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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Some Tools of Chaste Living: Introduction

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A dear friend recently asked me: how do you pursue chastity in a celibate state? I realized that I have never really written much on this question, though it is deeply significant to the whole project of helping to integrate gay people into a Church deeply committed to a traditional sexual ethic. Meanwhile, another friend has recently charged that we offer a false hope of a life which is ultimately unsustainable. As these questions come more to the front in my mind, it becomes clearer to me that there needs to be more discussion of how we hope to live chastely.

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C. S. Lewis to Sheldon Vanauken on Homosexuality

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When I was an undergrad, my friend Matt Canlis introduced me to A Severe Mercy, Sheldon Vanauken’s spiritual memoir about falling in love with his wife Davy, their studies at Oxford and joint conversion to Christianity under the influence of C. S. Lewis, her premature death at the age of 40, and his struggle to come to terms with it.

The book explores the danger of idolatry in romantic love in a particularly poignant way, but I won’t try to summarize that lesson here.

Instead, I want to focus on a letter from C. S. Lewis which Vanauken excerpts in the book. Vanauken taught at Lynchburg College, and he and his wife led an informal ministry to students there. Less than a month into the fall term in 1953, Vanauken writes,

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C. S. Lewis on Homosexuality & Disgust

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In the last few days, there has been an extensive debate over a post by Thabiti Anyabwile arguing that Christians should have done more to invoke people’s “gag reflex” about gay sex in order to oppose same-sex marriage. I responded directly to this yesterday, and also published a response by Kyle Keating.

Today, I want to highlight C. S. Lewis’s most extensive comment on the subject of homosexuality.

Lewis is probably the most effective, clear-headed communicator of Christian belief to unbelievers the Church has produced in a century. He understood how to appeal persuasively to his readers’ heads, hearts, and imaginations. His perspective is worth listening to when it comes to one of the most difficult communication challenges the Church faces in America today.

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Interscape

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I have been thinking about Gerard Manley Hopkins’ idea of inscape in relation to John Paul II’s theology of intersubjectivity. Hopkins believed that everything had a particular essence, an “inscape,” which expressed the spark of divine genius which had brought that particular thing into being and which caused it to speak itself as a gift to the world.

AS kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying What I do is me: for that I came.

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Beauty in the Midst of Tension

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Copyright 2013 Gregg Webb

Copyright © 2013 by Gregg Webb

We are people who enjoy comfort. It is easy to exist within a bubble where our ideas and world-views are only confirmed and never challenged. We are prone to shy away from opportunities for our own growth by allowing possible friends to remain strangers. Ideological differences are allowed to define and enforce separation often under the guise of safety.

My own experience has shown that this bubble is not truly “safe.” It is far too easily ruptured when an uninvited co-worker, family member or classmate who would otherwise be an ideological object becomes a real person. When this happens I am forced to grapple with the tension that relationship creates in my life. I must embrace a biblical calling to be “all things to all people” and by doing so understand my own convictions. It is only through relationship with others that my own understanding and faith can be fully deepened and formed.

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The Problem with the “Gag Reflex”

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A couple of days ago, Thabiti Anyabwile put up a post on his Gospel Coalition blog entitled The Importance of Your Gag Reflex When Discussing Homosexuality and “Gay Marriage” (warning: post contains graphic language).

There are a number of problems with this post. Before criticizing, however, I want to make a couple of points.

First, prior to reading this blog post, I knew relatively little about Anyabwile; however, the only contexts in which I had heard of him had been overwhelmingly positive. So I want to be clear that the negative things I say about this particular post are not intended to be an overall judgment of Anyabwile. I know too little to make such a judgment, and, aside from the problems with this particular post, everything else I have heard about him has been positive.

Second,  many of those who have criticized this post have done so because they disagree with Anyabwile about the morality of gay sex. However, I agree with him that gay sex is contrary to God’s plan in creation, and have written extensively on the subject (see, for example, The Great Debate, this speech at Georgetown University, or, for a briefer statement, this speech at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette). I share his concern about the way American culture has ceased to respect the sanctity of marriage, and have been defending the traditional Christian understanding of marriage for many years now.

(I will add that as a Lord of the Rings fan who loves to fly, the photo of the Air New Zealand 777 in painted in the Lord of the Rings livery was a pleasant distraction in an otherwise disappointing post.)

Having said all that, however, this post is one of the more problematic discussions of homosexuality I have seen in a serious Christian publication in recent years.

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The Gospel Doesn’t Have a Gag Reflex

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In a recent post (caution: contains some graphic language) over at his blog on The Gospel Coalition, Thabiti Anyabwile reflects on his participation in a think tank discussion about homosexuality some years ago. He concludes that one of the chief mistakes Christians have made in discussing homosexuality in the public sphere is avoiding the “gag reflex” that some people have when talking about homosexual sexual activity. He contends that instead, Christians ought to play up the “gag reflex” as much as possible.

I don’t know Thabiti. I don’t know how he typically talks about the issue of homosexuality as a pastor in his church. In fact, from what I’ve read from Thabiti, he and I probably agree about most things. But as a member of the same tribe, broadly speaking (conservative, Reformed Protestant, affirming a traditional Christian sexual ethic), I find his post deeply disappointing. The appeal to the “gag reflex” is simply not a good argument—it’s not good reasoning; it’s not good ethics; and it’s not good pastoring.

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