Sexuality and the Christian Body, Part 1: “Contrary to Nature” (by Richard Beck)

Within about four minutes of announcing our yearlong series on Sexuality & the Church, I realized I was in over my head. You just don’t realize how many books there are to read, angles to take, and people to interview until you’ve gone and committed to yourself to exploring a multi-faceted, hot-button issue like this one. 

So I emailed Richard Beck (and some others writers I respect) and asked for help. Richard’s blog, Experimental Theology, consistently falls into my personal Top 5 list and I can’t recommend it enough. Richard is a psychologist, and so his reflections on theology, the Bible, church, community, and spirituality always include some new angle I never considered before. (For example, recently he’s been discussing “the impossibility of Calvinistic Christian psychotherapy!”) I  had the privilege of meeting Richard and his awesome wife Janna when I visited Abilene Christian University a few years ago. Richard is Professor and Department Chair of Psychology there. He and Jana have two sons, Brenden and Aidan. Richard's area of interest--be it research, writing, or blogging--is on the interface of Christian theology and psychology, with a particular focus on how existential issues affect Christian belief and practice. Richard's published research covers topics as diverse as the psychology of profanity to why Christian bookstore art is so bad. His books include Unclean: Meditations on Purity, Hospitality, and Mortality and The Authenticity of Faith: The Varieties and Illusions of Religious Experience. 

Last year, Richard posted a review and some reflections on Sexuality and the Christian Body by Eugene Rogers—a book that has been recommended to me for the series, but which I just haven’t found the time to read. (Also, it costs 40 bucks.) Richard did such a good job discussing it on his blog, I asked if I could repost Part 1 of his reflections here. (You can read Part 2 over at Experimental Theology.) I hope you learn as much as I did. 

Sexuality and the Christian Body, Part 1: “Contrary to Nature”

by Richard Beck 

Recently, I finished Eugene Rogers' book Sexuality and the Christian Body. I thought I'd devote a few posts to some of the main ideas in the book for any who are interested.

The book is a theological argument advocating for the inclusion of same-sex marriages into the Christian communion. Consequently, I don't expect everyone to agree with Rogers' argument. Regardless, what I found encouraging in Sexuality and the Christian Body was a vision of marriage that inspired me in my own marriage to Jana. More, Rogers offers a view of marriage that also lifts up singleness and celibacy. In short, regardless as to what you think about Rogers' views on same-sex marriage, his theological treatment of marriage is, from a theological perspective, very inspiring. Or at least I found it so.

A key notion in Rogers' book is that the vast majority of Christians need to recover their identity as Gentiles. This is important for a few different reasons. First, this recovery highlights the fact that we are not "by nature" children of God. We've been chosen and adopted. In the language of Paul we've been "grafted into" the tree of Israel. Second, this action of God, grafting in the Gentiles, highlights how the grace and election of God determines the people of God. We are not God's children because of nature. We are God's children because of election. This places election at the center of Christian notions of marriage (and celibacy) rather than a Darwinian focus on procreation. Marriage is grace, not biology. Finally, a recovery of our identity as Gentiles helps us understand why God's actions toward the Gentiles was such a shock and offense to the Jews (both Christian and non-Christian). Importantly, this shock was very much focused on issues of holiness and morality.

Early in the book Rogers has us consider what he calls "the standard argument." The argument is standard because it has been used throughout history, at various times and places, to argue for the moral inferiority of a marginalized class of people. Gender and race have been common targets. And a common example of this moral inferiority is evidence of sexual licentiousness. Thus, in the Middle East today we see the standard argument applied to women. Women are sexually promiscuous and, thus, require a variety of social restraints to keep them in check. This is also why women are blamed for adultery. The woman's lust for the married man causes him to falter. A woman is a Jezebel, a temptress.

The standard argument was also applied to blacks in the American South during slavery and segregation. In particular, the black male had a voracious sexual appetite for white women. And blacks generally were considered to be more promiscuous than whites.

In both cases we see how immorality generally, and sexual licentiousness in particular, get attributed to natural kinds (e.g., race, gender). In the Old and New Testaments this same reasoning was applied to the Gentiles. As a natural kind the Gentiles were considered to be naturally prone to immorality and sexual deviance. Paul gives us the standard Jewish view of the morality of Gentiles in Romans 1:

Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen.
Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones. In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed indecent acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their perversion.
Furthermore, since they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, he gave them over to a depraved mind, to do what ought not to be done. They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; they are senseless, faithless, heartless, ruthless. Although they know God's righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them.

The important thing to note in this passage is that this is a description of the Gentiles as a natural kind. They are naturally depraved and deviant. Consequently, they engage in acts that are "contrary to nature." In all this we see another example of the standard argument, an argument that has been applied to all sorts of despised groups. Women. Blacks. Jews. And homosexuals in our time. What is important to note in all this is that it's not just that Gentiles do unnatural things. It is, rather, that they are morally inferior by nature.

This understanding helps us recover the moral shock of God's excessive grace in Galatians 3.28:

There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.

We tend to read this passage as a condemnation of slavery and as a call for egalitarian gender relations. No doubt that is a part of the story. But what Rogers argues is that what we are seeing in Gal. 3.28 is a fusion of natural kinds. More, we are seeing a fusion of the morally inferior with the morally superior. In the 1st Century slaves, women and Gentiles were all considered to be morally inferior to the highest natural kind: The male Jew. For example, each group was characterized by the sexual perversions we've seen Paul describe in Romans 1.

So what we are witnessing in Gal. 3:28 is something really quite shocking. Galatians 3:28 isn't about slavery or gender relations. It's about morality and holiness. More, it's about God's fusion in Jesus Christ of natural kinds, kinds that were believed to represent either holiness or depravity.

And the shock of God's actions goes even deeper. Later in Romans the phrase para phusin ("contrary to nature") reemerges. Only this time it is applied not to homosexuality but to God! In Romans 11.24 Paul describes the action of God in grafting in the Gentiles to the tree of Israel (the vision of Galatians 3.28):

 After all, if you were cut out of an olive tree that is wild by nature, and contrary to nature were grafted into a cultivated olive tree, how much more readily will these, the natural branches, be grafted into their own olive tree!

Does Paul know what he's doing here? Is he intentionally pulling para phusin from Romans 1 to make a parallel to God's grace in Jesus Christ? The Gentiles behave "unnaturally" and God, in his grace, does something just as "unnatural," he overrides the category of natural moral kinds to create one body in Christ. Surely the readers of Romans would have heard the overtones between Romans 1 and Romans 11, that their biases about what is "natural" or "unnatural" have been unnaturally reconfigured in the Kingdom of God.

How does Paul's argument apply to the case of modern day homosexuality? Rogers is clear that Paul is not offering his arguments in Romans to legitimize same-sex unions in the church. But what he does argue for is that Paul's arguments in Romans 1, Romans 11 and Galatians 3 are broadly isomorphic with the arguments offered to exclude same-sex unions from the church. That the arguments being made by the Jews to exclude the Gentiles are the same arguments being used to exclude same-sex couples from the life of the church.

In light of this, what we see in Paul is how the grace of God undermines the standard argument, an argument that there are kinds of people who are, by nature, morally inferior. And that these morally inferior natures cannot be "grafted into" in the church.

This is by no means the end of the discussion, but it does suggest that God does some very strange things when it comes to "nature." In fact, God himself often acts "contrary to nature" to erase our judgments about what is or is not natural or unnatural. This suggests that in the same-sex union debates we may have to rethink "nature" in light of God's election. God has chosen the Gentiles, by nature sexually deviant in the eyes of the Jews, and has grafted them into the tree of Israel. God overrides the standard argument in the minds of the Jews and, in doing so, also acts "contrary to nature." Such actions on the part of God should give us moderns pause when we reason about "nature" in the same-sex attraction debates.

How can you be certain of what is natural or unnatural worshiping a God who acts para phusin?

***

Leave a comment with your thoughts if you like, and then be sure to jump over to Richard’s blog for Part 2: “Grace and Election.”

You might also like Richard’s previous guest post, “A Non-Zero-Sum Conversation Between the Traditional Church and the Gay Community”

Check out the rest of our Sexuality & The Church series here. 

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Are we there yet?

Today I am pleased to introduce you to Jeff Chu.  Jeff is the author of Does Jesus Really Love Me?: A Gay Christian's Pilgrimage in Search of God in America—a fantastic book that is part-memoir, part investigative analysis. The book, which just released last week, explores the intersection of faith, politics, and sexuality in America in a way that is thought-provoking, well-researched, colorful, and deeply personal without being indulgent. I highly recommend checking it out. 

Over his eclectic journalistic career, Jeff Chu has interviewed presidents and paupers, corporate execs and preachers, Britney Spears and Ben Kingsley. As a writer and editor for Time, Conde Nast Portfolio, and Fast Company, he has compiled a portfolio that includes stories on megahit-making Swedish songwriters (a piece for which he went clubbing in Stockholm); James Bond (for which he stood on a Spanish beach and watched Halle Berry emerge from the waves over and over and over); undercover missionaries in the Arab world (he traveled to North Africa and went to church); and the decline of Christianity in Europe (he prayed). On the wall of his New York office, you'll find a quote from former Senator John Warner, who once told Jeff: "You're a good little interviewer!"  A California native, Jeff went to high school at Miami's Westminster Christian, where he sat behind Alex Rodriguez in Mr. Warner's world history class. A graduate of Princeton and the London School of Economics, Jeff has received fellowships from the Phillips Foundation and the French-American Foundation, and in 2012, was part of the Seminar on Debates in Religion and Sexuality at Harvard Divinity School.  The nephew and grandson of Baptist preachers, he is an elder at Old First Reformed Church in Brooklyn, New York. He loves the San Francisco 49ers, the Book of Ecclesiastes, and clementines. And he detests marzipan more than he can explain in words.

I hope you enjoy this post as much as I did. 

Are we there yet? 

By Jeff Chu

 “Jesus will not accept you, because of your hard heart and hate for him.”

“We must treat homosexuals like those suffering a mental disorder, because that is exactly what it is. If anything, we should have pity on these people.” 

“You need a good ex-gay therapist.”

Last week, messages like these filled comments sections of websites where my writing was being discussed. On Facebook, I was informed that I was clearly not saved. My inbox brought warnings that I needed to repent. 

I interviewed more than 300 people for my book, but intertwined with their stories is my own. I’ve never written about my life or my faith before, and naively, perhaps, I didn’t expect this onslaught. The night before my book came out, I sat at my desk in my office and did something that I haven’t done in years: I wept. 

For almost an hour, the tears rained down my face. I held my head in my hands, and I shook. Then, inside, I heard the softest echoes of my beloved late grandmother’s warbly voice, speaking to me in Cantonese as she had when I was 8: “You’re a big boy. Don’t cry. Big boys don’t cry. Crying doesn’t do anything.” 

Well, this big boy does cry—and on that day, it did do something. These were, at first, tears for fears—fears of being judged, fears of being condemned, fears of what might happen when the world saw me, through my book, for who I was and no longer for who I’ve long tried to be.

Then they became tears of grief. In some ways, I felt as if I were being excommunicated from my church—these messages all came from people who would place themselves in the evangelical part of the church that I grew up in. But in truth, they couldn’t kick me out. In soul and spirit, I’d already left those precincts of the church, and I was belatedly mourning that departure. I was also weeping for the loss of certainty—or at least the illusion of it that I once worked so hard to maintain. 

***

When I was a young journalist, I was taught to “kill your darlings.” Sometimes we writers will concoct a pun or a phrase that we just fall in love with. Applaud your own unparalleled cleverness, your unmistakable wit, I was told. Then cut what you just wrote. Your infatuation is also often the enemy of clarity—and sometimes truth.

One thing I had to mourn last week was the killing of perhaps my greatest darling: the persona of the Good Christian I long maintained, under the theory that it could somehow help preserve my faith.

This is, of course, a fallacy: Sometimes we speak as if our faith—and the faith—is unchanging. God may not change, but our beliefs and our understanding of Him do. Faith can’t be preserved, as if it were strawberries in jam or an unlucky beetle in ancient amber. It’s dynamic. It struggles and stumbles, waxing and waning, colored by circumstance, shifted by our spirits, and shaped (we hope) by the Spirit. I think, for instance, of Roman Catholicism, and how the Virgin Mary officially became retroactively and posthumously sin-free in the 19th century. And I think of the denomination I grew up, the Southern Baptist Convention, whose own less-than-immaculate conception was rooted in unfortunate disagreements with their northern brethren over slavery. 

For a long time, I resisted change. Though I felt alienated from the church and culture of my childhood, I played the image game well. I was treasurer of my college evangelical-fellowship group. I mentored younger students, my mouth saying things with far more surety than my heart ever felt. I even had a (shortish) string of long-term girlfriends—wonderful, godly women who, thank God, found much more suitable men to marry.

My semblance of pious normality reflected a Sunday-best mentality spilling over into the rest of the week. I thought that if, perhaps, I did a goody-goody-enough job with the façade, maybe it would percolate into the rest of me, preserving my faith. On some level, I guess I naively thought that I might even be able to fool God. 

I had to kill that person, that darling. I had to stop lying. And when I cried, I guess some of the tears were for that old Jeff. That costume, more comfortable than I’d like to admit even now, was a great hiding place, a cocoon that I convinced myself was safe. It was a big game of pretend, and I was pretty good at it, except that all games get old—or maybe you just get too old to play them.

***

A church of costumes and hiding places isn’t a place I want to be.

What we need, more than ever, is a church where we can shed the pretenses, and bring our doubts, our big questions, and our bigger fears. I don’t think I’m alone in desiring that. What I suspect many of us crave is a church where we can be our whole, ugly-beautiful selves.

This is who I really am: I am not an issue. I am a follower of Jesus. I love my husband like you love your husband. Sometimes I daydream during church, which I feel especially guilty about now that I am an elder. I am afraid to go to India because I don’t know if I am man enough to handle that much poverty in my face. I like to load the washer, but I’m terrible at unloading the dryer. I am really judgmental. I use the F-word a little too much. Sometimes, if I find a very old French fry, I will be tempted to eat it. (I will neither confirm nor deny that I ever have.) I love the Bible, and I believe that sin is a real thing, but I wish I understood better what God meant by it. I went to a Taylor Swift concert last week—for my job—and enjoyed it more than I’d like to admit. I need a good editor.

And who are you? Maybe you laugh too loudly. Or you cry too much. You love, even though you’re not always sure how to show it. You belch when you think nobody is listening. You love justice, but you’re not always sure what it looks like. You question your pastor. You watch too much Honey Boo Boo (which is to say, you watch it at all). You lie awake in bed some nights wondering whether God is as real as you want Him to be. You eat too many meals in your car. You say, “Bless her heart,” when you have no intention of blessing any part of her. 

Can we be these people in church? We must be—and the church that I’m talking about is not a building but the collection of the people who are trying their best to walk with Jesus. It does not end at 12:15 on Sundays. It’s wherever we and our hopes and our complicated, messy lives are. It’s a place where we aren’t afraid to say, “I don’t know.” 

Our church is a place where we’re unafraid to acknowledge that we’re always in beta. I was thinking about this during church this past Sunday. In his Easter sermon, my beloved pastor, Daniel Meeter, encouraged us to imagine “the life of the world to come … Imagine always trusting other people, without having to be careful, always being open and candid about yourself without having your guard up, and even knowing yourself with clarity and honesty and peace,” he said. “Well, you are not there yet.”

Indeed. 

Maybe I’ll end up in hell. Maybe I do have a mental disorder. Maybe their Jesus won’t accept me. But I still cling to a Jesus who will meet me—and will meet us all—where I am now. Can we build a church that welcomes our mutual strengths but also allows—and even embraces—our confessions of weakness? Can we be that community? Will you join me on this journey?

***

You can follow Jeff Chu on Twitter. And be sure to check out Does Jesus Really Love Me? which released last week! 



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‘Washed and Waiting,’ Chapter 3: “The Divine Accolade”

Today we pick up our yearlong series on Sexuality and The Church with a final discussion around Wesley Hill’s short book, Washed and Waiting: Reflections on Christian Faithfulness and Homosexuality. 

Wesley’s book is meant to both complement and contrast Justin Lee’s book, Torn: Rescuing the Gospel From the Gays-vs-Christians Debate, which served as a starting point for our discussion. Both Justin and Wesley are gay, but whereas Justin concluded that a relationship with another man could be blessed by God, Wesley has chosen celibacy. I picked these two books because I think Justin and Wesley represent the very best in civil, gracious, and loving disagreement on this issue…which for them is not a mere issue, but a deeply personal journey with deeply personal implications. I highly recommend reading these books together.

You can check out every post in our series thus far here.

***

Chapter 3 – The Divine Accolade

In Chapter 3, Wesley explains that many gay Christians like himself struggle with a sense of shame. It is “a sense of brokenness,” he says, “the shame of feeling ‘this is not the way it’s supposed to be’ with my body, my psyche, my sexuality.”

“Sometimes I feel that no matter what I do, I am displeasing to God,” he recalls telling a friend. “Even after a good day of battling for purity of mind and body, there is still the feeling, when I put my head down on the pillow at night to go to sleep, that something is seriously wrong with me, that something’s askew.” (134)

“For many homosexual Christians,” he says, “this kind of shame is part of our daily lives. Theologian Robert Jenson calls homoerotic attraction a ‘grievous affliction’ for those who experience it, and part of the grief is the feeling that we are perpetually, hopelessly unsatisfying to God.” (137)

Wesley writes that, for him, much of this shame was lifted when he encountered C.S. Lewis’ essay “The Weight of Glory”—a literary reflection on the moment when God glorifies his people, when followers of Jesus hear God declare, “Well done, my good and faithful servant.”

Summarizing Lewis, (and referencing Scriptural passages such as 1 Corinthians 4:5, 2 Corinthians 10:18, Romans 2:29, John 5:44, and 1 Peter 1:7), Wesley writes that “pondering this future glory…has implications for how we think about our lives now. God’s acceptance of us in the future, his being pleased with us, means that we may be pleased with ourselves in the here and now as we live our daily Christian lives; or, more precisely, we may be pleased that we are pleasing to God…According to Lewis, the promise of a future accolade from God means we can be satisfied with our work—our lives, our imperfect efforts to serve and love God—now.” (p. 140-141)

Sure, there is a sense in which the closer we get to God the more obvious and glaring our sins become. But the image of guilty, worthless creatures is simply not a pervasive one in the New Testament, Wesley observes.

“The whole tenor of the New Testament is strikingly positive when it comes to describing the Christian experience of trying to live in a way that pleases God,” writes Wesley. “Not triumphalistic, but positive. Maybe even optimistic. In short, rotten fruit isn’t the right analogy…The human heart that has been redeemed by Christ has been made new. And that heart leads to a new way of life. And that way of life will be honored when Jesus appears on the last day with a ‘weight of glory,’ a divine accolade.” (p. 144)

What does this mean for Wesley, a gay man whose convictions have led him to choose celibacy?

“My homosexuality, my exclusive attraction to other men, my grief over it and my repentance, my halting effort to live fittingly in the grace of Christ and the power of the Spirit—gradually I am learning not to view all of these things as confirmations of my rank corruption and hypocrisy. I am instead, slowly but surely, learning to view that journey—of struggling, failure, repentance, restoration, renewal in joy, and persevering, agonized obedience—as what it looks like for the Holy Spirit to be transforming me on the basis of Christ’s cross and his Easter morning triumph over death. The Bible calls the Christian struggle against sin ‘faith’ (Hebrews 12:3-4; 10:37-39). It calls the Christian fight against impure cravings ‘holiness’ (Romans 6:12-13, 22). So I am trying to appropriate these biblical descriptions for myself. I am learning to look at my daily wrestling with disordered desires and call it ‘trust.’ I am learning to look at my battle to keep from giving in to my temptations and call it ‘sanctification.’ I am learning to see that my flawed, imperfect, yet never-giving-up faithfulness is precisely the spiritual fruit that God will praise me for on the last day, to the ultimate honor of Jesus Christ. (p. 145-146)

Questions for Discussion

As we wrap up our discussion around this book, I’d love to hear your thoughts on Wesley’s perspective. What did you learn from this book? Did it change you in any ways? What did you find encouraging/ discouraging/ provocative/ frustrating?

And, again, I’d like to raise the question I raised last week: Do you think it is possible to fully support both Justin in his pursuit of a partnership/marriage to another man, and Wesley, in his decision based on his convictions to remain celibate? Or does the full support of one somehow diminish the support of the other? 

Moving Forward…

Moving forward with the series, I’d like to spend just a few more weeks focusing on the specific topic of homosexuality, before we move into other aspects of human sexuality, like singleness, “purity,” sexual ethics, marriage, and so on.  So at least until May, expect Mondays to include a few more interviews, guest posts, reflections, and book reviews on this topic.

(If you want to read along, we’ll touching on the following books/essays: Does Jesus Really Love Me? by Jeff Chu, Our Family Outing by Joe Cobb and Leigh Anne Taylor, A Time to Embrace by William Stacy Johnson, “The Body’s Grace” by Rowan Williams, The End of Sexual Identity by Jenell Williams Paris, and a few more.)

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