Ringing the Brothel Door
This article first appeared at Theopolis. Read it there HERE.
Bruce Marshall once wrote that every young man who rings the bell at a brothel is unconsciously looking for God. While it is not necessarily true that the inward desire of every man is ultimately a thirst for righteousness, it is true that every sin is the disordering of a good desire.
Every strip club is exploiting the deeply felt desire for the unveiling of mystery. The strip club erroneously states that there is no mystery. It is a revelation deep fake. The burka erroneously states that all is mystery. In the conflicting pulses of rejecting limitation and desiring mystery, we can land in a ditch on either side of the road. We must learn to interpret the symbolic aspects of creation, especially in Divine revelation, so that we can grow in our self-understanding and contentment without damaging our divinely established boundaries.
The pagan imagination has always disintegrated the boundaries of sexual identity in order to achieve the pagan goals of mystery. “Is that a man or a woman?” is a compliment when the goal is mystery. For the Christian, this must function as more than a mere observation. We must ask what the current trans crisis seeks behind the darkened brothel door.
The horseleach hath two daughters, crying, Give, give. There are three things that are never satisfied, yea, four things say not, ‘It is enough’: The grave; and the barren womb; the earth that is not filled with water; and the fire that saith not, ‘It is enough.’ – Proverbs 30:15-16
Excess is the path of death. The living alone are to know when to say, “It is enough.” Satisfaction belongs not to desire but to contentment—for desire to be satisfied, it must be stopped. All desire is truly the desire for the cessation of desire; but this can only be understood by the man who is willing to stop eating when need and sufficient pleasure have been met. To feed pleasure until pleasure says “stop” turns the soul over to devouring lust. Boundaries make satisfaction possible and without them, satisfaction will perpetually collapse under the weight of want.
Contentment and revelation are the things for which the desire for an intersexual state is yearning but will not receive. To utter the words “it is enough” is to erect a fence. To the rebel, this is a usurpation of the will deferring satisfaction. To the believer, this is the only means possible by which satisfaction could ever be attained.
Contentment is related to revelation in this way: the person who learns to place boundaries on desire is a person being catechized in the art of satisfaction and gratitude. Similarly, the person who learns that the ground of universal truth can only be found through the revelation of God will abandon the fruitless endeavor of locating truth in the intrigue of the indiscernible. Of course, there are things within the Godhead that are truly mysterious to us: the Trinity, the working of the Spirit in the sacraments, and the compatibility of God’s sovereignty and human responsibility. But it is when intrigue is the inevitable consequence of limitation that the mystery is proper. When intrigue is the goal in order to avoid limitation, disordering is the inevitable consequence.
In many ways, the icons of the trans movement are attempting to defy interpretation. In judgment, a thing’s identity is revealed. Revelation gives us interpretive dominion, a power that should rightly cause trepidation. However, for the Christian, revelation and interpretation are the ground of confession. To be told what a thing is enables the believer to confess after God what God has declared.
In Pilgrim’s Progress, Christian arrives at the house of the Interpreter and is shown . . .
. . . the picture of a very grave person hung up against the wall, and this was the fashion of it: It had eyes lifted up to heaven, the best of books in his hand, the law of truth was written upon its lips, the world was behind his back; it stood as if it pleaded with men, and a crown of gold did hang over its head.
Then said Christian, “What meaneth this?”
[The Interpreter replied], “The man whose picture this is is one of a thousand; he can beget children, travail in birth with children, and nurse them himself when they are born.”
Notice the interplay of the possessive pronouns its and his. The reader is to comprehend something, not merely a someone. The something has an expanded capacity not possible for the solitary male. But as a symbol, it will only beckon the viewer to carry the illustrative meaning back into reality by interpretation of the symbol. To woodenly apply the literal meaning from the symbolic meaning to the actual in himself would be to collapse Christian’s boundaries. Preventing the border collapse of definition is why the Interpreter is so necessary; without him, the meaning would stay hidden in the realm of intrigue. The Word of God is pure revelation and as such sets the hermeneutic for how to discern the meaning from the intrigue.
Christian from Pilgrim’s Progress must learn that certain feminine qualities which are limited to the female of the species in a literal sense are symbolically representative of virtues that should be cultivated in himself while retaining his clearly defined status as a male.
The man who learns to make disciples and nurture those in his care properly appropriates feminine attributes while retaining the proper boundaries around his maleness. A man that is overbearing in leadership or a man that is overly detached is someone who believes he is protecting the borders of his masculinity from intrusion but has rendered the masculinity within the walls corrupt. The symbol of a nursing man teaches Christian this lesson and thus matures him as a man. Mature men rightly appropriate femininity without doing damage to the borders of identity.
And kings shall be thy nursing fathers, and their queens thy nursing mothers: they shall bow down to thee with their face toward the earth, and lick up the dust of thy feet; and thou shalt know that I am the LORD: for they shall not be ashamed that wait for me. – Isaiah 49:23
Learning to interpret the symbolic allows us to grow in our understanding of self without doing damage to the divinely established boundaries of our identities. Revelation communicates meaning by making the definition visible, in order that we might mature while not breaking beyond the bounds. Transgender ideology is an attempt to fast track a maturation apart from revelation and a proper conception of one’s identity. A man matures into kingship and prophecy, not by becoming effeminate, but by understanding how to appropriately engender aspects of femininity that would cause thriving for the man who stays within his borders. A nursing king is a mature man, whereas a chest-feeding male is a deconstructed man. His disproportionality makes him disfigured in both realms of masculinity and femininity.
As one whom his mother comforteth, so will I comfort you; and ye shall be comforted in Jerusalem. – Isaiah 66:13
When God engenders something feminine, He does so without deconstructing the ways in which He is still a He. We should mirror His embodiment within our limits. When the Church, a bride, fails to mature in her femininity, it is often because she adopts exclusively masculine traits, thereby becoming a butch Church, or she disintegrates the very definitions that frame her identity. The former is often attempted in order to guard against weak leadership. The latter is often attempted to pacify the watching world by downplaying God’s ordained boundaries.
Godly maturity appropriates opposite-sex traits from outside of one’s borders of identity in order to bring about a greater thriving within the set borders of manhood and womanhood. A nursing father and a childbearing man are Godly things when they are accomplished within the boundaries of masculinity and not by abandoning those boundaries. The Church is to be led by righteous men who individually embody the qualities of the Church’s collective identity as feminine. These men are to be nursing kings. To the extent the desirous, borderless trans movement shapes the Church, it will result in women leaders, weak men, and sterility rather than purity.
But when men become kings, they are ornamented with jewels and headdresses akin to the proper feminine appropriation befitting a priest. In order for it to be a right appropriation and not disintegration of identity, it must never deconstruct the borders. When understood this way, the Church can celebrate their kings as nursing fathers while rejecting any and all confusion about whether or not they are men. The mature and healthy Church is both gloriously feminine in its collective identity and led by mature, Godly, and masculine men.
