Author: Ron Belgau

New Design for Spiritual Friendship

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As should be fairly obvious if you are reading this (and have ever read a post at Spiritual Friendship before), we have dramatically altered the website design.

When Wesley and I created Spiritual Friendship in April of 2012, we weren’t really sure what we were doing. We’d been privately discussing a bunch of the ideas we’ve talked about here, and a number of our friends encouraged us to talk about them more publicly. At the time, we weren’t sure how much interest there was in our ideas. The reparative therapy/orientation change model that had been used by Exodus International still seemed to be more or less the default approach in orthodox Christian circles. So, with some trepidation, we decided to start a blog. Because we weren’t really sure where this was going, we just chose a default WordPress template, and started tentatively putting out posts.

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Celibacy and Healing

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When I was an undergraduate, I read two of the most important ex-gay books of the time: Coming Out of Homosexuality by Bob Davies and Lori Rentzel, and Straight & Narrow? by Thomas Schmidt.

Coming out of Homosexuality was 208 pages long, and offered three chapters devoted to topics related to heterosexual dating and marriage. They then turned to the topic of those who remain single:

We have taken a detailed look in the past several chapters at different aspects of moving toward heterosexual relationships in terms of dating, engagement and marriage. This is an appropriate place to reaffirm the validity of being single.

The majority of former homosexuals are single, even those who have been out of same-sex immorality for many years. Some left homosexuality while in their late twenties or older and simply have not found a suitable potential spouse. Others have been married previously and hesitate to initiate a new marriage. Some are content in their singleness and feel no desire to begin dating. Whatever the reason, the Bible assures us that singleness is a positive thing; it should not cause us embarrassment or shame.

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Spiritual Friendship on Social Media

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We’ve now added a Spiritual Friendship Facebook page, a Twitter account (and even a Google+ page!) for those of you who prefer to interact on those platforms. At the moment, we’re just sharing links to Spiritual Friendship blog posts through those accounts, but will be exploring more creative ways of using them as we move forward. If you have any suggestions for how to make use of these platforms, please let us know!

Finding Meaning in God’s Calling

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Teaching Philosophy of Religion and Philosophy of the Human Person sometimes leads to interesting class discussions, where students’ engagement with some important philosophical text intermingles with concerns about the ultimate meaning of their own lives.

In these conversations, two important themes often emerge: “what will I do with my life?” And: “who will I love?”

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The older, more respectable sibling of gay pride

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I recently posted a link to Jerry Walls’s essay, “Homosexual Behavior and Fornication: Intimate Bedfellows,” in which he argued that Christians have no chance of challenging homosexual behavior with integrity if they do not begin with the far more prevalent sin among heterosexuals. James Mace, one of his good friends and former students, responded in the comments. While generally agreeing with Walls’s argument, Mace raised what he sees as an important difference between the two. Here is what he wrote:

While noting some similarities, nobody has taken into consideration the differences between the offensive pro-homosexual movement and the lack of such a movement of pro-adulterers. There is no Fornicators Pride movement actively undermining Christian theology to rewrite God’s word to say that fornication is the way God made us.

Thus, while the article has many true things re which I rejoice, I am disturbed by the seeming willingness to abandon the defense against attacks on theology and praxis from Sodomist ideologues, falsely equating them with garden-variety fornicators while ignoring determinative distinctions in their religio-socio-political agenda.

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Jerry Walls on homosexuality and fornication

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Jerry Walls has a new post up on Houston Baptist University’s Christian Thought blog called Homosexual Behavior and Fornication: Intimate Bedfellows. Here is the heart of his argument:

Christians have no chance whatever of challenging homosexual behavior with integrity unless they start with the sexual sins of heterosexuals. We cannot take a morally credible stand against the sexual sins of the small minority of the population if we condone the sexual sins favored by over 90% percent of the population. If fornication is okay, if casual divorce is no big deal, then it rings utterly hollow to try to take a loud (or even a quiet) stand on homosexual behavior.

Of course, challenging heterosexual sin is no simple matter in contemporary culture. For the fact of the matter is that the non-marital sexual practices of many persons, including Christians, flow quite naturally out of the worldview in which they have been steeped (unfortunately many Christians are shaped more by pop culture than they are by Scripture). To have any realistic chance of countering this will require a serious recovery of the Christian view of sexuality, which requires even more fundamentally a substantive Christian view of human persons and their place in the great drama of creation and redemption. In short, that will require that we persuasively teach Christian morality as an integral component of the entire Christian vision of reality. And we must convey the beauty and goodness of this vision, and how it conduces to human flourishing, as vigorously as we argue for its truth. But nothing short of that has any real hope of bringing genuine renewal in the realm of sexual morality.

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Condemnation, Forgiveness, and New Life

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Debates about Christian sexual ethics, and particularly debates dealing with homosexuality, are often difficult and sometimes counterproductive: the argument may do more to alienate the audience from the Church and the Christian understanding of sex than to draw them to Christ.

I want to begin my meditations on how Christians should understand and respond to contemporary debates about human sexuality with the story of the woman taken in adultery (John 8:3-11).

3 The scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in adultery, and placing her in the midst 4 they said to him, “Teacher, this woman has been caught in the act of adultery. 5 Now in the law Moses commanded us to stone such. What do you say about her?” 6 This they said to test him, that they might have some charge to bring against him. Jesus bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground. 7 And as they continued to ask him, he stood up and said to them, “Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her.” 8 And once more he bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground. 9 But when they heard it, they went away, one by one, beginning with the eldest, and Jesus was left alone with the woman standing before him. 10 Jesus looked up and said to her, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?” 11 She said, “No one, Lord.” And Jesus said, “Neither do I condemn you; go, and do not sin again.”

1. The first point to notice here is that the woman was caught in the act of adultery. If she was caught in the act, a man was caught with her. Yet the scribes and Pharisees did not bring him to Jesus. Only the woman was brought to judgment.

Sexual sins are almost never treated equally, and never have been: there are some people, and some sexual sins, which are treated as sins on paper, but excused in practice. Men’s sexual sins are almost always more socially tolerated than the same sins by women. A man who has premarital sex is only “sowing his wild oats”; a woman who does the same is a “slut” or worse. (Notably, however, this is reversed for homosexuals: sex between men is far more stigmatized than sex between women in most cultures that I am aware of.)

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Homosexuality and the development of doctrine

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For almost 20 centuries, there was little controversy over Christian teaching about homosexuality. For the last few decades, there has been an extraordinary amount of controversy. How should Christians respond to this changing situation?

In a helpful recent blog post, Christopher Damian draws on the ideas of John Henry Newman to explore how Church teaching on abortion has developed in the past, and how the teaching on homosexuality may develop in the future. The object here is not to argue for a revision of Church teaching to bring it into line with the fashions of contemporary culture. Rather, authentic doctrinal development leads to a deeper understanding of the unchanging deposit of Christian faith.

I wrote about similar ideas of doctrinal development last fall on Spiritual Friendship. As I am currently working on a series of posts which will, I hope, develop the orthodox teaching of the Church in a more pastorally fruitful direction, I thought I would begin with a reminder of some of my thoughts on doctrinal development from last fall. (Apologies for those for whom this is a repeat.)

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Three kinds of friendship

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In his treatise On Spiritual Friendship, Aelred of Rievaulx, a 12th-century Cistercian abbot, insists that we need to test our beliefs about friendship with Scripture. The treatise is a series of dialogues in which three monks join Aelred to examine their ideas about friendship in light of their Christian faith.

One of the most important passages in the treatise is the discussion of the three kinds of friendship—carnal, worldly, and spiritual—found in Book I, paragraphs 33-49. (This division of different kinds of friendship is not original to Aelred: Aristotle drew similar distinctions in the Nicomachean Ethics, Book 8, chapters 2-6.)

We might think that Aelred is talking about kinds of friendship in the same way that we think of planes, trains, and automobiles as three different kinds of transport vehicles. Although a car is very different from a plane, and both are very different from a train, each is a legitimate kind of vehicle.

This is not Aelred’s idea, however. He thinks that only spiritual friendship represents a true form of friendship. Carnal and worldly friendship are not real friendship, although many think they are. In speaking of different kinds of friendship, then, Aelred means to distinguish between true friendship and two different kinds of false friendship.

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Scout’s honor

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A while back, a student in my philosophy of religion class turned in a paper which stated that, “in The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values, Sam Harris argued that morality was based on scientific discoveries about the order God had put into the world at the Creation.” I was, I confess, a bit at a loss about what sort of helpful comments I could make on the paper. There’s only so much I could do to soften the blow of, “Actually, Sam Harris is one of the leading advocates of atheism, and his book argued that we can base morality on science, not God.”

I was reminded of that student’s paper the other day, when a friend pointed me to an article by Ken Klukowski, the Director of the Center for Religious Liberty at the Family Research Council, titled “Boy Scout Leaders Propose Incoherent Policy on Gay Scouts.”

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