The Disappearance of Eve and the Gender of Christ: Why Traditional Soteriology Requires a Trans* Savior

After hundreds of years during which Eve was blamed for originating sin, St. Paul removed her from the narrative of the fall to create a "one man"/"one man" typology between Adam as the origin of sin and Christ as the source of salvation. This disappearance created a theological problem. Eve fell outside the narrative of sin and salvation. Early Christians, sensing the lack in Paul's formula, created an alternative typology between Eve, the mother of all the living, and Mary, the mother of Jesus. Eventually, early theologians attempted to solve the soteriological problem Eve posed by coordinating these two typologies. This solution, however, produced a furthur dilemma. Either Mary had to be posited as a second savior, or the salvation offered to Eve in the revised scheme had to be second-class. Neither option is theologically acceptable.

The Disappearance of Eve and the Gender of Christ proposes a solution to this problem. It revises Paul's original formula and with it a set of common claims about Christ's sex and gender. It accepts Christ as the new Adam and the new Eve and accepts that Christ is, theologically speaking, trans*.

Carnahan offers a new theology of sex and gender as a calling within a context of responsibility as a framework for making sense of Eve, Christ, and ourselves. He shows how, from first-century Roman culture to medieval mystical experience and into our own time, there exists a long tradition of seeing Christ as transgressing and even transitioning across sex and gender boundaries.

Kevin Carnahan is professor of philosophy and religion at Central Methodist University. He is the past president of The Niebuhr Society, and former coeditor of the Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics. He is the author of Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Ramsey (2010) and From Presumption to Prudence in Just-War Rationality (2019).