Tag: sex

Sex in the prayer room; and when ‘thin places’ become thick

There’s lots that can (and must) be said about the present crisis in Australia around toxic sexuality (as an expression of toxic masculinity and rape culture). Lots is being said about the relationship between institutional Christianity, purity culture, and this crisis both outside the church (in the church shaped western world), and inside the church. I’m working with a brilliant friend who is a scholar on the Song of Songs to piece together a helpful response both for my own church community, and beyond.

But I was struck by reports emerging about videos and stories of bad sexuality in parliament house; and particularly struck by the location identified as home base for perhaps the worst of the depravity.

The prayer room.

If parliament house were meant to be a sort of temple to Christendom this is the sort of thing that would have Jesus flipping over the tables; it certainly reveals the hollowness (rather than hallowedness) of our parliamentarians praying “The Lord’s Prayer” at the start of the day (and of campaigns to keep that in place).

When Jesus flips the tables in the temple in Jerusalem it’s part of a wider act of judgement against those running the show; a judgment that culminates with the curtain temple tearing at his death, and with his Spirit not coming to the holy of holies in the temple, but into the hearts of those who recognise him as Lord. The church. The house — a place that once was the meeting place between God and humanity — is left desolate; and Jesus’ judgment is that this is the case because “My house will be called a house of prayer for all nations’? But you have made it ‘a den of robbers.”

In 2012, a travel writer from the New York Times, Eric Weiner, wrote a piece that popularised the concept of thin places, places in nature, but perhaps even places of human architecture, where ‘heaven and earth’ come closer together.

“No, thin places are much deeper than that. They are locales where the distance between heaven and earth collapses and we’re able to catch glimpses of the divine, or the transcendent or, as I like to think of it, the Infinite Whatever.

Travel to thin places does not necessarily lead to anything as grandiose as a “spiritual breakthrough,” whatever that means, but it does disorient. It confuses. We lose our bearings, and find new ones. Or not. Either way, we are jolted out of old ways of seeing the world, and therein lies the transformative magic of travel.”

The Temple was meant to be a ‘thin space’ — where the boundaries of heaven and earth were less obvious; a place that threw worshippers towards the transcendent realm; the heavens. Where the supernatural and natural overlapped. A house of prayer; but it had been corrupted by the idolatry and materialism of its day; the attempts to secure meaning and goodness not through relationship with God, but in material realities, like money and power.

There’s a corresponding story to Jesus judging the Temple in the New Testament to God’s judgment on ‘thin places’ (which are often ‘high places’ in the OT, if you want to trace this as an interesting and legitimate thread); particularly the judgment brought on those who are meant to be stewarding the Tabernacle; the ‘tent of meeting’ or dwelling place of God at the start of 1 Samuel. There’s an old priest, Eli, whose two sons are corrupt and corrupting not only the meeting tent — the thin place — but the whole nation of Israel. They’re extorting people, stealing food, and sleeping with the women allocated to serve in that thin place — abusing their power in pursuit of pleasure. And God steps in to judge this family because of their failure to represent God as his priestly people, presenting his house as a meeting place between God and the world.

Parliament house is built like an ancient temple. It has columns and courtyards and a pillar that reaches towards the heavens. It sits on the hill overlooking the capital. It’s a monument to our values and is meant to be an expression of our heart; our commitment to democracy; the equality of all people in the law, and perhaps, under God.

Whether or not it was ever meant to be a ‘house of prayer’ — leaders in western democracies; landscapes shaped by Christendom; were meant to be doing the work of God for us; leading ‘under God’; and the house and its prayer room and the Lord’s Prayer are all vestiges of that sort of vision.

If Parliament House was meant to be one of these ‘thin spaces’ — how much more the prayer room: a room where people go to connect with the divine; a sacred space; profaned. Desecrated.

When the apostle Paul writes about sexual ethics for married couples — upholding the goodness of the one flesh union of husband and wife as a created gift from God to be enjoyed together, he says the one thing that might keep them apart is their devotion to God, they might prioritise prayer “for a time” over sex; our parliamentarians have turned all that on its head; both the sexual ethic of the mutuality, commitment, and intimacy of marriage — where the parties belong to one another and are bound up in love and communion — but the idea that prayer might be a priority.

But these news stories — that MPs would use the prayer room — a thin space — for such thick purposes; worldly purposes far removed from the heavens — reveal something about our modern gods, our modern pursuit of goodness (and even perhaps echoes of transcendence not through prayer, or religiosity, but through the liturgy of sex and orgasm), and perhaps, for just a table-flipping moment, just how toxic and damaging these new gods are to us, and to our leaders.

Want to know why we’ve got no social changes or political will around rape culture — look at the heart of our nation and how deeply embedded this poison is.

The Lord’s Prayer opens by acknowledging the nature of reality and the heavenly realm; “our father,” it says “who is in heaven”… it acknowledges that God’s kingdom represents the overlap between this realm and the earthly realm — “your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven” — parliamentarians prayed this because the idea was their actions were meant to be part of the answer to this prayer. They’re clearly not. And should stop pretending.

Someone should flip some tables.

The kicker in the Lord’s Prayer here — when it comes to Jerusalem and its thin-place-become-thick, or Canberra and its thin-place-become-thick, is in the opening “hallowed be your name” — God’s name was attached to his temple, and his people. The way they lived and acted was to be an expression of the God they worshipped and a reflection on his reputation; it could either bring glory, or desecration. And desecration of God’s name brought consequences. Table flipping. Judgment. Jerusalem no longer the centre of, or vehicle of, God’s kingdom. Their temple, and nation, declared no longer a ‘thin space’ where heavenly realities are realised; but thick, and dead, and disgusting. This isn’t to say these things about the Jewish people; Jesus was Jewish, the vast majority of the ‘new temple’ were Jewish people, including those at Pentecost who had been spread into the distant corners of the globe, but about the hollowed out rather than hallowed religion of those operating the Temple in pursuit of false gods; perverting the name of the God they served.

Parliament House isn’t a ‘thin place’ — it’s become thick, or perhaps it is a ‘thin place’ like the corrupted Temple in Jerusalem, a place that reveals who we have become. In the NY Times piece that function of a thin place is meant to be good and life-giving, as it pushes us towards a greater sense of reality, but perhaps it can push in another direction too; exposing us like Jesus exposed the politcal-religious leaders of his day (and the prevailing culture that enabled them, and that they perpetuated)? So the Times piece says:

“Thin places relax us, yes, but they also transform us — or, more accurately, unmask us. In thin places, we become our more essential selves.”

Parliament house, like the temple, has been unmasked — and the essential selves revealed by this mirror, or this revelation, are not pretty. Parliament House, and these leaders — or this institution, won’t bring the sort of liberation from idolatry and the destructive nature of dehumanising toxic sexuality that is rampant in our culture; because it can’t. Instead, while this toxic heart beats — where sexual pleasure with no regard for another person is God — it’s just going to push us further and deeper into that pit. Unless someone flips the tables… unless a new heart is dropped in.

And yet, at the same time there is something revealing about the approach to sex in a ‘thick world’ in all this; we’ve replaced God and the presence of the divine — even the idea of ‘thin places’ we might travel to; with sex. With pleasure. With ‘created things, instead of the creator’ as Romans 1 puts it…

Sex is one of those ‘thin experiences’ that might push us towards the idea of something divine; a God out there who made goodness, and sensuality, and put us in this world so that we might seek him, and perhaps find him, with the help of all these good things that reveal his divine nature and character. Thin places and thin experiences are meant to push us towards the transcendent. Our issue, at heart, is that we keep exchanging the truth about God for a lie; we’ve put sex in the place of God, instead of sex being something that throws us towards the overlap between heaven and earth.

And so maybe the prayer room is the right place to take that search for meaning and significance; even if in doing so we’re opening ourselves up for judgement; turning what is meant to be a ‘house or prayer’ into a temple to toxic sexuality.

Maybe in this moment of judgement and exposure we might start to ask questions about the sort of culture we’re building when we make this exchange.

Maybe, though we’re quick to throw stones at the ‘Temple’ or thin space in Canberra, we might also — those of us who are Christians — seek to get our own houses in order; asking if they — whether our church spaces and communities, or our own homes — are built on the same hollowed out sexual idolatry and damaging, dehumanising practices — or are spaces committed to the coming of God’s kingdom and the hallowing of God’s name; lest the tables be turned on us.

March 24, 2021

Could a theology of beauty fix how we talk about ‘attraction’ and help us tell a better story about God, the world, and ourselves

There was a massive controversy in the church in the United States recently around a conference called Revoice.

Revoice was a conference held for Same Sex Attracted Christians who hold to a traditional sexual ethic. The Same Sex Attracted Christian camp who hold to a traditional sexual ethic are occasionally called ‘Side B’ as opposed to ‘Side A’ — those who affirm that same sex attraction is natural and to be embraced with body and mind. Within the ‘Side B’ tent there’s an emerging discussion about how appropriate it is for a same sex attracted Christian with a traditional sexual ethic (a commitment to celibacy or a mixed-orientation marriage) to use the label ‘gay’ for themselves; whether a ‘gay identity’ is compatible with the lordship of Jesus. My friend Tom has some thoughts on this question over at Transparent (part 1, part 2), and he’s much better equipped to comment on the lived reality of this tension than me.

The conversation has recently made it to our shores, in various networks, and while my inclination had been to not give the drama any oxygen because it is within the Christian bubble; both the way that conversation seems to be taking shape and the mainstream media coverage of Wesley Hill’s visit to Australia (he’s aligned with the Revoice conference, and one of the best voices on imaginative ways for Christians to maintain a traditional sexual ethic because of faithfulness to Jesus), here’s my contribution. It goes beyond questions about sexuality though, and into the realm of our relatively anaemic approach to aesthetics within the Reformed tradition, that I’ve written about previously.

The danger in these conversations, at least as they’ve played out in the blogosphere in the US, is that words are tricky to pin down and so people keep talking past each other. Identity is a pretty nebulous concept and a pretty recent one — the desire to have and perform an identity is a reasonably recent trend for us people; that comes with the collapsing sense that who we are is a ‘given’ from a transcendent order (God, or ‘the gods’), and something to be crafted by us as individuals. Identity the way we talk about it now — both as Christians and in the wider world — is a novelty, check out how both ‘identity’ and ‘sexuality’ are increasing in frequency in publication (using Google’s ngram data) and how recent that increase is. Certainly the Bible has lots to say about what it means to be human — but our current conception doesn’t immediately overlay on the Biblical account of our anthropology — and we need to be careful with that…

One of the reasons we need to be careful is that we might freight significance into terms that just isn’t there; and cause division in the body rather than working with one another to pursue greater clarity. We need to be careful not to assume that one’s sexual orientation is fundamental to a person’s identity (or personhood), but that it will shape their experience of reality (especially in a sexuality obsessed culture where identity construction is fundamental to being an ‘authentic’ self). We need to listen to those wanting to use a label like ‘gay’ to understand what they see encompassed in that label — if it’s just sexual attraction, or sexual desire, or a temptation, or lust, sexual expression, or some combination of those things, then we need to carefully parse what is and isn’t part of our inherent sinful nature. I’m going to assume, as someone operating in a particular Christian tradition, that all of us male or female, heterosexual or homosexual, cis- gendered or trans-gendered, are naturally sinful — that our hearts are, by nature, and from birth, turned from God and that this nature expresses itself in our sexuality, our gender identity, and even in our embodied experience of the world. One of the reasons to be careful is that I don’t have to walk around labelling myself as a ‘straight Christian’ — and it’s easy to, as a result, assume that all aspects of my identity at that point — from attraction to expression — are ‘licit’ or untainted by sin; and I know that not to be true, even in marriage. Parsing this stuff out carefully teaches us all something about the place sex has in our world; and about the problems with operating as though we are autonomous units engaged in the task of authentic identity construction (even if as Christians we want to ‘autonomously’ construct that identity centred on Jesus). As a general rule I want to push back on expressive individualism and the pursuit of an authentic ‘identity’ that we then perform, and cobble together through consumer choices and labels. That’ll probably increasingly be a theme in what I write… but in this particular instance I want to zero in on the part of this debate that argues that attraction, a same sex attraction, should be put to death, that to use it (or gay) as a description of one’s identity is to embrace and celebrate sin, and suggest an alternate approach where repentance is better (and rightly) understood as a same sex attracted person turning to Jesus as the source of their personhood and object of their love (and worship), such that this love re-orders their experience in the world and their attraction. I want to suggest that in my own ‘straight’ experience; and perhaps in the gay experience of others, attraction is an experience of beauty; and that there is a ‘right use’ of that beauty. I’m not suggesting anything that you won’t find better expressed by Hill and others; especially Augustine. I want to carefully listen to my same sex attracted friends, and brothers and sisters in Christ, when they say there’s more to the ‘gay’ label than temptation, lust, and sexual expression — and to ask if there might be something about the world God made that these brothers and sisters see that I do not, and that if ‘rightly used’, this might bless the church beyond just helping us support, care for, encourage and disciple our same sex attracted brothers and sisters… and I want to suggest that a better account of beauty might help us in this area; but might also help us be a witness to our neighbours.

From the first page of the Bible we get a picture of God as an artist — as creator — as one who delights in the beauty and goodness of the world he made. It’s a mantra repeated piece by piece as the beauty of his handiwork emerges to be met with him ‘seeing’ that what he made is ‘good’ and then the final declaration:

“God saw all that he had made, and it was very good.” — Genesis 1:31

There’s a link here between goodness and seeing — there’s also a link between function and seeing (following John Walton’s work on the verb ‘bara’ — create or make — where he shows that to create something is to make it for a purpose). Goodness is ‘teleological’ — it is not just arbitrary. But God is pleased with what he sees; he rests in it. This includes the pinnacle of that creation week — humanity. Male and female. Made in his image and likeness (Genesis 1:26).

So God created mankind in his own image,
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them. — Genesis 1:27

There is a beauty to the world, and to humanity, that reveals something of the nature and character of God as the creator of beauty. This seems a reasonably straightforward case to make from Genesis 1 (and one that Paul seems to make in Romans 1:20).

For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse. — Romans 1:20

Something of the divine nature is revealed — clearly seen and understood — from ‘what has been made’ — including, presumably, from its beauty.

“When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it.” — Genesis 3:6

It’s not the beauty of this fruit; or even appreciating the beauty of it (God had made it pleasing to the eye) that is at the heart of Eve’s sin here. She is attracted to the fruit because it is beautiful; it is what she desires about that fruit — a different purpose to the one that God created it with (a different ‘telos’) that is illicit. The fruit is beautiful and attractive. Desiring and eating the fruit is sin. Because it represented a desire contrary to God’s desires — and, indeed, a desire to be ‘like God’ in a manner different to the likeness we were created to enjoy. In this moment Eve is presented with a false picture of God by the serpent; and so she loves a created thing more than she loves the creator — and from that flows all sorts of sinful acts.

This might sound like a totally abstract thing, disconnected from sexuality, lust, and attraction; the idea that a piece of fruit might be the subject of erotic desire in any way analogous to sexuality… except that the writer of 2 Samuel makes a pretty explicit parallel (so too does the writer of Joshua when it comes to Achan’s sin with material things, and Judges when it comes to Samson’s desire for his first Philistine wife). It seems that theologians like James K.A Smith who want to suggest that there’s a link between worship and eros, so that idolatry is misdirected eros, or eros not first directed to God, aren’t far off the Biblical data. When David sees Bathsheba exactly the same patterns play out. I’ll bold the words that are the same as Genesis 3 in the Hebrew.

One evening David got up from his bed and walked around on the roof of the palace. From the roof he saw a woman bathing. The woman was very beautiful,and David sent someone to find out about her. The man said, “She is Bathsheba,the daughter of Eliam and the wife of Uriah the Hittite.”Then David sent messengers to get her. She came to him, and he slept with her. (Now she was purifying herself from her monthly uncleanness.) Then she went back home. — 2 Samuel 11:2-4

The ‘saw’ is the same root, רָאָה (raah), the ‘beautiful’ is the same as ‘good’ in Genesis 3:6 טוֹב (tob — where the ‘b’ is a ‘v’ sound), and the ‘to get her’ is the same verb as ‘took’ — לָקַח (laqach). David’s fall mirrors Adam and Eve’s — except with the additional dynamic of the Genesis 3 curse, where instead of a man and woman bearing the image of God together in relationship, he uses his power and strength (and position as king) to ‘take’ her (which is why this isn’t ‘David’s adultery with Bathsheba’ but ‘David taking Bathsheba with soldiers according to his desires’). There is nothing David does right with his sexuality here (and very little he does right with his sexuality his whole life). But… It seems to me that those who are saying Christians shouldn’t use the label gay because ‘attraction’ is inherently sinful must look at this episode and say the problem was Bathsheba’s beauty, or at least that once David saw it he was immediately captivated by it — that seeing her bathing and noticing her beauty he had no other option but to sin; such is his heterosexual orientation. But is there another way of approaching this narrative?

It seems difficult to separate our apprehension of beauty from the lust to possess that beauty that seems innate — that seems to be what we inherit as part of the ‘human condition’ since the fall. And yet both Job and Paul seem to posit an alternative account of faithful engagement with God’s beautiful world. One that doesn’t leave us taking or grasping, but thanksgiving. Job famously (at least in terms of Christian accountability software) declared:

“I made a covenant with my eyes
not to look lustfully at a young woman.” — Proverbs 31:1

Presumably there’s a difference between looking at a beautiful young woman, and looking lustfully at a beautiful young woman that requires the exercise of the will as an act of faithfulness. Presumably David could’ve exercised that same faithfulness from the rooftop when he saw Bathsheba. Paul follows up his statement about the telos of creation (including beauty) with a diagnosis about the heart of sin. He sees the start of sin as a ‘wrong use’ of creation — or, basically, a deliberate rejection of the first two of the ten commandments.

For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles.

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 about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen. — Romans 1:21-25

He also says this leads to ‘shameful lusts’ — our lust, or desires to do things with created beauty on our terms, flows from an inability to truly see God in his glorious goodness and for created beauty to be part of that picture. There’s a ‘right seeing’ of those things we then lust after, or desire on our terms. Whether we’re heterosexual or homosexual. Or, as he puts it in his first letter to Timothy, talking about people who want to draw particular boundaries to prevent idolatry by forbidding the right use of things God has made:

They forbid people to marry and order them to abstain from certain foods, which God created to be received with thanksgiving by those who believe and who know the truth.For everything God created is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving, because it is consecrated by the word of God and prayer. — 1 Timothy 4:3-5

The appropriate response to beauty is to avoid grasping-for-self — the Eve/David option, by thanksgiving-to-god.

I gave a talk recently on what this looks like with beer and sex. There’s some great stuff in Alan Noble’s book Disruptive Witness on this (review here), picking up on an article he wrote on lust and beauty that I’ve found exceptionally helpful personally and pastorally in terms of cultivating a different sort of ‘male gaze’. What does it look like to apply this framework to sexuality? And same sex attraction specifically.

If our sinful nature is a natural, fleshly, inherited, putting created things in God’s place — loving those things ‘inordinately’ — then that nature is, for all of us, worthy of God’s judgment. This includes heterosexual attraction if attraction is the same as lust, or exclusively sexual. Our sinful hearts — and the state of putting created things in the place of the creator means any actions, even apparently ‘licit’ actions, that flow out of that state of being, however ‘good’ they might be will be sin (all deeds that do not flow from faith are sin — Romans 14:23). This also means our fallen heterosexual attraction is not ‘good’, but will be tainted by our inordinate love of sex instead of God, or our pursuit of identity/meaning/significance in our sexuality (let’s call it ‘worship’ and let’s call that worship idolatrous). There isn’t a ‘straight’ morally upright sexual orientation, even if one’s behaviour lines up with God’s design (the theological label for this idea that our natures earn judgment, not just our actions — concupiscence — is a double edged sword that those of us who are ‘straight’ can’t just pick up and wield here).

Here’s the problem though with making ‘attraction’ or one’s orientation the equivalent with one’s sexual desires, not one’s predisposition to a certain sort of desire (in Paul’s terms, making it part of the sinful flesh rather than a distortion of the image of God in us)… I don’t have to repent of recognising that women who aren’t my wife are beautiful or attractive; I can thank God for that beauty and resist that ‘pull’ grabbing my heart and turning my mind towards lust. I have to repent when I objectify a beautiful woman who isn’t my wife and lust after her, and I have to guard my heart — by proactively loving God, and then my wife, in order to avoid my ‘sexuality’ being the centre of my identity — the driver of my personhood. When I say I’m attracted to women I don’t exclusively mean I lust after women, I mean that I’m drawn to appreciate the beauty of women in a way that I don’t appreciate the beauty of men. I can’t tell you what is a good cut for a male T-shirt, or reasonably predict which men on TV are considered ‘attractive’, but I can appreciate a nice dress or a beautiful woman; and I believe I can thank God for them in ways that reflect a certain sort of discipline instilled by the Spirit as it works to transform me.

When anyone, by the Spirit, is re-created as a worshipper of God, being transformed into the image of Christ, what seems to go on in terms of that worship is a re-ordering of our loves so that we love things in their right place. Paul comes back to the idea of worship, given to God, not created things in Romans 12 — instead of sacrificing everybody else for our desires we become, together, a ‘living sacrifice’ captured by the vision of God’s beautiful mercy to us. This absolutely involves a giving up of what we previously loved in God’s place for the sake of loving God — a re-ordering of our hearts so that creation serves its purpose again; revealing God’s divine nature and character.

Why is the ‘recognition’ of beauty or attraction between members of the same sex subject to a different standard? It’s because we’ve first committed to sexualising attraction. If we say ‘same sex attraction’ or to be ‘gay’ is always sexual; and so is impossible to split from lust (not just temptation) then adopting a gay identity would be to adopt and celebrate an aspect of our sinful, fallen, disordered selves. If this is the case then we need to check whether that’s a standard we apply to our own ‘attraction’ and how much our sexuality forms our identity if we’re going to play the identity game. But when a same sex attracted person says they are ‘gay’ and we jump to hearing it as describing, exclusively, a sexual preference and set of desires when they might first be describing an aesthetic orientation that produces those desires we’re not being consistent with how we view our own attraction, or actually listening to what is being said, at least this is the case in Wesley Hill’s own account of his attraction and experience, and what ‘gay’ means. Here’s what he told the Age:

Being gay colors everything about me, even though I am celibate . . . Being gay is, for me, as much a sensibility as anything else: a heightened sensitivity to and passion for same-sex beauty that helps determine the kind of conversations  I have, which people I’m drawn to spend time with, what novels and poems and films I enjoy, the particular visual art I appreciate, and also, I think, the kind of friendships I pursue and try to strengthen. I don’t imagine I would have invested half as much effort in loving my male friends, and making sacrifices of time, energy, and even money on their behalf, if I weren’t gay.  My sexuality, my basic erotic orientation to the world, is inescapably intertwined with how I go about finding and keeping friends.

Here he’s using ‘erotic’ the way James K.A Smith does — not just sexual, but sensual — as the sort of love that guides our interactions with God and his world. Hill’s writing in the magazine Smith edits, Comment, is some of the best writing on how to imaginatively pursue faithfulness to God via a traditional sexual ethic going round, he’s worth following (check out this piece on ‘jigs for marriage and celibacy’ for starters).

I think a category of aesthetics and beauty is sorely lacking in our theology; which leaves us oddly platonic (separating mind and body), and in weird legalism when it comes to relationships between non-married men and women (where we hyper-sexualise them so that men and women can’t be friends or alone together — and there’s a vicious cycle thing going on here where the sexualised culture we live and breathe in predicts that those sorts of circumstances will be sexualised). This then makes life for same sex attracted people in our churches almost impossible, who can they be in a room with?

What if ‘attraction’ is, before anything else, a predisposition to appreciate a certain sort of beauty? What if when somebody says they are ‘same sex attracted’ that includes sexual desire and lust as a result of our fallen hearts, but redemption of that attraction does not look like ‘turning it off’ but directing it to its telos — knowing the divine nature and character of the creator? This must necessarily mean encountering beauty on God’s terms, not through our idolatrous hearts that seek to possess beauty for ourselves as an object for our pleasure — making ourselves little gods who take and destroy others.

What if the goal of a same sex attracted Christian is holiness — a wholehearted devotion to God, including an appropriate response to the beauty that fires their hearts?

What if our inability to separate attraction from lust is a cultural issue that is the result of our perverted human hearts and the idolatry of sex (the idea that sexuality is the core of our personhood)?

But what if that is a misfire when it comes to beauty (the sort of misfire that means, when, for example, a father puts his hand on the chest of the nervous teenage girl in front of him the internet melts down and the meltdown continues even when it turns out he’s comforting his daughter because we sexualise all touch in our depraved imaginations)?

What if it is not that they stop recognising the created beauty of members of the same sex but they stop desiring that beauty in ways that reveal they don’t first desire God/holiness?

What if we were able to discipline ourselves across the board so that our ‘attraction’ is first a disposition towards the ordinary recognition of beauty in God’s good creation; recognising that this is then perverted by idolatry and disorder in a culture that idolises sexuality and individuality such that we’ve first invented a concept called ‘identity’ and then made sexuality central to it?

What if this was beneficial to all of us when it comes to understanding relationships with other people who we find beautiful.

What if the desire for male friendship and the recognition of male beauty is something our particular culture has beaten out of most heterosexual men, and what if that’s part of the problem? That I can’t conceive of a man as beautiful does prevent me from lusting after men, but it also prevents me rightly appreciating God’s artistry in the men in my life. What if my same sex attracted friends are open to more of that created goodness than I am, and so tempted in ways that I am not?

I think if we managed to move the conversation, and our practices, in these directions we’d have much better things to say about God, about human identity, and about the proper place of sex and sexuality in our lives (and personhood). I think we’d be able to better adorn the Gospel in our communities in such a way that relationships between men and women, women and women, and men and men were enhanced. I think we’d be more convincing when we talked to the world about sex and marriage. We’d tell a better story. As it is, we’ve bought into the same truncated humanity as the world around us and we’re unable to conceive of beauty and attraction without admitting that we’ll fall for it, so that the only way to be properly sexual (and thus properly human) is to marry, or turn off our recognition of God’s beautiful creation — including people.

And here’s the real rub. Our Side B brothers and sisters are at risk of being alienated by both sides of an increasingly polarised world. They are the most likely to face the ire of a world that believes the path to flourishing humanity is to authentically embrace and express your sexual desires. They are the most likely to be the public face of conversations around ‘conversion therapy’ even if they aren’t articulating anything like conversion to heterosexuality. They are also the ones we’re most likely to crucify because their experiences of sexuality are marginal within Christian community and so ‘outside our norms’ even as they prophetically question whether our norms have become worldly. These brothers and sisters are the prophetic voices we should be turning to in a world that idolises sex and sexual authenticity, and in this conversation we’ve turned on them.

It’s interesting that everybody wants to cite Augustine in this conversation. He’s a very helpful conversation partner here — and a particularly integrated thinker when it comes to how our loves shape our actions. Here’s two concepts from Augustine that should be in the mix — rightly ordered loves, and the maxim that ‘wrong use does not negate right use’…

Underneath our sinful decision to worship creation rather than the creator there’s a good creation that points people to the divine nature and character of God — that’s the ‘right’ love of creation; loving the creator first. The right love of male or female beauty is to thank God for it; I suspect there’s much my same sex attracted brothers can teach me about the goodness of God’s creation if they’re seeking to faithfully do this.

September 23, 2018

How beer and sex are proof that God is good and wants what is best for us

I gave a talk at Griffith University’s Mount Gravatt and Nathan campuses today for Griffith Christian Students. It was titled “How beer and sex are proof that God is good and wants what is best for us”.

Here’s the transcript (this approach was very much inspired by Glynn Harrison’s A Better Story: God, Sex, and Human Flourishing).

I want to start by asking you to use your imaginations.

Imagine you’re in love.
You’ve met the perfect person.
You’ve flirted.
You’ve been out for coffee.
You’ve had that awkward first date; and desire has awakened. You think this person might be ‘the one’…
The fires are lit. Metaphorical ones. There’s a part of you that is newly aroused — hoping for new possibilities… There’s anticipation in every touch, every moment of your skin brushing against theirs. The thrill of the chase — and of being chased… It’s like a dance…
You enjoy a nice dinner together; there are candles.
You find yourself together; alone at last; the barriers between you coming down. You feel safe to be yourself, shameless.
You come together. Your bodies joined. Your skin tingles. The hair on the back of your neck stands up. Your breath quickens…
For a fleeting moment you experience ecstasy. Pure bliss. You wish it could last forever…
You’re left wondering when the next time will be. Imagining it. Chasing it. Fantasising or researching how to extend that feeling… That bliss…
It feels like Heaven.

For some of you this story is a future hope — you are waiting for someone, somewhere, who’ll flesh this out for you… For others here it might be last weekend… Last month… For some of us this is the sort of illicit fantasy that might both thrill us and leave us feeling a bit dirty. Ashamed. Especially if you’ve grown up hearing Christians only ever talk about sex in hushed tones or about purity and sin… About the “price tag” sex has… It’s also the plot of just about every romance movie or novel ever written…

Here’s another story.

Imagine there’s a party. All your friends are there. There’s bunting, hipster lighting, the music is on point. There’s dancing. Laughter. You’ve never been funnier; you’ve never heard conversations that stimulate your imagination like this; you’ve never looked better. The food is amazing — dish after dish brought out for you to enjoy, it’s like someone gave you their Uber Eats account and said ‘go nuts’… And the beer. It’s not that cheap nasty stuff that students survive on… This is some hipster micro-brewed craft stuff — it’s like nothing you’ve ever tasted before. There’s complexity in every sip — flavours you can’t quite describe, it’s like the word for them appears on the tip of your tongue and then disappears only to be replaced with some other exotic idea. You feel the warmth of the alcohol working its way through your system — what was already a great night is suddenly even better. You’re totally relaxed. You have another sip and the coolness of the beer as it hits the back of your throat is exceptionally refreshing. The sun is setting — you want to capture this moment forever. Instagram won’t do it justice. This feels like heaven…

For some of you this story is the picture of the party you went to last weekend — or it’s the party you hope to throw. Some of you can’t stand the taste of beer or understand why anybody would bother, some of you have decided not to drink alcohol for very good reasons… Some of you are possibly not old enough to legally drink… I’d invite you to replace the beer in this scene with the best version of whatever drink it is that you enjoy.

The point is, there are all sorts of good things in this world that give us pleasure. That satisfy us. Sensual experiences that excite us, leave us hungry for more, and that might even lead to an addiction… And so I want to ask this afternoon…

“What’s the point?”

Do sex and beer have a point beyond themselves? An ‘end’ in the philosophical sense to which they are a means, are they just pointing to themselves as a source of a particular sort of pleasure?

What’s the point of pleasure? Our bodies are hardwired to receive it; to be stimulated by it; to enjoy pleasures — there’s a link between sensuality and our senses.

Why is that?

Where are you looking for pleasure? Where are you looking for satisfaction?

I want to make the case this afternoon that there’s a reason these sublime moments — the taste of joy via our senses — sex with a lover or a stunningly good beer — there’s a reason these fleeting moments feel like heaven.

It’s because they were made to by a good God; and more than that, that there is a purpose to these pleasures, and that’s to point us towards Heaven. Towards a connection — a relationship — with him as our loving and good creator.

I want to suggest there’s at least three bits of evidence for this claim —

One. The problems that come when we see these pleasures as “ends” in themselves, and build our lives around them.

Two. What the Bible says about God and his creation and what it is for, and that these pleasures are even better when we listen to him.

Three. And that better than that, we will truly flourish if instead of fixating on these pleasures — being captivated by them — we look along them to what they point to — this eternal reality.

The first two points are points you might even be able to leave today pondering and agreeing with without accepting the third; but the third is where the real punch is for Christians…

In a nutshell, what I’m claiming is that good sex and good beer are a taste of the good life with God for eternity; that being one with God is a greater source of intimacy and pleasure than a fleeting, orgasmic, moment here on earth — an eternal orgasm even… And that the best most fleeting bits of pleasure that come from food and drink now are a taste of the abundance of God — the banquet he prepares for us to enjoy eternally in a new creation — and that these things are meant to point us to God now, the danger is that because our hearts are turned away from God and towards ourselves — we take these pleasures and instead of directing them where they were made to be we pursue them for our own sake and end up owned by them; captivated… Enslaved… And so they lose their lustre as they lose their connection to their God-given purpose.

I’m saying that we get into trouble when it comes to beer or sex when we look at them as a source for satisfaction rather than looking through them… Imagine that I gave you a pair of glasses now and you had to choose between looking at them and looking through them — they might be an exceptional piece of craftsmanship and optometry so that you can appreciate them as glasses, but it’s only when you look through them and they correct your sight that they’re doing what they were made to do. This is the difference between seeing sex and beer… Or other pleasures… As ends to pursue with your life, and seeing them as a means to an ends.

The Dark Side of beer and sex
There are obvious problems when we look for heaven on earth — and these are problems that reveal a dark side of our hearts.

We’re not just wired to experience pleasure; we’re hardwired to love, to pursue some picture of a good life, to build our lives so that we’re living in some sort of story where we want a happy ending and we choose what that ending looks like by choosing what we love. Sociologists and scientists have started writing about the power of story in terms of what makes us human; it’s story making, story telling, and story keeping that sets us apart from the animal kingdom — the ability to give meaning to our experience of pleasure and then organise our lives around the pursuit of some good things flows out of this part of our humanity. We dream in stories — our subconscious, when left to its own devices, tells stories — and they’re stories where we are at the centre, we are the hero, this isn’t just a sub-conscious thing, it’s our experience of the world… We’re naturally wired to put ourselves first and to assume that we are the centre of reality because we are the centre of our own reality; our own experience. Some Christian theologians who saw the danger of this way of life described this reality — the reality that we are lovers and self-centred-story-tellers — as our hearts being curved in on themselves — even when love flows out from us towards a person, or a pleasure, it’s for our own good, our own joy, our own satisfaction… This is basically what the Bible calls sin, it suggests that instead of curving in on ourselves; instead of first being lovers of self and so lovers of the things that give us pleasure, we were made to be lovers of God and have that love shape everything else.

The consequences of this new natural inclination, our loves, being shaped like this, are disastrous… And sex and beer prove this…

Let’s talk about sex…

If you approach the goodness of sex, and sexual pleasure, with yourself at the centre then even in a relationship, one built on commitment and love, your relationship — and the sex within it — will be built around your pleasure, on your orgasms, the other person in your relationship will be there for your pleasure; a servant even… There are more destructive versions of this story…

Let’s assume you don’t want commitment and the responsibility it brings — that you’re part of the Tinder generation and more interested in hook ups, in pleasure with no strings attached… At that point while there might be mutual moments of bliss, sex has become a transaction, the other person purely a means with sexual pleasure as an end, with no greater purpose. It becomes hollowed of anything significant; it’s not part of the bringing two people together like the story we imagined at the start… It’s someone you might never see again — not even a friend with benefits… Sure, a Tinder hookup might lead to something more long term, but the mechanism is designed to make sex as frictionless as possible.

But for the people who can’t get a ‘swipe right’ — or the people who aren’t satisfied by the amount of sex or pleasure delivered in their encounters with a partner there’s porn and prostitution…

Now; while you might be here not thinking there’s anything inherently wrong with porn or prostitution, and while you might be expecting me to ride some Christian moral high horse at this point — quite apart from the question of sin, which is where they land according to the Bible, there is real harm done to women in both these industries — they aren’t the liberating, empowering, things that the Sex Party claims they are…

Porn rewires your brain and resets your expectations for real world relationships — counsellors and medical professionals have started telling horror stories of teenage girls being pressured into violent sex acts by their porn addicted boyfriends — but it’s worse than that, some research suggests a link between the desensitising effect of pornography when it comes to normal ‘in the flesh’ relationships and both an inability to orgasm in normal sex, or premature orgasm amongst those who use porn for a ‘quick fix’… Porn kills love. It kills sex. It removes any chance of a ‘greater’ end for sex, and turns it into a means to a quick release; where your imagination is reshaped so that your partner is simply the object of your fantasy — typically women are being turned into objects of the ‘male gaze’ — I heard a filmmaker, a woman, talking on the radio the other day about how the ‘male gaze’ in normal movies means women and their desirability are almost always presented on male terms, which means a male standard of beauty and sexuality is presented to our culture — porn takes this and amplifies it in a way that is destructive… To both men and women…

Then there’s the relationship between prostitution and the pornography industry and sex slavery — the women on screen, or in brothels are often trafficked; brought to the west on promises of liberty and prosperity and locked in places by lies and threats, forced to perform sexual acts for meagre financial return, and no love.

When we approach sex from ‘dark hearts’ — hearts curved on ourselves — as an ‘ends’ or for our own pleasure — we hurt others and we hurt ourselves. It’s not just those ‘moral high-horses’ that Christians like to whip so often that makes this case — it’s the #metoo phenomenon that reveals again what men with power do to women with that power, and it’s the staggering rate of sexual abuse on university campuses and in the world beyond the campus… And cultural issues around consent…

Add our darkened hearts around sex to the impact of those same hearts on how power plays out in systems and structures and the interactions of individuals and there’s a real ugliness to how sex is used in our world.

Sometimes one person’s pursuit of Heaven produces an experience like Hell for another person.

You can make the same case, or a similar one, with beer by pointing to alcoholism, alcohol fuelled violence, the effect of binge drinking, drink driving, and the link between excessive alcohol consumption and heart disease — the biggest killer in Australia. There’s, on the flip side, some evidence that moderate drinking actually provides a degree of protection from the heart disease thing — you can have too much of a good thing.

The point is we’re made to love and to pursue life by choosing what to love and if we put sex or beer or pleasure at the centre of our love rather than people or God, then that desire for pleasure warps all our other relationships, and starts to deform our bodies and our experience of life in the world. If I had time I’d argue that putting people in that central spot rather than God produces a similar warping of all our other relationships while loving God ultimately transforms our relationships with others, but that’s another talk… Because what I really want to talk about is how putting beer and sex in their right place transforms our relationship and helps us see the goodness and love of God.

The bright side (created for pleasure)
Sex and the raw ingredients of beer are made by God for our enjoyment — but our rejection of God’s design; and of God’s place in our hearts distorts that good design.

The story of the Bible begins with God telling people to have sex — to ‘be fruitful and multiply’; with his declaration that it isn’t good for us to be alone, and with the creation of marriage. God made us as sexual beings and part of the Christian account for how and why our bodies experience pleasure is to affirm that God wanted sex to be pleasurable.

The first pages of the Bible also have God giving people plants to nourish us, and the instruction to cultivate and create with the good things he made in the world as we reflect his creativity — that’s part of what the Bible means when it says we’re made in the image and likeness of the creator. I’m not sure what better product you can make from the combination of grains and hops, but people have been making beer for a long, long, time.

Christians have been known for being anti-beer and anti-sex — at times we’ve overreacted to some of the bad stuff we’ve just outlined above… And chosen to say no instead of saying yes to these good parts of God’s creation. The Bible warns about loving created things more than we love God — and about the disasters that follow for us when we choose to put those things at the centre of our lives, but it doesn’t say we should reject those created things to avoid loving them too much; it says we should see them as revealing God’s nature — that’s in Roman — and that we should receive them with thanksgiving — we should look through the glasses and see God and the world as it really is, rather than looking at the glasses and seeing them as ‘the main attraction’…

The apostle Paul, who wrote heaps of the New Testament, gets a bad-wrap as a killjoy; but he warned against the sort of people who’d turn up saying we should reject good gifts from God to stay ‘pure’ — he writes to his friend Timothy, and in the same letter that he tells him to “Stop drinking only water, and use a little wine”… He talks about this sort of person who he says will:

“… Forbid people to marry and order them to abstain from certain foods, which God created to be received with thanksgiving by those who believe and who know the truth. For everything God created is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving.” — 1 Timothy 4:3-4

For the Christian, these good things God made are meant to prompt us to turn to the creator, to love God above the things he has made and see these good things as loving gifts from a creator that we should thank him for… Part of ‘receiving them with thanksgiving’ is receiving them on the terms set out by the creator in his user’s guide — the Bible — you can’t truly receive something with thanksgiving at the same time as flipping off the giver… So the Bible suggests alcohol in moderation will bring pleasure and be good for us, and Jesus even turned water into incredible wine as his first miracle… And it says the best place for the best sex is in a marriage, which it describes as built on unity, mutual service, and love. This is the antidote to making sex all about your own pleasure — for it to be an expression of love… And not just love as some ‘curved back to ourselves’ thing we do for our benefit or advantage, but love defined as ‘self-giving’, the sort of love that puts the pleasure of your spouse above your own pleasure… And that doesn’t just emphasise ‘one off’ moments of bliss, but a lifetime pursuit of togetherness…

Plus… It turns out, that according to a bunch of studies, over the course of life, married people — people who stay married — have much more sex than people who either aren’t married or who leave a marriage. If sex is a taste of heaven, then marriage is the best way to enjoy this part of life.

So that’s point two — God made sex and the ingredients we make beer with — and he wants us to enjoy them in ways that bring us joy not destruction; in ways that lead us to thank him because he is good… And if you want to pursue the goodness of sex and beer this seems from the various observations and bits of anecdata i’ve laid out so far, to be best pursued in something like the way the Bible describes rather than being pursued wholeheartedly — from hearts darkened by self-interest where this pursuit of pleasure comes at the expense of ourselves and those around us.

I can’t imagine anyone seriously trying to argue that excess is better than moderation on the beer front, given the serious social, scientific and medical evidence to the contrary… And I suspect the same is true about stacking up ‘less sex with lots of people’ against ‘lots of sex with a person you love’… As a vision of a ‘satisfying’ or ‘good’ life…

The good life in Jesus
So here’s the trickier case to make — that beer and sex and the pleasures they deliver are a taste of Heaven; that there’s a reason those stories at the start are stories of heavenly experiences — and that’s that these pleasures aren’t an end in themselves; that they aren’t just things to thank God for or to enjoy on their own terms — that they don’t just point to God’s goodness in themselves — but that they point to something bigger than themselves — that they aren’t just a nice pair of glasses but that they help us see something true and grand…

I want to suggest that those two stories we imagined at the start — that story of intimate, erotic, love — the unity of two people culminating in orgasmic bliss, and that story of a party where the food and drink flow abundantly in ways designed to excite us — these two sensual stories — are actually two pictures the Bible gives us of eternal life with God in the sort of relationship the Bible invites us to enjoy with Jesus… That our fleeting experiences of bliss now aren’t just meant to push us to thanksgiving to God because he is good, but that they are meant to pull us towards this eternal reality; they are meant to leave us breathlessly wanting more… And some of the dark sides of our pursuit of pleasure through beer and sex are the result of these eternal desires being applied to temporary solutions that leave us craving more; things that can’t bear the weight of our longings because these longings are actually created to connect us with God… I want to invite you to make the switch from pursuing satisfaction and ultimate meaning in things that can’t deliver — in sex and beer — and switch to seeking satisfaction in Jesus and seeing sex and beer as good things from a good God best enjoyed on God’s terms…

This might seem abstract — the idea you can replace a concrete reality like your experience of pleasure via your flesh with something abstract like loving and being loved by a God you can’t feel with your senses; but the abstract idea actually changes the ‘concrete’ realities in ways that are better for you, and connects you with something eternal and beyond our limited comprehension. It’s something that works for Christians all over the world, and throughout history. It’s also part of what makes us weird… What makes the world seem ‘weird’ to Christians is the apparent determination to keep looking for satisfaction in temporary things and fleeting moments of bliss if the ‘real thing’ is real…

This might seem like a long bow to draw if it wasn’t for the evidence on how destructive asking sex and beer to bear the weight of our apparently insatiable desires obviously is.. To us as individuals, and to our society… And it’d be ridiculous if we weren’t actually taking the Bible on its own terms.

One way to understand the story of the Bible is to think of it as the story of God pursuing a beautiful lover — the Old Testament is full of language that describes God’s people as his bride; and then as an unfaithful prostitute — it’s the story of God seeking to rescue and redeem his beloved from the clutches of an evil dragon; the stuff our romantic fairy tales are made from — the Bible talks about God’s people as ‘the bride of Jesus’ and about his return as the wedding day; the moment two become one — the moment we are united with Jesus in blissful, eternal, sacrificial love. The barriers down. Shame gone. Pursued by God through the history of the world and brought to that moment where he delights in us as we delight in him. Here’s how the Bible describes this scene, just after the king, Jesus, has defeated the dragon, Satan:

“Hallelujah!
For our Lord God Almighty reigns.
Let us rejoice and be glad
and give him glory!
For the wedding of the Lamb has come,
and his bride has made herself ready.
Fine linen, bright and clean,
was given her to wear.” — Revelation 19:6-8

The coming of ‘heaven’ in the Bible is a wedding between the lamb, Jesus, and his bride, the church. It’s a party where the food and drink are abundant… It’s the culmination of a romance — right from the start of the Bible weddings are about union; about blissfully becoming one.

Our experiences of unity and oneness and bliss in this world are a pointer; an entree; a ‘taste of heaven’ — they’re something not to look at, but to look through towards what heaven is really like.

And here’s the revolutionary part of looking at these temporary pleasures this way — knowing that they are not ultimate, it means that those of us who are captured by this vision, who choose to order our lives and the pursuit of pleasure around the belief that God, as creator, and Jesus as God’s redeeming king, are the source of the ‘good life’ that we should put them first in our hearts, and order the rest of our relationships and experiences around this commitment… Ordering our love this way means we love people and things and pleasures differently; it means a re-prioritising of our approach to beer and sex that might involve us freely choosing to not pursue them because we’re happy to approach them on God’s terms, according to his design, because we’ve taken hold of the idea that there is something better. It frees us to be radically different in a world where so many of the people around us define their lives, in terms of how satisfying they are, based on how much sex — how many orgasms — they’re getting or how drunk they are on the weekend… It frees some Christians who won’t, or don’t marry to not feel like they are less human than others, but instead that they’ve been caught up in a story that will lead to eternal bliss, and in turn that produces a less destructive approach to sex and power and abuse in this world… This may be the story of some people here — and you need to know you’ve grasped hold of the best and most satisfying thing if you’ve grasped hold of Jesus — no finite thing compares to the infinite bliss promised to you if the Christian story is true… Those who take this path are still embodied; still wired for pleasure; still sexual even, but the ‘ends’ of their sexuality is not some limited, fleeting, moment of bliss — or the accumulation of such moments — it’s not a dirty part of us that can only be made ‘pure’ in procreation or abstinence — it’s part of our humanity that is like a homing signal pointing us towards the God who loves us intimately and asks for our faithful love in return… Who promises to satisfy our desires with good things…

This new vision of satisfaction also frees some Christians who observe the damaging effects of alcohol in their own lives or the lives of others to practice abstaining… This might be some of you here, and you need to know that as good as a craft beer is, you’re not missing out on much and there are plenty of sensational sensual alternatives to enjoy…

Christians don’t take these paths because we want to say ‘no’ to a good thing, but in order to demonstrate that we’re saying ‘YES’ to something better. We don’t want to take good things on our own terms in rejection of God because we believe that leads to disaster… both here and now, and for eternity.

Sex and beer are great gifts from God; they point to his goodness as the creator of both our bodies and our ability to experience bliss… Joy… Pleasure…. And they point to the reality that real satisfaction for our desires is not found in ‘created things’ but in the creator, through his love story; his proposal; to us in the life and love of Jesus. The real ‘taste of heaven’ is heaven itself…

August 23, 2018

Living Faithfully in the ‘sexular age’ (a talk/panel thing)

A couple of months ago the Presbyterian Church of Queensland met for its AGM, we call it ‘Assembly’, and our committee (The Gospel in Society Today) presented a forum on how the leaders of our churches might process the rapid upheaval in our world around the areas of sex, gender, sexuality and marriage.

I ripped off Stephen McAlpine’s ‘A Sexular Age‘ pun on Charles Taylor’s work to provide what I believe is a framework that is both Biblical and ‘real’ to describe the age we live in and what’s going on in conversations around these topics. We filmed the thing. Here it is. I don’t always blow my own trumpet, but if you want a tight summary of the thinking behind all the stuff I’ve written about sexuality and marriage here on this site, it’s probably 30 minutes of me talking that is almost worth watching… the panel discussion is better because there are more voices and people’s actual questions.

We also launched a website for the committee which you should check out (which has a mailing list you should subscribe to).

August 11, 2017

“Born this way,” sexual orientation, freedom, and “slavery to the flesh”

I don’t know about you, but I find the idea that the outcomes of my life are determined by my biology – something I have no control over – pretty repulsive. It robs me of my individuality, my identity is chosen for me… who’d want to live like that?

The whole “born this way” juggernaut has been rolling for a while now – championed, most famously, by Lady Gaga and her anthemic Born This Way…

Image Credit: Mashable

I reckon the best bit about Easter Sunday – and the resurrection – is that it kills the idea that “born this way” cuts it when it comes to deciding who we are.

The song isn’t just musically problematic – it’s also both anthropologically problematic and theologically problematic.

The anthropological problems with Born This Way

Let’s take the anthropological issues first – because their solution shows why Christianity is actually one of the most progressive accounts of what it means to be human competing in the intellectual marketplace…

In the Bridge of Gaga’s song, we’re given a comparison between race, gender, and sexuality that many of us take for granted – and each is said to be both innate (something we’re born with), and essential (something that defines part of our essence).

“Don’t be a drag, just be a queen
Whether you’re broke or evergreen
You’re black, white, beige, chola descent
You’re Lebanese, you’re orient
Whether life’s disabilities
Left you outcast, bullied, or teased
Rejoice and love yourself today
’cause baby you were born this way

No matter gay, straight, or bi,
Lesbian, transgendered life,
I’m on the right track baby,
I was born to survive.”

Doing what our genes tell us – what our birth gives us as “default” is something that we should apparently embrace without question as “the right track” which will apparently lead to our surviving (especially if we love ourselves).

That’s a level of biological fatalism that I’m uncomfortable with – and I’m the sort of Christian who takes such a high view of God that I sign up for predestination. I’ve got no qualms with agreeing that people are born with a race, a gender identity, a physical gender, and a sexual orientation, and that these are complicated, and that our society should not just accommodate people with whatever biological permutations and inklings the complex biological sequencing that makes humans humans throws up, but see people as people. Equal. Complicated. Messy. Broken. No matter what state we’re born in – choosing “straight” or “gay” or “bi” or anything as a marker of identity, on the basis of biology is, I think, a silly use of labels. Especially the “straight/not-straight” binary – if you’re going to bring a Christian account of humanity and sexuality to the table – we’re all sexually broken. Anyway, I’m drifting into theology…

When it comes to the “born this way” argument, It’s politically useful to keep trotting this line out when you’re fighting for whatever “rights” or “equality” you want to be tied up with something you’re born with. How can we argue with biology, mother nature, God, or whatever entity we choose to ascribe such a choice, and such control to… Gaga gives God the credit..

I’m beautiful in my way
‘Cause God makes no mistakes
I’m on the right track, baby
I was born this way

And we’ll get to the theology later.

But what sort of life does this leave you leading? What about one’s capacity to move beyond one’s station – what about liberty and the pursuit of happiness? What if deep down I don’t want my biology.

The whole born this way thing is clearly ridiculous as soon as you throw gender into the mix. If there are two aspects of gender that are biological – anatomy (your bits), and identity (how you are wired to think of yourself) – then which bit wins out? Typically it’s thought to be your identity – because the bits can be chopped and changed. But this is pretty arbitrary… It’s even more clearly ridiculous if we start suggesting that people are born biologically wired to all sorts of behaviours that are socially unpalatable – but that’s where the Bible goes… but again, we’ll get to the theology later…

Anyway. I read this interesting article from a blog called Social (In)queery suggesting maybe, just maybe, the GLBTI community should move beyond the “born this way” trope towards something a little bit more, well, freeing. Something that gives the individual a little more liberty to move away from their unchosen biological tendencies.

“The problem with such statements is that they infuse biological accounts with an obligatory and nearly coercive force, suggesting that anyone who describes homosexual desire as a choice or social construction is playing into the hands of the enemy.”

It’s worth a read. It’s about time people started thinking this way. The idea that we’re slaves to our flesh… err… I mean our “biology” is one of the more depressing outcomes of our modern naturalistic approach to human identity – and it immediately falls foul of what Hume called the “naturalistic fallacy” – he said we can’t say that something is how it ought to be, simply because that’s how it is in its natural state.

Who wants to be stuck being allergic to peanuts if that’s biological and can be fixed. We can’t force everybody to be fixed – that’s an equally dangerous flipside. But denying individuals the opportunity to make decisions about their own lives because we decree they have no choice in the matter because of their biology… Well. That’s an awful form of slavery.

The theological problems with Born This Way

The first theological problem with Gaga’s account of humanity is the idea that because it is “natural” it is something that God says is good.

That’s certainly not true for a Christian understanding of life in the world described by the Bible.

Sure. We were made in God’s image. But that was broken pretty early on. The whole point of the narratives in the Old Testament and God’s repeated use of sexually broken characters, who couldn’t be trusted to keep their sexuality on the straight and narrow (as defined by God at creation – one man, one woman, one flesh), is that all people are broken. That even those who are meant to be most explicitly bearing the image of God can’t. Or won’t. Or don’t. The patriarchs, the priests, the kings – they all stuff up. From Abraham (who pretends his wife is his sister and gives her to Pharaoh), to David, to Solomon… the big characters in the first half of the Bible are clear examples of this.

The OT stuff is relevant because people still want to claim that Paul made up the idea that people were broken, or that God’s image was tainted by what’s called “original sin,” when he wrote Romans. But Romans is completely consistent with every other description of humanity in the Bible. Especially the image of God stuff.

The idea that we have to obey our biology – without choice but with total compliance – is something Paul would describe as slavery. Here’s what he says in Romans 6.

¹⁶Don’t you know that when you offer yourselves to someone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one you obey.

The best thing about Paul’s account of humanity is that he isn’t claiming to be anything other than a broken human himself. In fact – he claims to be just a normal bloke, a human, who experiences a struggle between two powerful internal forces – the residual bits of being a person made in the image of God, and the bits of him that want to serve his biological desires – his selfish genes – the genes that tell him that the way to be truly happy is to “love himself” because he is “born this way”… that’s slavery. Paul doesn’t want to be a slave to his nature (which he says is “sinful” – which he means leads him to do things that aren’t consistent with bearing the image of God)… but he can’t help it. Here’s what he says in Romans 7.

“I am unspiritual, sold as a slave to sin. ¹⁵I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. ¹⁶And if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that the law is good. ¹⁷As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me. ¹⁸For I know that good itself does not dwell in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. ¹⁹For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing.²⁰Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it.

²¹So I find this law at work: Although I want to do good, evil is right there with me. ²²For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; ²³but I see another law at work in me, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within me“

Paul is saying exactly what we should all be saying – the idea that we must conform to our biology to be truly happy is a limiting prison that defines our lives, rather than frees us.

We’re faced with two choices – when it comes to our anthropology – as humans. We can conform. Or transform.

We can be slaves to our broken nature – or even just to our biology if we want to reject the idea that our nature could possibly be broken. Whichever way you cut it – this is a form of slavery. Not liberty. If who you are is determined for you, not by you, and you have no choice, that’s awful.

Or we can try to transform ourselves in a positive direction – this might mean taking the path suggested towards biology-free sexual enlightenment described in the link above, or it might mean, if we’re like Paul, looking for some sort of rescue.

²⁴What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death?²⁵Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord!

This is where Christianity is truly progressive.

If the resurrection that will be celebrated all over the world tomorrow really happened. In history. If Jesus really is “Lord” – if he calls people everywhere to turn to him for their identity – which is the scope of his claims over people, if he is God, and became man, and died and was raised… If these things are true then the implications for every aspect of our lives – not just our sexuality, not even just our biology – are huge.

And we have a choice. It’s not forced on us – this reality being forced on people would bring the same lack of liberty that being forced to conform to your biological reality would bring. But it’s a choice about who to serve, and where to draw value and fulfilment from – flesh, nature, biology… or Jesus.

Paul might step out of the frying pan of slavery into the fire – but at least he’s making a choice. He says following Jesus is just another form of slavery (to righteousness, not the flesh), but a slavery of your choosing, a voluntary slavery, is, in his mind at least, superior to a slavery you can’t choose.

The delivery Jesus offers – the transformation Paul says he offers – is a stunning account of what it means to be human. To be free from biological obligation. To be free of slavery to things beyond your control. To find your value in something outside of yourself. To find your identity based on choice, not just biological complicity. And to have the image of God not just restored in your life – but renovated. Here’s how Paul opens chapter 8…

Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, ²because through Christ Jesus the law of the Spirit who gives life has set you free from the law of sin and death.

He starts fleshing out the anthropological and identity implications of this freedom. It changes what it means to be human.

How we think…

⁵Those who live according to the flesh have their minds set on what the flesh desires; but those who live in accordance with the Spirit have their minds set on what the Spirit desires.⁶The mind governed by the flesh is death, but the mind governed by the Spirit is life and peace.

Our future prospects…

¹¹And if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies because of his Spirit who lives in you.

Our identity – we’re not slaves, but loved children…

¹⁴For those who are led by the Spirit of God are the children of God. ¹⁵The Spirit you received does not make you slaves, so that you live in fear again; rather, the Spirit you received brought about your adoption to sonship. And by him we cry, “Abba, Father.”

Christianity offers a more compelling and progressive vision of what it means to be human because it’s not about conforming to something you can’t choose – that was chosen by the random intersection somewhere in space and time, of two people who carry the biological data that made you, who bring all sorts of genetic baggage, and leave you as a person made in their image – forced to embrace your biology… it’s about being transformed, voluntarily, into the image of the person space and time was created to host – Jesus – and becoming a loved child of God – a God who knew you, planned you, and loved you, before your biology started kicking into gear.

²⁸And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose. ²⁹For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers and sisters. ³⁰And those he predestined, he also called; those he called, he also justified; those he justified, he also glorified.

March 30, 2013

Making “headlines” today

I’m reconsidering the Sydney Morning Herald’s place as my news source of choice. What do other people use?

The writing is as good as ever – there is no political commentator as astute as Annabel Crabb, and few sports correspondents can match it with the likes of Peter Roebuck and Will Swanton.

But when your banner of featured stories looks like this you’ve well and truly jumped the “sex sells” shark…

January 11, 2010