Will we remain male and female in heaven?

Duke Divinity School

". . . sexual difference is not, or should not be, a matter of theological indifference.  Genesis 1 suggests that sexual difference has something to tell us, not just about human beings, but about God in whose image they are made, male and female.  The unresolved question, then, is:  Where, why, and how does sexual difference make a difference? . . .
     "But is sexual difference then without theological importance?  Can we return to our tradition of sexual monoculture, of sexual 'indifference'?  I think not. . . .
     ". . . God is three in one, unity in difference.  Human beings in their createdness mirror this divine procession of love in being more than one, male and female.  Christian theology must affirm that all human beings are in the imago dei and that women are different from men.  This means that women were not made for men any more (or any less) than men were made for women.  The as-yet unsung glory of Genesis 1:26-27 is that the fullness of divine life and creativity is reflected by a humankind that is male and female, encompassing if not an ontological then a primal difference. . . .
     ". . . Sexual difference is a primordial difference, a template for the fruitfulness that can come not when two are the same, but when they are different.  For human creatures, as for sea and dry land, light and dark, fecundity is in the interval.  And this is why sexual difference is not just instrumental to marriage or even to the family.  It is good in itself.
     ". . . we will never know what man is until we can say, as Irenaeus obviously intended, 'The glory of God is woman fully alive.'"

     Janet Martin Soskice, "Imago Dei and sexual difference:  toward an eschatological anthropology" (orig. 2007), in Rethinking human nature:  a multidisciplinary approach, ed. Malcolm Jeeves (Grand Rapids, MI:  Eerdmans, 2011), 302, 304-306 (295-306).  This is as close as Soskice gets to the "eschatological" she inserted in to the title of this piece.  Which is to say, she does not come right out and reject "the more orthodox view that the resurrected body will be 'sexless'" rejected by Augustine (302), with whom she clearly sides.  Yet despite the reference to "marriage or even . . . the family," this seems to be an implication of her insistence that "Sexual difference is" "if not an ontological [(304)] then a primal[,] . . . a primordial difference."

Benedict XVI on the "pre-ordained duality of man and woman in creation"

". . . the family [i]s the authentic setting in which to hand on the blueprint of human existence. . . . [T]he question of the family is not just about a particular social construct, but about man himself – about what he is and what it takes to be authentically human. The challenges involved are manifold. First of all there is the question of the human capacity to make a commitment or to avoid commitment. Can one bind oneself for a lifetime? Does this correspond to man’s nature? Does it not contradict his freedom and the scope of his self-realization? Does man become himself by living for himself alone and only entering into relationships with others when he can break them off again at any time? Is lifelong commitment antithetical to freedom? Is commitment also worth suffering for? . . .  [O]nly in self-giving does man find himself, and only by opening himself to the other, to others, to children, to the family, only by letting himself be changed through suffering, does he discover the breadth of his humanity. When such commitment is repudiated, the key figures of human existence likewise vanish: father, mother, child – essential elements of the experience of being human are lost.
     ". . . the attack we are currently experiencing on the true structure of the family, made up of father, mother, and child, goes much deeper. While up to now we regarded [1] a false understanding of the nature of human freedom as one cause of the crisis of the family, it is now becoming clear that [2] the very notion of being – of what being human really means – is being called into question. [The Chief Rabbi of France, Gilles Bernheim] quotes the famous saying of Simone de Beauvoir: 'one is not born a woman, one becomes so' (on ne naît pas femme, on le devient). These words lay the foundation for what is put forward today under the term 'gender' as a new philosophy of sexuality. According to this philosophy, sex is no longer a given element of nature, that man has to accept and personally make sense of: it is a social role that we choose for ourselves, while in the past it was chosen for us by society. The profound falsehood of this theory and of the anthropological revolution contained within it is obvious. People dispute the idea that they have a nature, given by their bodily identity, that serves as a defining element of the human being. They deny their nature and decide that it is not something previously given to them, but that they make it for themselves. According to the biblical creation account, being created by God as male and female pertains to the essence of the human creature. This duality is an essential aspect of what being human is all about, as ordained by God. This very duality as something previously given is what is now disputed. The words of the creation account: 'male and female he created them' (Gen 1:27) no longer apply. No, what applies now is this: it was not God who created them male and female – hitherto society did this, now we decide for ourselves. Man and woman as created realities, as the nature of the human being, no longer exist. Man calls his nature into question. From now on he is merely spirit and will. The manipulation of nature, which we deplore today where our environment is concerned, now becomes man’s fundamental choice where he himself is concerned. From now on there is only the abstract human being, who chooses for himself what his nature is to be. Man and woman in their created state as complementary versions of what it means to be human are disputed. But if there is no pre-ordained duality of man and woman in creation, then neither is the family any longer a reality established by creation. Likewise, the child has lost the place he had occupied hitherto and the dignity pertaining to him. Bernheim shows that now, perforce, from being a subject of rights, the child has become an object to which people have a right and which they have a right to obtain. When the freedom to be creative becomes the freedom to create oneself, then necessarily the Maker himself is denied and ultimately man too is stripped of his dignity as a creature of God, as the image of God at the core of his being. The defence of the family is about man himself. And it becomes clear that when God is denied, human dignity also disappears. Whoever defends God is defending man."

     Pope Benedict XVI (Joseph Ratzinger), "Address of His Holiness Benedict XVI on the occasion of Christmas greetings to the Roman Curia," 21 December 2012.

"an extremely demanding one, fraught with difficulties"

"The inheritance of salvific truth is an extremely demanding one, fraught with difficulties.  Inevitably the Church’s activities, and those of the Supreme Pontiff in particular, often become a 'sign of contradiction'.  This too shows that her mission is that of Christ, who continues to be a sign of contradiction."

     Karol Wojtyła, Sign of contradiction, trans. St Paul Publications (New York:  A Crossroad Book, The Seabury Press, 1979 [1977]), 124.

"God made man right" from the beginning

"Such a revisionist Christology seems to exert a considerable attraction on contemporary theology.  With the past having been occupied by evolutionary science, so to speak, all that seems to be left for theology is the future.  Yet this is a dangerous illusion.  Because without a distinct salvation-historical beginning there is no terminus a quo that would give orientation to the terminus ad quem.  Emergentism would make Christ himself the figure of some future God-man, the typos for an antitypos still to come.  Yet such a construal would flatly contradict the [web?] of salvation history between the primordial past of a definite terminus a quo and the promised future of a terminus ad quem, the theological center and middle point being the Incarnation.  This is unequivocally affirmed by Gaudium et spes 22:  Christ’s mission is to restore the likeness of God.  Yet a restoration presupposes a loss or a privation, an original state in which the divine likeness obtained."

     Reinhard Hütter, “Humanity’s original state,” annual Aquinas lecture, Dominican House of Studies, Washington, DC, 23 January 2023, 8:15.  Aquinas:  "God made man right [(fecerit Deus hominem rectum)]" (Ec 7:30 Vulgate)] from the beginning.

"Every creature prays"

Salaam Halila

"All the angels pray. Every creature prays. Cattle and wild beasts pray and bend the knee. As they emerge [(egredientes)] from their barns and caves they look up to heaven and call out, lifting up their spirit in their own fashion. At that time the birds too [(Sed et . . . tunc)] rise and lift themselves up to heaven: they unfold a cross of wings instead of hands [(alarum crucem pro manibus expandunt)], and give voice to what seems to be a prayer."

     Tertullian, On prayer 28-29, modifications on the translation offered by DivineOffice.org (I haven't checked the Liturgy of the hours) mine.  (These seem worth noting because the effect is to capture the creatures at morning prayer specifically.)  From DivineOffice.org:

All the angels pray. Every creature prays. Cattle and wild beasts pray and bend the knee. As they come from their barns and caves they look out to heaven and call out, lifting up their spirit in their own fashion. The birds too rise and lift themselves up to heaven: they open out their wings, instead of hands, in the form of a cross, and give voice to what seems to be a prayer.

Latin from Universalis (=CCL 1, 273-74).
     My thanks to Brian Lugioyo for directing my attention to this passage.

The human body as scientifically but no longer morally intelligible

"In a time when we are experiencing the agonizing of creation against man’s work and when the question of the limits and standards of creation upon our activity has become the central problem of our ethical responsibility, this fact must appear quite strange. Notwithstanding all this, it remains always a disagreeable fact that 'nature' should be viewed as a moral issue. An anxious and unreasonable reaction against technology is also closely associated with the inability to discern a spiritual message in the material world. Nature still appears as an irrational form even while evincing mathematical structures which we can study technically. That nature has a mathematical intelligibility is to state the obvious, the assertion that it also contains in itself a moral intelligibility, however, is rejected as metaphysical fantasy."

     Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, "Difficulties confronting the faith in Europe today," Communio:  international Catholic review 38, no. 4 (Winter 2011):  732 (728-737), underscoring mine, and also here.  =L'Osservatore Romano, 24 July 1989.  Cf. pp. 730-731:

Where such thinking holds sway, the relationship of man to his body necessarily changes too. . . .  The body then comes to be considered as a possession which a person can make use of in whatever way seems to him most helpful in attaining 'quality of life.'  The body is something that one has and that one uses.  No longer does man expect to receive a message from his bodiliness as to who he is and what he should do, but definitely, on the basis of his reasonable deliberations and with complete independence, he expects to do with it as he wishes.  In consequence, there is indeed no difference whether the body be of the masculine or the feminine sex, the body no longer expresses being at all, on the contrary, it has become a piece of property. . . .  Likewise divested of every metaphysical symbolism is the distinction between man and woman [etc]. . . .

Anti-theological theology

By contrast with "Phariseeism," "Sadduceeism" is "the liberalist [(liberalistische)] misunderstanding that, in its determination to approximate the faith to the world, attempts to remove from it everything unlikely to please the world.  Here is indeed the walling-in of what is Christian [(die Ummaurerung des Christlichen)] that keeps it from having an effect in the world, decisively tattered [(entschieden abgerissen) as it is], such that [(aber)] the faith no longer serves the world as leaven, but . . . is transformed into the world and [becomes] for that reason neither interesting nor effective, but [rather] completely superfluous.  One cannot rightly [(wohl)] deny that it is like that today to a great extent.  There is a form of anti-theological theology, in which the important business of hermeneutics is converted into a method of transforming the whole of the Christian message into words without content, and of proving that it means just about the opposite of what must normally be taken to be its sense.  The content of such [a] theology consists fundamentally in this alone [(nur noch)], to explain to man that nothing was really meant as it is meant; that [it] all means fundamentally nothing; that from the whole, which appears at first so exciting and faith-necessitating, can be extracted, if only one employs the right hermeneutic, wholly plausible and harmless Existenzialien about which, however, no one can really be bothered because they are so commonplace [(allgemein)]; that one would consider them [mere] banalities had they not been extracted with such a display of learning from texts that, for the unpretentious mind, signify [however] something else entirely.  It’s not just that I am convinced that with such a sorry effort [(Machwerk)] one entices no cat out from behind the stove (which is to say, leads no one to Christianity); it’s that I am of the further opinion that whoever arrives at such judgments [(Meinungen)] would do better to strike the flag; to confess that he no longer extracts from Christianity any meaning [whatsoever], and therefore renounces the pretentious long-windedness [(Umständlichkeit)] of extracting from historical texts Existenzialien that can be had [far] more easily without them."

     Joseph Ratzinger, "Was heißt Erneuerung der Kirche?," Diakonia:  internationale Zeitschrift für die Praxis der Kirche 1 (1966):  ??? (303-316) =in Das neue Volk Gottes: Entwürfe zur Ekklesiologie, 2nd ed. (Düsseldorf:  Patmos, 1970), ??? (267-281) =in Kirche:  Zeichen unter den Völkern:  Schriften zur Ekklesiologie und Ökumene 2, Gesammelte Schriften 8/2 (Freiburg i. Br.:  2010), 1200 ff. (1186-1202), as quoted at Wolfgang Klausnitzer, "'Das Wort sie sollen lassen stahn':  neue Bibelhermeneutik oder Abschied vom Schriftprinzip in der ökumenisch umstrittenen Frage der Homosexualität," Catholica 67, no. 4 (2013):  265 (253-280), translation mine.  (So far as I've been able to tell, this essay has yet to be translated into English.)