ELCA Bishop Eaton Issues Statement onAnti-Transgender Legislation

Denying that sinners can change gender/sex is not “attacking their humanity,” but rather affirming it as divinely created. We are not a chaotic, unformed, genderless mix, rather our members, and their function are holy—not to be discarded or called mistakes. Rather, transgenderism elevates and worships identity—the pure sinful thoughts of sinners. Our dignity does not come in rejecting God’s creative will, shown in our biology and marriage, but loving Him and being called His child. But in calling for legal protections for all, and also dignity, no distinction is made between believer and unbeliever. Is not unbelief, being guilty for one’s sin and under God’s wrath, the greatest indignity?
True Christians do love their neighbor and therefore do not want people hurting themselves chasing a fantasy that is impossible (self-creation) and the denial of the body God gave to each. Love is not acceptance and automatic approval—that is actually weakness. Rather, love preserves God’s gracious creation and the intrinsic value and role of the body for all. Only by faith do we have the dignity of being holy to God, possessing eternal life, and knowing the resurrection to come. “Now this I say and testify in the Lord, that you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their minds. They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart. They have become callous and have given themselves up to sensuality, greedy to practice every kind of impurity. But that is not the way you learned Christ!— assuming that you have heard about him and were taught in him, as the truth is in Jesus, to put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires, and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness” (Eph. 4). —ed.

Statement