marriage

“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.

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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Why I Need Celibate Gay Christians

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I was forced out of the closet by a phone call. A dear friend had confessed that she was struggling with attraction for a woman, but was trying to not act upon it because of her Christian faith. Our other two friends on the phone strongly recommended she accept her sexual identity rather than let her sexual practices be dictated by her religious beliefs. I—the once militant atheist—came to her defense and said she should let her conscience be her guide. If she believed her religion that deeply, then she should try to her best to adhere to it and we shouldn’t admonish her for prioritizing her religion over her sexual inclinations. This, of course, stunned them and I was forced to come out of the closet as someone interested in Christianity. I confessed that I had started doing Bible studies and attending church. These were the friends least surprised when I was baptized a few months later.

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The Meaning of Vocation

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This is the sixth in a series of posts looking at my Catholic Faith, and how it relates to my life and my sexuality. Click to see the first, second,  third, fourth , and fifth installments.

In many Catholic circles today, vocation is often considered to be a calling either to marriage or to the priesthood or religious life. Growing up, I considered my vocation to be a calling to one of these ways of life. I either had a celibate vocation as a priest or religious, or I had a vocation to marriage with a woman.

I dated for a while, both in high school and in college. I dated women whom I found interesting, exciting, and beautiful. I never seriously considered how my attractions to women differed from other men until somewhat late into my college years. For me, men dating women was a good societal, religious, and human norm that was based upon mutual respect and discernment of a possible life spent together.

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On “Higher” Vocations and the “Marital Paradigm”

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Back when Joshua Gonnerman and I were students at Thomas Aquinas College, from 2005-2009, we were in an environment where the combination of geographical remoteness, Dominican community, and school-wide common study meant that any and every sort of intellectual conversation could take place. One would walk into the Commons and (I am perhaps underexaggerating here) and hear conversations abounding about anything, from Roman history according to Tacitus and Suetonius, to the political philosophy of the American Founding Fathers, to the question of how it is that angels may be said to move according to Aquinas.

There were a few “hot topics” every year that tended to repeat themselves, and one of them was the question of vocational order. This arose from a careful distinction Aquinas made in the Summa, but one which, left unclarified by those giving it only a partial reading, tended to give students heartburn. There is an order among the different states of life in the Church, one defined by both the weight of the sacrifice one makes to be in that state, and also by the juridical order of the Church herself. Because one makes a complete sacrifice of oneself, a holocaust, in entering religious life, Aquinas says that (objectively speaking) religious life is the highest form of life. In this he follows St. Paul, who says in 1 Corinthians 7 that he would that all would remain celibate, but that God calls some to marriage. (Of course, the way he puts this is a legendary bone of contention for those attempting to “justify” marriage as a high vocation. I tend to think he vindicated this, though, by his famous “husbands, love your wives” injunction at the beginning of the same chapter.)

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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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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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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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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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Friendship in Between ‘Romance’ and Loneliness

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Early on in Mark Vernon’s insightful book The Meaning of Friendship, there’s this throwaway observation: “In TV soaps, the characters always have their friends to return to when their sexual adventures fail; lovers come and go, but friends remain.” Reading that sentence, I think not only of old favorites like Seinfeld and Friends but of more recent sitcoms like How I Met Your Mother or Happy Endings: the string of the characters’ romantic attachments is forgettable; what keeps you watching these shows is the constancy of the (mostly twentysomething) friendships among the protagonists. Romance is fleeting; friendship is permanent.

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