One of the commonplaces of our culture is to distinguish between sex and gender. However, it wasn’t that long ago, when filling in forms, that we were asked about our sex—whether we’re male or female. Now forms ask us for our gender, and they often give us more than two options.
But did you know that the word “gender”, as applied to someone’s sexual nature or expression or identity, is a very recent invention? We only really started doing that in the late 1950s and 60s. The introduction of the idea of gender, and its separation or decoupling from the concept of sex so that we now have two potentially different things—sex and gender—is one of the extraordinary features of the story of Western culture over the past 30-40 years.
In this episode of the Centre of the Christian Living podcast, Rob Smith tells the story of how that happened, why it’s had such a massive impact on our society, and how it all relates to God’s theory of sex in his word.
Links referred to:
- The Body God Gives: A biblical response to transgender theory (Robert S Smith)
- The Gender Revolution: A biblical, biological and compassionate response (Patricia Weerakoon with Robert Smith and Kamal Weerakoon)
- How Should We Think About Gender and Identity? (Robert S Smith)
- The 2026 Priscilla & Aquila Centre Annual Conference (Mon 2 Feb 2026)
- Support the work of the Centre.
Runtime: 48:26 min.
Transcript
Please note: This transcript has been checked against the audio and lightly edited, but still may contain errors. If quoting, please compare with the original audio.
Introduction
[00:00:05] Tony Payne: One of the commonplaces of our culture is to distinguish between sex and gender. I can still remember filling in forms way back when that asked me for my sex—whether I was male or female. But now forms ask me for my gender, and they often give me more than two options.
[00:00:21] But I was fascinated to learn in my conversation with today’s guest on the Centre for Christian Living Podcast that even the word “gender”, as applied to someone’s sexual nature or expression or identity, is a very recent invention. We only really started doing that in the late 1950s and 60s. And the introduction of the idea of gender and its separation or decoupling from the concept of sex, so that we now have two potentially different things—sex and gender—it’s one of the extraordinary features of the story of Western culture over the past 30-40 years.
[00:00:56] In today’s episode, we hear the story of how that happened, why it’s had such a massive impact on our society, and how it all relates to God’s theory of sex in his word.
[Music]
[00:01:22] Tony Payne: Well, hello again. I’m Tony Payne. Welcome to another edition of the Centre for Christian Living podcast. It’s great to have you with us again. And sitting opposite me today here at Moore College in our studio is Rob Smith.
[00:01:32] Rob Smith: Hello, Tony.
[00:01:32] Tony Payne: Nice to see you, Rob! We’ve known each other for a long time through various different things. We were on the board of EMU Music together for a while.
[00:01:39] Rob Smith: For a while, yes. On the Doctrine Commission for many years.
[00:01:42] Tony Payne: Indeed, we have been. And many of our listeners will know you from your music, of course. We’ve sung your songs over the years, and just hearing your voice kind of makes me think of those recordings of “Undivided” and “Let Your Kingdom Come” and other things. Are you still writing much music and doing much of that stuff these days?
[00:01:56] Rob Smith: Well, I did put my music on hold, in many ways, for a number of years, while I was trying to write a PhD, which as you know, is all-absorbing.
[00:02:02] Tony Payne: Indeed, indeed. Yes.
[00:02:03] Rob Smith: Uh, but since finishing that, I have began to reengage with my music writing and recording, and so there’s some things in the works.
[00:02:11] Tony Payne: Oh, look forward to that! What else do you do with yourself these days—just to orient people to who you are these days?
[00:02:16] Rob Smith: Yeah, look, I’m on the faculty at SMBC: Sydney Missionary and Bible College. I teach theology and ethics, and occasionally, music ministry when that comes around.
[00:02:24] And while I was there, 20 years part-time before, in 2022, I started there full-time. So that’s a great privilege to serve there and to be preparing students for work in God’s harvest, uh, all over the place.
[00:02:37] Tony Payne: Indeed. Wonderful job to do, and especially glad to be chatting with another member of the Noble Order of Ethics Lecturers.
[00:02:45] Rob Smith: Absolutely.
[00:02:46] Tony Payne: There’s not many of us, so it’s lovely to have you here and to talk about your book, which we’re going to come to in a minute.
Why transgender theory?
[00:02:51] Tony Payne: You mentioned a PhD just a few seconds ago that you’ve been working on, and really, that’s the basis for this book. Your PhD was about transgenderism—about considering and thinking about transgenderism from a biblical perspective. And that’s what this book is about: The Body God Gives: A biblical response to transgender theory. I guess the first question to ask you is why this topic? How did you get interested, or what was the motivation for you in pain and suffering that a PhD involves, and that obviously has come out in this book—the enormous amount of scholarship that’s in it? What got you started?
[00:03:22] Rob Smith: What got me started? Well, I had been putting off doing a PhD for many years, partly because I was only for teaching part-time. But also I was just never really found the topic that I knew I would—would need to absorb me, to engage. Now, when this topic presented itself to me, perhaps it would be a way of saying it—in fact, you were there at the time, Tony, ‘cause we were, together, working on a report for the Diocese of Sydney on human sexuality. And I remember drafting the shape of the report, and there was a chapter there on kind of, “Where are we? How did we get here?” In my head, I thought, “Right, that’s a chapter for Tony to write.”
[00:03:54] Rob Smith: But as it turned out, it was a chapter I ended up writing and—
[00:03:57] Tony Payne: And you did it very well.
[00:03:58] Rob Smith: Well, thank you for that! But part of what I realised in the process of researching for the writing of that chapter was that the whole transgender phenomenon was kind of waiting in the wings, or to use a different metaphor, kind of coming like a freight train down the tracks, and here we were, perhaps, not paying it much attention, because we were very much focused on same-sex relations and same-sex marriage.
[00:04:19] And so, I remember starting to gather materials and making lists of things and bibliographies and thinking, “Who do I give this to? Do I give it to Tony? Or do I give it to someone else?” Like, who’s got the skills—the interests—to run with this ball? And after a while holding the ball, I realised, “Hmm, maybe I’m the one who’s meant to run with it.” So that did then morph into the PhD.
[00:04:42] Tony Payne: But you’ve written other things as well, haven’t you, on the—this is almost almost like your second or third publication on this topic.
[00:04:47] Rob Smith: Yes. Well, early in the PhD process, Don Carson asked me to write a, I guess you called it a long essay—17,000-word essay—for an initiative over at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, which then ended up being published by Lexham Press a little booklet called How Should We Think About Gender and Identity? So that, I think, came out in 2017, maybe.
[00:05:06] Now, in some ways, that’s a little bit of a sort of nutshell version of what later became the PhD—not that I didn’t learn a lot in the years following that, which ended up in the bigger book. And then of course I helped write the book, The Gender Revolution with Patricia and Kamal Weerakoon, which again, was trying to show how science and Scripture are actually telling us the same story and singing the same song when it comes to these matters. So that was a book that’s been very helpful, I think, to many, particularly ‘cause it’s accessible and just allows a wider range of people to read it.
Addressing transgenderism from a biblical perspective
[00:05:37] Tony Payne: But this book, The Body God Gives, coming out of the PhD research you did, does something different. It does that very detailed work that we needed someone to run with and do, and that you’ve graciously and laboriously—I know it’s—what a process it is, doing this kind of research and laying it all out—to not only trace how we got here, the historical perspective of how the transgender movement that is now such a prominent and such a common part of our cultural understanding today—how it got to be that way, but also how do we address it from a biblical perspective? And there’s a lot of issues in Genesis and in all kinds of places that need detailed work, and you’ve done that work, which is an enormous service to the church and to our society, in my view. And we’re going to dig into some of the aspects of the book. We’re going to, in many ways, in those two kind of movements, we’re going to talk about the history.
[00:06:27] And we’ll talk a little bit about the biblical material as well. But we are going to skate across, obviously, a lot of material that you’ve looked at at quite some depth, and I really encourage people, especially if you’re a pastor or a theological student, if you’re an MTS trainee, if you’re a thoughtful Christian who wants to dig into the detail and the evidence and really wrap your head around it, it’s all laid out here by Rob. And I don’t know if you’ve ever read stuff by Rob before, but he writes in this measured, clear, lucid way that just lays everything out so clearly. And even though you can see it—as I was reading this book—you can see its origins in a thesis: it has a certain shape to it and a lot of detail, but it’s readable. It’s not as if it’s impenetrable by any means. That’s damning you with faint praise, isn’t it!
[00:07:12] Rob Smith: Oh no, thank you.
[00:07:13] Tony Payne: It’s not impenetrable!
[00:07:13] Rob Smith: Thanks to the promo!
[00:07:16] Tony Payne: Read this book! It’s not impenetrable.
The historical perspective
[00:07:18] Tony Payne: But let’s dig into the first aspect of it, which is the historical perspective. I was really surprised: I knew that the word “gender” or the idea of gender as describing our consciousness of our sexual identity or something—that that was a very common word in our culture, and it wasn’t a kind of word we find in the Bible, or I couldn’t remember sort of reading it much in Christian history. But I was kind of shocked to discover from your book what a recent invention it is.
[00:07:44] Rob Smith: Yes, well, it really goes back to the late 1950s. It existed before that—indeed, comes out of it the French word “genre”. But it was really just a grammatical term in English. Or sometimes you might say a kind of humorous synonym for “sex”—biological sex.
[00:07:59] But certainly coming out of, well, second-wave feminism, but it wasn’t actually the second-wave feminists who coined the language. You know, Simone de Beauvoir wrote her book, The Second Sex, but she doesn’t use the word “gender” in there, even though she’s, perhaps, talking about what we now call gender the whole time.
[00:08:13] But it was some people in more than the psychological world—John Money particularly, and a guy called Robert Stoller—who started to use this language particularly to talk about aspects of both our experience and our expression that are different from our biological sex. That is, how we think about or perceive our own person, which now, of course, we tend to call “gender identity”, and that indeed was one of Stoller’s terms, but also the cultural sort of expression of being a person in the world—being a sexed person in the world: what is that? ‘Cause they’re often—in different cultures, we do sex differently, you might say. And so, that often got talked about as sometimes “gender expression” or “gender roles”, depending whether it was more to do with dress or to do with behaviours.
Sex versus gender
[00:08:56] Rob Smith: And so, you got this sort of set of terms that came into being. “Sex” remained a term for biology. But then “gender” seemed to encompass gender identity, which is more the psychological dimension, and “gender role”/expression, which is more the social. So again, if you think in terms of bio-psychosocial, which is a common way of, I suppose, trying to wrap our minds around who and what we are in terms of having these different aspects and dimensions, okay, “sex” was the bio; “gender”, the psychosocial. And so, yeah, that comes out of—and people call it the Money Stoller paradigm sometimes, or the gender identity paradigm.
[00:09:31] The feminist then took that up. They saw it as useful in the cause of minimising the significance of biological sex and maximising the so-called constructive elements of, again, being male or female.
[00:09:46] Tony Payne: This rings bells for me. It’s the kind of feminism, in a sense, I grew up with—the Germaine Greer, Betty Friedan—what we call second-wave feminism of the 60s-70s—especially 70s—60s and 70s, in which, as you say, the drive was to say, “Yes, there are biological differences between men and women”, and they were happy to acknowledge that and didn’t want to challenge that.
[00:10:06] But in a sense, they wanted to minimise the significance of those biological differences, in a sense, in terms of who we are and how we live in the world so that the socially and culturally constructed roles we adopt can be virtually interchangeable, because they aren’t really connected with our biological sex. Our biological sex is as it is, and that’s just the way it is. Men are men, and women are women in that sense. Or males are males, and females are females.
[00:10:31] But the way we express and live that out socially, culturally, can be constructed, really, as we wish, and it’s been done in a way that oppresses women. So we need to change that. And that was essentially second-wave feminism, right?
[00:10:42] Rob Smith: That’s the revolution in a nutshell. Yeah, and that, again, it took a variety of paths and there was certainly a big push for androgyny in the middle of it all.
[00:10:50] Tony Payne: Oh really?
[00:10:50] Rob Smith: And then lesbian feminism came into the picture as well. And so the story is quite complex, and even though I’ve put a lot of detail in my telling of it, there’s so much I left out as well. So.
[00:11:01] But yes, that part, it’s, yes, shrinking down the relevance of biology really simply to the reproductive realm and the different reproductive capacities of men and women, and then everything else, yes, is socially imposed or socially constructed. That was the claim.
[00:11:17] Now, as I think we can now say, it’s not that simple. There are definitely, it’s—things that are socially constructed about gender: certainly in gender dress and so on.
[00:11:27] Tony Payne: Different cultures do that differently.
[00:11:29] Rob Smith: Yeah, they vary. And likewise, even expectations about certain jobs and tasks and so on. But I think we can now say more confidently that the biological plays a much bigger part and influences a whole lot more than simply our reproductive roles.
[00:11:44] Tony Payne: I think so, and we might come back to this after we sort of take the story a little bit further to talk about how we do think about the socially constructed nature of who we are and the fact that we are social beings and that different cultures do the—we’ll come back to that, I think, because we wanted to sort of see how the story progresses from here. Because in a sense, what you’re saying is that the second-wave feminist, building on this gender identity kind of paradigm from Money and Stoller, we’re saying, well, gender is a different thing from biological sex. There was a sort of a separation of the two, a what do you call it? A decoupling of them, as you put it in the book. And that was the crucial move, right?
[00:12:19] Rob Smith: Yes. The distinction, firstly, which again, I think is valid to a large extent—distinguishing sex and gender, defined as they’ve defined them. But then the decoupling, that’s another move, again, that really takes us out of second-wave feminism into, well, at least in some versions of third-wave feminism, but certainly then into queer theory, where sex has no bearing on gender.
Queery theory: sex apart from gender
[00:12:41] Tony Payne: So that’s kind of the next stage of the story. Tell us what happens there.
[00:12:45] Rob Smith: Well, just that exactly. I mean, again, it has all kinds of antecedents, particularly in French Existentialism and the rise of postmodernism, and people like Foucault and so on. But even behind all of that, you can go back to Nietzsche and his idea that was very much taken up by a number of people—that there is no being behind the doing.
[00:13:04] And of course, Sartre is famous for his phrase that we effectively create ourselves—that our existence precedes our essence. So we don’t have a given essence that we then live out. No, we have just the raw fact of existence, and by our existence, we then create an essence.
[00:13:20] So all of these kind of things feed into queer theory, and certainly Judith Butler—who wasn’t the first person to play around with ideas of queer theory, but certainly the one who popularised them—she is wanting very much to talk about sex and gender as being radically independent. And so, the fact that you have a certain type of body tells you nothing about your gender. You might have a typically male body, but that doesn’t mean you’re going to be a man, says, Butler. And likewise, a typical female body doesn’t mean you’re going to be a woman. So these are just radically independent. We might think they’re connected, because perhaps in most people’s experience, they seem to be, or we like them to be. But who knows if that’s just being socially imposed, you know? But if they’re not connected, then there’s no reason they need to line up.
[00:14:03] Now, queer theory goes a step beyond even existentialism, because you never actually end up creating an essence in queer theory.
[00:14:10] Tony Payne: There is no essence.
[00:14:11] Rob Smith: No, there is no essence.
[00:14:11] Tony Payne: It’s just performance.
[00:14:12] Rob Smith: Just performance. And so, yeah, one of the little, um, well definitions that a guy called David Halperin gives of queer theory is that the essence of queer is identity without an essence. So you just exist and you never actually become anything. Um.
[00:14:27] Tony Payne: You just do, and you do in the way that does construct something and build something, but it’s not something essential. It’s something constantly shifting and evolving as you do it.
[00:14:36] Rob Smith: Yeah, that’s it. And it is all, in the end, performative. And you can change the performance at any point.
[00:14:42] So here’s where ideas of, you know, gender fluidity come in—that gender is just this malleable thing that can chop and change at any point.
Soft and hard trans theory
[00:14:50] Tony Payne: And so number of lights went on as I was reading through your treatment of the history, and one of them was to realise that the explanation you’ve just given very briefly, and that you give much more carefully and fully in the book, kind of explains the different sorts of trans approaches and trans ideologies that we come across. You talk about a soft trans theory and a hard trans theory. Just explain what those two things are and how, in a sense, they’re kind of connected to the trajectory of this thought.
[00:15:17] Rob Smith: Yes, yes. I struggled to find the right words. I went with “soft” and “hard” in the end, ‘cause often we talk about soft postmodernism and hard postmodern. I think, okay, let’s just use those terms. But there are, I realised, two quite distinct versions of trans theory. So that what I’ve called the “soft” version basically says, yes, your sex is determined by your biology. But your gender is determined by your gender identity. And so, if there’s a mismatch there, well, your gender identity is the real you. And so, your biology is the problem, and it, in whatever ways, can be changed, should be changed. So that’s what I’ve called “soft” trans theory. It doesn’t sound soft, ‘cause it’s dramatic and revolutionary.
[00:15:56] Tony Payne: But that’s the kind of theory where, popularly speaking, Bruce Jenner, who becomes Caitlyn Jenner, says, “No, I realise that, actually, I’m a woman.” Cliché: I’m a woman trapped in a man’s body. My body is wrong. And so, I’m going to change my body to look like a woman’s body.
[00:16:12] Yep. And that will reunite me, in a sense, or make me feel like a whole person again, because, at least, there’ll be some sort of match between who I really, truly am—my consciousness of who I am—and my body.
[00:16:23] And we’re very familiar with that. That’s a common trope, and you’ve call that sort of a soft trans thing, in the sense that it still has some reference to biology. Even if it’s, in a sense, saying that your gender consciousness, and who you feel and think you are, and how you think about yourself is what should define those things. Whereas, the other form of what you call the “hard” trans theory goes a step further than that.
[00:16:45] Rob Smith: It does. It basically says, “Your gender identity is not only the real you, but it’s so determinative of not just who you are, but what you are”—that your body, as it is, becomes—well, let’s say I have a feminine gender identity. Then my body, as it is, becomes a female body. I don’t have to do anything to it; I just simply have to identify myself as a woman, and this body is now a woman’s body, even though it doesn’t have female anatomy. And so, this is why you end up, as has happened now quite a few times, with males being put into female prisons, and sadly, male rapists sometimes being put into female prisons, because they are simply identifying as women, even though they’ve had nothing done to them. They’ve not taken a drop of hormones of the other sex. They’ve not had any surgeries—uh, not even changed their clothing or, they just—
[00:17:36] Tony Payne: Declared themselves to be women.
[00:17:37] Rob Smith: —declared themselves to be women. So often, this is called the self ID view: that is, if you just identify yourself, then you are what you identify as. So I’ve called that the “hard” trans theory. It’s the more radical and, in some ways, the more queer version.
[00:17:50] But again, there’s a saying out there, which most people have probably encountered by now, which is if when you’ve met one trans person, you’ve met one trans person who’s—what they mean by whatever label they’re using. Of course, it may not be trans at all; it may be non-binary or something else. But what they mean doesn’t necessarily mean what the next person means. They may be just declaring a self ID view, or “hard” version of the theory, or the “softer” version, or something else.
[00:18:14] Tony Payne: Would you say that they have in common, though, a decoupling of biological sex and gender?
[00:18:21] Rob Smith: Yes.
[00:18:22] Tony Payne: And the prioritising of gender over biological sex?
[00:18:24] Rob Smith: Correct. Yeah, that is the common denominator: that your gender identity is the real you. So again, either that entirely should change your body, or it actually reclassifies your body. But yeah, that’s the common thread.
[00:18:37] Tony Payne: What you said is very helpful, because I’ve often been really puzzled how, at one level, queer theory—you meld all these things together in your head and you see them as one thing.
Objections
[00:18:45] Tony Payne: And so I’ve always been puzzled as to how someone could have a kind of a queer theory approach—that is, that there is no essence to us. There’s just the construction of ourselves personally and socially—how having adopted that position, you would say, “I know deep inside I am this thing called a woman.” Which is a much more essentialist kind of statement, right?
[00:19:05] Rob Smith: Totally.
[00:19:06] Tony Payne: Where it says, there’s some little inner thing in me that is, in some way, female, or some ways, a woman. And I’ve always struggled to see how those two things hold together.
[00:19:15] Rob Smith: Well, and I don’t think they really do. It is one of the ironies and one of the self-contradictions in so much of this way of thinking that these ideas don’t coexist, ultimately. You know, to say, “I feel like a woman” when a woman is a person with a female body, but I don’t have a female body, how can I feel like a person with a female body—
[00:19:33] Tony Payne: If I don’t have one?
[00:19:34] Rob Smith: if I don’t have one? And indeed, how do I even know what it feels like to be a woman? I mean, I say I don’t even know what it feels like to be a man. I just know what it feels like to be me.
[00:19:43] Tony Payne: That’s right!
[00:19:44] Rob Smith: I don’t know what other men feel like. So, I mean, how would I know what it feels like to be a woman?
[00:19:48] Usually what people are simply saying when they make those kind of statements is—well, it could be a number of things: that I identify with this group, which we call women. I feel more at home with them. I feel like I belong to them more than I feel like I belong to the group we call men.
[00:20:02] Now, why then, if you dig into that, and we say, “Well, why is that?” Well, maybe ‘cause you just have more female typical tastes. Or perhaps you look at the cultural boxes, the gender boxes and the things that supposedly indicate that one is a man or a woman and think, “Actually, I don’t like footy. I don’t like going to meat barbecue events.” You know?
[00:20:22] Tony Payne: Yeah, yeah.
[00:20:23] Rob Smith: I much prefer to listen to opera. Or I think, “Okay, well, I clearly can’t be a—”
[00:20:27] Tony Payne: “—can’t be a man.” Which is a strange kind of stereotypical view of man and woman, isn’t it. It’s an unusual—like, it’s taking a set of traits or kind of common clichéd characteristics and identifying them as men, and.
[00:20:40] So would you say that it’s really more the soft trans version of the theory that regards or sees an essential womanness that I feel inside, whereas the harder trans version just says, “Look, it’s all up for grabs, and I can be whoever I want to be. And so, don’t try and nail me down into any particular gender or any particular set of clichés. I will just construct myself as I see fit.” And that can be any mix of anything. Would that be a fair characterisation?
[00:21:06] Rob Smith: I think that’s spot-on. That’s spot-on. And this is why, again, with regard to “soft” trans theory or the more typical or traditional, the second-wave feminists are up in arms, ‘cause for decades they’ve been trying to dismantle these kind of rigid, narrow, gender stereotypes, and suddenly, they’re back with a vengeance and being imposed on people in the most unhelpful of ways. And this is what happens to kids, right? He’s a boy who doesn’t turn every stick into a gun. Or a girl who loves rough and tumble and climbing trees and getting dirty. And well, once upon time we would say, “Oh, she’s a tomboy”, and that’s fine. That’s not a problem. Whereas now—
[00:21:38] Tony Payne: There’s a certain way to be a girl that’s like that.
[00:21:40] Rob Smith: Yeah, yeah. Now, so, oh, okay: “she’s trans” or “he’s trans”, right.
Second-wave versus third-wave feminism
[00:21:45] Tony Payne: Wow. Look, this is fascinating. So the development of third-wave feminism into these different versions of trans theory, that also explains something that I’ve observed a lot and been puzzled about, and that is why more traditional feminists are often so much at odds with current feminists or third-wave or trans theory people, and it’s got to do with two things. It’s partly that the old male and female stereotypes are being reconstructed all over again in order to determine people’s gender. If I like trucks, I’m a boy. If I like dresses, playing with dolls, I’m a girl, regardless of my body. And so in other words, men and women, male and female, now just becomes totally constructed on cultural stereotype, which is anathema to feminism, right?
[00:22:29] Rob Smith: It is.
[00:22:29] Tony Payne: But also, with the “hard” trans theory, you’ve got a dissolution of gender types and all, so that the very category of woman disappears, which is also kind of anathema to a second-wave feminist.
[00:22:41] Rob Smith: It is, yeah. A second-wave feminist is sex realist, and as one organisation has it that a lady called Helen Joyce heads up, Sex Matters. Now, she likes to say sex doesn’t always matter, but when it does matter, it really matters. And now we’re seeing that, you know, in sports for example. It really matters in sports, and it really matters in prisons, and it really matters in all kinds of arenas and domains of life. So that is different.
[00:23:07] Now, there’s an irony in all of that, and I don’t point this out with any glee. But this is kind of the revolution eating itself, right? Or the snake eating its own tail, or whatever image you prefer. And many pointed this out—many secular thinkers have pointed this out—that feminism gave birth to this craziness, even though it now regrets where it’s gone.
[00:23:26] Tony Payne: Do you mean by that move of decoupling gender from sexual biology so thoroughly?
[00:23:31] Rob Smith: Again, the minimising of it. And paving the way for the decoupling of it. And again, the expansion of the idea of social construction: that we can, apart from, again, those small biological differences that I want to say, everything else is social construction. And that’s really just opened the doors for where things have gone.
[00:23:49] Now again, often the revolutions in thought and other aspects of life don’t intend to bear the children that they do. And so, we can’t blame all this on second-wave feminism exactly, any more that we can blame it on Descartes, you know, as if the subjective turn somehow is responsible for women.
[00:24:05] Tony Payne: It was all his fault. Well, most things are his fault. I just blame things on the Enlightenment.
[00:24:08] Rob Smith: Yeah.
[00:24:10] Tony Payne: It was all the Enlightenment’s fault. It’s easy.
[Music]
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[00:24:39] Karen Beilharz: Every year, the Priscilla & Aquila Centre, a Centre of Moore Theological College, holds a conference that focuses on the application end of Complementarianism in order to encourage women in ministry, and in order to think more seriously and creatively about how men and women can work better together in ministry.
[00:24:58] In 2026, plenary speaker Simon Flinders will be exploring the concept of the church as the family of God. What can we learn from Jesus’ teaching about family, as well as other familial language in the Bible? And how do we apply this as siblings within God’s family? Find out more at the Priscilla & Aquila Centre Annual Conference on Monday, 2nd February, 2026, held at Moore College.
[00:25:22] To view the program and to register, visit the Priscilla & Aquila website: paa.moore.edu.au. That’s paa.moore.edu.au.
[00:25:36] Please note: Rob Smith will be speaking on the topic of gender at an evening seminar hosted by the Priscilla & Aquila Centre on 9th September 2026. Please visit the Priscilla & Aquila website next year for further details and to register. That’s paa.moore.edu.au. That’s paa.moore.edu.au.
[00:26:01] Tony Payne: And now, let’s get back to our program.
Critiquing history
[00:26:03] Tony Payne: That really brings us to your critique of this history and to how we should or could think about social construction. We mentioned this just briefly earlier and I’d like to come back and finish this part of the conversation on that point. Given the fact that we are socially constructed beings—we influence and shape each other in all sorts of ways culturally, and we are not only aware of that just personally, in terms of our groups and in subcultures we’re part of, but just obviously more generally in the world—how do we think about the power of social construction vis-à-vis biology in a way that doesn’t overwhelm the realities of biology?
[00:26:36] Rob Smith: Yeah, or undermine. Well, this actually leads us right into Scripture, which I know is where we want to go, because I think we learn fairly clearly in Genesis 1 and very early in the Scripture that we are not only created, but we’re created to create. We are given a—people often call it a “cultural mandate”, which means we are called to construct, and we construct all kinds of things. We construct buildings and homes and ideas and all sorts of things.
[00:27:03] Now, I do think there is an appropriate task of, you might call gender construction. But how do we do it appropriately? How do we do it faithfully? How do we be, well, stewards of our sex? And so, here’s where I’ve argued in the book that at least one way of talking about that is that we’re called to work with the grain of what God has made—what God has given—and not to work against it—not to overwhelm it, undermine it, deconstruct it, but we are to build on that foundation.
[00:27:30] And so, I do think, yes, we are called to, well, think rightly about who and what God has made us to be, and then express that coherently in the world. And that is in some measure in our hands the way we do that. And that’s, as we said, different cultures will do that in different ways and decide, okay, in our culture, this is going to be masculine dress; this is going to be feminine dress. But all that is simply a way of presenting our sex to one another truthfully so that we can read each other clearly.
[00:27:58] And so, this is where I think, you know, when Scripture prohibits cross-dressing and things like that, it’s really just saying that this is to confuse what God has made clear. This is to go against the grain. This is to disguise reality. This is to deceive others. No, if you’re going to be a faithful steward of your sex, you want to present that. Do you want to do gender in a way that is congruent with your sex so that others read you rightly?
Social construction
[00:28:24] Tony Payne: It’s very helpful, Rob, because it’s affirming that we do exist as social creatures, and we communicate and shape each other and relate to each other socially. And there’s an enormous variety of ways in which that gets configured historically, culturally, interpersonally, communally as we seek to express and relate to the reality that’s there. Because the reality that’s there is complex, and it’s a set of materials you can configure and work with and develop and cultivate in, in all sorts of different ways. That’s what’s so marvellous about God’s creation.
[00:28:56] Yet it still has a certain shape and a certain nature. It’s real. There’s something there to work with. Whereas the complete social constructionist view, in a sense, there’s—there’s really nothing to work with.
[00:29:07] Rob Smith: Yeah. It’s a wax nose, yeah.
[00:29:08] Tony Payne: It is. It’s just us talking. All there really is is us developing ideas and imposing them on this kind of blank canvas, this neutral sort of mass of plasticine, and shaping it into something that we’ve decided it might look like. And so, it’s a—social construction is all there is. And one of the nice points you make in the book is that in the end, it just collapses in on itself.
[00:29:30] Rob Smith: It does, yeah.
[00:29:32] Tony Payne: Because if all there is is social construction—if all there is is talk—then my talk about social construction is also just talk.
[00:29:39] Rob Smith: Yes, yes, yes. There’s no foundation. Right? I mean, the very notion of construction implies constructing on what? You know.
[00:29:48] Tony Payne: Or with what?
[00:29:48] Rob Smith: Or with what. Yes, and, but we construct on a foundation. So if you lay a foundation of a building, you can’t suddenly then construct on that at that sort of 45 degree angle. It’s going to all come apart. So faithful construction will pay very close attention to the order of things, uh—creation order in particular—and the God-given foundations that enable us to, well, to use the term everyone loves today: to flourish.
[00:30:12] Tony Payne: Yeah. To build on a solid foundation and to use good materials as we build on it, we might say, echoing 1 Corinthians 3.
[00:30:18] Rob Smith: Absolutely.
The Bible’s critique
[00:30:19] Tony Payne: You’ve mentioned the biblical work, and the careful way you then go into look at Genesis 1 and the creation of mankind in God’s image as male and female. And then Genesis 2, the making of the man and the building of the woman out of the man’s side and so on. You look at these passages in great detail, and it’s extremely helpful how you’ve drawn together the scholarship on those passages, and there’s been so much of it over such a long period. It’s a wonderful piece of work you’ve done, especially in then contrasting at that with the other readings of those passages.
[00:30:49] In some ways, I really enjoyed reading these chapters and working through the scholarship as you present it and argue it really, really carefully and well, is that you’ve gone to an enormous amount of effort and laboriously proven that the straightforward reading you would have if you just read it the first time is the correct one. Did you find that frustrating, having to sort of, in a sense, deal with readings of the text that, on their face, are incredibly tenuous and unlikely and a bit nuts in some ways? And yet showing that that’s the case takes a great deal of time.
[00:31:22] Rob Smith: It does take time. And I mean, I, well, quite deliberately worked very hard to listen carefully to contrary voices—to other interpretations—’cause I think we’ve always got to ask the question, “Have we got this wrong?” Have we—have we just been assuming we’ve understood this and perhaps not? If we’re committed to the authority of Scripture, we’ve got to allow ourselves to be corrected by Scripture. And so, I wanted to really give a careful hearing to some of these other interpretations. But yes, I just found again and again and again, you blow on them and they fall the pieces. But again, I just didn’t want to be dismissive. I wanted to do the job.
[00:31:56] Tony Payne: Like I just—like I just was. You know.
[00:31:58] Rob Smith: No, wouldn’t you—you have to be when you’ve got a only a sentence to do it, but.
[00:32:02] Tony Payne: That’s true.
[00:32:03] Rob Smith: Yeah. I, I mean, I had planned to write a chapter on Genesis 1 and 2. I ended up writing three chapters on Genesis 1 and 2. And could have written more. So that was one of the revelations to me. It was just—so much to say.
The image of God
[00:32:13] Tony Payne: There is so much to say and so much we could touch on, and we don’t have the time. I’m just going to ask you two aspects of what you dealt with—not so much in your very careful refutation of alternative readings, for example, that try to say, “There is no man and woman in Genesis 1 and 2, for example, in readings like this, and you deal with those very well.
[00:32:31] But as you dig into Genesis 1 and the image of God and the image of God as male and female, I really appreciated your treatment of what’s often been a vexed question for us, even well before and outside this particular issue.
[00:32:44] Is how we think of men and women being in the image of God and what is the image of God? And I especially liked the way you kind of didn’t put all your eggs in one basket. You showed that there was something about the image of God that reflects something about who we are, as well as what we do. Do you want to explain very briefly what you were saying there? That’s hard to do. I’m sorry. It’s hard to do.
[00:33:05] Rob Smith: To do. Hard to do, uh, briefly. Yes, the image of God is a very complex question with a long history of, well, confusing ideas. And some complimentary, some contradictory. But one of the questions that certainly has been asked in the last century is to what extent, or how significant is male and female made he them—that statement in 127C, how significant is that to being the image of God? Is it kind of irrelevant to that? Or is it actually central to that?
[00:33:36] Now, there are certain people like Karl Barth, for example, who think it’s central. And then others who’ve said, “No, he’s misreading the text” and it’s really just preparing for “be fruitful and multiply in”, in verse 28, and that it’s just about reproduction. It’s not really about the image.
[00:33:52] Now I’ve argued the case I think it’s about both. But it is complex. If you want to say, and to some extent, I’m happy to say that there is some analogy between who God is in in himself, and the unity and polarity of the human race. You’ve got to be careful how you say that, because it’s not a neat analogy. I mean, God is three persons in one divine being; humanity is one race, but coming in two sexed forms. So it’s clearly not a tidy analogy in that, numerically speaking.
[00:34:22] But there is some common feature here of unity and diversity, I think, that is in God himself, and not just in humanity, but in creation and in the church. I think 1 Corinthians 12, for example: I mean, God is a God of unity and diversity. And so, it’s not surprising that his image is going to be, in that sense, rich, and.
[00:34:41] Now, of course, we know beyond that, that man and woman, husband and wife particularly, become an image of the gospel, and God and Israel, Christ and the church, and so on. And so, Scripture will do various things with that. But I do think Karl Bart is onto something, even if he goes a bit too far with it. And—
[00:34:56] Tony Payne: Something that could be said of Barth in a number of areas.
[00:34:58] Rob Smith: Well, exactly! He tends to go a bit far on a few things, or not far enough on other things. But I think he’s right to see that there’s significance here.
[00:35:05] Now, none of that stops. It doesn’t, even for Karl Barth. He’s often misunderstood as if he’s denying that individuals are the image of God. He’s not denying that individuals are the image of God, and he’s certainly not denying that Christ is the image of God, because in, well, Scripture makes very clear, he’s the ultimate image of God and he’s the true human.
[00:35:23] But clearly, the human race is, well, again, not just a social reality, but it’s a reality that only grows because of the two sexes. And even though not every human being participates in that—that either because they don’t marry or can’t have children—the sexual dimorphism or the sex binary is just characteristic of who and what we are as a race, and testifies to the richness of the image of God and the world that God has made and indeed to God himself. And so, there’s something very deep and profound and beautiful there that, again, I think is worth appreciating.
[00:35:59] Now, we can take this in a number of directions and I try to do that in the book.
[00:36:02] Tony Payne: Very helpful, Rob. Yes, we could talk about this for ages. I’ll just say especially what I found useful in that is that I’ve often kind of lent towards a more functional view of the image of God. That is of, of men and women—that to be God’s image is to be his representative, his vice regent who rules and has dominion and who rules the world under God’s authority, Two Ways to Live-style, okay. So I think that’s an important stream of what the image of God does in the world—of who we are as God’s image, where God—we’re rulers like God.
[00:36:30] But I think what—what your treatment showed me quite helpfully is that there’s no need to draw a distinction or make a choice between seeing that as an essential element of what it means to be in God’s image—that we are given to rule like God does—that that means that if that’s going to be our function, if that’s going to be what we do, it must also say something about who we are and what sort of beings are we such that like God, we fill and multiply and rule. And I think your treatment helped me see that it’s maybe a false choice there: to say it’s either the relational nature of humanity in our dimorphism has something to do with it, or it’s that we rule the world. I think those two things obviously go together.
[00:37:10] Rob Smith: Yeah, yeah. There’s a lot of false choices to get forced on us sometimes here. But the other thing to add onto is what you’re saying there—is that yes, the image of God clearly has a function. Let them rule. That’s our task. And have dominion and be fruitful. But what the image does, I don’t think, tells us everything about what the image is.
[00:37:26] Tony Payne: Hmm. That’s a fair point.
[00:37:28] Rob Smith: I do think that Genesis 5, in fact, actually gives us a real key to understanding a little more of what the image is. And without going into the detail, but certainly Gavin Ortlund, I think, has made this point very powerfully—that that notion of sonship is really at the heart of what it means to be God’s image. Which certainly is there in Genesis 5, but it also takes us straight into Christology and the fact that the true image of God is the Son of God. And so, I think if we’re asking, “What does the image do?”, that’s one thing, but “What is the image?” Then, I think, we—Scripture’s actually pointing us in this direction.
[00:38:02] Tony Payne: And that connects with rule, of course, and kingship.
[00:38:04] Rob Smith: Yeah, absolutely. Totally.
[00:38:06] Tony Payne: And there’s a connection between sonship and rule and authority that you see tracing knots running through Israel and through the kings of Israel, but on into Jesus as well, and on into, in a sense, the authority and rule and kingdom that Christians share. We could just talk about this for the rest of the time.
[00:38:22] Rob Smith: Yeah.
[00:38:23] Tony Payne: It’s really useful. But I feel like we should press on.
Genesis 2 and men and women
[00:38:26] Tony Payne: The other thing in your biblical material that I found very interesting and helpful was your treatment of Genesis 2 and the making of man—of Adam—from the ground, and then the taking and building of Eve out of his rib or out of his side, as you suggested should be translated. What significance does that have for how we think about the sexed nature of men and women and who we are as men and women?
[00:38:50] Rob Smith: Yeah. Well, many potential answers here. One thing we discover in Genesis 2 is that—well, in Genesis 1, we have the terms “male” and “female” , right? “Zakhar uneqevah”, which are again, are physiological terms: they can apply to animals as well as humans.
[00:39:03] Genesis 2, we get human-only terms. “Ish” and “ishah”: man and woman, which I—sometimes I speak of them as gender terms. They’re not really gender terms; they’re just human sex terms. A man is an adult human male. A woman is adult human female. But they are specific to humanity. And they are really all about the body.
[00:39:22] Rob Smith: So God creates the body of the man—creates the man from—the Adam from the Adamah. But he’s a man even before he gets the breath of life. So what determines his manhood is the particular body that God has made. And so, that tells us straight away, contrary to one of the, again, false claims, that he’s not a kind of bisexual being who’s a half-man, half-woman.
[00:39:45] Tony Payne: Waiting to be split in two, kind of thing.
[00:39:47] Rob Smith: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that is a view that a number of scholars have put forward. Even people who have really helpful things to say somehow get caught on this—that he’s this kind of dual sexed being, and then suddenly, boom: made into two. No: a separate creation takes place with woman, right?
[00:40:03] Now, again, I think the Hebrew is quite clear: it’s a part of the side of the man that is taken in his sleep. And “built” is the term, which is quite a significant Hebrew verb, because it’s one that’s often linked up with the creation of sacred architecture and things and—in the tabernacle and the ark and so on.
[00:40:20] So again, that’s telling us something about the specialness of her body, but also the discreteness of her body. She is woman, not man. Yes, she’s bone of his bone, flesh of his flesh. But she is a—the Hebrew expression is a “kenegdo”: like opposite, right? “Ezer kenegdo”: helper. Like opposite. That’s what he needs and that’s what God makes: one who is like him in his humanity, but opposite him in her sex. He gets all the animals paraded before him. He names them all. But none of them are a ezer kenegdo, right? None of them are a like opposite. The male animals, uh, well, they’re not even like; they’re unlike same. The female animals are unlike opposite. But neither are like opposites. And nor would another man be a like opposite; another man would be a like same. So God makes a like opposite.
[00:41:05] And again, it’s the body. The title of my book, which I didn’t come up with; it was the marketing people at Lexham, I guess—I think says it all: The Body God Gives is what tells us whether we are man or woman. And that’s what we see in Genesis 2 very profoundly.
[00:41:19] Tony Payne: Look, maybe on another day we’ll come back and talk further about all the implications of that, ‘cause that’s massive, isn’t it?
[00:41:24] Rob Smith: It is. It is. It runs right through, then, the Scriptural narrative—that if you’ve got a male body, you grow to be a man. And every other role in life is determined by that, whether you’re a husband, father, brother, uncle. Go down the line and we could tease out all the implications from there.
[00:41:41] Tony Payne: Yes, well and look, I’ll tease that conversation that we may have at some stage.
[00:41:44] Rob Smith: Sure.
[00:41:44] Tony Payne: And it’ll be good to follow it through. I like the way you, just in passing, talked about a fairly common scholarly view—that there’s a significance in the fact that Adam is taken from the ground and works the ground and is returned to the ground in judgement. The woman is taken from his side and becomes the mother of all the living—becomes the generator of life and of community and relationship. And that these two aspects of the man’s body and the woman’s body, their very nature as created beings says something about the shape, the general shape, or the focus of their activity—the focus of their manhood and their womanhood, their maleness, their femaleness—as it gets socially constructed in different ways of lots of varieties, but there will be a difference and the difference will be seen out of those things, for example.
[00:42:33] Rob Smith: Yes, I think that’s right. Now, one thing as I say in the book is I don’t think this necessarily takes you down into a kind of rigid, separate spheres ideology as if men, therefore, ought to work outside the home, women inside the home.
[00:42:46] Tony Payne: Exactly.
[00:42:46] Rob Smith: But I think it does tell you that, well, in fact, no, both male and female, men and women, are given the same cultural mandate: to be in it all together, and fathers to be in the home, not just outside the home. But we’re going to be different in those spheres. So we’ll be in all the spheres, but we’ll do things differently in those spheres, not just with our different personalities and different skill sets, but by virtue of our different sexes.
[00:43:08] Tony Payne: Our different sexes and our different bodies, in that sense, will determine who we are and will shape who we are in all sorts of ways. It’s to receive that with thankfulness, as Paul says—to receive that gift thankfully and joyfully and to construct and build with it, in a sense—to do something with it faithfully under God—is the calling, really, of what it means to be a faithful creature: to receive the body God gives and to do something with it for the sake of others in the world.
[00:43:35] Rob Smith: Yeah. Amen.
[00:43:36] Tony Payne: Hmm. Amen to that.
The next book
[00:43:37] Tony Payne: Look, Rob, thanks for talking about all this. There’s a lot we haven’t covered.
[00:43:41] Rob Smith: I suspected that would be the case.
[00:43:42] Tony Payne: I suspected so too, but our time is well and truly up. And I just want to express my gratitude on behalf of the Christian community to you for this work. It’s a long and laborious labour to go through all these arguments in such detail, especially when, in some senses, the simplest person can look at a number of these concepts and say, “That just sounds completely implausible and nonsensical to me.”
[00:44:03] And in many respects, that’s the case. But as with many ideas that are put forward like this, it’s easy to put forward the ideas. It takes a long time and a great deal of care to refute them, as you’ve done. And thank you for doing that.
[00:44:15] I suppose very briefly just to finish, this book is really not at all about how we should interact with or deal with or pastor or minister to people with gender dysphoria, or for whom this is a personal issue in their families. I guess that’s your next book.
[00:44:32] Rob Smith: It is, yeah, absolutely my next book. This book lays the foundation for the next book. I say the front of this book, “This is a book about ideas, not so much about people”, although of course, you can’t prise those too far apart. But yeah, I do want to now write a pastoral care book, and that’s my plan in the back half of this year to, “Okay, well, how do we walk alongside somebody who is wrestling with deep gender questions and struggling with the sex of their body and perhaps experiencing gender dysphoria? How do we care for them well? How do we guide them? How do we love them? How do we counsel them?” That’s the book that needs—what, that I want to write next. Others have had goes, and hopefully there’ll be many more. But I need to put some work into that.
[00:45:11] Tony Payne: Thanks, and in many ways, as I was thinking about that aspect of it, towards the end of the book, it occurred to me that there is a difference between—almost in a sense, this almost analogously, how Jesus responds to sinful, broken, struggling people: the compassion, he shows them the care, he shows them. The truth, he still speaks to them. Like that woman caught an adultery kind of idea. And yet he is very strong, very clear and scathing at various points to those who are teachers. And who propose ideas that are harmful, twisted, unfaithful, erroneous. Uh, if you contrast his stance towards the sinful broken women and men he deals with, and the Pharisees and scribes who are pedalling a dangerous and destructive ideology and teaching, they’re different sorts of stances.
[00:46:05] Rob Smith: Totally, totally. Yeah, we need to take a strong stand against poisonous ideas that are ruining people’s lives, and then be very tender and gentle with people who’ve been misled, afflicted, got themselves confused, done things that they can’t undo. That’s where we need to come alongside and—arm around the shoulder or sit down, listen, pray, be patient.
Conclusion
[00:46:30] Tony Payne: Thanks, Rob. Thanks for modelling that twin approach for us. And this book is more the formal: it’s more engaging with erroneous and dangerous ideas. And doing so very graciously, though very carefully and very, as you say, with a great deal of care to represent people’s views accurately and carefully. You’ve done that. But you’ve refuted and argued with those ideas very helpfully, and we’re really grateful for you for doing it. And thanks for being here today with us on the Centre for Christian Living and sharing things with us.
[00:46:56] Rob Smith: Thank you. It’s been a pleasure.
[Music]
[00:47:12] Tony Payne: Well, thanks for joining us on this episode of the Centre for Christian Living Podcast from Moore College. For a whole lot more from the Centre for Christian Living, just head over to the CCL website: that’s ccl.moore.edu.au, where you’ll find a stack of resources, including every past podcast episode all the way back to 2017, videos from our live events, and articles that we’ve published through the Centre.
[00:47:37] And while you’re there on the website, we also have an opportunity for you to make a tax-deductible donation to support the ongoing work of the Centre here at Moore College.
[00:47:46] We’d also love you to subscribe to the podcast and to leave a review so that people can discover our podcast and our other resources. And we always love and benefit from receiving your feedback and questions. Please get in touch: you can email us at [email protected].
[00:48:06] Many thanks to Karen Beilharz from the Communications Team here at Moore College for all her work in transcribing and editing and producing this podcast; to James West for the music; and to you, dear listeners, for joining us each week.
[00:48:19] Thank you for listening. I’m Tony Payne. ‘Bye for now.
Photo by Serenity Mitchell on Unsplash
