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Prejudice? Or Defending Marriage?

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I think I was in middle school when the pastor of the little Southern Baptist Church I grew up in preached about Jesus’ words on the subject of divorce for the last time. Afterward, he received a great deal of criticism from many in the congregation—including a number of Sunday School teachers and other influential members—who were divorced and remarried.

After that, he did not preach any more sermons condemning divorce.

On the other hand, when there were sermons that denounced the homosexual agenda, or called for reinstating the biblical death penalty for homosexuals, the pastor’s call was met with a resounding “amen,” and there were no protests from the congregation. So those sermons continued throughout my youth, and were still occurring from time to time when I left for college.

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Sin and Sexual Minorities Part 2: Why I Criticize Christians

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Many, though not all, of the sins I will mention in this series are not infrequently committed by Christians. In the past, when I’ve brought up these kinds of sins, I’ve sometimes been accused of harboring a deep-seated hatred of Christians. As is probably obvious to everyone who actually knows me, nothing could be further from the truth. I think these accusations might come from people whose thinking has been deeply affected by a mentality of culture war, and who see my concerns as a form of friendly fire that inhibits an effective attack on the enemy. I don’t think much of such a paradigm, especially given that our true enemy is not of this world and that we should be at war with all forms of sin, especially our own sin.

So why do I actually choose to spend so much time focusing on the sins of Christians? It can basically be summed up the same way Matt Jones discusses his reasons for coming out in Going Public, Part 2—“I love the Church too much to let it love LGBTQ people so poorly.” I think that some of the ways many Christians have approached sexual identity issues have been incredibly detrimental to the witness of the Church, both to sexual minorities and to the culture at large.

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Sin and Sexual Minorities Part 1: Introduction

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In Christian discussions about sexual identity issues, the notions of “sin” and “morality” often come up. Typically, gay sex is in focus. There are often complaints about how the gay community is promoting particular sins or forms of sexual immorality. As someone who holds to a traditional understanding of sexual ethics, I agree with some of these concerns.

However, I think this is a far too limited way to view sin and morality. Christian morality cannot be reduced to sexual ethics; other issues are critically important as well. Furthermore, many complaints by Christians demonstrate much greater concern about certain sins committed by sexual minorities than about sins committed against sexual minorities, if sins against sexual minorities are acknowledged at all. Sins against sexual minority people are in fact serious and common, and as Matt Jones discusses in “What Is Love?,” true concern for sexual minorities requires us to acknowledge and fight these sins.

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Sexual Ethics and the Trinity: A Follow-Up

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Yesterday’s post on Sexual Ethics and the Trinity was mostly very well received (for which I am grateful). But I did get some criticisms, which I’d like to try to respond to. (I suppose it’s inevitable, when you try to push the conversation in a very different direction, that some readers will not understand where you are going.)

Social and religious context

Why did I write this in the first place? What problem was I trying to address?

In the last 40 years, western culture has gone through a profound shift in its understanding of marriage, human sexuality, and procreation.

This shift has also affected Christians in various ways. In the Catholic Church, contraception, remarriage after divorce, and same-sex unions remain contrary to Church teaching, but this teaching does not receive anything like universal assent in the pews. In other Christian communions, there have been divisive debates about a variety of issues in sexual ethics, with varying levels of official acceptance of changing attitudes toward sexual ethics.

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Sexual Ethics and the Trinity

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God reveals Himself primarily as Father. What does that mean for our understanding of marriage?

Even in Christian culture, marriage is often seen primarily as a romantic and erotic union between a man and a woman. Thus, it has become more and more common, when we want to speak theologically about marriage, to talk about the image of Christ as the bridegroom of the Church.

Moreover, the widespread availability of contraceptives has made children seem a somewhat secondary, and voluntary, addition to marriage. Christians are not as inclined to reflect deeply on the connection between marriage and children as earlier Christian generations did.

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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.

The Question of Truth

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In his excellent posts from Monday (Celibacy Is Not the Gospel and Celibacy in Light of the Resurrection), Wes attempted to respond to the following concern: “If we’re going to ask gay Christians to give up gay sex, that self-denial must be demonstrably good for us.” I liked what he had to say in response, but I think there is something more fundamental that ought to be said.

In “Christian Apologetics” (collected in God in the Dock), C. S. Lewis stresses the importance of focusing first of all on the claim that Christianity is true:

One of the great difficulties is to keep before the audience’s mind the question of truth. They always think you are recommending Christianity not because you think it is true but because it is good. And in the discussion they will at every moment try to escape from the issue ‘True—or False’ into stuff about a good society, or morals, or the incomes of Bishops, or the Spanish Inquisition, or France, or Poland — or anything whatever. You have to keep forcing them back, and again back, to the real point. Only thus will you be able to undermine … [t]heir belief that a certain amount of ‘religion’ is desirable but one mustn’t carry it too far. One must keep on pointing out that Christianity is a statement which, if false, is of no importance, and, if true, of infinite importance. The one thing it cannot be is moderately important.

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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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