What Advanced this Year
As the days of December dash to a demise, we ask which were among the most important events of this year. What would you say? This was the year of __________? My choice would be the technological re-making of the human body.
Earlier this year National Public Radio (NPR) alleged an increase of people getting voluntarily sterilized. NPR attributed decisions to permanently forego having children to a fear about abortion legality. This reminded me of how doctors now prevent gender development in children by puberty blockers. Also, 2022 witnessed an explosion of transgender drugs and surgeries as many people used powerful medical technology to alter their bodies with cross-sex operations, with dire consequences.
How to Understand our Advance
How are we to understand these burgeoning technologies? As a Christian, I would call it an operation of being human. Being human? Yes. We were charged, in our beginning, with a task: to take dominion over the creation (Genesis 1:26-28) and we imbibed it. We cannot not take dominion in our actions, any more than we can stop being human. Technology is an outworking of that charge, a fundamental good and a fundamentally human activity. So, the thrill we feel with technological advance is a primordial fulfillment of our Creator’s word to us. Our tech are the tools of dominion.
Yet God gave us dominion-taking to further His righteous rule on the earth, to cooperate with Him in pushing back the chaos (Genesis 1), to bring health and beauty to all His creation. From the time of our turning we have gone astray. So has our tool-making. We can look at the tools we build now and often see their goodness. The thrill of our cars and computers and cataract surgeries calls us back to our first purpose. But technology without moral consideration of God’s way becomes a monstrous thing. Sometimes we have to squint a great deal to see the goodness when our tool-making is so twisted.
Our To-me Tool moment
This year saw a new level of tool-making allowing a new degree of dominion-taking: that over our bodies. Rather than Me-Too, it is our To-Me moment. Technology turned inward grants us the ability to display God’s image or to distort it. Our Me-Too tools have a greater power of death or life.
This level of dominion-taking can forward or undo creation. Human tools can now undo being human, or enhance who God made us to be. To orient our tech in the right direction, to take our bodies in the right direction, we need the One who can re-make our hearts in God’s image. He provides the blue-print for baking in beauty and by-passing barrenness.
Come, Lord Jesus.
“But technology without moral consideration of God’s way becomes a monstrous thing.”
Powerful words Sam. Here is a mental exercise for you (or anyone) – remove the word “technology” from the above statement and see how many other words can be plugged in that render that statement as true.
Great post and thought provoking. I have a thought and a question.
The young people undergoing these physiological changes to their bodies; a poor basis of comparision, but I am reminded when the tattoo craze began 20 years or so ago. How many people I have talked to since that now have deep regrets about what they did to mar the beautiful body that God gave them (in His image). What will these youngsters think in 20 years? When I minister to young folks I often ask them to remember how they thought about things when they were younger and ask them if they think that way today? Inveriabily the response in ‘no’. I then ask them if they think if in 10 years they will think the way they do today?
The people that undergo these changes via ( or supplementally with) hormonal injections; will they need to periodically need to have additional injections to remain as is?
As a Christian I have learned that a big part of building loving relationship is to 1st listen and I have found so many people that ‘are messed up’, have not had many people in their lives that have listened to them
Keith,
Some great thoughts there. I think the comparison to tattoos as a somewhat permanent marking of the body is apt, although not as serious, of course. A tattoo you got as a kid might be embarrassing, but it didn’t give you osteoporosis or make you infertile. I am glad you are listening to the people you are helping.
For those who decide to live imitating the other gender, hormone treatments must continue for the rest of their natural lives. A man, for example, must sustain a regime of anti-androgens to keep blocking his body from producing the male hormone, and estrogen to mimic female effects. In addition, there are almost always additional medications like progestin that a trans-person must take to address the continual damage that these cross-sex hormones cause, e.g., hyperkalemia, high blood pressure and blood clotting, heart problems, Type 2 diabetes, as well as depression.