Just elected Lutheran Bishop Megan Rohrer of Sacramento is America’s first transgender bishop. Rohrer, who was born female and identified as lesbian now identifies as “they.”
Rohrer interestingly tweeted yesterday about the fourth century Council of Nicaea that set parameters of Christian doctrine:
The first council of Nicaea’s first action was to try to limit the leadership roles of trans pastors and bishops. I’m grateful the Lutherans of the @sps_elca are beginning to dismantle this and some of the the other hurdles BIPOC and LGBTQ pastor’s encounter.
Claims of suppressing transgender clergy are elusive to history. Rohrer did not cite sources. But presumably Rohrer is referencing Canon 1 from the council declaring eunuchs can be priests unless they castrate themselves. The early church did not fault eunuchs who had been castrated against their will for service to nobles or rulers.
But the early church did condemn self–mutilation as an assault on the goodness of the human body. Self-mutilation was not typically an effort to change genders but to escape sexual temptation. Reputedly the early church father Origen had himself castrated for this purpose though the story is disputed. True or not, the bishops at Nicaea disapproved.
Nicaea is commonly demonized or enshrouded in mythological conspiracies by dissenters from orthodox Christianity who wish to believe their preferred ostensibly more liberating theologies were suppressed for imperial or other nefarious purposes. Sometimes these conspiracy theories become bestselling books and movies.
Infamously, Dan Brown’s 2003 novel The Da Vinci Code, oddly treated as pseudo history by some, portrays the Council of Nicaea as the Emperor Constantine’s tool for unifying the Roman Empire by suppressing theological dissent and imposing belief in Christ’s full deity. Perhaps there is now a new legend about suppressing transgender clergy.
In Brown’s novel, one character explains the conspiracy at Nicaea:
Because Constantine upgraded Jesus’ status almost four centuries after Jesus’ death, thousands of documents already existed chronicling His life as a mortal man. To rewrite the history books, Constantine knew he would need a bold stroke…Constantine commissioned and financed a new Bible, which omitted those gospels that spoke of Christ’s human traits and embellished those gospels that made Him godlike. The earlier gospels were outlawed, gathered up, and burned.
Many of the books supposedly suppressed by Nicaea, according to contemporary religionists like popular author Elaine Pagels, were gnostic alternative gospels rejecting ecumenical orthodoxy in favor of secret knowledge stressing self-actualization and inner journeys instead of salvation and worshipping the Creator. The Gnostics minimized or ignored the Hebrew scripture that orthodox Christians deem sacred and the foundation of God’s self-revelation.
Ben Witherington of Asbury Seminary explains:
Where Judaism and Christianity emphasize the role of faith and works in salvation, and salvation of both body and spirit, gnostics taught that the soul’s salvation depended on the individual possessing quasi-intuitive knowledge (gnosis) of the mysteries of the universe and of magic formulas.
And:
Gnosticism fundamentally rejected Jewish theology about the goodness of creation, and especially the idea that all the nations could be blessed through Abraham and his faith.
Witherington notes that Elaine Pagels highlights a phrase attributed to Jesus by the gnostic gospel of Thomas: “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you.”
Pagels explains her joy over this gnostic wisdom:
The strength of this saying is that it does not tell us what to believe but challenges us to discover what lies hidden within ourselves; and with a shock of recognition, I realized that this perspective seemed to me self evidently true.
Witherington observes:
Here we find the appeal to personal impressions or experience as the final authority. The believer is not asked to believe specific things that come from without (by revelation), nor to submit to any authority but the self. Instead, we are to be the measure of ourselves and to find our own truths within us.
In this spirit, Bishop Rohrer says she’s glad her liberal Mainline Protestant denomination is “beginning to dismantle” the injustice at the Council of Nicaea. No doubt much more dismantling must be done before true justice and knowledge can prevail against the external authority of revelation proposed by historic Christianity. Or so the Gnostics, yesterday and today, always proclaim.
I really wonder if the ELCA will change their liturgy now to remove the Nicene Creed from their worship services. It would be pretty arbitrary to keep one resolution from a patriarchal, unenlightened council from pre-scientific times and embrace another. Alas, consistency is so often in short supply when it comes to this sort of thing.
Don’t give them ideas. I can assure you that murmurations among the more woke churches in TECUSA is that the Nicene Creed is incorrigibly sexist.
This silly woman is just following pseudo-history. There was no “suppression” of any books at the Council of Nicaea.
The criterion for judging whether a book was to be counted as “scripture” was always whether or not it was written by or under the authority of an Apostle. Some gnositc books fraudulently pretended to be of apostolic authorship, but once these claims were investigated and proved wanting, few people were interested in reading them anymore. That’s the main reason gnostic literature died out.
The Lutheran church is in sad shape if its leaders are as crackpot as this lady.
Not to be upstaged by Katherine, the episcopalians’ little Lutheran friends have a coed bishop fruitcake of their own. The use of “their” for her would-be-former-herself is amusing. Does anyone notice the similarity between people who insist they (!) are “plural” and the self imposed name of “Legion” in the Gospel? It’s hard to miss and certainly comes from the same source. When this goes on do any episcopalians still feel even the slightest shred of embarrassment? The ones that are left are simply beyond that and numb. For further insight to her personality check out the blog of this poor woman of a few years ago. She went into some surgical engineering to create pelvic plumbing that isn’t standard equipment. She had to testily dismiss any requests for details on changes in topography. How very ELCA, a bishop who invents sort-of sex organs AND fake history.
They has been used colloquially as a singular pronoun in English for decades. I remember we spoke that way even in elementary school. It is not new.
My mother was using it that way in the 1940s (and probably earlier) but I never liked the use of the word as a singular.
Thank you for sharing that. I knew that it must have been used even before the 90s and 80s. I appreciate that you shared it was used even in the 40s! It certainly is not a new usage to English.
We are not amused, and neither are they.
What’s crazier than this is that there are people who insist that this be taken seriously…
Funny, I believe the very word “transgender” might have been conceived a few years after the first Council of Nicea assembled. Just a few.
Frankly, I’d be surprised if you’ll find much evidence of the word transgender before the Plastic Age (late 1980s). Even during the Christine Jorgensen era the preferred term was “transsexual” or even “transvestite”, words that are verboten today. But then, language changes so quickly in the Howling 20s you can rest assured by evening that what you said earlier that morning will pass as bigoted.
I’m probably less opposed to transgender advocacy than most people here. But I can certainly sniff out historical/theological revisionism, and when it’s done in the service of individual identity, it’s fairly obvious who’s coming first in the homilies of Bishop Megan Rohrer…and it’s not the Trinity, Scripture, her Church, or even her congregation.
I pray for the souls of so many who will be seriously mislead by this dishonest false teacher. There is no limit of corruption that Evil won’t pursue in order to fight the kingdom of the one true God of all Creation.
I was just reading 2 and 3 John and was reminded that false teaching is not new. The fight goes on.
I was confused by the name “Megan,” which is apparently the name given at birth; however, the Twitter feed specifies “they/he.”
And now an article at PJ Media possibly clears up my confusion. It says this is a biological male who now identifies as female, which is more consistent with the impression I get from the photo in this article.
[Edit: A correction at PJ Media makes this as clear as it can be, which isn’t very clear. Rohrer is a biological female, who previously identified as a “lesbian” and now identifies as a vaguely non-binary person, using “they.”]
It is disappointing to see the personal attacks aimed at the Bishop-elect. Rather than disrespecting their pronouns or their personhood, the focus should be on the content of the tweet. I really doubt the ELCA is even close to removing the Council of Nicaea from doctrinal statements. The council, while of course imperfect as all humans are imperfect and fallible, produced the Creed that is the cornerstone for orthodox Christianity. Even most social liberals like myself support orthodox theology.
The marriage of orthodox theology and social liberalism is as Christlike as the marriage of orthodox theology and social conservatism, but, yes, I agree that the focus should be on the content of the tweet, which is a classic case of question-begging.
It’s disappointing you can’t see the obvious: This woman is a tiresome, narcissistic idiot. At some point, and she has passed it long ago, a person that stupid can’t and shouldn’t be taken seriously. Personal attack? No. Stating what is clear to anyone. She has it coming. ELCA also. The joys of not being involved in “ecumenism” are limitless.
What is obvious to me is that self-castration is a serious matter in church history. It is addressed by Jesus, and also in the Old Testament. Admittedly Rohrer has referenced the matter in a self-serving manner, but it is not right to call her an idiot. We should oppose normalising gender dysphoria, of course, but we do not need to be offensive.
I disagree. She has created the issue and it speaks to her character which is extremely pertinent for someone seeking an administrative promotion.
There is nothing wrong with Rohrer raising a contentious or provocative issue, but she should address the question at issue, namely, concerning whether men who performed self-castration did so against their own life, being an act of self-murder (Apostolic Canons 21-24). I assume that Rohrer is not suggesting that deviants should be given leadership roles in the church.
Becoming curious about her background I checked out her wiki page that notes she is descended from a 15th century Swiss saint. Not knowing the saint I followed the link provided to the his wiki where she is specifically cited as a descendant (16 generations). I found that to be a bizarre reference in the bio and assume she made that edit herself.
What amazes me about these people, such as this supposed bishop, is that they (in the plural sense) want us to take them seriously, then do not resort to historical revisionism as to what the Bible and the creeds meant by eunuchs. However, this is very common now amongst ELCA’s more extremist, leftist, and dare I say, probably non-Christian wing. Recently, a friend, who is a Lutheran missionary reposted on FB a post from the ELCA’s GLBT group a comment the Ethiopian eunuch being a transgendered person. (For the record, the friend is I would say SSA, and rejects the fully affirming theological gymnastics.) The thing is is this either willful manipulation and misrepresentation akin to what Peter, Paul, John, James, and Jude say about false teaching, or just wholesale ignorance. Unfortunately, if you are a bishop as he is, then this is willful, and God have mercy on his soul.
Wow, and I thought we Catholics had our hands full with nut cases like Fr James Martin, SJ.