Author: Wesley Hill

The Many Facets of Christian Friendship

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This may be of interest to some of our readers: The Washington Institute for Faith, Vocation, and Culture is featuring several pieces on friendship on their website at the moment. Logan Melh-Laituri writes movingly about broken friendships, reconciliation, and friendship with God. Another piece, originally a sermon given at The Falls Church in Virginia by Rev. Bill Haley, is largely about practices that can nurture friendships. Finally, Steve Garber reflects on the relationship between marriage and friendship, about how “if the truth about marriage is that it is a long friendship, not a long date, then much more attention ought to be paid to learning to be friends.”

My favorite line was from Melh-Laituri’s piece: “Friendship simultaneously requires and creates the kind of faith that Christians are called to.”

There’s much food for thought here.

Discipleship for Wayfarers

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I recently talked with Matt Woodley of Preaching Today about how pastors might approach the topic of homosexuality in sermons and other parish teaching opportunities. (The interview is available for free, but you might have to register at the site to access it in its entirety.)

For those who have heard me talk about these matters before, there won’t be much that’s new here. But I thought it would be valuable to try to restate, specifically for an audience of preachers and pastors, some of my gradually-coalescing musings on friendship.

Here’s an excerpt:

I think we need to have an approach to pastoral ministry that allows for a long-term sense of waiting and enduring something that we wish were otherwise. For me, for example, there are many ways in which I just don’t feel that I am made for celibacy. I mean, it often leads to loneliness, to difficulty. The natural impulse of a pastor is to want to say to a person who is suffering, “Let’s make this better. Let’s fix this condition of celibacy so that it’s not so painful anymore.” I think that comes from a good motivation, but the most helpful pastors in my life have recognized there are many situations that people find themselves in that you can’t fix. So the pastoral strategy then becomes not “how do we rescue this person out of this terrible condition?” but “how do we help this person flourish and find love?”

Paul talks a lot in 2 Corinthians about being weak, and you never get the sense from him that God has delivered him from weakness. In fact, God said to him, “My grace is sufficient for you, my power is made perfect in your weakness”—not by rescuing you out of your weakness. I find it helpful when a pastor can recognize that being gay is not something we’re going to fix. There may be a diminishment of same-sex attraction that some people experience, or there may not. But either way, it’s not something that you can just fix. So the question is, How do we help this person find grace and hope in the midst of a situation that may never be what they would wish for?

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“Celibates Lead Us in Our Anticipation of That Eternal Joy”

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My friend Fr. Stewart Ruch III, the newly elected Anglican (ACNA) bishop of the Diocese of the Upper Midwest, was recently interviewed about a sermon he gave on celibacy. For many years, Fr. Stewart has been the rector of Church of the Resurrection in Wheaton, Illinois, and in this interview he draws on several conversations he had with celibate members of his parish.

Here’s a taste:

I wanted to talk about a larger issue than just human marriage or singleness. I wanted to talk about the very goal of human personhood. God in Christ wants to marry humanity. He chose spiritual marriage, the great marriage of our souls with God, as a kind of beatific vision, the end goal of all of our personhood. Marriage with God is a dramatic biblical metaphor for God’s relationship with his people.

The concept of “singleness” can’t do justice to this. For one thing, no one is autonomous or truly “single.” When we realize this, we begin to see that every person is profoundly connected, and has the ultimate destiny of absolute communion with God.

Often, the problem in the church is that “singles” get left behind. We subtly communicate that marriage and raising a family is the “big deal” of Christianity. That’s incomplete. Celibacy, just like marriage, points us towards the real big deal—the marriage of God in Christ with humanity. A celibate Christian can be a sign of living faithfully into that marriage. Celibacy is a far more rounded, nuanced, positive word to say what our theology calls us into. I call those embracing this lifestyle “celibate” because they’re actually being called to live in full marriage with God as a picture of what we’re all going to be when there’s no giving and taking of marriage in heaven.

Read the whole thing.

Celibacy in Light of the Resurrection

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And one brief follow-up to my last post…

I’ve always been fascinated by the way the apostle Paul describes his understanding of his self-denial near the end of his first letter to the Corinthians:

For if the dead are not raised, not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. If in Christ we have hope in this life only, we are of all people most to be pitied…. Why are we in danger every hour? I protest, brothers, by my pride in you, which I have in Christ Jesus our Lord, I die every day! What do I gain if, humanly speaking, I fought with beasts at Ephesus? If the dead are not raised, “Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.”

I don’t know any other way to interpret this than to recognize that Paul is saying, if he weren’t a Christian—a believer in the coming resurrection of the dead—then he wouldn’t be living his life the way he currently is. All that risk-taking, all that self-sacrifice on behalf of his churches, all that arduous ascesis—none of it would be worth much to him, in and of itself, if there weren’t a future bodily resurrection. Or, at the very least, he wouldn’t be the one pursuing these costly practices. Leave it to other moral heroes.

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Celibacy is Not the Gospel

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Is celibacy “good news” for gay Christians? That’s the way the question is often asked, and very poignantly, too (for instance, in the recent posts by Stephen Long at his blog Sacred Tension and also by Rowan Williams: “In what sense does the Church actually proclaim good news to the homosexually inclined person…?”). The point, usually, seems to be this: If we’re going to ask gay Christians to give up gay sex, that self-denial must be demonstrably good for us. We need to be able to point to ways that celibacy enriches us and contributes to our thriving, if we’re going to continue to ask it of gay people.

And there’s something unquestionably right about this. The church is called to promote joy and flourishing. Part of our life together as believers is about trying to find ways of living that enable Jesus’ words in Matthew’s Gospel—“my yoke is easy and my burden is light”—to be felt. If gay Christians are pursuing celibacy in our churches, we are right to want to make that experience one that is nurtured by friendship and various other forms of community and able to be practiced with peace, courage, and hope. We are right to want to eradicate shame and isolation. (And we’re also right to critique the ways the church is captive to certain “family values” which often amount to little more than an idolatry of marriage and the “nuclear family.”)

But I wonder if there isn’t something unhelpful about this line of thought, too. When the New Testament uses the term “gospel”—“good news”—it isn’t talking primarily about celibacy or marriage or any other form of human activity. The gospel is an announcement of what God has done and will do—about God establishing his reign in the world, defeating sin and death, through the work of Jesus Christ (see, e.g., Mark 1:14-15; Romans 1:1-5). It is about the forgiveness of sins and the hope of the resurrection of the body (1 Corinthians 15:1-11).

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A Quiet, Gay-Rights Revolution Among Evangelicals? Well, Maybe…

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A few days ago, The Atlantic ran a piece about the growing support for gay rights among Christians. But the article left me wanting more precision. Consider this claim:

In 2004, just 36 percent of Catholics, the Christian sect most supportive of gay marriage, favored it, along with 34 percent of mainline Protestants; today, it’s 57 percent of Catholics and 55 percent of mainline Protestants. Even among white evangelical Protestants, the most hostile group to gay marriage, support has more than doubled, from 11 percent in 2004 to 24 percent in 2013.

I can’t shed much light on the Catholic and mainline Protestant percentages there, but I can highlight how that figure for evangelical Protestants may be misleading.

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Souls Knit Together

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Justin Taylor points to an excerpt from an article by Michael A. G. Haykin, the Patristics scholar, on biblical images for friendship:

The Bible uses two consistent images in its representation of friendship.

The first is that of the knitting of souls together.

Deuteronomy provides the earliest mention in this regard when it speaks of a ‘friend who is as your own soul’ (Deut. 13:6), that is, one who is a companion of one’s innermost thoughts and feelings.  Prominent in this reflection on friendship is the concept of intimacy.  It is well illustrated by Jonathan and David’s friendship.  For example, in 1 Samuel 18:1 we read that the ‘soul of Jonathan was knit to the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul.’  This reflection on the meaning of friendship bears with it ideas of strong emotional attachment and loyalty.  Not surprisingly, the term ‘friend’ naturally became another name for believers or brothers and sisters in the Lord (see 3 John 14).

The second image that the Bible uses to represent friendship is the face-to-face encounter.  This is literally the image used for Moses’ relationship to God.  In the tabernacle God spoke to Moses ‘face to face, as a man speaks to his friend’ (Exod. 33:11; see also Num. 12:8).  The face-to-face image implies a conversation, a sharing of confidences and consequently a meeting of minds, goals and direction.  In the New Testament, we find a similar idea expressed in 2 John 12, where the Elder tells his readers that he wants to speak to them ‘face to face.’ One of the benefits of such face-to-face encounters between friends is the heightened insight that such times of friendship produce. As the famous saying in Proverbs 27:17 puts it, ‘Iron sharpens iron, and one man sharpens another.’

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It Gets Better for the Chaste, Too

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Matthew Vines has assigned my book, Washed and Waiting: Reflections on Christian Faithfulness and Homosexuality, as one of the core texts of his new training program, The Reformation Project. Matthew disagrees with my conclusions in the book, but he assigned it so that the participants in the program could hear from a gay person who’s trying to live within traditional Christian teaching on homosexuality.

These participants have noted, though, how much I talk about the difficulty of living within the bounds of traditional Christian teaching. There’s a lot in the book about my experience of loneliness, drawing on Henri Nouwen’s powerful writings on that theme, and those descriptions have caused Matthew Vines’ readers to wonder if my experience is typical of gay people who choose to pursue celibacy. Or, more precisely, I think, it’s caused them to wonder if I am baptizing a particular experience of shame- and guilt-induced loneliness and calling it “faithfulness.”

Two initial responses come to mind.

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What Does Same-Sex Marriage Mean for the Single, Straight Christian?

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One of the more interesting points for me in Sherif Girgis, Ryan Anderson, and Robert George’s book What is Marriage? was their reflection on how the legalization of same-sex marriage may contribute to demoting friendship as a lesser form of love. If marriage is so important that it has to be defined as the place where intimacy is available, then friendship, by contrast, looks paler and less attractive than ever. “We come to see friendships as mere rest stops on the way back to family life,” the authors write.

In her most recent editorial for Christianity Today, “Same-Sex Marriage and the Single Christian,” Katelyn Beaty, a single, heterosexual woman (and a friend of mine) explores this point powerfully and poignantly. Writing about the elevation of marriage in the evangelical Christian world—an elevation that mirrors, in ironic ways, the wider society’s elevation of marriage—Beaty says:

[L]ocal churches have acted as if monogamous sexual unions are the closest icon of heaven in this life. That no matter how much self-giving ministry or cultural creativity we undertake in our lifetimes, they are second-best without a spouse and children in tow.

In more detail than this space allows, other writers and theologians (I think especially of Rodney Clapp and Joseph Hellerman) have deftly tackled American Christians’ overemphasis on marriage. What I might offer to the conversation is the perspective of a single Christian. As I watch many fellow young Christians come out in support of gay marriage, lest they bar friends or family from finding the gift of sexual companionship, they are making it harder for me to make sense of chastity.

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How Do Bodies Matter?

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In the most recent issue of Christianity Today, Andy Crouch has an excellent editorial on the church’s future and matters LGBTQIA. Please do read the whole thing. He writes,

There is really only one conviction that can hold this coalition of disparate human experiences [i.e., the experiences captured under the label LGBTQIA] together. And it is the irrelevance of bodies—specifically, the irrelevance of biological sexual differentiation in how we use our bodies.

What unites the LGBTQIA coalition is a conviction that human beings are not created male and female in any essential or important way. What matters is not one’s body but one’s heart—the seat of human will and desire, which only its owner can know.

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