celibacy

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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The Gift of Celibacy

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[This is the second in a series of three posts on celibacy. The first was What Does Genesis 2:18 Really Teach?]

I’m frustrated with a lot of the way many Christians talk about “the gift of celibacy.” There are some unbiblical ideas that often creep in, and I think we’re missing some big pastoral issues. Given that I’m bisexual rather than gay and still pretty young, I’m not talking so much about my own experience as that of others (both gay and straight) whose experience is being ignored.

I don’t see how “the gift of celibacy” entails not dealing with sexual temptation or with loneliness. Paul never says that in 1 Corinthians 7 – he just says that he can maintain self-control, which is not at all the same thing. We recognize that being given the gift of marriage doesn’t make everything easy. Marriage comes with a lot of difficulties, and there’s a lot of focus on how to help married people deal with them. When celibacy comes with difficulties, it often seems our only focus is on getting people married. Few people seem to take seriously the idea that someone with a healthy sex drive could be called to celibacy. Our surrounding culture is deeply opposed to celibacy, and many Christians tacitly or explicitly agree with this attitude. In Protestantism, some of these attitudes stem back to the Reformation, despite the Bible’s clear teaching that celibacy is a higher calling than marriage. (This is not to say that all Protestants dismiss the Bible’s teaching on celibacy. For example, John Stott was himself celibate for his entire life but was a respected leader. However, anti-celibacy attitudes are common within Protestant culture.)

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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 Genesis 2:18 Really Teach?

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A frequently misinterpreted verse in the Bible is Genesis 2:18, where God says, “It is not good that the man should be alone” (ESV).  From the immediate context, where God creates Eve as a helper for Adam, many people understand the state of being single to be “not good” and marriage as the only real solution to loneliness.

Common as this interpretation is, it cannot be squared with the full witness of Scripture.  Take Matthew 19, for instance.  After Jesus had just finished making an argument from Genesis about divorce, the disciples assert that it is better not to marry.  If the common understanding of Genesis 2:18 were correct, Jesus would have immediately brought it up.  He didn’t, but instead basically said that it can be better to remain unmarried, just not for everyone.  He mentioned three categories of people who would remain celibate, only the third of which would have any explicit choice in the matter.  (See Seeds of Celibacy for a reflection on this last fact.)

The only way I can reconcile Genesis 2:18 with Matthew 19 is that “being alone” and being married are not the only choices: there must be a third option.  This makes a good deal of sense even in the context of the Genesis passage: after all, Adam was not merely single, he was the only human being on the face of the planet.  It was through his relationship with Eve that the world was populated.  In the New Testament, the Church plays a significant role as family for all believers.  In my current situation and life stage, I find that fellow believers do fulfill this role for me, because I do have meaningful companionship and support from my Christian brothers and sisters.

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Going Public, Part 2

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The first post in this series briefly explained some of the potential dangers and pitfalls of writing openly about that bewildering intersection of my faith and homosexuality. I’m here again, so apparently I did a terrible job of dissuading myself.

This post will focus on a few of the reasons why I believe the good that can come from being fully “out” overwhelms any fears or negative responses, and compels me toward a life of openness.

So.

Pros: On a personal level, not having to cover up my sexuality is a blessing. Or, stated more profoundly, not having to hide the full breadth of the grace of God in my life is tremendously freeing. If my testimony is the story of how I have come to know God more intimately and powerfully, then integral to that witness is his process of bringing an intensely confused and hurting son of his from the depths of denial about his sexuality to a place where he feels increasingly reconciled to himself, where he is surrounded by friends and mentors who form a rich community of laughter and rest, and where he can say – and this is no small thing – that he knows he is loved and that he knows he is worthy of love.

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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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A Note on Karl Barth, Celibacy, and the ‘Image of God’

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In his Bible, Gender, Sexuality: Reframing the Church’s Debate on Same-Sex Relationships, James Brownson critiques the idea that the “image of God” in humanity includes sexual difference:

Throughout much of Christian history, the notion that gender differentiation is part of the image of God (“male and female as the image of God in stereo”) has occasionally surfaced as a marginal voice, but it has never occupied a significant place in the Christian understanding of the imago Dei. The reason is a simple one. If both male and female must be present together in order to fully constitute the image of God, then those who are single do not fully reflect the image of God. This runs deeply against the grain of many passages in the Bible. But even more important, the New Testament clearly proclaims that Jesus is, par excellence, the image of God (e.g., 2 Cor. 4:4; Col. 3:10; 1 Cor. 15:45). Unless we are to postulate an androgynous savior, something the New Testament never even contemplates, we cannot say that the image of God requires the presence of both male and female. It is far better to interpret Genesis 1:27, which insists that both male and female are created in the divine image, to mean that all the dignity, honor, and significance of bearing the divine image belong equally to men and women. We need not delve into the entire debate about what exactly the image of God signifies. For our purposes it is enough to say what is not signified by the divine image: gender complementarity.

One theologian Brownson singles out for criticism is Karl Barth, for whom, Brownson says, “a complementary understanding of gender is essential to the image of God.” Brownson thinks this understanding of the imago Dei would require each person to be married to a member of the opposite sex in order to fully become a divine image-bearer.

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Thoughts on ‘Does Jesus Really Love Me?’

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I’ve just finished reading Jeff Chu’s new book Does Jesus Really Love Me? A Gay Christian’s Pilgrimage in Search of God in America, and I highly recommend it. Besides being well-written and engaging (I could hardly put it down), it’s also very illuminating. The book is a balanced, fair-minded collection of snapshots of virtually every corner of the (Protestant) Christian discussion of LGBTQ matters. If someone wanted to get a sense for how American Protestants treat their gay and lesbian neighbors, this is the book I would give them first. It covers Westboro Baptist, The Episcopal Church, and everything in between.

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Celibacy and friendship “after 30”

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This was published last summer in the NYT, but it’s just now coming to my attention (via Luke Neff): “Friends of a Certain Age: Why Is It Hard to Make Friends Over 30?”

An excerpt:

In studies of peer groups, Laura L. Carstensen, a psychology professor who is the director of the Stanford Center on Longevity in California, observed that people tended to interact with fewer people as they moved toward midlife, but that they grew closer to the friends they already had.

Basically, she suggests, this is because people have an internal alarm clock that goes off at big life events, like turning 30. It reminds them that time horizons are shrinking, so it is a point to pull back on exploration and concentrate on the here and now. “You tend to focus on what is most emotionally important to you,” she said, “so you’re not interested in going to that cocktail party, you’re interested in spending time with your kids.”

As external conditions change, it becomes tougher to meet the three conditions that sociologists since the 1950s have considered crucial to making close friends: proximity; repeated, unplanned interactions; and a setting that encourages people to let their guard down and confide in each other, said Rebecca G. Adams, a professor of sociology and gerontology at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. This is why so many people meet their lifelong friends in college, she added.

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Spiritual friendship in 300 words

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A friend of mine and I were recently discussing the difficulties of trying to explain the themes we discuss on this blog clearly and succinctly, in a way that does justice to the various aspects of the discussion. After thinking about it for a bit, I decided to try my hand at explaining what I’m about in 300 words, in a way that was personal, hopeful, honest about obstacles, and in touch with the broader Christian tradition.

(Actually, Microsoft Word informs me that this is only 297 words.)
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