Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:06] Speaker B: Welcome to the Truth Exchange Podcast. This is a weekly program with Dr. Jeffrey J. Ventrella where he answers questions from subscribers around the globe, answering questions about worldview, cultural apologetics and other miscellaneous items. I'm your host, Joshua Gilo, and this is another edition of the Director's Bag.
SEAN from Boston, Massachusetts, writes Dr. Ventrella, is there a strong distinction between the terms gender and sexuality? A quick Google search posits all kinds of bizarre notions. It would be interesting to read or hear how we have come so far in this understanding of human distinctions of sex. Also, I wonder what kinds of things can Christians do besides getting married, having children, raising them with creational norms that might aid in a sweeping Christian culture that can overtake the tide of neopaganism? What are your thoughts, Dr. Petrello?
[00:01:10] Speaker A: That's a very helpful question. I thank you, Sean. Let me answer the second inquiry first, and that is this. You've tapped into something that I think is undervalued by many of the brothers and sisters, and that is what I call heroic ordinariness. We do the things that we know are God's will that may not get clicks or fanfare, and yet they are providing the foundations, laying the groundwork for our Great Commission and cultural mandate. So getting married, having children, being mothers, being fathers, rearing our children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord, envisioning them that this is our Father's world and they are there and called to work, work and to toil and to labor. All those things are huge. They're not mere.
I call it mere heroic ordinariness simply to showcase the fact that we oftentimes discount them.
Secondly, I think though, what we need to do is to be very clear. We need moral clarity which leads to moral conviction, which gives us then moral courage. And in particular in this area of sexual anarchy, we need to have our vocabulary very clear and very crystal clear. We do not need to participate in the abuse of language because that is in fact part and parcel the tactics being used not only by the left but by the so called spiritual left. And so we have to not in a pugnacious or blurring kind of way, but we need to use biblically accurate terminology. And I think that could go very far and not buy in why do I say that? If you buy the term, you buy the premise. And ultimately if you buy the premise, you will buy the conclusion. I was very fortunate that I had some very good teaching in the early 80s which refused to deal to call the practice of sodomy Gay, because what you do is it creates an identity when there's no such thing. There is sexual normativity and sexual deviance. And to put a different label on us allows you to slide into it and suggest there's an identity here as opposed to chosen behaviors and so forth. So I would say that's the case. In particular, this idea of sex and gender is a very recent idea. You may know that gender was simply a grammatical term. It applied to how language was utilized. And certainly in the United States legal scene, it was actually before she was a justice, Ruth Bader Ginsburg was, I think, general counsel of the American Civil Liberties Union, and she ran litigation dealing with equal protection kinds of questions, particularly on the basis of sex. You'll notice that the statutes which bar discrimination do so on the basis of sex. They don't talk about gender, but she and her team injected gender because she. This is a story that they didn't want those old white guys to focus on sex. And so they took the word out and they use this. This grammatical term, gender, or. Well, now critical theory has really amplified this and tells us that, oh, sex is very different than gender. Sex is, quote, assigned at birth, which is a nonsense statement. No one assigns anything. You simply are. But that gender is something that is explored, chosen, fluid. And so by creating this faux category of humanity, it allows critical theorists like Judith Butler, who created essentially queer studies, to then go on and talk about, well, sexuality is 100% constructed, and that's your gender, that's your choice. And so we're creating, oh, Star Trek, we're creating parallel universes, but one is completely made up. And so, again, it gets back to my first point about using biblically accurate terminology. That doesn't mean you simply use Bible words, you know, thumping the Bible, but it does mean you have those categories very clearly in mind and utilize terminology that's consistent with it. So I don't use that unless I use. Use it in quotes. I will say gender etiology because that, in fact, is what it is. It's an etiology predicated upon this notion of. Of gender. But in terms of. When I talk about persons, I say sex.
We are created as sexual dimorphs, male and female. The Bible uses sexed terms to describe humanity. And that's a good thing. It gives us distinction. It echoes what Peter Jones has talked about, the creature creator distinction, so on and so forth. That's kind of a ramble, but that's how I would approach.
[00:06:19] Speaker B: Yeah, that's helpful in your. The recent dicta. Gender ideology The Neopagan Blurring of Biology and Justice. It's a two part series that we have up on the website. There's a. There's a quote that you used by Hinkle stating about. Well, read the quote. Homosexuality must make its moral case, not merely its civil, social justice or social rights case. It must show the deep spirituality of homosexual love. You respond to that quote in the Dicta. Hinkle is correct in one sense. Homosexual love is deeply spiritual. And we had that stirred up some comments on the Truth Exchange website as well as some of our social media sites. And I was curious, would you be able to talk a little bit what you mean by how homosexual love or homosexuality, there's. There's a relationship of spirituality to it.
[00:07:13] Speaker A: Sure, yeah. And that's an important question, Joshua. Thank you for framing it the way you did. So. Of course, of course, as most people know, truth exchange kind of bottoms its analysis of things, its big picture of things based upon the cosmology, the reality of the universe, as the apostle Paul articulates it and explains it. And what he tells us is that the truth is exchanged for the lie. This is an impact of the Fall. And so we are drawn toward the lie.
You shall be as God, the fundamental lie. And what that happens, there's a spiritual response. Paul tells us that when the truth is exchanged for the lie, the creation, or some part of it, is worshiped instead of the Creator. And so there's a switch, a supplantation, a change that occurs. And we have a worship impulse. Remember, mankind is created by God, who is a God, the God, meaning that we are inherently spiritual beings, not in the sense of being, you know, ghosts, but in the sense that we have a responsiveness to the divine, the Creator. And so when we have the Fall, we have disordered worship. And so we worship something in the creation. Well, what Paul says is when that happens, he says for this reason or because of this, men begin to practice unrighteous things, including homosexual relationships. Okay, so what we see then is this theology of disordered worship expresses itself in unethical practices. So theology and ethics, how we live correlate. Disordered worship leads to disordered practices. And so that's what we have here. And so Paul's analysis is we ex. We suppress the truth. I hadn't said that before. We hold it down, we exchange the truth for the lie. Then we worship and serve the creation rather than the Creator, including our own selves, okay, or our ideas or those kinds of things. And then that leads to practices, ethical practices, meaning that those practices in their bottom line stem from disordered worship. That is to say, they are deeply spiritual. And then, as we'll see in the dicta that will be posted on St. Patrick's Day the 17th, I'm going to talk about Romans 1:32 and the approval process, showing you from the headlines that this is exactly what's going that there's a press in our culture and in our law to approve or codify these unrighteous practices. So I hope that helps some of our listeners. I would encourage them. I don't think it reads long, but read Part one and Part two and I think that sets forth at least my most mature understanding and research concerning neo pagan spirituality and its implications for both the church and and the culture.
[00:10:31] Speaker B: This concludes a recording of the Director's Bag. For more resources from Truth Exchange, please visit us online at www.truthexchange.com. you can follow us on X as well as Facebook for more updates and content related to Truth Exchange. Be sure to join us next week for more questions from the Director's Bag. I'm your host, Joshua Gilo, and this is the Truth Exchange Podcast.
