be necessary for advocating for justice and matters relating to gender.”
If there is no such underlying reality as “woman,” how can we defend women’s rights? Yes, we could defend the rights of people who are considered to be part of this category in our particular time and place, but as soon as anything changes in time or place, we no longer have a basis for calling certain people “women” and therefore worthy of certain rights and protections. If “woman” doesn’t really exist across cultures, how can we argue that women in Africa should be treated with dignity the same way we want women in North America to be? Must we re-justify human rights anytime we change zip codes or decades?
Instead, do Vale defines gender as being “concerned with selves or identity and with the way selves organize social goods pertaining to their sexed bodies.” Our sexed bodies inform our genders—we cannot divorce gender from our biology, although he doesn't go into details about how he thinks this works. But gender is just as much a part of how those sexed bodies are perceived by our culture and what “social goods”—including everything such as clothing, customs, preferred colors, etc.—are associated with particular bodies. Amidst this complex mosaic a Christian must take stock and ask themselves how to love God and others.
This is also where I'm conflicted. I loved do Vale’s interaction with Augustine and Sarah Coakley about desire and love but found it a bit nebulous as well.
Coakley defines gender as desire, and do Vale takes this and narrows it to be gender as “that specific kind of desire that takes into account our cares and what is important to us, thereby forming our identities.” What we love is that which we change ourselves for, molding our habits, motivations, and identities around. Not all desires do this; we all have conflicting desires and the ones which are deepest, which do Vale would say are our loves, win out. It is these deepest desires that he says are gendered: “Our gendered desires are those that we appropriate and with which we identify. This is what makes them love.”
Drawing the link between gender and love means that he can then bring in Augustine's idea of ordering our loves. These gendered desires are a gift, provided they are loved in the correct way. There are obvious examples of when gendered desires become inordinate, leading to things like abuse, addiction, possessiveness, manipulation. “Ordered love,” do Vale writes, “also respects the finitude of the beloved, not loving in the expectation of ultimate beatitude, or in any other vicious way, knowing that such a love would destroy the beloved.” This has ramifications that are both explicitly sexual and more generally relational. The idea of rightly ordered gender desires prevents us from condemning these desires as wrong because “the world is full of beautiful things to love, on an Augustinian picture” but also forbids acting on any desire we have because “they cannot be loved above God, who alone provides the true felicity for which human beings were designed.”
This is helpful theological grounding for a balanced perspective of desires, but I wonder how it helps us think about how to actually live them out in the realm of justice and ethics, which do Vale clearly cares about. What is a rightly ordered love when it comes to homosexual desire, for example? Or what about different levels of sexual desire within a heterosexual marriage? What about sexual desire as a single person? How do we judge when these eclipse our love for God?
These questions form my basic complaint against the book: It lays down very thoughtful, nuance, rigorous ideas for thinking about gender beyond just body parts/functions or just social constructs, and it urges Christians to take seriously their role to morally evaluate the gendered assumptions and goods that influence all of us through the lens of Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection. But I still don't really understand how to do so or what this looks like. Perhaps that is beyond the scope of this book. But what I am finding in the literature is books like this and Daniel R. Patterson’s Reforming a Theology of Gender: Constructive Reflections on Judith Butler and Queer Theory, which are excellent philosophical works that hint toward a new way of practically addressing these issues, but few books that are case studies of how this theology actually gets worked out in specific churches and communities. Perhaps that is because people are actively doing that work right now. Perhaps those books are coming. I hope so.
I'm of two minds about this approach. On the one hand, it does free us from focusing solely on thorny philosophical debates, which is valuable not because those debates are unimportant but because they can often distract us from the ethical issues of how to actually love the people around us. As he says, “my model attempts to take a discussion normally held in the realm of ontology and transpose it to the world of ethics, the world in which concrete individuals actually live.”
I also agree that it is foolish, unhelpful, and even illogical to make universal statements about what is “feminine” and what is “masculine.” Do Vale explains, “We do not have to try to be gendered, nor do we have to wonder which are those social goods which make up our genders. We walk out of our doors in the morning and encounter them directly, often with force. The goods are right there to be loved, and this is why I am not taking any time to specify which gendered goods constitute masculinity and femininity. Such a task would be impossible, for those goods will differ contextually.”
On the other hand, I do think we need to be able to say something about what gender is. Not only does sidestepping that question feel like a copout, it's philosophically dangerous because our metaphysics cannot be divorced from our ethics. Ethics is downstream from metaphysics. I laud do Vale’s emphasis that “any theory or theology of gender must be consistent with and supportive of the cultivation of justice” but that requires a pre-existing account of justice.
To be fair, do Vale does actually say something about what gender is. He brilliantly threads the needle between gender essentialism and social constructivism. Regarding essentialism—the idea that gender is purely biological and can be defined by physical traits—he warns against its tendency to conflate universal traits with natural ones. He cautions,
“Even if it could be shown that some gender trait is universally demonstrated throughout all time and places, it still would not be the case that this trait can be assumed to be natural. Consider a trivial counterexample: it is universally the case that every human baby has not been born on the moon. Yet, if a baby was born on a space station on the moon, would that baby not possess a human nature? Of course it would, because universal properties and natural properties are not the same. This is precisely why biological essentialism often ends up baptizing culturally particular (and very often sexist) assumptions about men and women and inscribing them into 'the law of nature,' when at most they are merely universal.”
Yet gender is not completely socially constructed either. Wholly embracing that theory leads to other problems:
"[T]he social constructivist view commits one to the conclusion that there is no single social kind, 'women' (and mutatis mutandis for any other gender); rather, there are numerically distinct social kinds corresponding to genders of different times and places. What must be realized, however, is that this has devastating metaphysical and moral consequences. It results in an incoherence in gender theory and renders particular genders morally unevaluable, something I take to be necessary for advocating for justice and matters relating to gender.”
If there is no such underlying reality as “woman,” how can we defend women’s rights? Yes, we could defend the rights of people who are considered to be part of this category in our particular time and place, but as soon as anything changes in time or place, we no longer have a basis for calling certain people “women” and therefore worthy of certain rights and protections. If “woman” doesn’t really exist across cultures, how can we argue that women in Africa should be treated with dignity the same way we want women in North America to be? Must we re-justify human rights anytime we change zip codes or decades?
Instead, do Vale defines gender as being “concerned with selves or identity and with the way selves organize social goods pertaining to their sexed bodies.” Our sexed bodies inform our genders—we cannot divorce gender from our biology, although he doesn't go into details about how he thinks this works. But gender is just as much a part of how those sexed bodies are perceived by our culture and what “social goods”—including everything such as clothing, customs, preferred colors, etc.—are associated with particular bodies. Amidst this complex mosaic a Christian must take stock and ask themselves how to love God and others.
This is also where I'm conflicted. I loved do Vale’s interaction with Augustine and Sarah Coakley about desire and love but found it a bit nebulous as well.
Coakley defines gender as desire, and do Vale takes this and narrows it to be gender as “that specific kind of desire that takes into account our cares and what is important to us, thereby forming our identities.” What we love is that which we change ourselves for, molding our habits, motivations, and identities around. Not all desires do this; we all have conflicting desires and the ones which are deepest, which do Vale would say are our loves, win out. It is these deepest desires that he says are gendered: “Our gendered desires are those that we appropriate and with which we identify. This is what makes them love.”
Drawing the link between gender and love means that he can then bring in Augustine's idea of ordering our loves. These gendered desires are a gift, provided they are loved in the correct way. There are obvious examples of when gendered desires become inordinate, leading to things like abuse, addiction, possessiveness, manipulation. “Ordered love,” do Vale writes, “also respects the finitude of the beloved, not loving in the expectation of ultimate beatitude, or in any other vicious way, knowing that such a love would destroy the beloved.” This has ramifications that are both explicitly sexual and more generally relational. The idea of rightly ordered gender desires prevents us from condemning these desires as wrong because “the world is full of beautiful things to love, on an Augustinian picture” but also forbids acting on any desire we have because “they cannot be loved above God, who alone provides the true felicity for which human beings were designed.”
This is helpful theological grounding for a balanced perspective of desires, but I wonder how it helps us think about how to actually live them out in the realm of justice and ethics, which do Vale clearly cares about. What is a rightly ordered love when it comes to homosexual desire, for example? Or what about different levels of sexual desire within a heterosexual marriage? What about sexual desire as a single person? How do we judge when these eclipse our love for God?
These questions form my basic complaint against the book: It lays down very thoughtful, nuance, rigorous ideas for thinking about gender beyond just body parts/functions or just social constructs, and it urges Christians to take seriously their role to morally evaluate the gendered assumptions and goods that influence all of us through the lens of Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection. But I still don't really understand how to do so or what this looks like. Perhaps that is beyond the scope of this book. But what I am finding in the literature is books like this and Daniel R. Patterson’s Reforming a Theology of Gender: Constructive Reflections on Judith Butler and Queer Theory, which are excellent philosophical works that hint toward a new way of practically addressing these issues, but few books that are case studies of how this theology actually gets worked out in specific churches and communities. Perhaps that is because people are actively doing that work right now. Perhaps those books are coming. I hope so.
July 8, 2024
Do Vale brings a ton of helpful theology scholars together in this conversation on gender. This is a good book to read if you are interested in learning more about the scholarly conversation on gender and how it intersects with theology.
December 20, 2024
Thougths from a second read through:
3 stars -> 2 stars.
Reading this again what stands out is that do Vale approaches almost everything backwards he:
1. investigates reality from a posture of skepticism; making the meaning and content of creation almost entirely unreachable (supposedly due to the fall but this seems more Kantian than scriptural and is clearly contra Romans 1)
2. confuses Being with Becoming; the idea of being changed by what we love turns into us simply being our acts of loving; this means effectively that a person does not experience/journey through their life BUT rather IS their life; this postmodern approach to reality makes it very hard to index right and wrong, as everything is story and change.
3. Makes grace replace nature - all worth is defined in light of Christ's gift to people, such that nothing else matters (according to footnote 80 on page 277) this applies to everyone in creation not merely the church; this sort of logic is used to argue for women's ordination (as a case against discrimination) as almost everything but this "worth" has been made squishy I think you could argue for anything you want from these premises.
Original review from 1st read:
Fabulous but Flawed
This book has a lot to offer BUT I cannot recommend it widely, whilst it is fabulous it is also fatally flawed.
do Vale is fabulous when he's:
- performing internal critiques of Gender and Sex as Social Constructs (in particular arguing that we must be able to distinguish women from men if we are to stand against the abuse of women including sexual assault)
- expounding Augustine's vision of Love, Use and Enjoyment
- applying the gospel to Sexual Abuse with compassion
do Vale is flawed when he:
- straw mans and rejects all Natural Law
- determines that Gender is ineffable, even using Divine Simplicity as an analogy for it
- argues for using preferred pronouns
- asserts that it is unjust to not ordain women
- dodges the question on transgenderism
What is do Vale's Model?
do Vale seeks to provide a "Theological Theology" of Gender (drawing on John Webster's approach to theology). Hence he wishes to lean hard into other theological concepts, including a broader theological anthropology and the story of the Bible.
He also wants to hear the best of feminist critiques of traditional approaches, hence listening to objections that simplistic "traditional" approaches to gender have involved over-generalising from stereotypes (in our modern culture pink is feminine but ~100 years ago it was masculine; hence we must concede that the ways gender is displayed change as culture changes) or saying "X is this way therefore X should be this way" (e.g. women have never had the vote therefore women should never have the vote). Along these lines he also highlights that there's far more to gender than the basic biology though he affirms that biology is significant he denies (based on observations of reality) that biology is a sufficient answer to the question of Gender.
Strangely do Vale asserts that Natural Law = making simplistic generalisations and as such should be rejected and rather we should appeal to scripture for our theology of Gender (he says despite clearly leaning heavily on feminist philosophy).
Drawing on Augustine's theology of Love, do Vale explains that we become (or even we are) what we love; and hence concludes that "gender is about the appropriation of social goods, an appropriation that occurs when certain goods are loved in virtue of the possession of a sexed body". This leads to the idea that a Godly use of Gender is a love for God by virtue of the body we possess.
How else does it go wrong?
Running his concept through the narrative of scripture (Creation, Fall, Redemption, Consummation) do Vale sees an epistemic veil drawn over gender by virtue of the fall hence refraining from defining it any more precisely; he believes that this will be withdrawn in the eschaton.
Whilst arguing that we can recognise gender without clearly defining it (just as the child knows water when he sees it long before he learns its chemistry) this idea of the temporary ineffability of Gender meshes with his rejection of Natural law and any significant creation based theology and leads to denying that we can say much about Gender with specificity; this in turn eliminates any clear grounds for teaching a moral import of gender roles (a point that emerges throughout the book) OR any easy way to criticise someone for identifying as a different gender: "to use the term 'woman' one does not need to specify all the necessary conditions for being a woman... If the reference-fixing function of our gender terms... do not require strong commitments about the applicability of the metaphysics of the gendered individual, then no reason is left not to use preferred pronouns". (page 87). He goes on to say (page 191, footnote 38): "I do not believe my account of gender settles trans* questions conclusively, though what I say is relevant for the discussion... the only modification necessary to be friendly to trans* affirmation would be to say that what we need is a perceived sexed body, not a sexed body as such."
Consistent with his criticism of Natural Law, do Vale also collapses all of the economy into the gospel (even saying that the Divine Economy of creation, fall, redemption and consummation could just be called the Gospel), this cashes out in wanting to define the worth of people based on the sacrifice of Christ leading to him having to clarify (on page 227 footnote 80) that he does indeed believe that the unconverted have worth (a point he wishes to ground in Christology, through seeing Christ as the image of God and all humans being made in his image); having dismissed almost all creation grounded theology his approach here seems to come as a sticking plaster over a chasm.
We see the same loss of Creation theology in his reversing of the order of male and female, on the last page he speaks of us as "women and men in Christ..." called to be "women and men in glory"; whilst he has argued for gender distinction, any idea of masculine or feminine virtues or roles to be pursued or male headship or even an ordering in creation have collapsed.
3 stars -> 2 stars.
Reading this again what stands out is that do Vale approaches almost everything backwards he:
1. investigates reality from a posture of skepticism; making the meaning and content of creation almost entirely unreachable (supposedly due to the fall but this seems more Kantian than scriptural and is clearly contra Romans 1)
2. confuses Being with Becoming; the idea of being changed by what we love turns into us simply being our acts of loving; this means effectively that a person does not experience/journey through their life BUT rather IS their life; this postmodern approach to reality makes it very hard to index right and wrong, as everything is story and change.
3. Makes grace replace nature - all worth is defined in light of Christ's gift to people, such that nothing else matters (according to footnote 80 on page 277) this applies to everyone in creation not merely the church; this sort of logic is used to argue for women's ordination (as a case against discrimination) as almost everything but this "worth" has been made squishy I think you could argue for anything you want from these premises.
Original review from 1st read:
Fabulous but Flawed
This book has a lot to offer BUT I cannot recommend it widely, whilst it is fabulous it is also fatally flawed.
do Vale is fabulous when he's:
- performing internal critiques of Gender and Sex as Social Constructs (in particular arguing that we must be able to distinguish women from men if we are to stand against the abuse of women including sexual assault)
- expounding Augustine's vision of Love, Use and Enjoyment
- applying the gospel to Sexual Abuse with compassion
do Vale is flawed when he:
- straw mans and rejects all Natural Law
- determines that Gender is ineffable, even using Divine Simplicity as an analogy for it
- argues for using preferred pronouns
- asserts that it is unjust to not ordain women
- dodges the question on transgenderism
What is do Vale's Model?
do Vale seeks to provide a "Theological Theology" of Gender (drawing on John Webster's approach to theology). Hence he wishes to lean hard into other theological concepts, including a broader theological anthropology and the story of the Bible.
He also wants to hear the best of feminist critiques of traditional approaches, hence listening to objections that simplistic "traditional" approaches to gender have involved over-generalising from stereotypes (in our modern culture pink is feminine but ~100 years ago it was masculine; hence we must concede that the ways gender is displayed change as culture changes) or saying "X is this way therefore X should be this way" (e.g. women have never had the vote therefore women should never have the vote). Along these lines he also highlights that there's far more to gender than the basic biology though he affirms that biology is significant he denies (based on observations of reality) that biology is a sufficient answer to the question of Gender.
Strangely do Vale asserts that Natural Law = making simplistic generalisations and as such should be rejected and rather we should appeal to scripture for our theology of Gender (he says despite clearly leaning heavily on feminist philosophy).
Drawing on Augustine's theology of Love, do Vale explains that we become (or even we are) what we love; and hence concludes that "gender is about the appropriation of social goods, an appropriation that occurs when certain goods are loved in virtue of the possession of a sexed body". This leads to the idea that a Godly use of Gender is a love for God by virtue of the body we possess.
How else does it go wrong?
Running his concept through the narrative of scripture (Creation, Fall, Redemption, Consummation) do Vale sees an epistemic veil drawn over gender by virtue of the fall hence refraining from defining it any more precisely; he believes that this will be withdrawn in the eschaton.
Whilst arguing that we can recognise gender without clearly defining it (just as the child knows water when he sees it long before he learns its chemistry) this idea of the temporary ineffability of Gender meshes with his rejection of Natural law and any significant creation based theology and leads to denying that we can say much about Gender with specificity; this in turn eliminates any clear grounds for teaching a moral import of gender roles (a point that emerges throughout the book) OR any easy way to criticise someone for identifying as a different gender: "to use the term 'woman' one does not need to specify all the necessary conditions for being a woman... If the reference-fixing function of our gender terms... do not require strong commitments about the applicability of the metaphysics of the gendered individual, then no reason is left not to use preferred pronouns". (page 87). He goes on to say (page 191, footnote 38): "I do not believe my account of gender settles trans* questions conclusively, though what I say is relevant for the discussion... the only modification necessary to be friendly to trans* affirmation would be to say that what we need is a perceived sexed body, not a sexed body as such."
Consistent with his criticism of Natural Law, do Vale also collapses all of the economy into the gospel (even saying that the Divine Economy of creation, fall, redemption and consummation could just be called the Gospel), this cashes out in wanting to define the worth of people based on the sacrifice of Christ leading to him having to clarify (on page 227 footnote 80) that he does indeed believe that the unconverted have worth (a point he wishes to ground in Christology, through seeing Christ as the image of God and all humans being made in his image); having dismissed almost all creation grounded theology his approach here seems to come as a sticking plaster over a chasm.
We see the same loss of Creation theology in his reversing of the order of male and female, on the last page he speaks of us as "women and men in Christ..." called to be "women and men in glory"; whilst he has argued for gender distinction, any idea of masculine or feminine virtues or roles to be pursued or male headship or even an ordering in creation have collapsed.
August 14, 2024
While he makes a really compelling case against the social constructionist view of gender, I felt that his proposal for what gender actually is was hard to follow.
It seems like he was primarily seeking to critique the social constructionist and biological essentialist understandings of gender without offering a clear alternative.
It seems like he was primarily seeking to critique the social constructionist and biological essentialist understandings of gender without offering a clear alternative.
January 11, 2025
He critiques both gender as a social construct and gender essentialism and offers a 3rd way. It still seems hard to define to me but he does a good job showing how gender is hard to define. I still fall more on the gender essentialist side and then agree with his claims that gender is defined by love and made perfect by grace.
March 13, 2025
Fellipe do Vale is the Department Chair & Assistant Professor of Biblical and Systematic Theology at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School where his research and teaching focus is on moral theology, gender, human identity, and theological anthropology. He has written several books and articles on this topic. This project is definitely not an introductory book nor is the target audience lay people. I very much appreciated his proposal, which avoided false dichotomies and sought a more robust approach to thinking about gender. Gender, as discussed in this book included male, female, and intersex discussions but did not address LGBT+ which should have been included too.
The book was fairly interesting but too academic. The author cites the scholarship of so many others with whom I am not familiar that I would only recommend it to people already well-read on this topic. Additionally, the book is theological and abstract, and I wish there had been more concrete applications. I'm not really sure how to apply what I learned in practice.
Forward
“While the church is unlikely to come to perfect agreement about a theology of gender, we cannot avoid the conversation if we are to love the hurting people God loves (px).”
Part 1: The Landscape and Its Faults
Chapter 1: What Does It Mean to Give a Theological Account of Gender?
Is gender an essence or a social construct? And what are the best/right tools and methods to study the theology regarding gender? “I am concerned with how views about personhood, particularly human genders, are situated in the divine economy (p18).” “If it can be demonstrated that a particular understanding of human nature is facilitating system trauma to significant swaths of its participants, then that construal must be abandoned, for it could not be from God, for God is not a God of evil (p21).”
Chapter 2: Understanding the Social Construction of Gender
Three interrelated types of social construction are explained: socially distinguished, socially caused, and socially constituted. “My conclusion will be that social construction should not be the view championed by theologians who want to account for gender, but neither are they forced into a simplistic biological essentialism as the only alternative (p26).”
Part 2: The Constructive Proposal
Chapter 3: “What God Has Joined Together, Let No One Separate”
“On one side of the debate are those who rightly see the relevance and importance of the cultural expression of gender while deflating the importance of the body; on the other side are those who rightly see the pertinence of the body and of sex while denying any role to cultural expression. But why should one accept the terms of the debate as they have been laid out? … It is the task of the remainder of this project to find a better alternative (p74).” “In short, a biological essentialist holds that sex, specifically the biological features that differentiate males from females, fully account for gendered behavior (p95).”
• Thesis 1: “Gender is an essence, though this is not reducible to or identical with biological determinism (p94).”
• Thesis 2: “The complexity of gender, the noetic effects of sin, and the current conditions of oppression complicate our epistemic access to gender’s essence. All the same, we can be assured that issues surrounding gender will be rectified in the eschaton (p100).”
• Thesis 3: “Any theory or theology of gender must be consistent with and supportive of the cultivation of justice (p103).”
• Thesis 4: “Gender is concerned with selves or identity and with the way selves organize social goods pertaining to their sexed bodies (p104).”
“Taken together, these claims are sufficient to prove that God has not intended gender to be characterized by injustice and that proposals about gender that fail to support the cultivation of justice fall outside of the possibilities for theological consideration (p103).”
“No theology of gender that cannot challenge male dominance, misogyny, sexual assault, violence against women, or any other kind of gendered injustice is fit for Christian assent (p104).”
Chapter 4: An Augustinian Theology of Human Love
“Human beings are created to love God above all else and to love created goods in God, all while becoming conformed to those objects of love (p111).” “‘Do not look at his appearance or on the height of his stature, because I have rejected him, for the Lord does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.’ Our identities are, so it seems, our hearts or that place from which our love proceeds (p112).” Summarizing Augustine, “Because we were created to love God above all, it is only in loving God that we are truly happy (p122).”
“To love one’s neighbor rightly, in other words, Augustine’s abiding conviction was that we must not first love the creature but must first love God. The use/enjoyment distinction, the ordering of love, and all other aspects of Augustine’s theology of human love are not deterrents to love; rather, they are powerful encouragements to love – to love boldly, to love rightly, to love with integrity, and to love with respect (p129).”
Chapter 5: Gender as Love
“Love, I conclude, is a better category than desire for understanding gender (p142).”
“I offered a basic definition of gender: gender is the appropriation of cultural goods pertaining to the sexed body by means of which the sexed body is socially manifested in something like an identity (p143).”
“If loving provides the coherence to the sequence of my life, infuses my life with importance, and identifies the ends for which I act, then it is by loving that ‘our individual identities are most fully expressed and defined’ (p160).”
“Rather, gender is love, for love makes us who we are (p161).”
“This, I should say, is where social constructionist views are exactly right – many, if not most, of the goods we love in virtue of our own sex are not intrinsically gendered but acquire a social meaning that is gendered (p163).” “Is ordination a gendered good to be loved in virtue of one’s sex, or should it be seen as a good to be loved independent of sex (p166).” “Some goods will be morally good, able to be loved without risk of injustice. Other goods will be unjust, such that loving them will yield oppression and harm (p166).” And many goods are neutral or situational. “Ultimately, Scripture is concerned with the ways in which the gospel governs the love for gendered goods, whatever those goods might be (and the specification of which cannot be done apart from specific contextual analysis) (p168).
“Rightly loved gendered goods are those we recognize as gifts from God, to be used according to the specifications of the gift giver, which is to say for the flourishing of humanity, in the promotion of kindness, gentleness, and virtue (p169).” “A proper recognition of the noetic effects of sin is crucial, for our assurance that we are relating well to the goods that make us men and women must always be provisional (p170).”
“If that is the case – and it very often is – that men enjoy the attachment to a gendered good that is harmful to women, then they must surrender attachment to that good. It should be obvious that a good that causes and promotes harm to women cannot be a good loved in God (p171).”
Part 3: Gender in the Story of God
Chapter 6: Gender in Creation
“When God created the heavens and the earth, all things were good in the sense that they did precisely what they were meant to do (p189).” “In other words, on the model presented in this project, the proper function of sex is to be gender (p190).”
“Another implication of creation for gender is that, as created, gender must be seen as good, not as something to be overcome and done away with (p191).”
“As a rule of thumb, it is generally thought that there are as many intersex/DSD individuals as there are people with Down Syndrome (p193).”
“If creation’s normativity extends to the fact that humanity is female and male, does this make intersex/DSD individuals subhuman? That some have acted as if this is so is nothing short of abusive and heinous, an awful application of doctrine that any Christine should recognize as a failure to love (pp193-194).”
“All sexed bodies – all human beings – function improperly, and intersexuality/DSD is not a uniquely inhuman instance of this (p200).
Chapter 7: Gender in Fall, Redemption, and Consummation
“Additionally, our ability to tell just what is natural to that goodness [of creation before sin] and what is cultural preference is compromised, which often leads us toward unjust and sexist proclivities (p205).”
“Sexual assault, by most metrics, is the most prevalent issue in sexual ethics facing the church today (pp205-206).”
“Survivors are in need of support from the church, but too often it is the church that exacerbates the harm rather than healing it (pp206-207).” “Much as in some segments of the church today, purity was prized as a distinctly feminine virtue (as more important even than a woman’s life), which led to a culture in which the perceived loss of purity stripped a woman of worth and brought upon her unspeakable shame (p209).” “‘Shame’ and ‘worthlessness’ are words commonly used by victims to describe the impact of rape and assault, and this experience must be taken into account in the theological reflection at hand (p210).”
“For, so it is assumed, only someone who is worthless can be treated like this. Someone with dignity would have been treated better (p211).”
“This also means that worth is not affected by whether one has been raped or is ambiguously sexed (or any other form of worth attaching itself to sex and gender) (p223).”
Conclusion
“I proposed four theses for a workable ontology of gender, theses that take into account the central tenets of essentialism (like the stability of gender kinds) and the main motivations of the social constructionist position (the restraint of epistemic access to gender kinds and the importance of social identities) (p238).” “My main claim is that we can see gender as love (p238).” “God has not left humanity on its own when it comes to gender, for the One ‘who began a good work among you will bring it to completion by the day of Jesus Christ’ (Phil 1:6) (p239).”
Closing Thoughts
I was introduced to several new ideas around the subject of gender and a definition that has helped me think about gender more clearly. I had also expected the book would look at more passages in the Bible than it did. It seemed like the author spent more time looking at Augustine’s writings than directly at scripture.
I didn’t find the book especially practical but can think of an example where it has helped me. Recently, I heard someone say he wants his daughters to marry a “real man”; a man who is a leader and provides for his daughter. Implied in his statement was that humans who are biologically male (by chromosomes/ gonads) but do not lead or do not provide for their family are not “real men” but are less than “real men”. This is a social construct view of gender: “real men” are leaders and providers. Now that I have read this book, I feel I have better tools to identify why this comment bothered me. A person’s worth and value are not tied to their gender or to patriarchal cultural constructs and a good marriage should include partners who value each other, act in each other’s interest, and where one member does not domineer over the other.
I have many other questions about gender that this book did not adequately address. While I recognize that no book covers everything, there were significant aspects of gender that were not addressed at all.
The book was fairly interesting but too academic. The author cites the scholarship of so many others with whom I am not familiar that I would only recommend it to people already well-read on this topic. Additionally, the book is theological and abstract, and I wish there had been more concrete applications. I'm not really sure how to apply what I learned in practice.
Forward
“While the church is unlikely to come to perfect agreement about a theology of gender, we cannot avoid the conversation if we are to love the hurting people God loves (px).”
Part 1: The Landscape and Its Faults
Chapter 1: What Does It Mean to Give a Theological Account of Gender?
Is gender an essence or a social construct? And what are the best/right tools and methods to study the theology regarding gender? “I am concerned with how views about personhood, particularly human genders, are situated in the divine economy (p18).” “If it can be demonstrated that a particular understanding of human nature is facilitating system trauma to significant swaths of its participants, then that construal must be abandoned, for it could not be from God, for God is not a God of evil (p21).”
Chapter 2: Understanding the Social Construction of Gender
Three interrelated types of social construction are explained: socially distinguished, socially caused, and socially constituted. “My conclusion will be that social construction should not be the view championed by theologians who want to account for gender, but neither are they forced into a simplistic biological essentialism as the only alternative (p26).”
Part 2: The Constructive Proposal
Chapter 3: “What God Has Joined Together, Let No One Separate”
“On one side of the debate are those who rightly see the relevance and importance of the cultural expression of gender while deflating the importance of the body; on the other side are those who rightly see the pertinence of the body and of sex while denying any role to cultural expression. But why should one accept the terms of the debate as they have been laid out? … It is the task of the remainder of this project to find a better alternative (p74).” “In short, a biological essentialist holds that sex, specifically the biological features that differentiate males from females, fully account for gendered behavior (p95).”
• Thesis 1: “Gender is an essence, though this is not reducible to or identical with biological determinism (p94).”
• Thesis 2: “The complexity of gender, the noetic effects of sin, and the current conditions of oppression complicate our epistemic access to gender’s essence. All the same, we can be assured that issues surrounding gender will be rectified in the eschaton (p100).”
• Thesis 3: “Any theory or theology of gender must be consistent with and supportive of the cultivation of justice (p103).”
• Thesis 4: “Gender is concerned with selves or identity and with the way selves organize social goods pertaining to their sexed bodies (p104).”
“Taken together, these claims are sufficient to prove that God has not intended gender to be characterized by injustice and that proposals about gender that fail to support the cultivation of justice fall outside of the possibilities for theological consideration (p103).”
“No theology of gender that cannot challenge male dominance, misogyny, sexual assault, violence against women, or any other kind of gendered injustice is fit for Christian assent (p104).”
Chapter 4: An Augustinian Theology of Human Love
“Human beings are created to love God above all else and to love created goods in God, all while becoming conformed to those objects of love (p111).” “‘Do not look at his appearance or on the height of his stature, because I have rejected him, for the Lord does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.’ Our identities are, so it seems, our hearts or that place from which our love proceeds (p112).” Summarizing Augustine, “Because we were created to love God above all, it is only in loving God that we are truly happy (p122).”
“To love one’s neighbor rightly, in other words, Augustine’s abiding conviction was that we must not first love the creature but must first love God. The use/enjoyment distinction, the ordering of love, and all other aspects of Augustine’s theology of human love are not deterrents to love; rather, they are powerful encouragements to love – to love boldly, to love rightly, to love with integrity, and to love with respect (p129).”
Chapter 5: Gender as Love
“Love, I conclude, is a better category than desire for understanding gender (p142).”
“I offered a basic definition of gender: gender is the appropriation of cultural goods pertaining to the sexed body by means of which the sexed body is socially manifested in something like an identity (p143).”
“If loving provides the coherence to the sequence of my life, infuses my life with importance, and identifies the ends for which I act, then it is by loving that ‘our individual identities are most fully expressed and defined’ (p160).”
“Rather, gender is love, for love makes us who we are (p161).”
“This, I should say, is where social constructionist views are exactly right – many, if not most, of the goods we love in virtue of our own sex are not intrinsically gendered but acquire a social meaning that is gendered (p163).” “Is ordination a gendered good to be loved in virtue of one’s sex, or should it be seen as a good to be loved independent of sex (p166).” “Some goods will be morally good, able to be loved without risk of injustice. Other goods will be unjust, such that loving them will yield oppression and harm (p166).” And many goods are neutral or situational. “Ultimately, Scripture is concerned with the ways in which the gospel governs the love for gendered goods, whatever those goods might be (and the specification of which cannot be done apart from specific contextual analysis) (p168).
“Rightly loved gendered goods are those we recognize as gifts from God, to be used according to the specifications of the gift giver, which is to say for the flourishing of humanity, in the promotion of kindness, gentleness, and virtue (p169).” “A proper recognition of the noetic effects of sin is crucial, for our assurance that we are relating well to the goods that make us men and women must always be provisional (p170).”
“If that is the case – and it very often is – that men enjoy the attachment to a gendered good that is harmful to women, then they must surrender attachment to that good. It should be obvious that a good that causes and promotes harm to women cannot be a good loved in God (p171).”
Part 3: Gender in the Story of God
Chapter 6: Gender in Creation
“When God created the heavens and the earth, all things were good in the sense that they did precisely what they were meant to do (p189).” “In other words, on the model presented in this project, the proper function of sex is to be gender (p190).”
“Another implication of creation for gender is that, as created, gender must be seen as good, not as something to be overcome and done away with (p191).”
“As a rule of thumb, it is generally thought that there are as many intersex/DSD individuals as there are people with Down Syndrome (p193).”
“If creation’s normativity extends to the fact that humanity is female and male, does this make intersex/DSD individuals subhuman? That some have acted as if this is so is nothing short of abusive and heinous, an awful application of doctrine that any Christine should recognize as a failure to love (pp193-194).”
“All sexed bodies – all human beings – function improperly, and intersexuality/DSD is not a uniquely inhuman instance of this (p200).
Chapter 7: Gender in Fall, Redemption, and Consummation
“Additionally, our ability to tell just what is natural to that goodness [of creation before sin] and what is cultural preference is compromised, which often leads us toward unjust and sexist proclivities (p205).”
“Sexual assault, by most metrics, is the most prevalent issue in sexual ethics facing the church today (pp205-206).”
“Survivors are in need of support from the church, but too often it is the church that exacerbates the harm rather than healing it (pp206-207).” “Much as in some segments of the church today, purity was prized as a distinctly feminine virtue (as more important even than a woman’s life), which led to a culture in which the perceived loss of purity stripped a woman of worth and brought upon her unspeakable shame (p209).” “‘Shame’ and ‘worthlessness’ are words commonly used by victims to describe the impact of rape and assault, and this experience must be taken into account in the theological reflection at hand (p210).”
“For, so it is assumed, only someone who is worthless can be treated like this. Someone with dignity would have been treated better (p211).”
“This also means that worth is not affected by whether one has been raped or is ambiguously sexed (or any other form of worth attaching itself to sex and gender) (p223).”
Conclusion
“I proposed four theses for a workable ontology of gender, theses that take into account the central tenets of essentialism (like the stability of gender kinds) and the main motivations of the social constructionist position (the restraint of epistemic access to gender kinds and the importance of social identities) (p238).” “My main claim is that we can see gender as love (p238).” “God has not left humanity on its own when it comes to gender, for the One ‘who began a good work among you will bring it to completion by the day of Jesus Christ’ (Phil 1:6) (p239).”
Closing Thoughts
I was introduced to several new ideas around the subject of gender and a definition that has helped me think about gender more clearly. I had also expected the book would look at more passages in the Bible than it did. It seemed like the author spent more time looking at Augustine’s writings than directly at scripture.
I didn’t find the book especially practical but can think of an example where it has helped me. Recently, I heard someone say he wants his daughters to marry a “real man”; a man who is a leader and provides for his daughter. Implied in his statement was that humans who are biologically male (by chromosomes/ gonads) but do not lead or do not provide for their family are not “real men” but are less than “real men”. This is a social construct view of gender: “real men” are leaders and providers. Now that I have read this book, I feel I have better tools to identify why this comment bothered me. A person’s worth and value are not tied to their gender or to patriarchal cultural constructs and a good marriage should include partners who value each other, act in each other’s interest, and where one member does not domineer over the other.
I have many other questions about gender that this book did not adequately address. While I recognize that no book covers everything, there were significant aspects of gender that were not addressed at all.
March 12, 2024
Probably would place this book in the appreciated but neutral 2.5⭐️ zone. This was a very helpful book for me to read for several reasons.
1. I had very little understanding of secular gender theory. This book was a helpful start.
2. I’ve been grappling with Sarah Coakley and her theology of desire for a while - it was nice to have a companion in that endeavour.
3. It’s interesting to see the “you are what you love” theological anthropology (often attributed to Augustine) put to work in such a project.
On point 1. above (part 1 in the book) I really appreciated do Vale’s outline and critique of both Social Constructivist and Bio-essentialist framings of Gender. I feel I’ve gained some valuable tools for engaging both framings in the future. I also appreciated the “4 theses on the metaphysics of Gender” (in part 2 of the book)
On point 2. I appreciated some of do Vale’s engagement with Sarah Coakley. It helped me better grasp the nature of Coakley’s project and clarified some of the enduring misgivings I have about the theological work to which Coakley puts “desire”.
On point 3. I found do Vale’s Constructive Proposal on “Gender as Love” ultimately a little untethered; I’m not convinced by the “you are what you love” reading of Augustine. Unfortunately do Vale does not invest much time in establishing his reading of Augustine, but *almost* assumes it (supported by very brief one line quotes from Augustine’s work).
I find the proposals of Martin Westerholm (On the Structure and Significance of Augustine’s Moral Grammar) and O’Donovan (Ethics as Theology) to be a more convincing reading of Augustine - one in which faith and hope actively shape our love (not simply passive prerequisites).
Given that the “you are what you love” reading of Augustine is *SO* central to do Vale’s constructive proposal, I’d have loved to see substantially more work done in establishing this reading. This leaves me with reservations as to whether do Vale’s move to replace Coakley’s “desire” with “love” is ultimately sufficient; love may be the greatest of the three, but with no reference to faith and hope, even love will leave us eschatologically adrift. I suspect this is why some reviews have voiced the sense that do Vale’s responses to some contemporary gender issues felt like a “cop out” - a slightly harsh way of stating things
1. I had very little understanding of secular gender theory. This book was a helpful start.
2. I’ve been grappling with Sarah Coakley and her theology of desire for a while - it was nice to have a companion in that endeavour.
3. It’s interesting to see the “you are what you love” theological anthropology (often attributed to Augustine) put to work in such a project.
On point 1. above (part 1 in the book) I really appreciated do Vale’s outline and critique of both Social Constructivist and Bio-essentialist framings of Gender. I feel I’ve gained some valuable tools for engaging both framings in the future. I also appreciated the “4 theses on the metaphysics of Gender” (in part 2 of the book)
On point 2. I appreciated some of do Vale’s engagement with Sarah Coakley. It helped me better grasp the nature of Coakley’s project and clarified some of the enduring misgivings I have about the theological work to which Coakley puts “desire”.
On point 3. I found do Vale’s Constructive Proposal on “Gender as Love” ultimately a little untethered; I’m not convinced by the “you are what you love” reading of Augustine. Unfortunately do Vale does not invest much time in establishing his reading of Augustine, but *almost* assumes it (supported by very brief one line quotes from Augustine’s work).
I find the proposals of Martin Westerholm (On the Structure and Significance of Augustine’s Moral Grammar) and O’Donovan (Ethics as Theology) to be a more convincing reading of Augustine - one in which faith and hope actively shape our love (not simply passive prerequisites).
Given that the “you are what you love” reading of Augustine is *SO* central to do Vale’s constructive proposal, I’d have loved to see substantially more work done in establishing this reading. This leaves me with reservations as to whether do Vale’s move to replace Coakley’s “desire” with “love” is ultimately sufficient; love may be the greatest of the three, but with no reference to faith and hope, even love will leave us eschatologically adrift. I suspect this is why some reviews have voiced the sense that do Vale’s responses to some contemporary gender issues felt like a “cop out” - a slightly harsh way of stating things
August 8, 2025
It's rare for a book to get a 2-star review from me, but this one deserves it. To begin charitably: the research is extensive, covering not only contemporary gender theory and theology, but also early church fathers (Augustine primarily, with Irenaeus and other early fathers making some appearances).
But in my view this book exhibits the worst tendencies of contemporary systematic theology. There is no sustained exegesis of Scripture. Even the sections that claim to be reading Scripture (Song of Songs, Genesis 1-2) do so only through the lens of some theologian's reading of the text. God's Word is, at best, a sourcebook for creative theological synthesis - not the norming norm of classical Protestant and Reformed traditions.
And do Vale's model for gender - gender identities are those things we take to ourselves by loving social goods in virtue of our sexed bodies - is simultaneously opaque and destructive. Opaque, because it cloaks in academic jargon one of the most basic features of human experience: our physical embodiment, and destructive because it allows a bifurcation between our reproductive capacities and our gender identity. Yes, do Vale is right to reject a biological essentialism that sees human gender as merely our reproductive capacities. But, that said, it's remarkable that a book purporting to give a theological account of gender spends one paragraph discussing reproduction (190), and that merely to dismiss it as inadequate to found our gender identity. The proposal do Vale argues for actually could easily accommodate gay and trans identities (something he acknowledges on p.24 and 170, n.70). From a historical Christian perspective, this is a sign the model is flawed!
I can't recommend this book, and it is troubling that it has received high praise in some evangelical circles.
But in my view this book exhibits the worst tendencies of contemporary systematic theology. There is no sustained exegesis of Scripture. Even the sections that claim to be reading Scripture (Song of Songs, Genesis 1-2) do so only through the lens of some theologian's reading of the text. God's Word is, at best, a sourcebook for creative theological synthesis - not the norming norm of classical Protestant and Reformed traditions.
And do Vale's model for gender - gender identities are those things we take to ourselves by loving social goods in virtue of our sexed bodies - is simultaneously opaque and destructive. Opaque, because it cloaks in academic jargon one of the most basic features of human experience: our physical embodiment, and destructive because it allows a bifurcation between our reproductive capacities and our gender identity. Yes, do Vale is right to reject a biological essentialism that sees human gender as merely our reproductive capacities. But, that said, it's remarkable that a book purporting to give a theological account of gender spends one paragraph discussing reproduction (190), and that merely to dismiss it as inadequate to found our gender identity. The proposal do Vale argues for actually could easily accommodate gay and trans identities (something he acknowledges on p.24 and 170, n.70). From a historical Christian perspective, this is a sign the model is flawed!
I can't recommend this book, and it is troubling that it has received high praise in some evangelical circles.
July 10, 2024
This is a tough one to rate. When it's good, it's GOOD. It has some of the absolute best theological writing (in certain chapters) that I've read in a long time. His critique of "social constructionism" related to gender theory is outstanding, and his explication of Augustine is top-notch. This is all fantastic stuff, and anyone would benefit from reading it. I also love his overarching thesis that "gender" is not reducible to either biological essentialism NOR socially constructed theories, and his efforts to move the debate more into the realms of ethics and epistemology (read: we should be MUCH more epistemologically humble and restrained!) is admirable, and I am totally on-board.
On the other hand, the book doesn't quite always feel like it comes together coherently, and there are sections that are way too long (ie, the intro on "theological theology") and sections that I wish had more page count (esp. the final chapters on explicating gender through the biblical narrative). I also wish he had addressed the question of transgender identity much more explicitly and head-on than he did. I get that a big part of the book is epistemic restraint, but at times it felt like restraint was a bit of a smokescreen over questions that could have used more development.
I don't want to be too tough in that critique, as it's a remarkably hard balance to strike, and I also think, on balance, the book is excellent and succeeds at what Do Vale is trying to do, which is remarkable in itself. His four aspects of a gender theory are also outstanding and very helpful when integrating a theory of gender into a theological/biblical view. So there's a lot to gain from reading 'Gender as Love,' even if I had some quibbles.
On the other hand, the book doesn't quite always feel like it comes together coherently, and there are sections that are way too long (ie, the intro on "theological theology") and sections that I wish had more page count (esp. the final chapters on explicating gender through the biblical narrative). I also wish he had addressed the question of transgender identity much more explicitly and head-on than he did. I get that a big part of the book is epistemic restraint, but at times it felt like restraint was a bit of a smokescreen over questions that could have used more development.
I don't want to be too tough in that critique, as it's a remarkably hard balance to strike, and I also think, on balance, the book is excellent and succeeds at what Do Vale is trying to do, which is remarkable in itself. His four aspects of a gender theory are also outstanding and very helpful when integrating a theory of gender into a theological/biblical view. So there's a lot to gain from reading 'Gender as Love,' even if I had some quibbles.
March 18, 2024
This book is rigorous. The author wades through challenging sociological works regarding gender as well as Augustine's deep theology. Does Vale make a good case that the dichotomy regarding the ontology of gender - either it's a social construct or essentially biological - is not helpful?
Do Vale is most helpful in his placing gender within the divine economy at various stages. It is not enough to ask questions about gender at creation. We must also consider the role of gender in the fallen world: how it has gone wrong, how it is misused, etc. Then, we can evaluate what the redemption of gendered humans looks like and how the church should represent this reality. This is done in light of considered gender in the eschaton. This was an excellent paradigm.
If I had read this book ten years ago, I would have thought it a difficult but very interesting book. But now, the author's reluctance to address clearly pressing issues related to gender felt a bit more like a dodge. Maybe that's a different book, and this one is simply laying the theological foundations for understanding gender, but more needs to be said.
Do Vale is most helpful in his placing gender within the divine economy at various stages. It is not enough to ask questions about gender at creation. We must also consider the role of gender in the fallen world: how it has gone wrong, how it is misused, etc. Then, we can evaluate what the redemption of gendered humans looks like and how the church should represent this reality. This is done in light of considered gender in the eschaton. This was an excellent paradigm.
If I had read this book ten years ago, I would have thought it a difficult but very interesting book. But now, the author's reluctance to address clearly pressing issues related to gender felt a bit more like a dodge. Maybe that's a different book, and this one is simply laying the theological foundations for understanding gender, but more needs to be said.
March 29, 2025
A very dense book, but the deep dive I was looking for in the theology of gender. I didn’t agree with everything, definitely didn’t understand everything, but am walking away with a greater understanding of the ideas of gender as a social construct and the arguments circulating in the world of theology around gender.
I recently read this article by Sam Allberry, and I think it dressed some of the abstract thoughts of do Vale with practicality which helped me conceptualize some of the ideas of the book to a greater degree - What Are the Differences Between Masculinity and Femininity? https://www.crossway.org/articles/wha...
I recently read this article by Sam Allberry, and I think it dressed some of the abstract thoughts of do Vale with practicality which helped me conceptualize some of the ideas of the book to a greater degree - What Are the Differences Between Masculinity and Femininity? https://www.crossway.org/articles/wha...
Want to Read
September 30, 2024Read the first three chapters. It's a good book to engage with even though I disagreed with some parts, e.g., his lack of focus on reproduction for understanding gender.
November 6, 2024
An important and helpful book, but requires some pretty heavy theological lifting. My reading of it was particularly enriched through conversation with the author and discussion with colleagues.
August 3, 2026
My rating: 4 stars.
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