Reading Material

Here's some reading material on sexuality that might be worthy of your time:

Modesty and Men

Before young women face undue pressure to monitor their male peers’ sexual purity, Christian communities ought to provide a biblical context for why we pursue modesty in the first place — and make sure both men and women get the message.

Two evangelical leaders with two different views on the Civil Partnership Bill:

View 1 - The realist
View 2 - The idealist

(Though I don't know what side of the fence I fall on (if any) and can only offer a provisional coment, for what it's worth, I don't think the second view really is ideal (to use Patrick Michel's word). Christianity is not about imposing things from the outside in, but about a radical change from the inside out. It is about life in the Spirit; a life that is at once free of the law and the fulfillment of the law. To impose Biblical ethics on those living "in the flesh" (to borrow a Pauline phrase) is actually to place a yoke on them that we too have been unable to bear.)

Daniel Kirk on Christian Sexuality:

And the model of self-giving love is where, it seems to me, we so often go astray at the get-go when it comes to sexuality. The call to give up our lives so that another might live flies full in the face of our desires for sexual gratification. Whether it’s the stereotypical guy who’s looking for the physical pleasure or the stereotypical woman who wants to know that she’s desired and accepted–or the very real people who are a mash up of both of these and a whole lot more–sex is an activity in which we are seeking our own.

The Motherhood of God

One aspect of God that you don’t often read about is his motherhood, probably because “his motherhood” sounds ridiculous. But it must be remembered that much talk of God is freighted with analogy, including his gender. God is neither male nor female (which may be why Paul can say that “in Christ there is neither male nor female”). Of course that’s not to say that masculinity and femininity have no relation to God. God created human beings in his image, so our maleness and femaleness reflect the image of a God who subsumes both, or even brings both into perfect union.

In the book of Isaiah, the motherhood of God is a word of promise spoken to exiled Israel. YHWH says to his people,

You will be like a child that is nursed by its mother, carried in her arms, and treated with love. I will comfort you in Jerusalem, as a mother comforts her child.

This unique role of women -- that of “nurse” to a hungry, dependent child uncomfortable in their new surroundings -- offers an insight into the character of God, and thus the actions he is prone to undertake. God nurses, God comforts, God carries, God treats with love. Picture a mother holding her newborn baby in her arms, feeding him when he is hungry, singing to him when he is upset, loving every little detail about this new creation; picture this, and you begin to get a fuller picture of who God is.

Jesus also creates a snapshot image of motherhood, but applies the image to himself. Lamenting over impenitent Jerusalem, he says,

O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you would not!

The picture here is one of a mother’s protection for her own. This echoes some passages in the Psalms, which speak of abiding “in the shadow of [YHWH’s] wings”. There the children find refuge in times of trouble, the strength of a devoted mother in times of weakness and vulnerability.

One of the interesting things about Jesus’s application of this maternal image to himself is how blurred it makes the lines between “gender roles”; how close it brings the “complementary” nature of “biblical manhood” and “biblical womanhood” together. Jesus as image of God brought the two into one. His maleness didn’t preclude him from embodying the characteristics associated with motherhood. In fact, for Jesus to really be the image of God -- “the exact imprint of His nature” as Priscilla writes in Hebrews (oh no he didn’t!) -- male and female had to become one in him, for God is one. And so they did.

None of this is to say that father’s should start breast feeding their children, of course. Nevertheless, the image of a child being nursed at its mother’s breast is one that God is not hesitant to apply to himself in order to reveal the kind of God he is and the kind of things he desires to do (nurture, sustain, love, etc). The man Jesus fully revealed this maternal instinct, and whether male or female we too are called to embody the motherhood of God, displaying all the compassion, care and comfort that a mother has for her beloved child.

Metaphorically speaking, you can milk anything with nipples.

It Was The One-Armed Man

I find it amusing when people today say that they want to be a “New Testament church”. I know what they mean to some degree, but I like to pretend that they’re hankering for the good ol’ days when church members were getting drunk on communion wine and sleeping with temple prostitutes. Oh to be a New Testament church like the one in Corinth, eh!?

Speaking of temple prostitutes (there’s a segue you don’t hear too often), one of the Bible verses that has long-bewildered me is found in Paul’s response to the Corinthians’ liaisons with some women of the night. Having explained that sex with a prostitute creates a bond that is not easily broken -- “the two will become one flesh” -- Paul goes on to write,

Flee fornication. Every sin which a man may do is outside the body, but he doing fornication sins against his own body.

Flee fornication. That much is understandable. This is no arbitrary law to be kept for law-keeping’s sake, but a way of life that promotes our own good and that of others when we abide by it and causes us and others harm when we turn away from it.

But what about the next sentence? The belief that “Every sin which a man may do is outside the body” does not fit easily into the overall context of 1 Corinthians, nor into the theology/ethics of Scripture in general. Our bodies are either instruments of righteousness or instruments of sin. The univocal witness of Scripture is that what we do with our bodies matters, so how do we explain this verse?

The way I have usually heard it explained is that sexual sin is of a different class to all other sins. When we misuse our sexuality we are harming our own bodies in a deeper way than when we commit a more run-of-the-mill sin. Sex is an intimate thing, and so its abuse has intimate consequences.

I don’t necessarily question this diagnosis of sexual sin, but it has always seemed to me to set up a false contrast. After all, Paul usually groups sexual sin in with others like greed, envy, and bitterness, without marking it out as being “internal” as opposed to “external”. And besides, what does it even mean for greed or envy to be committed “outside the body”? That doesn’t make any good sense.

O wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this exegetical conundrum? Thanks be to God through Richard B. Hays our scholar.

This particular section in 1 Corinthians starts with the much-loved phrase, “All things are lawful for me”. This is not a phrase of Paul’s creation, however, but a Corinthian slogan used to justify certain sinful actions. So the exchange between the Corinthians and Paul goes like this:

Corinthians: All things are lawful to me.

Paul: But not all things are beneficial.

Corinthians: All things are lawful to me.

Paul: But I will not be enslaved by anything.

The next Corinthian slogan is more long-winded than most (if not all) translations allow for. As Hays argues, however, we must include all of the following lest we end up with a Platonic dualism of bad matter and good spirit:

Corinthians: Food is meant for the stomach and the stomach for food, and God will destroy both one and the other.

Paul: The body is not meant for sexual immorality, but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body.

Here (and at the end of the section) the body is affirmed as God’s good creation to be used for His glory. It is not something to be destroyed, but something to be redeemed. That is its raison d’etre.

And so we come to the most pertinent Corinthian--Paul exchange. How do you solve a problem like sins outside the body? Just assume that Paul never said it. Assume this, as Hays does rather convincingly, and you end up with the following back-and-forth:

Corinthians: Every sin man does is outside the body.

Paul: But the man guilty of sexual immorality sins against his own body.

Paul isn’t contrasting sexual sin with all other sins (and he's certainly not making it sound worse or more grievous, which is a possible and lamentable result of the usual interpretation). He’s simply exposing the fallacy of the Corinthians’ argument. To paraphrase Paul's intention:

You Corinthians say that what we do with our bodies is of no consequence. You say that sin is not a bodily matter. I say that it is.

The coup de grace comes in the next verse, where Paul makes the astounding claim that our bodies are the dwellings places of the Holy Spirit. But let’s not go there just yet.

For now, all you need to know is that if there is a verse you find difficult to swallow, just assume that the church in Corinth came up with it. You wouldn’t believe how liberating it is to think that “Love your neighbour as yourself” is a Corinthian slogan, for example.

Bob, Jennifer and the Jack of Hearts

A man who once fraternised with a male prostitute, a recording artist who has recently revealed she is in a relationship with another woman, and a pastor - all claiming to be on a journey towards the truth, all claiming to be Christians, all appearing on Larry King Live.

I didn’t see the show, but I read the transcript. How could I not with such a, ahem, festive line up? I may discuss some of what was said another time, but my initial reaction is simply this: Why?

Why did this dialogue take place on national television? Assuming Ted Haggard, Jennifer Knapp and Pastor Bob Botsford to be Christians and thus members of the Church, is there a justifiable reason for opinions to be aired and judgements to be made outside of a church context? Who benefits when Christians argue about the sinfulness (or lack thereof) of homosexuality in a secular environment? This is akin to the church members of Corinth going to court against one another, thus bringing what should have been church-related matters into a non-church environment. As Gordon Fee points out, Paul’s correction of this behaviour is a correction of the Corinthians’ failure to let the church be the church.

The media has no interest in enhancing the unity of the church. This self-serving moral compass (the media, not the church…oh no - never the church) wants scandal and bickering and contradiction. It wants the Westboro Baptist Church, not Redeemer Presbyterian; it wants Pat Robertson, not John Stott. This may sound like I want to isolate the church from “real life”, to cover up its failings so that it appears good from the outside looking in. I don’t. As recent church history in Ireland tragically demonstrates, this can only end badly.

What I am advocating is for debates such as the one in question to be kept in their proper context. Since the matter of homosexuality and its relation to Christian discipleship is a community-of-faith matter and a Scripture-interpretation matter, it has no business being discussed outside of the church. In fact, this debate is unintelligible outside of the church; unintelligible in the world of the ‘No-God’ (to use some Barth-speak in an effort to delude myself into thinking I know what he’s on about).

One of the conclusions of Richard Hays’s book Echoes of Scripture... is that the Bible can only be read faithfully by members of the new covenant founded in Christ and energised by the spirit; that is, by members of the church, for whom the text of Scripture not only stands as a word spoken over and against our own words, but as a word to be “made flesh” in the life of the community.

This community, and not the bright lights of a television studio, is the place to thrash out thoughts and feelings about homosexuality. In the world of television, Jennifer Knapp becomes a mere idea, a political pawn to be used by both sides of the divide, a discussion topic for pseudo-theological bloggers to vent ab…oh…right. I’ll be off, then.