Episode 109: Megan DeFranza – The Bible and Intersex Believers (REISSUE) –

00:00

Pete:  You’re
listening to the Bible for Normal People, the only God-ordained podcast on the
internet.  Serious talk about the sacred
book.  I’m Pete Enns.

Jared:  And I’m Jared
Byas.  Welcome, everyone, to this episode
of the Bible for Normal People. 

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Speaking of archives, today, you’re in for a treat.  We’re looking back at Season One with Megan
DeFranza, the Bible and Intersex Believers. 
This is one of my favorite episodes from Season One and frankly, one of
the favorite episodes that we’ve done.  A
lot of appreciation for Megan’s insights. 
I hope you enjoy this.

The Bible and Intersex Believers.

[Jaunty Intro Music]

Pete:  Hello everybody!  Welcome to the Bible for Normal People
podcast.  Our topic today is the Bible
and Intersex Believers and our guest is Megan DeFranza.  She is a theologian and she’s currently
serving as a visiting researcher at Boston University School of Theology.  That’s pretty impressive, folks.  Don’t know if I have to tell you that, but it
is.

She’s written a wonderful book to sex difference in Christian theology.  This topic, the Bible and Intersex Believers,
what does that even mean?  Megan’s gonna
help us understand that.  I know I can
speak for myself and for Jared a little bit. 
I’m 56 years old.  When I was in
high school, this wasn’t even on the radar.

Last year, this wasn’t on my radar screen.  It wasn’t until Megan came to speak at
Eastern University where I teach, where she’s talking and I was like, “Oh.  I didn’t know any of this.  It’s really interesting.  It affects people’s lives in ways that I
can’t even imagine.”

Jared:  After she
spoke at Eastern, Pete was telling me about it over dinner and I had to talk
with her.  I got on the phone right after
that and said, “What is this that you’re doing [laughter]?  I don’t understand.”  It is just very fascinating, so I was just
really excited to have her on the podcast and just explain it, even for me to
better understand.

Pete:  Right.  It’s one of these issues that is all around
us in the sense that it can be somewhat unsettling and uncomfortable and even
divisive among people because you have to engage the Bible at some point.  That’s exactly what Megan does.  All she does is engage the Bible and the
history of the interpretation of the Bible and theology and all those—

Jared:  The ancient
church.

Pete: —the ancient church and ancient readings of biblical
text to show a rather surprising story that intersex is not a new issue.  People have been thinking about that and
commenting on it for a long time. 

For us, today, people like me and Jared, for who it’s new,
where we’ve been, we were never taught this in seminary.  I never really thought through it and never
had to, because it wasn’t brought to my attention. 

This is an issue, like other issues (for example, gender
equality or same-sex marriage), it’s so potentially volatile, it actually
forces you to go back and re-examine your own thinking, your own theology and
the biblical text.  You actually can’t
get around that once you start listening to people who actually know the topic,
how much there is in the Bible that can help us think through some of these
kinds of issues that sometimes lay buried or sidelined, because it’s not where
we are.

We come at the Bible with our questions already
premade.  What these issues do is they
force us to ask different kinds of questions we would never have thought up on
our own.

Jared:  And unearths
our assumptions.  I appreciate how when
you look at the Bible through a particular lens, it helps you understand that
you’ve been making assumptions all along that you didn’t even know.

Pete:  Right.  Right.

Jared:  Good.  Let’s have this conversation with Megan.

[Jaunty Music]

Megan:  We’ve done our
theological reflection.  We’ve done our
biblical study, only thinking about these idealized versions of male and
female.  That’s not good enough.  We have to do our biblical study and our
thinking theologically about what it means to be human and what it means to be
a faithful Christian in a way that includes everyone in the community.

We haven’t done that yet. 
Let’s start a new conversation.

5:01

Jared:  Welcome to the
podcast, Megan.  It’s very nice to have
you.

Megan:  Thanks so much
for having me.

Jared:  The topic
today is the Bible and the Intersex Believer. 
This term, neither Pete nor I had ever really come into contact with
that term before we met you, Megan, last year or a few years ago.

Bring us up to speed on what it is we’re talking about—

Pete:  If we don’t
know what it is, nobody knows about this—

Jared:  Clearly.  Clearly—

Pete:  That’s the way
I look at it.  Enlighten us all—

Megan:  That’s really
common.  The reason it’s new is because
it’s a fairly new term for a very old phenomenon.  Intersex is just a broad umbrella term that
talk about bodies that don’t fit the medical definitions of male and
female.  There’s a mix of male and female
characteristics in the same body and that can happen in a lot of different
ways.

Jared:  What would be
some common things, just concrete examples of—

Megan:  Sure.

Jared:  —where this
term might be appropriate for people?

Megan:  Yeah.  One of the most common kinds of intersex is
something called androgen insensitivity. 
You have a baby that’s born with XY chromosomes, which is your typical
male pattern and they make the gonads, which are neutral in the first few weeks
of gestation, go and become testes and starts secreting the typical level of
male hormones.

But, at the cellular level, the cells can’t process those
male hormones.  The body defaults to
female.  On the inside, it looks like
male anatomy and on the outside, it looks like female anatomy.  That’s a fairly common kind of intersex.

You can also have the opposite with XX chromosomes and
ovaries, with extra production, or higher-than-typical production of androgens
that can make a female body look more masculine or anywhere in-between.  Something called congenital adrenal
hyperplasia.  All these fancy medical terms,
which is why we use the generic “intersex” most of the time.

Pete:  Thank you.  [laughter] Yeah.

That’s very helpful to distinguish intersex from other terms
that float around like—

Megan:  Yup.

Pete:  —the alphabet
soup.  Right?

Megan:  Mm-hmm.

Pete:  This is
something that is a new term that people are maybe beginning to see and maybe
come to terms with, for the sake of a population that probably feels, I would
imagine, rather isolated and misunderstood.

Megan:  An older term
would be hermaphrodite or androgyne.  But
those are mythological creatures that have full sets of male and female
anatomy, which is humanly impossible, which is one of the reasons we’ve moved
away from that language towards stuff that’s more precise, to the particular
variations of individual people.

Pete:  You’ve written
a wonderful and tremendously scholarly and well-researched book, Sex Difference in Christian Theology,
and you have a website that is just very informative.  It’s a wonderful thing to visit if people—if
you want to know anything, folks, that’s where you go.

To me, it raises a question of curiosity.  What is it in your life that is driving you
to be passionate and supportive of the intersex community?

Megan:  I started this
work because I grew up in a very conservative church, where being a woman with
a mind was a problem.  I started studying
gender and sex difference and biblical scholarship and history and all of that,
to try and figure out how I could serve God and not sin, because I happened to
have a female body.

That led me to research, to talk about, that there are not
just male and female in the world, that there are all these intersex variations
as well. 

It was hearing those stories, the stories of individuals, particularly
recent medical history, where with our advanced technology, we here in the
United States and Europe and elsewhere, have tried to fix intersex.  Doctors come in to a baby that is born with
ambiguous genitalia.  They’ll say, “We
can figure this out.”  They’ll do plastic
surgery on the genitals of a child to make them look more typically male and female.

These surgeries have lasting harm, pain for life, for many
many people.  Hearing their stories of
physical pain, of feeling unsafe to share their stories in their own faith
communities, pastors saying, “Thanks for telling me, but please don’t tell
anybody else,” really drove me to realize that my questions about gender and my
frustrations as a woman in the church were small in comparison with my intersex
siblings in Christ, who had all of these added complications.

It was really hearing their stories that led me to say,
“We’ve got to do something about this.”

9:58

Jared:  As we get into
the topic, it’s just interesting to me the contrast that some of our listeners
will have where you’re using lots of medical terms and you’re talking about the
technology and the science of a lot of things here. 

How does that connect with the Bible for Normal People?  Say more about how your story coincides as
you became aware of all of this within the church community.  When did you start thinking about how the
Bible fits into all this?

Megan:  For me, the
Bible was the place I started.  Reading
scriptures about women’s place in the church led me to go back and look at
history and realize that in Christian history, we’ve thought about gender
differences very differently over the last 2,000 years, since the birth of
Christ. 

Getting into that history, the history of biblical
interpretation, really was the thing that moved me to say, “Wait a minute.  If we’ve thought about this differently in
the past, that gives us opportunity to think differently and maybe in fresh
ways in the present about differences that, actually, the ancient church was
quite familiar with, but we’ve lost that language and knowledge, even though
our science is more sophisticated.”

Pete:  Can you give an
example or two?  I can imagine people
listening, saying, “What are you talking about [laughter]—

Megan:  Sure.

Pete:  —we’re just
having this conversation about gender and we thought what we think today is
what people have always thought,” which is a typical response, “what I think is
what the church has always thought.”

You’re saying it’s more diverse and very early on—

Megan:  St. Augustine,
in the City of God, talks about
hermaphrodites.  He says, “As for hermaphrodites,
also called androgynes, they’re certain very rare, but every culture has people
that they don’t know how to classify as male or female.  In our culture, we call them by the better
sex.  We call them men.”

Pete:  Hmm.

Megan:  Here’s Augustine
saying, “Oh yeah.  Everybody knows about
hermaphrodites.  We assign them on the
masculine side.”  In the ancient world in
Rome and Greece, there were laws for men and laws for women and laws for
hermaphrodites and laws for other categories of people that we’ll talk about as
we continue here.

Pete:  With Augustine,
for example, he lived around when?

Megan:  He lives in
the third, fourth century in the Christian Era.

Pete:  That’s a long
time ago, right—

Megan:  It is.

Pete:  Was there a
tone of judgment in reading Augustine about what we call intersex or was he
just matter-of-fact about it?

Megan:  In that
passage, he’s very matter-of-fact, actually—

Pete:  Okay.

Megan:  —just stating
a fact that everyone’s aware of.

Pete:  Not freaked
about it.

Megan:  Not freaked
out.  He’s much more concerned about
castrated eunuchs and their place and pagan religious cults.  He speaks very harshly of them.  But he’s very matter-of-fact and fairly
neutral when it comes to hermaphrodites—

Jared:  You say “neutral.”  It’s interesting to me—what I heard you say
and maybe I misheard—“we have this category of people and we as a community
assign them to the male side of things.” 
Actually, it seems like there’s some social consequences to that.  It would be a more of a place of privilege at
that point.

Megan:  Right. For
hermaphrodites, Augustine is giving them the male privilege, whereas, it’s
interesting—castrated men, men who had their testes or crushed or cut off or
birth and who developed differently or who maybe did that later on in life, he
says of them, that they are “no longer men,” even though they were born whole.

Pete:  That’s
confusing.

Megan:  Yeah.  Sure is. 
[laughter]

Pete:  Just to fill
things out for the benefit of people listening, can you point to something else
that might be instructive for us, another example or two from this ancient
church period or from other cultures, perhaps?

Megan:  Certainly, in
the Jewish culture, there was a recognition of more than male or female.  The ancient rabbis came up with four
additional categories between male and female.

One was a naturally-born eunuch, which they classified more
on the masculine side, but not all the way over to the male.

They have another term, called the ilonite (SP?), which was
toward the feminine side, but not always to the edge.

They also used the term androgenos for someone whose right
in the middle.  They didn’t know how to
classify them one way or the other.

They had a fourth term, which was really something they
said, “We’re not sure what we’re dealing with now, but we’re pretty sure their
sex will become clear over time.”

They developed laws and rituals, religious laws to govern
these various persons and would debate those throughout the centuries.

15:00

Jared:  Tying it to
the Bible itself; we have the ancient church and we have this Jewish tradition,
where Augustine and the rabbis recognized different categories, often the
argument or the conversation when it comes to the Bible goes back to Genesis.

Megan:  Right.

Jared:  It is “God
created them male and female.” 

Megan:  Right.

Jared:  How does that
square with this conversation?

Megan:  That’s where
we all start, right?  This is where it’s
important to recognize that the Bible’s a big book and that Genesis is not the
whole of the story. 

Certainly, we have the beginning.  God creates them male and female in God’s
image and blesses them that way.  But
does that mean that’s all God created or all God intended?

Now that we have this other language that I just mentioned
from the ancient rabbis, we can look for other language in Scripture and that’s
what I was so delighted to find in my research is actually none other than
Jesus speaks about intersex people with one of these categories that the rabbis
mention in Matthew Chapter 19, verse 12, where he’s being asked about whether
or not, you can divorce your wife if she burns the toast. 

He’s being asked to weigh in on this ancient debate about
how bad does the infraction have to be for you to divorce your wife.

Jesus quotes Genesis 1. 
He says, “Don’t you remember God made them male and female.”  He quotes Genesis 2, “For this reason, a man
shall leave his father and mother and cling to his wife, and the two shall
become one flesh.”

Then his disciples say, “Well, if we can’t get out of
marriage, maybe we shouldn’t get into it, since our parents are typically
choosing a spouse for us.”

Jesus says, “No. 
No.  No.  You’re not understanding what I’m
saying.  There are those who’ve been eunuchs
from birth.  There are those who’ve been
made eunuchs by others.  There are those
who make themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven.  Let anyone accept this who can.”

I like to say, “Let anyone accept this who has any idea what
Jesus is talking about.”  [laughter]

The church has debated, “What does this mean?  What did it mean to make oneself a eunuch for
the sake of the kingdom?”

We know a lot about the second category.  That’s the castrated men that I just
mentioned, very common slaves and very expensive slaves, luxury items, status
symbols and sometimes even sex slaves in the ancient world.  Castrati were very very common.  We know a lot about that.

This first category, the eunuch from birth, Jesus’ is
drawing on this ancient rabbinic of the eunuch, of the sun as it is in Hebrew,
from the day the sun first shone upon the child, we knew this one is different.

Here’s Jesus, in the context of talking about divorce and
certainly affirming Genesis, he throws in these other categories and he doesn’t
do it with any criticism and he doesn’t say, “But God didn’t mean for it to be
this way.”  He just lays it out there.

That pushed me to think, “How do we take Genesis and give it
its place in the cannon at the beginning, but also recognize that we have to
find a way to read Genesis in a way that fits with these words of Jesus?”  So how do we do that?

That’s what I was—

Pete:  This is beyond,
then, that all parts of the Bible are equally ultimate and we read verses and
they tell you what to think.  You’re
actually describing a dynamism in the Bible that we have to take all this into
account somehow and make, not to put words in your mouth, but to make
theological decisions on the basis of this grand conversation that’s happening
in the Bible.  Is that a fair way of
putting it?

Megan:  The
theological decisions are how to interpret the description that God made male
and female.  It doesn’t say, “God made
male and female and anything else is a result of the fall.”  Yet, that’s a very quick theological move
that many Christians make.  “If there’s
not male and female, then anything else must be a result of sin.” 

Jesus doesn’t do that in Matthew Chapter 19.  The text doesn’t tell us that.  That’s a theological reading we’re bringing
to the passage.  Does it say that?

I asked, “Are there ways that we can read Genesis that make
it fit with the words of Jesus and with the larger canon all together?”  I think that there are ways that we can.  We could read Adam and Eve as the parents at
the beginning of the story, rather than the pattern for all people.

Megan:  We could read
them as the statistical majority.  Most
people are clearly male or clearly female. 
But just because they are the statistical majority doesn’t mean they are
the exclusive model or the only way that God allows humans to be born.

20:14

Megan:  When we look at other parts of
Genesis 1, we recognize that there are all sorts of things that aren’t named in
the creation account.  There are three
different types of animals.  There are
the “fish of the sea, the birds of the air and the creatures that crawl upon
the earth.”

These are the three categories of animals that God
creates.  But we all know that there are
creatures that don’t fit into those categories. 
Penguins are birds that don’t fly. 
There are other things in the sea other than fish.  There are things that crawl, but they live in
the water.  There are amphibians that are
both water and land animals.

But I’ve never heard an Old Testament scholar like yourself,
Pete, say, “Hey look.  Frogs.  They’re proof of the fall,”  [laughter] because they don’t fit into the
three categories of creatures—

Pete:  Hey.  That’s my next blog post.  That’s my next blog post.  [unintelligible]—

Megan:  You’re
welcome.

Pete:  What you’re
saying is exactly right.  I think the
response would be, “In the Old Testament, in the Pentateuch, when you have
clean and unclean animals, some of these in-between things, “You don’t eat
lobster.”  They’re sea animals, but they
also have legs.  They don’t fit.  They’re unclean.  You don’t eat them.

This is something I can imagine people, as sort of a
counterpoint to what you’re saying, to draw on that.  How might you navigate that particular issue?

Megan:  The canon
gives us the way to do that too.  Even if
we see them as outsiders.  Lobsters are
outsiders.  Bees are outsiders.  Frogs are outsiders.  Maybe this other category of people who don’t
fit into male and female.  Certainly, in
the Old Testament, we have, laws for men and laws for women and it doesn’t
leave a lot of place for anyone who doesn’t fit those categories.

But fast-forward up to the prophet Isaiah in Chapter 56, he
talks about two categories of outsiders, one being the eunuch and the other
being foreigners, Gentiles.  They’re complaining,
“Hey God, it’s not all that easy to be a eunuch or a Gentile and live in
ancient Israel.  The system isn’t set up
for us.” 

God says, through the prophet Isaiah to them, in Isaiah 56,
“Don’t let the eunuchs complain that I’m only a dry tree.  For to the eunuchs who keep my Sabbath and
obey me,” and there’s a long list of things, “I will give to them within my
house a name, an everlasting name that’s better than sons and daughters, a name
that will not be cutoff.” 

Then he speaks to the foreigners and says that they’re
offerings will be accepted on his altar for “my house will be a house of prayer
for all the peoples, “ (Isaiah 56:8), which we’re much more familiar with.  That’s in the context of God folding in
outsiders, who didn’t fit in earlier chapters of the story.

But God is saying, “Don’t worry.  I’m going to give you a place.”  He doesn’t say to the eunuch, “I’m going to
heal you and make you into the categories I intended, either male and female.”  He says, “I’m going to give you something
better than sons and daughters.  I’m
going to bless you in a way that a Jewish man or a Jewish woman could ever
imagine being blessed.  I’m going to give
you an everlasting name.”

Pete:  No talk about
eunuchs being a product of the fall any more than foreigners would be—

Megan:  Right.

Pete:  —a product of
the fall.  There’s nothing in Isaiah—I’m
just curious now because I haven’t studied this as closely as you have—but
there’s no indication there of how they came to be eunuchs.

Megan:  Nope.

Pete:  Okay.

Megan:  That’s the
challenge is that intersex is this broad umbrella term for many different
bodily variations. This term eunuch was an umbrella term for many different
things.  Sometimes, it’s hard to
tell.  Does this mean a castrated
eunuch?  Does this mean a natural
eunuch?  Is this a position in the court?  We have to do careful scholarship to see what
they’re talking about.  It’s not
particularly clear in Isaiah and yet,
[MUSIC STARTS] there is this idea that however these people came to be
eunuchs, God’s blessing them as they are, not requiring them to become
something they’re not and healing them into some creational category that we
find in Genesis Chapter One and Two.

24:50  (Producer’s
Group Endorsement)

25:53

Jared:  That’s a
really good point.  One thing I’m
thinking as you guys are talking about the categories and we keep coming back
to the words and how that there’s different variations—I want to make sure that
we’re being clear—how is intersex different than say transgender which is becoming
more and more a conversation, politically and otherwise?  What’s the difference and where does that fit
in this conversation?

Megan:  Sure.  Right now, the only difference between
intersex and transgender people is that transgender people cannot point to a
medical diagnosis.  I know trans people
who have said, “I wish I were intersex, because then people wouldn’t think I’m
crazy.”  They would be able to say, “Oh
no.  Some of their cells are XY.  Some of their cells have just one X.  No wonder they’re body is developing
differently or their gender identity is developing differently.”  They don’t have that luxury.

There are some intersex people whose experience is like that
of a trans person.  I work with LeeAnn
Simon, who’s a wonderful Christian woman and author and she has what I just
described.  Some of her cells are
XY.  Some have just one X.  Her gonads are part ovarian tissue, part
testicular tissue.

At puberty, she didn’t develop one way or the other and
chose to, though she was identified as a boy at birth, it wasn’t a fit for her,
as an adult, chose to identify as female and to live, to transition.  Her experience is intersex, but it also could
be understood as transgender.  That’s not
the majority of intersex experiences. 

Sometimes, these terms overlap and sometimes, they
don’t.  We have to be [unintelligible]—

Jared:  Where they
don’t, what I hear you saying is there’s not a chromosomal or biological thing
that you can pinpoint.

Megan:  At this point,
where our science is.  It may be that as
neuroscience advances, we will be able to pinpoint other things, but we can’t
at this point.

Jared:  Good.  I think that’s an important piece of the
conversation, that we don’t—

Megan:  Sure.

Jared:  [unintelligible]
It’s kind of a Venn Diagram overlap.

Megan:  Yup.

Pete:  Megan, you’ve
thought so much about this.  We’ve talked
about Augustine a little bit and rabbis and Jesus’ own words.  And Genesis and how that all fits into
this.  And Isaiah.   People still come back to Genesis.  Because it’s first, it’s therefore determinative
of everything else.

Megan:  Sure.

Pete:  You don’t think
that.  Help people walk through why it’s
okay not to think that.  It’s at the
beginning of the Bible.

Megan:  Sure.

Pete:  You get this
wrong, you get everything else wrong. 
Plus, it’s all good.

Megan:  Right.  Exactly. 
It is important and it does set the stage for the beginning of God’s
great redemptive story.  But it’s not the
whole of the story.  I see its pride of
place is as the opening chapters.  But,
at the end of the story, we find a vision of heaven in the book of Revelation
where people are included in the worshipping community who don’t fit in the
garden.

Here I’m thinking of Revelation Chapter 7, where there’s a
great multitude worshipping before the Lamb from every tribe, and nation and
language, people group.  If we think
about Genesis, we don’t have multiple tribes. 
We don’t have racial difference in the Garden of Eden.  We don’t have different languages represented
at the beginning.  There are many ways in
which this story that starts with these two ends up in full, moving through
Adam and Noah and Abraham and all the way through and then folding in the
Gentiles and folding in others.

29:56

It’s a story that gets bigger and wider and God’s redemptive
love goes out.  He blesses the Israelites
so that they could be a blessing to all the nations.  It’s this narrow story through these few for
the benefit of all, which is why I think we see many things in the book of
Revelation that echo things in the Garden. 

There are trees in the beginning and at the end.  But they are not the same trees.  It’s important that we don’t think that we’re
trying to get back to the Garden of Eden. 
Yes.  It has pride of place at the
beginning of God’s story.  But it seems
like God’s story gets bigger and more complicated, but also more beautiful and
more welcoming than what it is in the first chapters.

Pete:  It’s like the
Garden reimagined at the end of the Bible—

Megan:  Yeah.  It is.

Pete:  You’re not
actually returning to the Garden.  It’s
metaphorical language anyway.

Megan:  Right.

Pete:  It’s something
that is meant to evoke those memories, but then also to go beyond that to
something that—

Megan:  It’s called
new, right?  It’s called new creation—

Pete:   It’s new.  Right. 
Right.

Megan:  It’s not
paradise lost and regained, like we’re trying to get back.  It’s a new—God is doing something new at the
end of this grand story that is going to have some continuity with what came
before and some differences.

Jared:  I appreciate,
Megan, what you said about the—you talk about Isaiah and as the story unfolds,
it’s interesting that we may start with a garden, but this narrative of
inclusivity, of folding more and more people in, really starts just a few
chapters later with the start of Israel, with Abraham’s story.

Megan:  Right.

Jared:  Then, from
there, we just start including more.  I
just appreciated the point about how Israel was then adopted to be a
blessing.  Through that, the blessing is
this inclusivity.  It’s interesting, in
this conversation, that early on in the prophetic literature of Isaiah, that
the eunuchs are included pretty early in on that conversation before even—

Megan:  You know
what’s even more radical than that?  If
we look at Acts Chapter 8, at the first foreigner whose baptized?

Pete:  You took the
words right out of my mouth.  Go
ahead.  [laughter] Let’s talk about the
Ethiopian eunuch—

Megan:  Yeah.  Exactly. 
This is the Ethiopian who is a eunuch, who is the very fulfillment of
the prophecy in Isaiah, that as the gospel is going out from Judea, through
Samaria to the utter ends of the earth, as Jesus said to His disciples at the
end of the book of Matthew, and we see these significant baptisms in the book
of Acts.  The first foreigner whose
baptized is an Ethiopian eunuch, whose made this many-hundred-mile trek to
Jerusalem to worship.  Even though he’s
an outsider on many levels, he knows there’s only so close he can get to
God. 

There’s the Holy of Holies. 
There’s the Court of Men.  Outside
of that is the Court of Women.  Outside
of that, is the Court of Gentiles. 
There’s only so close you can get to God as a Gentile and as a
eunuch.  He knows that, but he goes
anyway.

As he’s reading the prophet, Isaiah, God sends Phillip to
him to interpret the Scriptures, to open them and to share with them the good
news of Jesus.  This Ethiopian eunuch
says to Phillip, “Look, here’s water.  Is
there anything preventing me from being baptized?”

I have read that passage my whole life, but until I studied
the place of eunuchs in the ancient world, I never understood the significance
of that question.

Pete:  Right.  Right.

Megan:  Here he’s
asking, “What’s my place gonna be if I follow this rabbi Jesus?

Pete:  Right.

Megan:  Am I gonna be
a second-class citizen like I am as a non-Jewish believer?

Pete:  Mm-hmm.

Megan:  Is there a
place for me in this new community?  I’m
just so frustrated that we don’t have the answer given to Acts.  [laughter] We don’t know what Phillip
said.  But we know that one of them
commanded the chariot to stop.  They both
got out of the chariot and Phillip baptized him.

Pete:  I’ve always
read that instinctively, “Is anything preventing me from getting baptized?” as
“We’ve got some time on our hands.  Let’s
just do this now.”  Not like they’re
actually socio-cultural-religious—there’s a matrix there of this. 

Maybe the Bible’s surprisingly not uptight.  [laughter] Go figure.

Megan:  God does tend
to surprise us at every turn.

34:48

Jared:  I’m wondering—I
was just thinking about this connection, this phrase of “foreigners and
eunuchs” and how that goes throughout the Bible.  In some ways, do you feel like “foreigners”
is clearly throughout the Bible representative of the marginalized throughout,
as we get to the Gentiles and others.  Is
“eunuchs” also—I’m channeling my upbringing where I want to take that
literally, “I’m willing to—you raise some good points, Megan—I’m gonna allow
for eunuchs as part of this, but now, I’m going to still exclude others,
because it doesn’t say it literally and specifically.

Is there a case to be made in terms of reading and how we
read the Bible for taking foreigners and eunuchs as almost representative of
this is a narrative of inclusion.  You
can’t really accept the eunuchs and exclude transgender people.  You can’t really take this group and exclude
that group, because it’s really representative of this radical inclusion. 

What would you say?

Megan:  First, I would
say that in some ways, Gentle or foreigner is not category of the marginalized,
if you think just statistically. 

Jared:  Right.  Right.

Megan:  Everyone who’s
not a Jew is a foreigner.

Jared:  They’re
usually the majority. 

Megan:  Right.  Throughout Israel’s history, they were
oppressed by these majority—

Jared:  Yeah.

Megan: —communities, so they were the minority.  You could really read that two different
ways.  But definitely, with the eunuchs,
we’re talking about people who have been oppressed in many different ways and
excluded in many different ways.

Even though the rabbis made space for naturally-born
eunuchs, castrated eunuchs couldn’t go to worship in ancient Israel.  Naturally-born eunuchs could.  But they, in some ways, had a double
religious duty, because the rabbis are pulling from the laws for men and the
laws for women and wanting to make sure all of their bases are covered.

They are this minority group has more to do and it’s harder
for them.  I do think that category is
one that certainly stands for the outside and the marginalized and those have
been excluded, whose voices haven’t been heard, who’ve been considered unclean
and not welcome in the worshipping community.

Pete:  Let me ask you
a question here, Megan.  I want to try to
articulate this clearly.  Following on
what Jared just said about eunuchs and the poor and the oppressed, marginalized
peoples, you see in Isaiah and then in the New Testament in Matthew 19 and Acts
8, you see a hint, a trajectory of—

Megan:  Yeah.

Pete:  I want to ask
you if you agree with this.  If yes,
great.  If not, fine.  Tell me why. 
It seems like the New Testament itself is not the end of the story.  It’s trajectories.  That’s an important thing to talk about for
people who take the Bible seriously.

Megan:  Yeah.

Pete:  The Bible, even
the New Testament, does not settle all these questions for us, but is itself
part of a moment—

Megan:  Yeah.

Pete:  —that is also
moving, right?  And so—

Megan:  Yeah.

Pete:  I gather you’re
agreeing with that, so regalias on your opinion [laughter].

Megan:  It’s not—I was
helped in this regard.  I remember in
seminary reading N.T. Wright’s book, The
New Testament and the People of God, where he likens the Bible to five acts
in a Shakespearean play, where the fifth act is unfinished.  He sees creation as Act One; the fall as Act
Two; Israel, Act Three; Jesus is Act Four; and the Act Five is the Church.

We have only the first few pages of the script in the New
Testament, but we are not—we are called to finish the story.  We’re called to live our parts.  We’re not called to be First Century Christians
in Rome or in Corinth or in Ephesus. 
We’re called to be 21^st Century Christians living where we
live.

We’re not trying to get back to Ancient Israel.  He keeps saying, “If we’re going to put on
this play,” back to the analogy with Shakespeare, “we’re not just going to
repeat lines from an earlier part of the story. 
We’re going to study the whole story. 
We’re going to see the direction it’s going.  We’re going to pick up on those hints that
you just mentioned.  If we’re going to
put on this play, we’re going to have to improv.”  He uses this term, “faithful improvisation,”
where we’re trying to see where the story is going and how do we live in—

Pete:  Right.

Megan:  —our part
faithfully, yet without a script.

Pete:  I would add to
that Fifth Act, analogously, is that you see that in the Bible anyway because
people are winging it.  [laughter]

39:53

Pete:  That’s not a
bad way of putting it.  In the Old
Testament, you have shifts and changes and new perspectives on things.  It seems inescapable.  To help people to say, “It’s okay to think
responsibly and theologically and biblically today about an issue that maybe we
have to address in different ways than previous generations.”

Megan:  We’re so
afraid of doing something wrong that oftentimes, we do nothing.  We give the apostles permission to think
creatively.  We give Calvin and Luther permission
to think creatively, to do something different. 
But we rarely give ourselves permission—

Pete:  Why is
that?  What are we afraid of—

Megan:  —to do what
they did.

Pete:  We should get a
therapist [laughter].  What do you
think?  You’ve experienced these
things.  What—

Jared:  [unintelligible]

Pete:  —are people
afraid of?

Jared:  In the
congregations that you’re teaching and educating people—

Pete:  Yeah.

Jared:  —what are
fears that you find?

Megan:  There’s so
much censure in our communities, right? 
If you put a toe out of line, there’s shame that’s brought on by the
community.  There’s exclusion.  All of these things.  We don’t want that.  We don’t want to put on the outside.  We don’t want to be cast out like these
outsiders.  We better keep in line.  We better follow the script.  We better recite the confession in whatever
version it’s in and dare not think differently lest we become an outsider.  I think we’re afraid of becoming outsiders
ourselves to our very community—

Pete:  Yeah.  Maybe you’re putting the nail on the head
there.  The head on the nail rather.  [laughter] Who wants to be an outsider?

Megan:  It’s hard.

Pete:  Yeah—

Jared:  I was going to
say—and not to be too theological, but it seems like that’s exactly what
solidarity is about, right, is taking that step in saying, “I’m willing to risk
becoming an outsider in order to be in community with the outsiders.”

Megan:  Yeah.  It’s hard. 
You don’t get to have it both ways. 
You don’t get to have solidarity with the marginalized and popularity
with the powerful.  It doesn’t work like
that.

Jared:  That’s a good
phrase—

Pete:  Which brings me
to the entire New Testament—

Megan:  [laughter]
That’s a good place to go.

Pete:  —which has a
thing or two to say and we could throw the prophets in there as well.  It strikes me, Megan, that this issue is one
of several issues that the Church is either dealing with or going to have to
deal with that really raises to the forefront—I don’t want to put it
negatively, but the complexity even in the ambiguity sometimes of theological
decisions.

Megan:  Yeah.

Pete:  It’s not easy—

Megan:  It’s not.

Pete:  Living life is
hard enough.  [laughter] To think you
have to have all the right answers all the time makes it that much harder, but
the life of faith may be not as clear as we think and we’re doing the best that
we can, and for some people, and you’re one of them, and I think Jared and I
are the same, if we’re going to err, we’re going to err on the side of people
and lives and their experiences and not a system that we think is immovable and
unchanging, because oddly enough, the system, which comes from the Bible, is
itself a changing, moving thing—

Megan:  Yeah.

Pete:  —which is a
good model for us.  It’s not going to
give us the answers to any particular question, but it is going to drive us to
think about—you don’t get off the hook by quoting Bible passages.  Life ain’t like that—

Megan:  But you do
have to study them and see where they’re pointing—

Pete:  Yup.  Right. 
Exactly right—

Jared:  Which is that
faithful improvisation, which is a nice connecting.  The faithful is that rootedness—

Megan:  Yeah.

Jared:  —within the
text, which your articulation today—I appreciate this conversation of rooting
it in these texts and then still saying—but there is still some creativity that
has to happen, some improvisation.  That
fifth act is up to us on how we’re going to be faithful to that.

Megan:  I don’t have
it all figured out, but what I’m trying to do in my book and in my work is to
say, “Okay.  We’ve done our theological
reflection.  We’ve done our biblical
study only thinking about these idealized versions of male and female.  That’s not good enough.  We have to do our biblical study and our
thinking theologically about what it means to be human and what it means to be
a faithful Christian in a way that includes everyone in the community.”  We haven’t done that yet.  Let’s start a new conversation where we let
more voices come and be at the table and it means voices that have been at the
table need to be quiet for a while and listen and see if there’s something new
to be learned, new perspectives to be had.

Pete:  Right.  Being quiet. 
That’s hard.

Megan:  It is
hard. 

44:58

Pete:  [laughter] Megan, I appreciate the
way you put that.  That’s very well
put.  Unfortunately, we could talk for
hours about all this.  [laughter] So much
stuff.  We’re just handling the
Bible.  That always comes up in these
kinds of conversations.  We’re coming to
the end of our time.

In closing, tell us where people can people find you on the
worldwide interwebs.  What projects are
you involved in, if you are writing another book?  Make sure you tell us about the book that you
have written and make sure people know what that is.

Megan:  Thanks.  You can find me at www.megandefranza.com, pretty easy to
find.  You can see the books that I’ve
written there, chapters, and other books. 
The main one we’ve been talking about today is Sex Difference in Christian Theology. 
The subtitle is Male, Female
and Intersex in the Image of God, where we spend lot more time talking
about all these things. 

You can find me there. 
One of the things I’m most passionate about is that I just started a
non-profit with my colleague, Leann Simon, who I mentioned earlier and we have
a website, www.intersexandfaith.org,
where we’re working to educate faith communities about intersex, provide
support for intersex people of faith and advocate for the inclusion of all
God’s people.

One of the things we’re doing, what I’m really excited
about, is we’re in the process of making a documentary film, which right now is
entitled Stories of Intersex and Faith,
where people of faith—right now, we have Christians and Jews sharing their
stories about being intersex and being people of faith and the good parts of
that, the helpful parts of that and the difficult parts of being intersex and
in a faith community. 

We’re hoping to create that as a full-length
documentary.  But I’d also like to use
that footage to create a series for churches that will be an educational
curriculum, that’s video interviews and others, so that we can have better
conversations in our communities. 
Because as you said, if we’re not already having these conversations in
our churches, you will be next year, or the year after that.

Pete:  Or your kids
will force them.

Megan:  Right.

Pete:  Right.

Megan:  I want to help
provide some resources for churches having these conversations. 

Pete:  Some video
clips are on your website, already, of—

Megan:  Yeah.

Pete:  —you hope to
have the longer documentary eventually.

Megan:  Yeah.

Pete:  Okay.  That’s good.

Megan:  Thanks.

Pete:  Listen, Megan,
thank you so much.  We had a great time
talking to you.  Very informative.  Let’s do this again sometime.

Megan:  Thanks for
doing what you do.  Appreciate you
inviting me.

Jared: 
Absolutely.  Bye.

Megan:  Take care.

[Jaunty Exit Music]

Jared:  Thanks again
for listening to another episode of the Bible for Normal People.  Again, if you feel you want to support the
podcast and what we do, you can just go to patreon.com/thebiblefornormalpeople. 

Otherwise, we hope you enjoyed the episode and we’ll catch
you next week.